How Could You? Hall of Shame-Florida Foster Father

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Osceola, Florida, “a private agency in charge of managing cases in Florida’s foster care system repeatedly missed warning signs, allowing a boy to be sexually abused and battered over and over by his relative caregivers for four years, a lawsuit filed in Osceola County claims.

Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services, a Clearwater based nonprofit with offices in Osceola and other parts of the state, initially failed to investigate why the potty-trained 4-year-old — identified as C.R. — was wetting his bed, defecating in his pants and crying when asked to go the bathroom, the lawsuit states.

As he grew older, the organization failed to look into why they boy was hugging and touching other students at school, getting into fights, refusing to comply with instructions and stealing food.

Gulf Coast also overlooked reports that C.R.’s foster father — a distant cousin identified as D.M. — was a “sexual deviant” who had problems “keeping his penis to himself.” And even after these revelations, the organization continued to back D.M.’s adoption of C.R. despite reports that the boy was arriving late to school, failing to turn in assignments, logging some of the lowest scores in class and threatening to kill other students.

“The inappropriate touching, the fear of bathing, the fear of going to the bathroom, the hugging, the physical assault … There are a lot of places where someone should have said: Stop, we need to find out what’s going on. But no one did,” said Thomas Dikel, a Gainesville pediatric neuropsychologist and expert witness in foster abuse cases. “That’s a really sad situation. Ultimately whatever the failure of the adults involved, the child had to pay.”

Dr. Sandra Braham, Gulf Coast’s president and CEO, declined to comment, saying it was inappropriate given the case is in litigation.

For Dikel and other critics, Florida’s privatized child welfare system is to blame for C.R.’s problems. Overworked, underpaid case managers and the lack of accountability of private nonprofit organizations are the central problems.
‘A child suffered unimaginable abuse’

Prior to privatization, the state ran the system and it could be blamed when something went wrong, Dikel said. Now that responsibility has been parceled out to 17 private agencies, which, in turn, have subcontracted cases out to dozens of organizations like Gulf Coast.

Because case managers at these organizations are overburdened, there is a lot of turnover and case managers loose track of children. At least 13 case managers and supervisors were assigned C.R.’s case between 2014 and 2018, the lawsuit says, and “no case manager or supervisor ever truly understood C.R. or the dangers he was being exposed to by D.M.”

“By privatizing, things are supposed to get more efficient,” Dikel said. “But when you privatize, you also have to turn a profit and that profit has to come from somewhere. You either pay case workers less or you hire fewer of them. That means they have higher caseloads than they can handle and they get overwhelmed.”

What the system really needs, Dikel said, is greater financial commitment from the state so that case managers can be better trained and better paid and so that they will bulldog cases to really find out what’s going on — something that definitely didn’t happen with regard to C.R.

“A child suffered unimaginable abuse,” said Stacie Schmerling, the Fort Lauderdale attorney with Justice for Kids — a division of the Kelley Kronenberg law firm — who filed the lawsuit. “Then you’ve got a private agency lacking accountability.”
‘The bare bones minimum’

Schmerling explained that C.R. was removed from his home in 2014 at age 4. Gulf Coast of Osceola County then placed him with D.M. and his domestic partner in Highlands County with full knowledge that D.M. had a history of domestic violence.

D.M., who is gay, had been arrested for domestic battery with a former romantic partner and had “been the subject of a law enforcement report alleging fraud for using a stolen credit card to purchase online pornography.”

Dikel, the Gainesville neuropsychologist, noted gay men are less likely to abuse boys than men who are straight.

“It’s not a strictly sexual thing,” he said. “Child sexual abuse is more like rape.”

After moving to Highlands County, Gulf Coast learned that C.R. was wetting the bed and having accidents in his pants — often signs of extreme stress, according to John DeGarmo, a foster care expert and author of The Foster Parenting Manual.

“A child may go six months or a year without wetting the bed and then something traumatic happens,” DeGarmo said. “It may be due to being placed in foster care or being moved from home to home or something as serious as what was happening to this kid. But it’s a red flag and they should have looked into it.”

Between the ages of 4 and 6, the lawsuit states C.R. was throwing toilet paper on the floor and urinating on the walls and floors of the bathroom. He ran his fingers across another child’s face at school and called the child cute. He asked D.M. and his partner for mouth kisses in front of a visiting case manager, and stroked the case manger’s hair in a bizarre way.

All the while, Gulf Coast was not getting C.R. the counseling he needed, Schmerling said, and it failed to inform the court of his behavior.

Then came confessions from D.M.’s longtime partner in 2017 — when C.R. was 7 — that D.M. was a “sexual deviant,” that he had a “sexual addiction,” that he snuck men into the home to have sex with them, and that the partner and D.M. had not slept in the same room since C.R. had come to live with them, which meant there was no adult in that room that could have prevented the abuse.

But even in the face of these revelations, the lawsuit alleges that Gulf Coast did not try to learn more about D.M.’s sexual deviance and risky behaviors. It “failed to consider that D.M. was sexually abusing C.R., failed to inform the court of these alarming allegations against D.M., and instead left C.R. in danger in the care of his abuser,” the lawsuit states.

During the summer of 2018, C.R. finally disclosed that “D.M. had been sexually abusing, assaulting, battering, and exploiting him on an ongoing basis for years.” That included taking sexually explicit photos and videos of him engaging in sex acts with D.M. and other men.

D.M. was charged with lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 12 years old among other crimes. One of his partners also was charged with sex crimes.

C.R. was adopted by his biological paternal grandparents. He will require ongoing therapy for the rest of his life, Schmerling said.

“Gulf Coast was the primary management agency for this case,” she said. “But when they placed the child in a different county they didn’t want to be bothered with managing the case. Even when informed of what was going on, they didn’t follow up.

“We sometimes refer to these cases — when a child is placed in another county — as courtesy cases,” Schmerling continued. “They are treated like step children. They do the bare bones minimum.””

Florida foster child sexually abused for 4 years, private agency misses multiple red flags

[The Ledger 10/31/2020 by Michael Braga]

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