AMERICA’S DEAD AND MISSING ADOPTED CHILDREN
By Lawdoll
Children in America are dying after they have been removed from their “allegedly” abusive and neglectful homes and placed in foster care or adopted by people who the child protection agency has found to be more suitable parents. Yet many of these children who have been removed are ending up dead in the very homes CPS has deemed better than the natural parents.
Child Protective Services removes these children for minor infractions, such as dirty dishes in the sink, loosing 10 ounces after birth (something most of us realize is normal), or in some cases, no reason at all. The removal of some of these children is based on false allegations alone with absolutely no other reason. Maybe they don’t like you, or you crossed them in some unrealistic way.
CPS will in many cases that I have heard of, and seen evidence of, commit perjury, forge documents, falsify records and just blantantly make shit up in order to remove children from their homes.
I do not understand the exact reasons why, though I am sure some of it has to do with meeting their “quota” for adoption funding and bonuses.
To say the least, wouldn’t these children have been safer in their own homes, with the biological parents, then with the mosters that CPS has entrusted with their care.
It seems to be a never ending circle of death when Child Protective Services is involved. Either they fail to follow policy, fail to properly investigate reports of abuse, ignore all the documented proof that people try to show them and leave the severely abused children in their homes to be murdered or they remove children who should have never been removed and send them to placements where they die. All the while CPS just keeps going on its happy, merry way without any worries of accountability for its failures.
A suggestion Child Protective Services, stop removing children from good homes. Stop ignoring the abuse that is in front of your face and the child with bruises screaming to be heard and for the love of God, stop placing children in homes, walking away and never bothering to check on them again!
Just because you choose a home that you believe to be safe for a child, does not mean that it is…I mean do you honestly trust your own judgment, because you shouldn’t with your track record.
I find it very disturbing that many of these children who have been removed by CPS are victims of the very people CPS placed them with. This is the story of some of them.
HAS ANYONE SEEN ADAM HERRMAN?
The above is an age progression picture of what Adam Herrman would probably look like now. No one has seen him for 10 years, even though he has just recently been reported as missing!
Where is Adam Herrman? Is he out there living the carefree life of a runaway, that his adopted parents would have us believe or is he dead, killed by the very people who were supposed to protect him?
Did he run away from his “allegedly” abusive adopted mother and find a better life? Did he run away hoping to find a better place only to meet up with a different kind of predator, or is he dead, killed in the adopted home CPS placed him in?
Right now the police have no idea what happened to Adam, although they are handling his disappearence as a death investigation, as well they should considering all of the things that have come to light.
The adopted parents did not report this child missing for 10 years, and it was only after Adam’s adopted sister, Crystal, called SRS in the hopes of learning information about Adam that anyone realized that his child had been missing for 10 years, that no one had seen him since 1999.
Although SRS had receive previous reports of abuse allegations against Adam’s adopted mother and investigated her at least twice, once in 1996 and again in 1998, the year before Adam disappeared they left the child in the care of his adopted parents and never checked on him again.
The adopted parents continued to claim Adam as a dependent, they also continued to cash (and spend) the adoption Subsidy Checks in the amount of $700.00 a month that they received for having him in their home.
I find it hard to believe that having no idea of this child’s whereabouts that they would be so comfortable frauding the government out of money for his care. Shouldn’t they have been afraid, if he just ran away, that he might show up somewhere and they would get caught. In my opinion, only people who are absolutely sure there is no chance of a child showing up would defraud the government like this for years.
While they were defrauding the govenment, the parents kept up the lies about Adam, telling people that he was back in state custody, giving other family members updates of his imaginary placements…such as he was in a mental instution. These people lied their asses off and we are now supposed to believe their story about Adam’s disappearence and that they did not do anything to him. Well I don’t believe them, I think Adam probably died in the last home he ever had with them.
For more on Adam’s story visit these links:
http://www.ksn.com/news/local/37234714.html
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6588020&page=1
http://www.kansas.com/854/story/658930.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/06/national/main4701584.shtml?source=RSSattr=U.S._4701584#
http://www.ksn.com/news/local/37186834.html
Just exactly what kind of people are they allowing to adopt these children?
Children’s Remains Found in Home Freezer Monday, September 29, 2008 (Fox News Article)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,429842,00.html
LUSBY, Maryland — Child-sized human remains uncovered in a basement freezer were those of two girls and have been there for months, their adoptive mother told investigators. Authorities said Monday they believe she is responsible for their deaths.
Sheriff’s deputies were investigating an abuse complaint regarding a third, surviving child Saturday when they discovered the remains encased in ice. The mother told investigators that they had been in her southern Maryland home’s freezer for at least seven months, and police said they are considering the case a homicide.
“We have reason to believe that’s the two children in the freezer,” said Lt. Bobby Jones of Calvert County Sheriff’s Office. “We believe that the mother, who adopted the two children, is responsible for it.”
Autopsies would need to be completed before authorities know for sure whether it is the girls, who would be 9 and 11. Deputies made the gruesome find in Lusby, about 50 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. They were at the home with a search warrant to investigate what happened to a runaway 7-year-old girl who was found wandering the neighborhood, injured and hungry in a blood- and feces-soaked nightshirt.
The girl’s mother, 43-year-old Renee Bowman, has been arrested, and a judge has ordered her held without bond. She is charged with first-degree child abuse in the beating of the 7-year-old.
“I asked if she was OK. She said no,” said neighbor Phillip Garrett, who found the girl walking down the street. “She said, ‘My mother beats me to death all the time.”‘
She escaped from a locked bedroom by jumping out a second-story window, and Bowman admitted beating her with a “hard-heeled shoe,” officials said.
Bowman told detectives that she brought the remains of her other daughters with her when she moved in February from Rockville, about 60 miles away. Montgomery County Police said they are investigating whether the deaths took place in Rockville and that detectives are trying to pin down when the older girls were last seen alive. Bowman has not been charged in the deaths.
The medical examiner’s office in Baltimore planned to examine the freezer and its contents, but it was unclear how long it would take for the remains to thaw sufficiently.
Bowman was a foster mother to all three before adopting them in the District of Columbia, officials said at a news conference.
According to charging documents in Calvert County, the youngest girl went door-to-door looking for help Friday night.
The girl had open sores and lesions on her buttocks and lower thighs, marks on her neck made by a cord, rope or other item and bruises on her hands and lips, police said.
The girl is in a hospital. The Maryland Department of Human Resources plans to petition the court Tuesday to gain custody, said Nancy Lineman, an agency spokeswoman.
Garrett, 21, who lives two houses down from Bowman, said he brought the girl to a neighbor’s house, called 911 and ordered her a pizza. She indicated she had last eaten on Tuesday when her father was at the home, said Garrett, who realized he had met her mother once and described her as “frazzled.”
“She didn’t seem like all her pieces were there,” Garrett said.
Later Friday, authorities went to Bowman’s modest, single-story house in the secluded, heavily wooded subdivision but nobody was home. Bowman showed up later at the sheriff’s office and said she had locked her daughter in the child’s bedroom.
She told the deputy who interviewed her about the 7-year-old’s abuse “that she knew what she did was wrong,” according to the charging documents. “She advised she (Bowman) was out of control and needed help.”
Sheriff Mike Evans said the surviving girl was never enrolled in Calvert County Schools and that no trouble had ever been reported at the house. Bowman’s only contact with the sheriff’s department since she arrived was a traffic stop.
Lineman said her agency had no records to indicate the involvement of child-protective services with Bowman’s family, but a review of statewide records has been ordered.
Evans said Bowman had a boyfriend who was cooperating with investigators. The boyfriend was a potential witness, but Evans would not comment on whether he was a suspect. He said the man did not live with Bowman and was not a father to her children.
No attorney had entered an appearance on Bowman’s behalf Monday afternoon.
Bowman adopted the oldest girl in July 2001, D.C. officials said. Three years later, she adopted the girl who would now be 9 and her 7-year-old sister. She is not biologically related to them.
SEAN PADDOCKS SHORT LIFE
Published: Jun 29, 2008 12:30 AM Modified: Jun 30, 2008 04:01 AM
Sean Paddock’s short life shows system’s flaws
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/paddock/story/1124238.html
State, local and nonprofit agencies overlooked red flags that indicated 4-year-old was in danger
By Mandy Locke, Staff Writer
Social workers fretted over how to protect the boy. They finally recruited new parents to raise him.
Sean Paddock was born in turmoil, early and tiny, to a broken family.
Sean, 4, died at the hands of his adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock. She beat him and bound him in a dark, drafty attic in her Johnston County farmhouse. This month, a jury sent Paddock to prison for the rest of her life.
Sean’s death rattled the system the state built to protect children like him. The state funnels foster children into adoptive homes, sparing them years in limbo while their parents straighten up.
To make the system work, the state attaches a dowry of sorts to children like Sean. The state pays new parents and pays private adoption groups such as Children’s Home Society to help recruit families.
But Sean’s death shows how the system can fail the children it was meant to protect.
Nearly 12,400 former foster children are currently being reared by adoptive parents recruited through this system. It’s not clear how many have been adopted into dangerous homes. Adoption records and social services reports of abused and neglected children are confidential in North Carolina.
But Paddock’s trial, a review of state contracts with Children’s Home Society and documents obtained by The News & Observer show how easily Sean ended up in harm’s way.
Social workers had plenty of warning that Sean might be harmed at Paddock’s home. Wake County social workers had misgivings about putting him in the crowded house, miles outside the nearest town; a bruised backside after his first visit made them even more nervous.
And, over a decade, a social worker from Children’s Home Society spotted unsettling risk factors in Paddock’s home. But her agency had no incentive to walk away. The state pays the agency for completed adoptions.
The state Division of Social Services might have noticed something was amiss, but its annual audits don’t go beyond a technical review of contract obligations.
In 2005, social workers declared the Paddocks’ home the best place for the Ford children to grow and thrive. The state sent the Paddocks their first monthly check for $1,270.
All the while, Lynn Paddock was coming undone.
Moment of reckoning
North Carolina’s child welfare officials had a moment of reckoning in the early 1990s. Abused and neglected children were growing up without parents. The state had found their birth parents unfit, and they had been sent to live in temporary homes while social workers waited on their parents to get it together.
The state set deadlines for these parents. If they couldn’t shape up in about a year after their child was taken, the state would look for replacement parents.
Finding them would be difficult. Most of these children were damaged: beaten, starved, molested. Persuading parents to adopt them would be a tough sell.
The state carved out money to pay private adoption agencies to recruit and prepare adoptive parents. Agencies such as Children’s Home Society earn from several thousand dollars to $15,000 for every child placed. Children’s Home Society could have earned as much as $45,000 for placing Sean and his two siblings, though the state won’t say exactly how much the agency earned.
Adoptive parents would be paid, too, for taking on such a responsibility. Depending on the child’s age, they earn between $390 and $490 a month until the child is 18.
In the mid-1990s, the number of foster children adopted each year jumped from about 250 to about 1,300. This year, the state offered nearly $26 million to adoptive parents caring for 12,384 former foster children.
Children’s Home Society did well. They found homes for hundreds of foster children.
The agency was also responsible for screening families, weeding out those not equipped to adopt foster children.
The state’s relationship with Children’s Home Society could be a problem, said Richard P. Barth, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work. He said there’s no incentive to walk away from a bad fit.
“To do more placements and meet contract obligations, there’s a tendency to overlook … red flags,” Barth said.
Heavy baggage
Lynn Paddock followed a boyfriend and the hope of a job to Raleigh in the late 1980s, her family said. She hauled heavy baggage: a turbulent childhood, two failed marriages and an addiction to alcohol.
In 1989, she ended up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Raleigh, ready to get clean.
There she met Johnny Paddock, a young father also trying to wean himself off alcohol. Within a few months, Lynn moved in with Johnny and his infant daughter, Jessy. By 1990, they’d married.
They wanted a playmate for Jessy, Lynn told jurors, but pregnancy never took. One day, as the Paddocks ate at a Wendy’s restaurant, a place mat caught her attention. On it, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas urged customers to adopt older foster children.
“At that point, I thought that was my calling,” Paddock testified.
The Paddocks called a social worker at Children’s Home Society of North Carolina. Deborah Artis, now the Triangle’s regional director for the agency, screened them. According to Artis’ reports, she inspected their home, talked to their friends, reviewed their income statements.
In 1994, the Paddocks earned $43,000 a year cleaning carpets. Artis told the Paddocks that the state could offer help to ease the financial hardship of caring for a troubled child.
Artis probed into the Paddocks’ childhoods. Johnny described his Army father’s long absences and a reckless youth of smoking dope and drinking heavily.
Lynn told Artis that she had used alcohol to cope with life’s challenges, the records show. She told Artis about the foster family who’d taken her in after she ran away from her abusive mother.
Paddock described her painful life with her mother. She said she’d been “spanked, hollered at or hit, sent to [her] room without eating.”
Cleared to adopt
A few months after Artis met the Paddocks, she determined they were ideal adoptive parents.
She helped them adopt Tami, a 9-year-old in foster care in Wilmington. By 1997, the Paddocks asked to adopt a boy. Artis launched another round of paperwork, and within a year, they welcomed Ray, then 8.
In 2002, the Paddocks called Artis to ask for a group of siblings. By then, much in their lives had changed.
Paddock had begun homeschooling Jessy, Tami and Ray. The family had left its Baptist church in Raleigh and found a smaller, fundamentalist church in Sanford that advocated wearing long dresses and shutting out popular culture. Lynn Paddock had turned to the advice of Michael Pearl, a minister from Tennessee who advises parents to whip children with plastic plumbing supply line; Paddock put a piece of it in every room of the house.
The Paddocks had also moved to a farm in rural Johnston County. The family of five shared a single bathroom in the 1,200-square-foot home; they hoped to finish the attic and convert it into a bedroom.
Artis extolled their new house in a pre-placement adoption report in 2002.
“The home has lots of character and open space. There are large windows, which allow lots of light into the home,” Artis said. “They are convenient to area shopping, educational and medical facilities.”
In 2003, soon after the Paddocks had been approved for another adoption, Artis phoned. She had a troubled girl who needed a home right away.
The next day, the Paddocks and Artis traveled to a Raleigh mental hospital to pick up their newest daughter, 5-year-old Kayla.
With four children, the Paddocks still wanted more, preferably a sibling group of four or five, according to Artis’ reports. Artis returned in 2004 to prepare another assessment.
For the new report, Artis repeated everything from her 2002 pre-placement assessment. She inserted a few lines about Kayla, their new daughter. But everything else, including descriptions of the children, now two years older, was identical to her 2002 assessment.
Artis did not return calls for this story. At Paddock’s trial, Artis testified that she’d been deceived by the family, that Paddock had never told her that she beat her children. Artis wept as she looked at pictures of the children’s battered bodies.
Barth, the social work professor, said Artis’ reports revealed a number of troubling risk factors in the Paddocks’ home.
“It is unbelievable that an additional child would have been placed in a home like that,” Barth said.
Relying on trust, faith
As part of Children’s Home Society’s contract with the state Division of Social Services, officials from the state DSS audits the agency each year. It’s a technical audit, though, designed to ensure that the agency performed the services it billed for. Before 2003, state officials didn’t even keep a record of their monitoring visits, said Esther High, who supervised the auditors for the state DSS until her retirement last fall.
“A lot of this relies on trust and faith between agencies,” High said in 2006, after Sean’s death.
In January 2005, DSS official Tamika Williams went to inspect several of Children’s Home Society’s adoption files. She reviewed the file for David, Sean’s brother. She checked a box indicating that Children’s Home Society provided “appropriate/quality services.”
DSS officials and Children’s Home Society leaders declined to comment for this report, citing a pending civil claim for Sean’s death. A DSS spokeswoman did say that since Sean’s death the agency has not changed they way it supervises or audits private agencies such as Children’s Home Society. This year, Children’s Home Society secured $1.5 million in contracts to help the state find adoptive homes for foster children.
Goodbye to family
In October 2004, Artis heard that the Ford children — Sean was then 3, Hannah 6 and David 8 — needed new parents. Artis called a Wake County social worker to recommend the Paddocks and their farm.
Wake County workers weren’t sure about the match, Arlette Lambert, a social worker, testified at Paddock’s trial. The children’s court-appointed guardian worried that the children would feel isolated on the Paddocks’ remote farm. The Paddock children were quiet; the Fords were noisy. Paddock home-schooled her children; how would David and Hannah, special education students, do there?
But Children’s Home Society prevailed in its pitch for the Paddocks, and Wake County social workers readied the children for their first visit.
Sean left that visit with a bruise on his backside, according to Wake County records. He told his foster mother and a day-care teacher that Paddock hit him because he petted the family dog.
Wake County opened an investigation and asked Johnston County social workers to check on the older Paddock children. It also asked Children’s Home Society to talk with Paddock.
Artis explained in her report to Wake County that Sean had a temper tantrum during his visit to the Paddocks. She said Paddock put him down for a nap, and he fell out of the bunk bed.
Two weeks later, Wake County agreed to go forward with the adoption. By mid-March, the Ford children were sent to live with the Paddocks for good.
Wake County officials declined to comment, citing the pending lawsuit.
The day Sean and his siblings left for the Paddocks, they visited with their aunt and uncle, Ron and Lee Anne Ford. They had looked after the children when they were first taken from their parents in 2002; the couple went broke caring for them.
Ron and Lee Anne Ford snapped photos of their niece and nephews and made them scrapbooks.
Ron Ford said he begged the social worker to leave the children with him.
Ford remembers her words: “There’s nothing you can do. At 12:05, you will no longer be their family. They will be adopted.”
A social worker pulled 3-year-old Sean out of Lee Anne Ford’s arms and drove him to Smithfield.
The next time the Fords saw him, Sean was lying in a coffin, tiny and blue.
mandy.locke@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-8927
For more on Sean’s story visit the following link:
