Firstly, I’d like to offer my extreme gratitude to the Washington State Child Protective Services.
To be honest, this comes a little hard for me. I lived in North Carolina for several years and witnessed firsthand the repeated problems with that state’s family services agencies. Later, in Utah, I worked for a court-appointed monitoring panel established to address some of the insane, pervasive, and fundamentally wrong problems in their Division of Family Services. I saw some of the most disturbing images in my life during those months, and was shocked and repulsed by the fuckups working for DFS.
I saw a culture of “family reunification at all costs.” I saw children placed into the homes of convicted heroin and rock dealers. I saw children released from hospitals into the custody of the parents who put them in there. I saw the records of a 13-year-old girl who had run away 12 times after being repeatedly raped by her stepfather. When her mother was put into prison, the girl was given into the exclusive custody of that same stepfather. I saw a broken foster system without oversight. And I saw a government who didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass.
Utah is getting better, but slowly. It’s hard to fight that kind of apathetic inertia.
So, to Washington.
Outside Spokane, a woman just had a baby.
In 1995, this woman’s twin daughters, 10 months old, dies of hyperthermia when their mother wrapped them tightly in blankets and placed them in front of a space heater. OK, it’s awful, it was mind-numbingly stupid, it was neglect. But I might have thought it was just a tragic accident until I fould out that the woman was shitfaced that evening–another person in the house had to explain to her that her girls were dead.
In January 2000, there was fire in the woman’s trailer. Her BAC was close to .40%. Her three sons died in the fire.
She later admitted that she had given them some prescription cough medicine to “quiet them down.” Further, she acknowleged this was not an uncommon occurrence.
The three boys, aged 2 to 5, were too drugged to get out of the house as it burned.
She’s charged with 3 counts of manslaughter.
She had her sixth baby yesterday morning. The baby was taken into CPS custody immediately. After an investigation, ti has been determined that the mother can in no way care for the child safely. And there are no suitable relatives with which to place the child. He will be fostered, possibly for his entire childhood. Which sucks. Big time.
But he will not be with the waste of flesh that bore him. Maybe he’ll have a chance in life. At least he has a chance of seeing elementary school.
Thanks, Washington CPS.
You done good.