Lawsuit: DSS South Carolina

“A South Carolina couple are suing the state’s social services agency, claiming that case workers negligently placed their teenage daughter in the care of a male neighbor and that she was repeatedly raped over months.

The federal lawsuit filed earlier this month in Charleston accuses the Department of Social Services of negligence in placing the girl with a man who wasn’t a relative and had not been certified by the state as a foster parent.

The girl, named in the lawsuit as Jane Doe, was 13 years old when she was removed from her family’s Georgetown County home in June 2011 after an abuse allegation, according to the lawsuit. That allegation isn’t spelled out in the lawsuit, and Bill Luse, an attorney for the girl and her family, declined to comment on it.

At the time, the lawsuit says, social services workers “did not make any effort” to place the girl with a relative or someone who had been certified as a foster parent. Instead, her lawyer writes, the girl was sent to live with Rhett Tison, a neighbor who was 42 at the time.

According to the lawsuit, the agency did not follow its own procedures, failing to run background checks on Tison or inspect his home. At the time of the placement, Georgetown County court records show that Tison had a series of debt collection judgments entered against him but had been charged with no criminal offenses.

Over the year and a half that the girl lived with Tison, her lawyer says she was repeatedly sexually assaulted and, at times, locked in a bedroom to which only Tison had the key. Tison’s attorney declined to comment.

In a statement Saturday, DSS spokeswoman Marilyn Matheus said DSS only recently received the lawsuit. “We are in the beginning stages of the legal process, and we will respond to the allegations in the lawsuit in court,” she said.

In addition to DSS and local social services workers, the girl is also suing Tison, now 45, who was charged in September 2012 with several sex-related offenses, including criminal sexual conduct with a minor and lewd act on a minor.

Police papers don’t specifically tie those charges to Jane Doe, but they occurred during the time she was living with Tison, and Luse said they are related to the girl. The case is still pending.

The lawsuit is one of several now ongoing against the embattled South Carolina agency, whose director resigned earlier this year amid escalating, bipartisan calls for her ouster. A Senate panel investigating the agency has told its acting director to create a plan within two weeks for getting certified and trained caseworkers on the job as soon as possible.

Earlier this year, a girl, now 19, sued DSS for repeatedly placing her in the same foster homes as her brother, even though, she said, agency officials knew he was abusing her. In court papers, DSS and the youth homes where the children lived denied the allegations, saying they could not have anticipated the “alleged intentional and criminal conduct” of the girl’s brother.

Another lawsuit pending in Richland County accuses DSS of failing to protect a 6-year-old girl from a teenage foster child with known behavioral problems who was HIV-positive and admitted to sexually assaulting her. In that case, DSS officials say the agency investigated the situation, determined that treatment plans had not been followed and had subsequently disallowed the foster parent involved from having future foster children. The statement also said the foster child was regularly monitored and was in a “therapeutic” foster care home designed to meet his needs.

In the new litigation, attorneys for 13-year-old Jane Doe say her mother complained to DSS that “something was not right” with her teenage daughter being placed in a home with a male nonrelative in his 40s, and asked that the girl be placed with an uncle in Michigan. The mother, according to the lawsuit, told the agency that her daughter and Tison “were acting like boyfriend and girlfriend.”

The lawsuit also accused Tison of repeatedly refusing to drop the girl off for scheduled visits with her mother.

Luse said the girl is living with her parents again but is having difficulties trusting authority figures and is fearful of developing relationships with anyone.

“It’s a horrible thing, and I feel horrible about what happened,” Luse said.”

[Charlotte Observer 9/27/14 by Meg Kinnard]

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