Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (6 page)

When it was time for lunch, one of the aides asked whether we would mind feeding Danielle. Bernie and I were surprised that she wasn’t self-feeding yet. We cut her sandwich into bite-size pieces because otherwise she put the entire sandwich in her mouth. Likewise with the orange sections and the carrots. We had to make sure she didn’t cram another one in before she swallowed the first. Sometimes she took something and put it in her mouth herself, and other times we held a sandwich piece in front of her face and she opened her mouth like a little bird. But she wasn’t eating baby food like many of the other children, and she had no lack of appetite.

After lunch, the children needed to be changed, and when the aide came over to fetch her, I offered to do it. All of my boys had toilet trained early, so I had not changed a diaper in about five years, and that was on a toddler. I picked up Danielle, laid her down on a large changing table, and pulled up the skirt she was wearing. She was oblivious, and that seemed so strange to me. She should have been embarrassed that she was wearing a diaper and that a total stranger was preparing to change her. I reached automatically for a baby wipe, and the reality of the situation hit me. Here was an eight-year-old girl having her diaper changed, and that seemed so horrible to me. Tears came into my eyes again.

It was as if she could sense what I was feeling and my anxiety, because as soon as I took her diaper off, she started screaming at the top of her lungs, as if I was murdering her. It was terrifying. I froze for a second, and then I thought, “Well, someone’s been doing this for her one way or another for her entire life. She’s gotten used to it, and it’s no big deal to her. So just get over it and do it.”

I said, “I’m sorry to upset you, Danielle, but we have to change that diaper.” She stopped screaming. I used the baby wipe, put on a dry diaper, and pulled her skirt back down, and she swung her legs over the table and onto the floor. Off she went on her toes to find her Slinky. I took a deep breath, and as I turned around, I saw Bernie, smiling at me from across the room. He looked absolutely delighted, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to hit him or hug him. But he had a look on his face that said, “Don’t worry so much, Diane. We’ll be fine. We can do this.” It was a look I had seen many times in our marriage, and he had always been right.

Chapter 6

Falling through the Cracks

When we left the classroom, we told Danielle we would see her again soon, but it didn’t seem to make an impression on her one way or the other. We said good-bye to Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Perez and also told them we’d be back soon. I’m not sure if they believed us.

We were tired and hungry and had a long drive ahead. Our friend Evie Barnes had kept Willie after school for us and would make sure he did his homework, but I knew he would be dying to hear about Danielle and the visit and wouldn’t go to bed until we got home.

We probably would have gone to a drive-through and hit the road, except that we still had official agency business to attend to. The next step in the procedure was for Garet to do “Disclosure,” which meant giving us all of the information the agency had in Danielle’s file. It sounded very official and a little bit scary.

Part of us wanted to know all of it, and another part wished that we could just burn the file and start fresh. We had heard some things about bug bites and the condition of the house, but that was all we knew. We thought it had to be pretty bad for her to be removed from the home.

We drove to a Chili’s restaurant, sat down at a table, ordered, and talked a bit about the visit. Garet thought it had gone well, and so did we. Still, it seemed like our chatter was just delaying the inevitable, and Bernie—in that direct way he has—finally said, “Well, let’s get to it.”

Garet reached into a folder and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. She gave us a copy and kept a copy for herself. The title page said
Study of the Child Danielle Ann Crockett.
I gasped when I saw the photo on the front—it was the same one I had seen at GameWorks. I was amazed at how different Danielle looked in the classroom a year or so later. It made me sad to see that picture again; she looked so vulnerable and lost.

Garet put a small tape recorder on the table—required procedure—then turned it on and began reading aloud. This way, the potential parents couldn’t say that they were misled or not told something. I read along with our copy while Bernie listened to Garet.

The report began with the biological family, headed by the mother, a forty-nine-year-old white woman who had two sons while living in Las Vegas with her husband before being widowed in 1997. Not long after he died, Danielle was conceived through a “very brief affair,” so brief that the mother didn’t know the man’s name.

I read the sentence again. Even before Danielle was born, there was a huge missing piece in her history, one that would never be found. She would never know her birth father’s name, what color his eyes were, whether he was short or tall, or how he made a living. Because the “affair” occurred in Las Vegas, it was quite likely that he was from somewhere else, in town for a convention or just passing through. He never knew that she existed.

I wondered what that would be like, to find out you were pregnant by someone you barely knew and who was long gone. Did the mother think of aborting or giving the baby up for adoption? What made her decide to keep Danielle? No one but the mother would ever know that, yet Bernie and I learned a lot about her from the report, with the exception of her first name. She was simply referred to as “Mother” throughout, which seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. She was born in Syracuse, New York, and graduated from high school there. At some point, she, her mother, and her two sisters moved to Florida. She claimed to have attended three years at the University of Tampa, but no proof of her enrollment there was ever found. She also said that she obtained an AA degree in the “law” field, but the medical professionals who worked with her believe that is untrue because tests showed that she was in the borderline range of intellectual ability.

“Borderline range of intellectual ability.” That raised a flag for me. What did borderline range mean, and how did that affect Danielle?

The mother had two sons from her first marriage. Thomas would have been sixteen when Danielle was born, and the second son, David, was thirteen.
¹
The entire family moved to Florida in 2000.

It was determined that the younger son had a learning disorder, was “slow,” according to his mother; in school he was put in Special Ed. Thomas was of average intelligence, although he did not finish high school. Like “Mother,” they both worked part time, on and off, here and there, and received social security. David had one arrest charge, in October 2001, for alleged battery against a school bus driver.

It seemed to me that they were like thousands of families in America who eke out a living on government aid and minimum wage, occupy cheap rental housing, and rely on public transportation to get around and emergency rooms and clinics for medical care; they pay bills with cash or money orders. Because they have no bank accounts or credit cards and own nothing of real value, they don’t leave much of a paper trail. They live below the radar.

But sometimes a blip appears, which is what happened in February 2002. Before Garet read the next section, she stopped, took a drink of her water, and asked whether we wanted to take a break. Bernie glanced at his watch and said no. I sensed that something disturbing was coming. The look on Garet’s face was a mixture of sadness and anger.

She took a deep breath and began the next section of the study: “Departmental History.” In February 2002, an anonymous call was made to the Abuse Hotline of the Florida Department of Children and Families. The caller alleged that “Ongoing, the mother does not clean the living area and the home is filthy. The rug is dirty. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat in the home and the counter is covered with trash and clutter. The child is never seen dressed. She is always in a diaper or naked.”

With that kind of detail, I guessed that it was someone who had been in the apartment to see the filth and the naked child, maybe a maintenance person or a property manager. Whoever made the call was trying to do the right thing and get Danielle the help she needed.

The response from the DCF was to assign the case to Child Protective Investigations. The victims in this first report were identified as David Crockett, who was sixteen at the time, and Danielle, who was three and a half. The allegations were of conditions hazardous to health and neglect.

On the initial visit, David and Danielle were at home alone. David said his mother was at work and would be home later. When the investigator was able to speak with the mother, she claimed that Danielle didn’t like to wear clothing, but she forced the child to when they went outside, which she said she attempted to do at least once a week. She said that her sons attended a nearby adult school and that she did not leave for work until one of them was home to watch Danielle. She admitted that the child had no pediatrician; she insisted that Danielle’s shots were up to date, but she produced no records.

On a follow-up visit about ten days later, the home was in worse disarray and smelled of cigarettes. Two days after that, on a third visit, the home had been cleaned and clothes picked up.

Ultimately, the mother was warned about smoking too much around the child. She declined the department’s offer of day-care and after-school services, the risk to the child was assessed as low, and the case was closed.

Nine months later, another call was made to the DCF, this one worse than the first. The caller said that at four years old, the child was still in a diaper and drinking from a bottle and was never seen outside the home. The report alleged that the mother frequently left the younger son and Danielle at home while she worked and spent her nights with a new “paramour” in his home. I didn’t think I had ever seen a boyfriend referred to as a
paramour
and wondered whether the person writing the report had a peculiar sense of humor or was just very old school.

An investigator went out the next day. According to that report, which was documented in the
Study of the Child
, Danielle had no marks or bruises and was asleep under the covers. Did the investigator uncover Danielle and make sure there were no marks or simply assume? Or just didn’t bother? The boys said there was always a babysitter. Mother admitted that she did leave the children home alone once a week, but she was about to break up with her “paramour.” She explained that Danielle slept in a diaper at night because she still had “accidents,” although no one asked why Danielle was always in a diaper during the day. Mother also said Danielle took a bottle at night only when she “has a fit” without it. She admitted to still having no pediatrician but said she would take Danielle to the hospital if she got sick. The kitchen stove was covered in food, which the investigator pointed out would attract bugs.

Other witnesses in the apartment complex told investigators that they did not believe the mother was a “fit mother,” that the child was always either naked or in a diaper, and that both Danielle and David lacked supervision.

The alleged maltreatment is again listed as Inadequate Supervisory Care Present and Inadequate Clothing and the maltreatment type as Neglect.

Again, the conclusion was that the risk was “low, based on the children are visible to the apartment community.” Visible how? Through the window? It had already been reported that Danielle was never seen outside. Again, the mother refused services. Again, the case was closed due to no present indicators of inadequate supervisory care. So, adequate supervisory care was determined to be her mentally disabled adolescent brother, home alone with his defenseless, naked baby sister. Again, the DCF walked away.

By this time I was in tears. Bernie had stopped eating. The conditions Danielle had been living in were horrible, and even when people tried to help, she was left with Monster Mother. It was just inconceivable to me that a mother could have so little maternal instinct for her own child.

I worried—too much, Bernie always says—when one of my boys had a fever or a stomach ache. If they had a nightmare and cried out from their beds, I woke up and raced to comfort them. Surely, there had to have been times when Danielle had gotten sick or frightened and cried out in the night. Who took her temperature? Who held her, rocked her, whispering words of comfort until she slipped back into sleep?

I looked at Garet and asked her how the DCF could have left Danielle there, especially after the second call in less than a year. She said simply, “Someone blew it.”

I thought about the children who make sensational stories on the six o’clock news when they are discovered dead, murdered at the hands of their own mothers or fathers or both. I doubt that death was the first act of abuse, but it was certainly the last.

One neighbor says to the reporter, “We had no idea.” Another might admit, “The child never did look quite right.” People ask, “How could this happen?” Outrage ensues, agency heads and politicians promise action, someone gets suspended while an investigation begins and then is quietly transferred to another department a few weeks later.

I had a sickening feeling that all of the children Bernie and I had looked at on the Internet who were in the foster-care system and available for adoption had been through scenarios exactly like this. No wonder they were so damaged. First, their parents let them down, and then the system that was meant to save them failed them instead.

Garet went back to reading the report. “Danielle was again brought to the attention of Children and Families through abuse report 2005–415132, which was received on July 12, 2005, at 12:34 p.m.”

Bernie and I looked at each other, then at Garet. That was three years between calls. What had happened to the poor child during that time?

1
The first names of Michelle Crockett’s sons have been changed.