“No One Knows What Could Be Happening to Those Kids”
(Page 3 of 4)
But now, a month later, standing at the hospital alongside a child who was nearly dead, Christine was in a daze. No matter how many hours a day she spent at her job, she still could not comprehend why an adult would deliberately hurt a child. Even if the mother wasn’t abusing her daughter, she surely had to have known for months that someone else was. “This is one of those cases where you ought to be able to go to a judge, tell him the facts, and get that child to a family who will love her,” Christine said.
Yet she couldn’t. Instead, she had to go back to work and prepare an affidavit asking a judge to remove the child from her mother’s home. Pulling together the twenty pages of paperwork would take the rest of the day and much of the night, putting her farther behind on her other cases. Even then, she knew that there was a good chance the mother would get the child back. Since Christine had found no hard evidence suggesting the mother was the abuser—the child was, of course, too young to give a statement—the mother could easily challenge the affidavit. It was a scene that played out over and over at the child welfare courtroom in downtown Austin: a parent tearfully proclaiming his or her innocence before a judge, then lambasting CPS caseworkers as storm troopers with a license to rip apart families.
Back at the office, other caseworkers were immersed in new cases of their own. A toddler with gums that were bleeding from forced feedings. A three-year-old boy seen holding a marijuana cigarette. A thirteen-year-old girl, mentally unbalanced since her stepfather shot her in the head when she was four, living on the streets because her mother said she could no longer care for her. When I told Christine that the Child Welfare League of America recommends that a caseworker handle just twelve cases at any one time, she laughed. “Where did that number come from?” she asked. “Fantasyland?” In the investigative units in Texas’ urban areas, caseworkers rarely have fewer than forty cases going at once. “Unless you are willing to be here all day and all night and on weekends,” Randy said, “you will never have time to build a relationship with these families, some of whom really would like some help. You don’t get the chance to prevent fires. You’re lucky if you’re able to put a few out before they burn out of control.”
AS OPPOSED TO THE TYPICAL CPS staffer who receives a college degree in social work and comes straight to the agency, Randy began his career as a Chinese linguist with the Air Force. When he left the service in 1990, he could have made a nice living as a national security consultant, but instead he joined CPS’s Austin office as a caseworker. “Nothing sounded more heroic than rescuing abused children,” he told me. He quickly learned, however, that there were few chances to be a hero. In one of his first cases, he went to the hospital to look at a baby who had been shaken so badly by the father that his brain was disconnected from his spine. Randy held the baby’s hand as a nurse turned off the life-support machine.
A few years after arriving at the agency, he realized that all 24 people who had been in his training classes had resigned. Many quit out of exhaustion or because of the extraordinarily low pay. Some quit because they kept waking up in the middle of the night, terrified that a kid in one of the cases they didn’t have time to investigate would turn up dead. “They didn’t want blood on their hands,” Randy said. “Who could blame them?”
But Randy stayed. He bought a rusty school bus, towed it to a piece of land he owned outside of Austin, and converted it into a home for himself. He purchased a beat-up Mercedes that often broke down but had a back seat that was big enough to accommodate several kids at once. Although many abused children hid under beds or ran from their homes when they saw him tooling through their neighborhoods—their parents had told them CPS wanted to put them in prison—Randy kept coming back around. After he removed his first three kids—he got a court order to take them from their mother, an aging prostitute who was reportedly trying to sell them to her johns—he became so attached to them that he looked them up each Christmas thereafter and gave them presents.
In July 1996, after working in a CPS conservatorship unit (a group that watches over kids who have been removed from their homes), Randy was named the supervisor of Unit 25. Waves of new caseworkers were put in his charge, and he tried to teach each one everything he knew: how to stay calm when listening to threats from parents, how to avoid gasping when a child began reciting the litany of ways he’d been kicked or punched, how to let a child know quietly that nothing he’d done was deserving of such punishment. He made a point of going on calls with the new caseworkers, making sure they looked in refrigerators to see if there was food and ran their fingers through the ashtrays to see if there was any marijuana or crack. He insisted that his caseworkers have cute stuffed animals in their offices so that visiting children could have something to play with, and he provided them with anatomically correct dolls that could be handed to a child to learn whether someone had touched him in a “good place” or a “bad place.” He stopped taking vacations. He worked on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. He started spending nights at the office.
And yet the cases kept coming. By 1998 Travis County was leading all other Texas counties with 9.5 cases of reported child abuse and neglect for every one thousand children—second-place Bexar County had 8.1 cases—and more kids were slipping through the cracks. In the fall of 1997 Randy received a phone call from a caseworker at a dilapidated house less than a mile from the state capitol. Inside was a nine-year-old girl named Victoria. She apparently had been living in a single room and had never once ventured outside. Her clothes were stained with feces. She urinated on the floor and, as a cat does, attempted to cover it up. She had no language skills; she only made squeaking sounds, imitating the rats that climbed around the windows of her room and rustled underneath the piles of trash on the floor.
Randy did some checking and learned that CPS had received its first phone call about Victoria in December 1994. Yet the report was never assigned to a caseworker because the information was too “vague.” After two more referrals about the girl in 1995, it was turned over to another unit. An investigator made quick visits to the home but did no follow-up after the mother assured him the girl was mentally retarded and was being home-schooled. Not long afterward, that caseworker quit the agency for another job, and the manila folder containing details of Victoria’s life of squalor went untouched for more than two years. Only when another complaint came in did the case get the attention it deserved.
Around the same time, a two-month-old baby boy named Nakia was found dead in his crib in another ramshackle, trash-filled Austin house overrun with rats and roaches. The baby had died from a respiratory infection that was possibly caused by rat feces. His mother was just seventeen years old, and she was living with her own mother and her seven younger brothers and sisters. Randy was devastated when he found out. The family had been the subject of ten CPS investigations between June 1994—more than three years before Nakia was born—and February 1997. The last time, a just-hired caseworker had gone to the house to look into reports of physical and medical neglect of the children, but he had closed the case after the adult mother promised to fix the broken stove, clean the refrigerator, where roaches were nesting, and get rid of the rats. It never happened. “The hardest thing for a new caseworker is to decide whether children should be removed from a home where there is no abuse,” said Randy. “No matter how impoverished the home life is, it’s still home for those kids, and you know that moving them out and putting them in foster care will scar them forever. On the other hand, if you give a neglectful parent too many chances, those kids will be scarred in another way altogether. In this job, you can feel damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
PREDICTABLY, IT DIDN’T TAKE TOO LONG for most of Randy’s caseworkers from that period to resign or transfer to other CPS jobs. The woman who had handled Victoria’s case was so shocked by what she had seen that she quit working with children and moved to Chicago. Replacements arrived, though not much changed: One lasted only a day.
But when Christine, Reneé, Jackie, Stephanie, and others arrived in late 1997 and early 1998, Randy thought he had finally turned a corner. They were willing to do whatever it took to protect kids. On her own, Stephanie marched up to a crack dealer’s house and demanded to see a mother who supposedly was living there with three unfed, unclothed children. “Get off my f—ing property or I’ll kick your ass,” the crack dealer told her. The mother quickly moved to another crack house, but Stephanie found her, showed up with the police, and got the children removed.
