How Could You? Hall of Shame-Cleo Klepzig UPDATED

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 Corvallis, Oregon, adoptive parent Cleo Klepzig has been charged with abandonment in Delaware of one of her adopted children. Delaware is one state that does not allow parents to voluntarily terminate their rights, leaving a handful of bad choices when postplacement help cannot be obtained.

Before living in Oregon, Cleo lived in Montana with five special needs adopted children. The 10-year-old boy that she abandoned in Delaware had been adopted in Delaware. She left the boy in 2007 at a Delaware office of the state Family Services Division. A warrant was issued for her arrest that year.

Corvallis Gazette-Times says “After learning that its executive director faces an arrest warrant from another state, the board of the Linn-Benton Housing Authority has launched an internal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the case.

An article published Sunday in the Corvallis Gazette-Times and Albany Democrat-Herald disclosed that Cleo Klepzig faces a misdemeanor charge of child abandonment in Delaware. A warrant for Klepzig’s arrest was issued in 2007 and remains in effect.

Klepzig was hired to run the Housing Authority in September 2010 at an annual salary of $75,000. Based in Albany, the agency develops and manages low-income housing in Linn and Benton counties, serving more than 2,500 families and administering $12 million a year in government rental subsidies.

“With the positive momentum she has achieved towards addressing the need for affordable housing, we were surprised to learn that she had an outstanding warrant in Delaware,” the board said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon.

“We take these allegations and the responsibility of citizens to hold themselves accountable for their actions seriously,” the statement says. “As such, we are currently conducting an investigation into both of these matters.”

Before coming to work for the Linn-Benton Housing Authority, Klepzig lived in Montana, where she and her husband adopted five special-needs children. In an interview last week, Klepzig acknowledged that she had taken one of the children back to Delaware, the state from which he had been adopted, and left him at a state Family Services Division office there in August 2007.

The boy was 10 years old at the time.

Klepzig claims the boy had been abusing a younger sibling and says she made numerous attempts to get him into a residential treatment facility. Montana authorities say they investigated those claims and found no evidence of abuse.

Under Delaware law, there is no accepted process for dissolving an adoption.

“When a child is adopted, that is your legal child,” Family Services Division spokesman Joseph Smack said.

In the statement issued Tuesday, the Housing Authority board said it conducted a background investigation on Klepzig during the hiring process, contacting former employers and people familiar with her character.

“No issues were brought to our attention, and Ms. Klepzig had no convictions for any crimes,” the statement said. However, it added that “we will be looking at potential policy changes so that we are not taken by surprise in the future.”

Sources:

Agency investigates claims against director

[Corvallis Gazette Times 4/11/12 by Bennett Hall]

Housing director for 2 Oregon counties wanted in Delaware on charge of child abandonment

[The Republic 4/11/12 by Associated Press]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update: Hat tip to our commenter about this additional article and the information about why this case has come to light.

“Local housing agency director faces charge of ditching adopted son in another state

One day in August 2007, Cleo Klepzig picked up her 10-year-old adopted son from the home of a respite care provider near Helena, Mont., and drove him to the airport, where they both boarded a flight to the East Coast.

She told the boy’s caregivers that she was taking him to visit his biological sisters in Delaware, the state from which he’d been adopted several years before.

But that’s not what she did.

Instead, she took him to the Delaware Family Services Division office in Wilmington. She found a state employee, gave her a stack of papers documenting the boy’s situation and said, “I’m leaving him with you.”

Then she walked away. She got on another plane, flew back to Montana, and went on with her life.

Today the boy has a new adoptive family in Montana.

Klepzig has a new home in Oregon and a new job as the head of a public agency in Albany.

And the state of Delaware has a warrant out for her arrest on a child abandonment charge.

Klepzig, interviewed last week by the Gazette-Times after the warrant came to light, claims the boy was abusing a younger sibling and that she returned him to Delaware authorities only after exhausting all possible avenues to get help.

“This isn’t about just what I did,” she told the newspaper. “This is about a really broken system.”

But law enforcement authorities in Delaware and Montana say there’s simply no excuse for abandoning a child.

And the head of the search committee that hired Klepzig to run the Linn-Benton Housing Authority says she should have come clean about the warrant before accepting the $75,000-a-year job (see related story).

A mother’s defense

After raising four children of their own, Cleo Klepzig and her husband adopted five more, including some with significant health issues.

The youngest is deaf and nearly blind. He has spinal malformations and a cleft palate, and he cannot speak.

This is the child, Klepzig claims, who was abused by his brother, who is about two years older.

“He was the perfect victim,” Klepzig said.

When the two were alone together, Klepzig said, the older boy would trip his brother, slam his head against the floor and find other ways to hurt him.

She says she got the older boy into therapy and the family into counseling. After three years of intensive treatment, the family left the program when federal insurance benefits had been exhausted.

But things got worse at home, Klepzig said, and eventually it became apparent that there was sexual abuse as well.

“We tried to keep them apart, watch (the older boy) all the time,” Klepzig said. “We thought we were being hypervigilant.”

In the end, she said, the older boy was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, a condition that prevents the formation of normal relationships, and a psychological evaluation determined that his little brother would never be safe around him.

Klepzig says the family had to make a choice.

“Our attachment was to (the younger boy), and his was to us.”

But, Klepzig says, while she was able to get temporary respite care and a brief stay in a residential treatment center, she couldn’t find any kind of permanent placement for the boy.

Montana and Delaware officials, she claims, also refused to take him off her hands.

“I couldn’t get anyone to help me,” Klepzig said.

“So I really only had one option, and that was to take him to the office of the Division of Family Services in the state of Delaware.”

Crime and punishment

Delaware officials, however, say that was never an option.

“When a child is adopted, that is your legal child. In the eyes of the state, the courts, all legal entities, that child is your child,” said Joseph Smack, a spokesman for the state’s Family Services Division.

“There really is no legal way to abandon a child.”

On Aug. 31, 2007, the Delaware State Police issued a warrant for Cleo Klepzig’s arrest. The charge, abandonment of a child, was a Class A misdemeanor.

In 2009, because of the Klepzig case and others like it, the state assembly rewrote the statute to make child abandonment a felony.

“We thought it was important to send a message that, in our mind, your parenting responsibilities are sacred and you don’t get to abandon your children,” said Patricia Dailey Lewis, a deputy Delaware attorney general who lobbied for the change.

The warrant for Klepzig’s arrest remains active, even though it’s more than four years old. While the Delaware State Police have no jurisdiction in Oregon, the warrant could still be executed if Klepzig were detained by authorities in Oregon on a traffic stop or other charge.

In that case, Delaware officials could still prosecute her on the original misdemeanor charge, Lewis said.

Klepzig thinks it’s unlikely that will happen. And if it does, she asks, would that really be justice?

The real victim, she argues, is not the son she dropped off at the Delaware Division of Family Services, but the son she was trying to protect. Arresting her now, she suggests, would only punish her family for the shortcomings of an adoption system she claims failed to protect them.

“Haven’t we suffered enough?” she asked.

“There’s a saying that no good deed goes unpunished. I think of that often.”

Court of public opinion

Back in Montana, plenty of people see things differently.

Matthew Johnson, the chief prosecutor for Jefferson County, says Klepzig’s allegations of abuse were thoroughly investigated by the sheriff’s office.

“We just found there was insufficient evidence to do anything,” Johnson said.

He acknowledged that the alleged victim’s inability to speak complicated the case but emphasized that no evidence of abuse was found. He noted that state family services workers had also looked into the situation and pointed out that the alleged abuser was a very young child.

“We simply don’t put kids under 10 years of age in jail. It’s unheard of,” Johnson said.

And even in the face of extreme behavior problems, he added, parents have an obligation to care for all their children.

“It’s not easy, and yet at the same time I don’t think you can excuse just giving up on a child you’ve adopted,” he said.

“You take them as they come.”

Kendel West, a school employee who worked with both boys, said she doesn’t believe Klepzig’s claims of abuse.

“I think she adopted all those high-risk, high-needs children for the attention it brought her,” West said. “Wasn’t she wonderful, wasn’t she a great mother, even though she didn’t spend much time with them.”

And, in fact, Cleo Klepzig’s adopted children have brought her a good deal of positive attention.

In 2004, she and her husband appeared on a celebrity-studded CNN television special about HIV and AIDS. The program focused in part on their adopted daughter, who was born HIV-positive. Shortly afterward, the girl was the subject of a story in the Helena newspaper.

In 2010, not long after the family relocated to Oregon, Klepzig and her youngest son were featured in a Salem Statesman Journal article about the Oregon School for the Deaf.

West and others close to the situation feel Klepzig got off too easily on the child abandonment charge.

“To have that lady walk away really pissed me off, I’ll tell you that — me and a lot of other people,” said Dennis Sheline.

Klepzig’s son had been staying with Sheline and his wife under a respite care program in 2007 when she called and said she would be picking him up early the next morning to go to the airport.

Several weeks after Klepzig left the boy in Delaware, he was returned to the Shelines. The fourth-grader stayed with them for the better part of a year, until he was adopted by another Helena-area family.

Dennis Sheline said he doesn’t believe Klepzig’s claims that the child who lived under his roof for all those months had been preying on his younger brother. He said the boy, who’s now 14, has blossomed into a star athlete who plays the piano and does well in school.

“Now,” Sheline said, “he’s a perfectly normal kid.”

Abandoned

[Corvallis Gazette-Times 4/8/12 by Bennett Hall]

“GUPTA: Welcome back to HOUSE CALL. Children don’t usually come to mind when thinking about HIV, but thousands are living with this deadly disease. And we met some of these courageous kids at a camp where HIV and AIDS are nothing to be afraid of.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KAITLYN KLEPZIG: Do I look scary to you? If I don’t, would I if I told you that I have HIV? Hi, my name is Kaitlyn. I am 12 years old and HIV positive.

GUPTA: Kaitlyn Klepzig was born HIV positive. She was adopted when she was just two days old.

CLEO KLEPZIG, KAITLYN’S MOTHER: But there were no other infected children in the state of Montana at that time.

CASEY KLEPZIG, KAITLYN’S FATHER: We were bringing in the biggest scare of the whole time. And that was a child with AIDS.

GUPTA: But for a new generation, a generation that has never known a world without AIDS, things are starting to change.

K. KLEPZIG: I am 12 years old, and I have been HIV positive for as long as I can remember, since I was born. And it’s just been a great part of my life.

GUPTA: Part of the reason it’s been so great is because of Camp Heartland, a safe haven where kids can hike, sing songs, perform skits and talk about AIDS. All the campers have been touched by HIV.

K. KLEPZIG: Nobody’s mean to each other here. And you have nothing to be scared of. It’s just the hardest thing is accepting sometimes what people think of you and how they look at you.

GUPTA: That’s why campers here practice telling their stories, something they’ll do for real at schools around the country.

K. KLEPZIG: I went to see my birth mom a couple of months before she died, but sadly for me, I don’t remember anything but the plane ride. NEIL WILLENSON, CAMP HEARTLAND FOUNDER: This is the one place where as a human being, they can share that secret and tell someone else I have AIDS. And their friend can put their arm around them and say, me too. The words “me, too” are very powerful.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: Want to hear more about Kaitlyn and Camp Heartland? Well, tune in Sunday night to my primetime special called “RU Positive?””

HOUSE CALL WITH DR. SANJAY GUPTA A look at HIV/AIDS

[CNN Transcript 11/27/04]

Cleo’s deaf son was featured in this September 6, 2010 story about Oregon School for the Deaf Deaf students meet, make friends

[Statesman Journal by Stefanie Knowlton]

The Delaware DSC has a document that describes who is allowed to terminate parental rights and adoptive parents are not listed. See here. We assume DCS filed for termination in order for the Montana family to adopt him.