“No One Knows What Could Be Happening to Those Kids”
(Page 4 of 4)
By last November, however, Randy could sense the dynamic shifting. His staff had grown tired of writing up the notes from all their investigations, especially those that turned out to be false reports. They resented having to spend all day standing outside a courtroom waiting for a hearing, only to have lawyers postpone it for another week. They hated having to work holidays, when parents were more likely to be home drinking and losing patience with their kids. And they were sickened by seeing so many child abusers getting off scot-free. Randy himself knew the feeling all too well. Once, he had worked on a case in which a father had beaten his child to a bloody pulp, then drop-kicked him into a wall and stuffed him between pillows. But because there was no corroborating evidence—as in many cases, the wife and children were too scared to testify against him—the father was never prosecuted. A few years later, the father was riding his bicycle when he was accidentally hit by a truck and killed. Randy and his CPS colleagues could barely keep from hugging one another when they heard the news.
In January, after a difficult month in which more than 550 cases were assigned to just three investigative units in Travis County, Jackie Rowe quit. She had not been able to sleep at night, she said. When she closed her eyes, she would see the faces of children. She would lie in bed wondering about kids she’d not been able to visit that day. When Randy asked her what she would do next, she said, “I don’t know. I’m just leaving.”
Jackie’s co-workers openly admitted that they were jealous. While sitting in Reneé’s office one afternoon, Christine said, “Every morning when I open the newspaper, I look for the stories about dead children to see if one of them was mine. I want to know what it feels like to get up in the mornings and not have to worry.” In the last six months of 1998 Christine had gained 25 pounds. Instead of Carson McCullers, she had taken to reading Sylvia Plath. She had begun scouring online classified ads for another job. “Sometimes when I’m alone in my office around all my files,” she told me, “I shut the door and put my head down on my desk, and I try not to cry.”
But Christine was not the next to go. In early February Randy gathered his staff around his desk and told them he had been chosen to manage a statewide program that would set up contracts with organizations to provide more services to children, such as runaway shelters and outreach programs. The money was a little better—after eight years at CPS, he was making only $34,000 a year—but the real reason he was leaving, he said, was because he too was overwhelmed. His caseworkers stared at him open-mouthed. Soon, other workers from around the building were coming over to Randy’s office to ask if the news was true. They told him that he couldn’t leave: He was the only investigative supervisor with more than a few months of supervisory experience. “I just need to take a break,” he told me that day. “Whenever I’ve tried to take a vacation, I spend all day on the phone talking to caseworkers who need help.”
He paused for several seconds. “Maybe I’ll come back. Maybe I will. But, God, I’ve never felt so weary. I’m having a hard time giving my old pep talks to the caseworkers about how they are making a difference. I just gave Christine a case about a father carving 666 in his chest, bleeding on his own six-year-old daughter, and then taking her to a funeral home to dance in a fountain. And here’s another one about a three-year-old girl from Honduras who’s been abandoned here. She’s dying of AIDS. She’ll die alone somewhere, wondering where her mommy is.”
AS IT HAPPENED, RANDY BARELY had time to say his good-byes. In his last days on the job, he had new cases to assign and a new caseworker to train: Ambrose “A.J.” Jones, a bright 33-year-old who was hired to take Jackie’s place. Like Randy, A.J. had been in the military—in his case, the U.S. Navy. After his time in the service, he returned to college to get a degree in social work. He joined CPS, he told me, “because I wanted other children to know they felt protected, the same way my own seven-year-old son feels.”
On February 11 A.J. left the office to look into a report that a young boy was being neglected at a shabby home in South Austin. Randy decided to go with him, and as he read over the initial report, he recognized the name of the nineteen-year-old father. When the father had been a boy himself, Randy had removed him from his home after discovering that his parents were neglecting him. “It’s amazing the way this cycle works,” Randy said. “The kids I once tried to help are now the parents I’m having to investigate. Maybe I have been in this business too long.”
The house smelled like sewage and dogs and rotting food. The floor was covered with tops from old vegetable cans, soiled magazines, old clothes, beer bottles, and cigarette butts. The broken toilet was full of feces, the bathtub half full of brown water and garbage. The stove had been ripped from the kitchen wall. The father was gone—he had moved out days before—but sleeping in the house were two young men in punk outfits who, Randy guessed, spent their days begging for money along the University of Texas Drag. A.J. and Randy went into a front bedroom and saw a two-year-old boy with dirt on his feet and hands lying on a bare mattress. The boy’s mother, wearing overalls and a tank top, was sitting beside him. She had clearly not bathed in a long time: There was a ring of dirt around her neck. Both she and the boy sounded congested.
A.J. did the initial questioning. The mother told him that she was doing her best with her son. She said she had taken him to the doctor—and, indeed, she showed A.J. the medicine she had been given for the boy’s cough. “I love my child,” she said. “I do everything I can for him. Do you want to punish me just because I’m poor?” As filthy as the house was, A.J. had to admit that he’d seen worse. He also had met parents who were far more neglectful and who never would have gone to the trouble to get medicine for their sick children. He decided to give the mother a stern warning about the condition of the house. He was going to leave the boy in her care, but he would return in a few days to see how things looked.
But after studying the medicine bottle himself, Randy took A.J. outside and said, “We’re removing the child. The mom’s not giving the child the proper dosage of medicine. She should have finished this bottle by now. There’s no telling how sick this kid is.” A.J. stared at Randy. He had not even thought of checking the medicine. “It’s all right,” Randy said. “You only learn this stuff from experience.”
When Randy told the mother they were taking the boy with them and getting a court order to keep him until the house was no longer a health hazard, the mother began screaming, “No! No!”
“What gives you the right to play God, you motherf—er?” one of the young punks shouted at Randy. “I bet your place looks like shit too!”
For several minutes, the mother wouldn’t let go of the boy. Neighbors surrounded Randy and A.J. and insisted that the woman didn’t mistreat her child. “Get your ass out of here,” someone shouted. “Why do you like ruining other people’s lives?”
When Randy finally got the boy out of his mother’s arms, she collapsed and began sobbing uncontrollably. Randy and A.J. then drove him to the emergency room, where doctors discovered that he had severe bronchitis, infections in both ears, and a temperature of 103.7.
“If I had left him at the house, he could have died that day,” a visibly shaken A.J. told Randy that night. At first Randy said nothing; then he told A.J. to go home and get some sleep. But A.J. didn’t sleep a wink. He lay awake in bed, wondering if he would be able to last a year on the job.
A FEW DAYS LATER, RANDY’S COLLEAGUES gathered at a nearby restaurant for his good-bye party. Everyone was determined not to talk about work, but within fifteen minutes the air was thick with stories about the latest CPS investigations. Christine came with her new boyfriend, an Austin police officer she’d met while working on a case. “Where else does a CPS worker meet someone?” she asked me. A.J. sat quietly at another table and left early. Reneé sipped cocktails with a couple of CPS staffers who used to work for Randy. (“I’m staying,” she was overheard murmuring. Although she and Christine had quietly put in for transfers soon after learning of Randy’s resignation, they had made a pact to remain with Unit 25 until the fall of 1999 so that they could say they had lasted two years.) Most of the group didn’t go home until around midnight. Randy, one of the last to leave, said he was going to take a long-deserved three-day vacation before starting his new job.
But the next morning, he slipped back into his old office. It was a Saturday. No one else was there. He began to pack his things, but then he saw some manila folders on his desk. He stopped what he was doing, flipped open the top one, and started reading. “I just want to make sure no one is slipping through the cracks,” he said.
