Henry J. Stern
August 1, 2007
Every once in a while a scandal is reported that dwarfs the ordinary misdeeds
of criminals, while revealing huge gaps in government supervision.
The most recent outrage, and it is truly horrifying, is the discovery in
St. Lucie, Florida, of a 62-year-old woman, who had gotten hold of
about a dozen children, most of them handicapped, and was being paid hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year to care for them. In fact, she starved,
tortured and beat them, but that never stopped the paychecks from coming
in.
The horror was first discovered on July 4 when an 18-year-old female, apparently
abandoned, was found in a park where she had been left. The police
officer, who found her, brought her back to the house where she lived, but
found it locked. After a number of visits, the police found many other children
in the basement, shackled to each other, in a pitiful state, starved and
beaten. The lawn outside the house was neatly trimmed, however, with
a small statue of a screaming child. The homeowner and caregiver, Judith
Leekin, a Trinidadian immigrant who lived in Laurelton, Queens, in 1973,
had adopted the children over the years from different agencies, using various
aliases.
The New York City Administration for Children's Services had no idea
that all these children were under Ms. Leekin's tender loving care, not that
they checked up on her or anything like that. The government agency's
function appeared to be simply to keep the checks coming in on time, although
there is no record that they were asked to do anything else.
The gruesome story received the most coverage in the Post. Tuesday's
paper, on p17, under MOMMY MEANEST Cops: Kept NY Kinds Shackled in
Florida" by
Cathy
Burke. Her lede: "Nine teens and young adults adopted in New York were
cruelly abused, starved and shackled like prisoners in their Florida home
by a heartless scam-artist mom who lived off money meant for the kids, authorities
said."
Today, the Post promoted the story to the wood, the main item on page one.
$3M 'MOM' SCAM, Kid-Cash Adoption Outrage, with a picture of Ms. Leekin on
page one and a larger picture on page five. Without judging her guilt
or innocence by her appearance, one can observe that her visage appears remarkably
similar to that of a female guard at a concentration camp. Recognizing
its importance, the Post put three reporters on the story,
Matheus
Sanchez in Florida and
John
Doyle and
Leonard
Greene in New York. Their lede:
"The woman accused of keeping New York kids in a Florida house of horrors
netted up to $3 million from the adoption scam, which began 30 years ago
in Queens with two foster kids she tormented even as she pampered her own
son, the Post has learned.
The Times covers the situation in an article by
Cara Buckley that starts on B1 and jumps to B4. In an appropriate
gesture, the Times credits
Carmen
Gentile and
Leslie
Kaufman for contributing reporting to the 1110 word story. The
headline:
CRIMINAL CASE AFTER ADOPTIONS SPURS REVIEW.
The lede: "Child welfare workers in New York City said yesterday that
they were poring over hundreds of records for possible cases of adoption
fraud and abuse after a woman who adopted 11 foster children, and collected
subsidies for them, was arrested in Florida and charged with abusing and
neglecting the teenagers and young adults living under her care."
The Times account reviews the facts, which are still being uncovered, in
the Leekin case, and contains interviews with neighbors and child welfare
experts. It is clear from the story that the system is not geared to
prevent fraud, perhaps on the naive assumption that people who want to adopt
children generally do not intend to torment , starve and shackle them, and
to buy real estate with the state subsidies they receive for the children's
care.
The Administration for Children's Services deserves credit for breaking the
story in a
Monday
(July 30) press release, which you can link to here. An ACS spokesperson
told us that, under current law, once an adoption is finalized, the agency
has no jurisdiction over the family unlesss there is a report of abuse. If
adoptees are kept locked in a basement, it is highly unlikely that
anyone would be able to see them and report the abuse. ACS is
working hard to uncover other adoptions Ms. Leekin may have made over the
years she was engaged in the business of child abuse and to devise a plan
to prevent others from gaming the system.
It may or may not be the law that contact with child welfare agencies terminates
with adoption. If it be the law, it more than justifies the quotation
from Charles Dickens'
Oliver Twist: "The law is a ass - a idiot."
spoken by Mr. Bumble. We believe that such a law, or regulation by
the State Department of Family Assistance (formerly Social Services, formerly
Welfare, et seq.) is ridiculous. As long as the state continues
to spend tax dollars to pay the adoptive parent, (from 23K to 55K a year),
it should have the right to require that the money be spent for the child's
welfare, not to enrich the adoptive parent. If the State Commissioner
of Children and Family Services, Gladys Carrion, cannot or will not correct
this situation, the legislature should.
Another suggestion is for ACS staff begin by taking a census of out of state
adoptees, and then journey around the country visiting children adopted through
public agencies in New York City and checking up on whether they are still
alive, still living with the adoptive family, and if so how they are being
treated. Under current regulations, the adopting parent has the obligation
to report any change in the adoptee's circumstances, and the city is required
to inquire about this by mail biennially (That means, as you know, every
two years, a long time in the life of a child. And who is likely to
report that their little meal ticket has married, or run away, or joined
the Marines? Certainly not a child abuser.
There is much to be done in this area to change the rules and increase the
level of enforcement. It will require the co-operation of the city
and the state. We suggest the creation of a task force, directed to
make recommendations on these issues within a few months. There is
a huge hole in the law here, as shown by the Leekin case. Hopefully,
this horror story will lead to reforms which will make the tragedy less likely
to be repeated.
The image of nine shackled and beaten children, some multiply handicapped,
rotting away in a cellar while a human monster steals their sustenance is
grotesque. It reminds one of the
Nixzmary Brown case
in 2005, where a 7-year old girl was beaten to death by her mother's boyfriend,
in terms of the sufffering. It is different in that there is no direct
failure on the part of ACS. This is a systemic tragedy, rather than
the failure of individuals or their supervisors, which has occurred in other
cases where ACS has been faulted. Bad as it is, it is not another Brown case.
It is time to change the system. If the people in charge can't do it,
change the people.
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