David Joles, Star Tribune August 2008

I began compiling notes to do a post last week about the sentencing and conclusion of the attempted murder trial of 61 year old defendant Sylvia Sieferman. It has taken me a bit of time to get my ducks in a row, so while this is slightly belated, it’s still deeply important, particularly in light of the broader questions (far beyond that of sentencing Sieferman) of how these events were enabled to unfold.

In August 2008 Sieferman went on a bloody rampage, wielding first a knife, then an axe trying to murder her two adopteed Chinese daughers, (now named) Hannah and Linnea.

The attack was concluded by Hannah’s escape to a neighbor’s home who called the police, Sieferman’s own attempted suicide, and a note left in the bedroom saying among other things “sorry, I can’t deal with them anymore.”

Linnea had her throat slashed and multiple stab wounds.

Hannah, after first seeing her sister attacked, was then also attacked with a knife, and struck at least five times by an axe. In the course of the attack she ran downstairs to a bathroom, but neglected to lock the door. Sieferman found her and Hannah suffered further attempts to stab her in the neck and in the heart.

Incredibly, she defended herself by grabbing the blade, causing severe lacerations on her hand. Somehow she was able to escape and made it to a neighbor’s house to call for help.

When police arrived at the house,

The 60-year-old woman, sitting cross-legged in front of her house in this St. Paul suburb, was bleeding profusely from her neck.

Inside the house, the horror continued: Blood was everywhere, and the woman’s 11-year-old daughter was lying unresponsive on her bedroom floor in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut. And at a neighbor’s house, the woman’s other 11-year-old daughter was also bleeding – from knife and ax wounds.

“Kill me! Kill me!” the woman yelled as police approached her, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday in Ramsey County District Court.

The girls barely surived.

Linnea Sieferman suffered life-threatening injuries and was in critical condition at Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.

and

Hannah was in good condition at Gillette Children’s Hospital, where she was being treated for head trauma, a fractured skull and severe lacerations to her hand.

Here is a Star Tribune piece filed at the time, back in August almost a year ago.

Sieferman’s excuse for the vicious attack? (also see video connected to the piece,)

When Sieferman entered her plea, she told the court she planned to kill the girls because she feared they would be placed in foster care and raised by strangers.

Ironic, in that at the time she adopted the girls Sieferman, herself an American “stranger” became a single mother (adopting Hannah at age 53.)

This twisted form of rationalization is all too familiar to those who work in the domestic violence field or adoptionland: family members who decide “their” families are better off dead than beyond their reach.

As part of her adoption process Sieferman blogged about the adoptions, though the blog has since been taken down.

Neighbors said Sieferman is a single mother who adopted the girls from China. Her online blog identifies the girls as Hannah, adopted in 1999, and Linnea, adopted in 2003.

The blog contains Sieferman’s account of her longheld desire to adopt daughters from overseas and her joy upon meeting them and watching them grow.

Quotes from the blog can still be found online such as this one, describing the final post dated 2005,

“I suppose my adoption journey really started 25 years ago, when I used to dream of adopting an Asian girl someday,” Sieferman wrote. After reading an article on the subject, “(I) started off to explore exactly what would prevent me, then nearly 50 and single, from becoming a mom.”

But this attack did not come out of the blue, Sieferman had told medical personnel she feared harming the girls,

Sylvia Sieferman was hospitalized two months ago after fearing she might hurt herself or her daughters, former neighbor Carrie Micko told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Micko said she didn’t understand how Sieferman could be released and the girls go back into the home, apparently without any follow-up. “Somebody should have gotten the clue that unless the circumstances at home changed those kids should not have gone back into the house,” she told the newspaper.

Roseville police Capt. Rick Mathwig said that in this case, rules involving patient confidentiality would have likely prevented police from knowing if there had been trouble in the home.

“Bad Mom,”

During the assault, Sylvia Sieferman said “I’m a bad mom” and “I had to do this,” according to her daughter’s account of the assault.

Clearly her self image and self doubts as a(n adoptive) Mother played an important role in the attack.

At least one neighbor was aware of the concerns,

A former neighbor, Carrie Micko, said Sieferman was severely depressed and worried about the safety of the girls.

Micko, in fact, was the one who took her to the hospital,

In the six and half years between when she adopted Hannah and now, Micko said many things changed. She said one of Sieferman’s homes was in foreclosure and she’d lost several jobs.

About two months ago, Micko took Sieferman to the hospital. Sieferman had been making comments that she wanted to hurt herself and her children.

“Her children were everything to her. Her whole life was about her kids,” she said. “And after a series of financial mishaps, she just couldn’t see her way through. She was under extreme financial, emotional and spiritual distress and didn’t want to fail them. She couldn’t bear to have them see her fail.”

Micko said Sieferman left the hospital after three days because she had some job interviews lined up. Sieferman also feared the county might take her children away. Micko said she tried to talk to the social workers and hospital personnel but couldn’t get through because she wasn’t family.

Fear of failure and adopter expectations, and appearing to fail against the societal standard of parents appear to have played an important role.

From further down in the story, we learn,

Neighbors said Sieferman had foreclosed on a home and was having legal problems.

and

“It didn’t have to happen. She was very clear about her intentions and told them and I think that was her way of saying help me, that the children,” Micko said. “They didn’t respond the way she was hoping or I was hoping.”

According to the Mental Health Association of Minnesota, doctors could have involuntarily committed Sieferman for six months. Generally, though, they prefer friends or families members to encourage them to stay voluntarily.

Tom Johnson, a client advocate with the Mental Health Association, wouldn’t talk specifically about Sieferman’s case, but said ones like hers are difficult.

“It can be an easy process if it’s very clear the person is a danger to herself or others,” he said. “It’s not quite as easy is someone has said outside ‘I’m going to do something to myself’ but then they come in to the hospital and the doctor sees them and the person says ‘I wasn’t really serious about that.’”

Ironically, Minneapolis IS one of the places in the county that is set up to provide a sort of “time out” by way of emergency child care, though it is unclear whether Sieferman was aware of the program at the time. Clearly fear of losing the girls is part of what led to her decision to leave the mental health services.

Micko said a group of neighbors stepped into the watch Hannah and Linnea when Sieferman was in the hospital. She also when social workers mentioned protective custody to Sieferman, she wanted to leave the hospital.

Molly Kenney, interim program director for the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, said her organization is there to help families like the Siefermans. Families in need of help can call the nursery for advice or a safe place for kids to stay. Children can stay there for three nights at no cost to give parents a break. Kenney said it helps to prevent violence.

“The point is they have to call us and that reaching out for help is the first point of entry we see as a sign of strength,” she said. “They want what’s best for their kids.”

The Crisis Nursery parent hotline is open 24 hours a day. Each county in Minnesota also has a 24 hours crisis hotline.

Hennepin (Children): 612-348-2233
Hennepin (Adult): 612-379-6363
Washington: 651-777-5222
Anoka: 1-888-422-6522
Dakota: 952-891-7171
Carver: 952-442-7601
Ramsey (Adult): 651-266-7900
Ramsey (Children): 651-774-7000

Still, in light of the fact that she Sieferman was explicit about being a potential threat to the girls, where was the follow up? Why was she simply allowed to return home to them?

The lack of follow up, and unwillingness to step in to protect the girls was a direct factor that led to the horror that ensued.

Thus this is not merely a matter of Sylvia Sieferman failing these girls in one of the worst ways imaginable, it is ALSO a failure of the system itself.

Where is the investigation of ultimately whose job it was to ensure that a woman who had threatened her adopted kids lives wasn’t just left alone with them to do with as she pleased?

Apparently with Sieferman now sentenced there appears to be a growing consensus that everything has been taken care of and it was all merely an individual problem. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ignoring the systemic failures only ensures the same mistakes will be repeated.

By and large I’ve been unable to find the direct voices of the girls speaking for themselves, though I did find this one small paragraph

When police arrived Hannah told them her mother “attacked me and my sister with a knife. My sister should be dead.” She said that during the assault her mother said, “I’m a bad mom, I had to do this.”

Police at the scene discribed it thusly

“This townhome has five levels to it and when I went in there and looked, there was blood on at least three levels. Pools, splatters and things like that. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to look at,” said Captain Rick Mathwig of the Roseville Police Department.

Sieferman…

…was sentenced in Ramsey County District Court to 16 years and six months for one second-degree attempted murder charge, and 12 years and 7 1/2 months for the other charge. She will serve at least two-thirds of that time for each concurrent sentence.

Sieferman pleaded guilty in May to spare her daughters the trauma of trial, her attorney, Paul Rogosheske, said. She initially faced a first-degree attempted murder charge.

While you might think there would be massive media coverage, or international coverage, most of what you” find online treats it as a mere local story.

What coverage there has been has often tied it to the larger story of the American financial meltdown (see this piece as well,) rather than understanding it in the context of the nuances of adoption and expectations specific to adoption marketing like giving a child “a better life” so often create. (As better life” so often translates directly to children coming from economic dire circumstances to wealthy western adopters.)

The girls are recovering from their many injuries and are now living with a family member (of their adoptive mother.)

A fund has been set up to help them go forward with their lives.

HOW TO HELP HANNAH AND LINNEA

A trust fund has been set up for Sylvia Sieferman’s former adopted daughters. Donors can contribute at any Wells Fargo branch, or they can mail donations to Sieferman’s civil attorney, Cynthia Stange, at 1970 Oakcrest Ave., Suite 217, Roseville, MN 55113, payable to the Hannah & Linnea Sieferman Trust.

Much as I wish that was all there was to the story, naturally it isn’t. Because in the midst of it all a quack pseudo-therapy “attachment disorder” self promoter has decided the brutal attacks could make a useful career stepping stone.

A Search for Survivors has a comprehensive overview of the case and then reports on Heather Forbes’ efforts to utilize the attempted murders to gain media personal appearances in this piece,

Attachment Therapist Heather Forbes tries to twist the repeated stabbings of adopted children Hannah & Linnea Sieferman into personal publicity campaign

Far beyond mere ‘ambulance chasers’, people like Heather Forbes view every blood spattered townhouse as an opportunity.

Attachquacks of course, don’t blame the Adoptive Mother, they don’t blame the system, nope, they blame the adoptees themselves, (quoting the ASFS post,)

Never mind the fact that Hannah and Linnea Sieferman were clearly intelligent, sweet children. Never mind the fact that their adoptive mother had serious mental problems, to the point where she was willingly checked into a hospital to prevent her from hurting herself and others.

No, to Heather Forbes and the rest of the RAD cultists, the fault lies with the children, never the parent. By virtue of being adopted, children are automatically written off as traumatized, disabled, inferior and ultimately the catalyst for any tragedy, no matter how undeserved or utterly indefensible.

I’ve done multiple posts within this 24 hour period so be sure to see the post beneath this one as well.

***

This is my fourth post following the horrific events in Maryland this past week, the grizzly discovery of two of Renee Bowman’s adopted daughters kept in a freezer in a Southern Maryland home and a third adopted daughter barely escaping with her life by jumping out of a window after being locked in and left alone. The brave 7 year-old showed long term signs of severe abuse.

My 3 earlier posts can be found by way of my Maryland tag.

As many new readers are finding my page via websearches, the short introduction is I’m an adult adoptee Bastard blogger, who lives in Maryland. If you want to know more, visit my about page, or simply explore some of the tags down the left side of my blog.

***

I don’t have a lot of time to put this post together, but I at least wanted to provide a few of the links readers may want to explore further.

This AP piece details some of the concerns surrounding the issue of outsourcing home studies and other aspects of the process. Lack of oversight on the private contractors has been an ongoing issue.

AP, by way of The Capital DC welfare agency questioned about adoptions after deaths October 1, 2008:

Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children’s Rights, said the New York-based advocacy group has long had concerns about whether D.C.’s child welfare agency adequately supervises private contractors. The group brought a class-action lawsuit against the city nearly 20 years ago that eventually forced the child welfare system into receivership.

In July, Children’s Rights sought to hold the city in contempt for failing to make adequate progress. Lowry said work done by contractors was one of the concerns.

Wexler, of the reform group, said he worries that D.C. social workers might have been under pressure to hastily finalize adoptions because of payments — up to $8,000 per child — that state and local governments get from the federal government for adoptions.

Gerald said D.C. received an incentive award only in 2004, the year Bowman adopted the two younger girls.

While autopsy findings are not in yet, (and may not be for some time) we do have, by way of the Post, what Renee Bowman told police about how the two girls died.

Washington Post Starvation, Injury Cited as Causes of Girls’ Deaths October 2, 2008:

The Calvert County woman who is being investigated in the death of her two adopted daughters found frozen in her home told police that one child died of starvation and the other died after apparently falling backward, two law enforcement sources said today.

Also be sure to note this paragraph from the same article concerning the private contractor who did the initial home study (Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church in Baltimore, a faith-based organization:)

The private agency that performed the initial study of Bowman’s application to become a foster parent, and eventually an adoptive parent, released a statement yesterday saying that its recommendations were reviewed by CFSA and Superior Court. The Baltimore-based agency, the Board of Child Care, has a $2.7 million contract to provide services to CFSA through Jan. 31.

Also see the Washington Post for More Tests Are Needed To ID Girls In Freezer October 2, 2008, which clarifies the series of moves, county to county:

“This is an unusual case where all of these girls had limited exposure to the outside world,” Baur said.

As detectives awaited further findings from the medical examiner, they continued to try to trace Bowman’s movements from Montgomery to Charles County to Calvert. The children were apparently in the freezer when it was moved to each location. Investigators have found no record of school attendance in those counties for the children, who would be 9 and 11, or for their 7-year-old sister, who was found wandering a Calvert street last week.

Here are two more pieces:

Gazette.net Initial autopsy of frozen human remains did not show cause of death October 2, 2008

AP, By way of the Baltimore Sun Girls in freezer had likely been dead for months October 2, 2008

WTOP radio is reporting that the remains are those of the two adopted girls, Sources: Remains in freezer are adopted girls October 2, 1:04pm

Authorities are confident the two young girls found in a freezer in a southern Maryland home are the adopted daughters of Renee Bowman, according to sources close to the investigation.

and

Sources say the girl’s names and photos will be released in the hopes someone may remember seeing the girls alive. Police say this could help determine when and where they died.

As I had mentioned in earlier posts, many neighbors were unaware Bowman even had kids.

See WJZ-TV 13 Dead Girls’ Mother Was Investigated For Neglect October 2, 2008

Montgomery County police say it’s almost as if the three adopted girls didn’t exist in to the outside world.

In the house where they believe two of them were murdered, neighbors say they don’t remember seeing children, and they were never enrolled in any Maryland school.

Neighbors in southern Maryland also say they didn’t ever see the surviving child outdoors.

We also learn that Bowman HAD been visited by a caseworker responding to an anonymous tip about her while living in Charles County (between her time in Montgomery and Calvert Counties.) The visit had not shown up in initial searches as Bowman was living under an assumed name in Charles County:

For a short time, Bowman lived in Charles County too, and Social Services is reporting it did respond to a complaint about a neglected child there in January.

They say when they arrived, the child looked healthy and the house clean.

and

Earlier this week, the state Child Welfare Agency said it had never been contacted about Bowman, but when they learned the 43-year-old woman did use an alias late Thursday, they did find that complaint about child neglect.

The Maryland Department of Human Resources issued the following statement involving the case:

“Earlier this week, the Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR) conducted a state-wide search of our data systems to determine whether our agency had ever received a child abuse, neglect or abandonment complaint regarding the Bowman family.

After learning yesterday that Ms. Bowman may have used a fictitious name while she resided in Charles County, we conducted an additional search of our records.

This additional search has uncovered that DHR received a single, anonymous call from a person reporting an allegation of child neglect.

This call resulted in a caseworker visiting Ms. Bowman’s home in January of 2008. During the visit, the caseworker observed the home to be clean and appropriately furnished but did notice a smell of mildew in the home. Dogs and cats were also in the home.

Ms. Bowman reported the smell in the home was caused by a water leak in her basement. The child was observed to be of appropriate weight and good health. Conditions in the home were adequate to meet the needs of the child. Based on these findings and observations no neglect was found at that time.

DHR staff will work with law enforcement and the state’s attorneys’ office as this complicated investigation continues.”

A second similar story can be found in the Baltimore Sun Social workers found no problem at Bowman home, October3, 2008, which confirms the name deception:

Bowman used a false name while living in Charles County, officials said.

It appears that Bowman moved from Charles County to Calvert County sometime shortly after the social worker’s visit, perhaps trying to stay one step ahead of entanglement with the system in any form.

***

Finally, perhaps somewhat separated from links bearing at least some resemblance to ‘news’, we find today’s Washington Post piece, Shopping On eBay As Girls Lay Dead, which begins to looks a hell of a lot less like actual news and more like the national tabloids. None-the-less, read the piece, it does contain some pertinent details, it’s a shame the writers, Petula Dvorak, Meg Smith and Ashley Halsey III couldn’t be bothered to write such into a real news story.

While titillating readers and appealing to Americans’ socially voyeuristic tendencies, detailing Bowman’s recent eBay purchases down to the clothing size, or her “love for the Internet — she had at least three e-mail addresses” (good grief! Utilizing three e-mail addresses is enough to tag you as somehow extraordinary? Oh please!) and her mention of “Dexter” as her favourite television show, the article completely misses the core fundamental aspect of the Bowman case when the authors ponder:

…fact-finding is unlikely to answer one of the questions that make the case so horrifying: How could a mother go on with life knowing that her daughters lay encased in ice in the freezer?

That aspect of course, being that Bowman was an ADOPTIVE mother, these were her ADOPTED daughters.

Whether or not that made it any easier for her to do what she did we may never know.

But what we do know is that unlike biological parents, Bowman went through a state-run (o.k. D.C, District run) vetting process, and was state approved to parent, not once by three times over.

That is what lies at the heart of this case, not irrelevant space fillers along the lines of “”I love to shop!”

(All of which is to say, articles focusing on eBay habits on page A-1 means it’s time for the Post to get its eye back on the ball.)

I’m doing two posts tonight, so please also be sure to read Adoption subsidies for frozen corpses, more on the Maryland nightmare for part II of my coverage. (This third post is coming almost immediately on the heels of my second post following the developing Maryland story. I cut this writing about today’s Washington Post piece off the bottom of my last post to cut down the length and try to maintain the continuity.)

For new readers, also be sure to go back to part I, Maryland- 3 adopted daughters; 1 beaten, 2 dead, frozen in freezer for 7 months to get up to speed

***

Wednesday’s Washington Post reveals more details in its most recent article, Girls May Have Been Dead More Than a Year, Police Say. This latest piece says Bowman may have moved to Prince George’s OR Charles County:

Renee D. Bowman, 43, who arrived in Calvert in February, “indicated” in an interview that the bodies were in the freezer when she moved out of her former residence in the Rockville area, investigators have said. Yesterday, authorities revealed that she left that area last October or November and then stayed briefly in Prince George’s or Charles County before moving to Calvert.

So we may still only be dealing with three counties.

The new article also reveals that Bowman on top of the misdemeanor conviction, Bowman had filed for bankruptcy and that the information may not have been included in the outsourced background check:

The case continued to raise questions about D.C. child welfare services yesterday, three days after the bodies were found. The D.C. Child and Family Services Agency recommended Bowman as a suitable adoptive parent even though she filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, the year she adopted one foster child, and had just emerged from it in 2004, when she adopted two others. In between, she lost her Landover house to foreclosure.

Bowman, now jailed on child abuse charges, had also been convicted in 1999 of a misdemeanor charge of “threatening bodily harm” to a 72-year-old man.

“We want to know how did this person . . . qualify to become an adoptive parent?” said D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), chairman of the Committee on Human Services and a former social worker. “Is there anything we don’t know or should have known that would have prevented the adoption?”

Acting Attorney General Peter Nickles said he was not aware of the bankruptcy filings or the misdemeanor conviction and does not believe that the information was included in a home visit report generated by a private contractor.

“That was not revealed. At least, I don’t think it was revealed,” he said. “I’m not saying . . . that I’ve seen everything.”

Then again, as the contractor, Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church, (yes, folks more faith based adoption entanglement) isn’t saying anything either, we may just be looking at finger pointing and ass-covering in all directions at this point.

According to the Post:

Thomas Curcio, president of the nonprofit Board of Child Care, the private agency hired by the city to evaluate Bowman, has not responded to phone messages seeking a comment on the case.

As details of the adoption process are kept secret by law, determining misconduct in the process becomes an incredibly complicated endevour.

Bowman’s adoptions were approved by a D.C. Superior Court judge after a background investigation by a private agency under contract with the child services agency. Records of the adoptions remain confidential under D.C. law.

Meanwhile baby-step reforms, as opposed to comprehensive systemic overhauls (which I spoke to in my last post) are already being contemplated:

The case is prompting discussion among child-welfare advocates in the region about developing a standardized protocol to ensure thorough examinations of prospective adoptive parents and increasing post-adoption monitoring. Most states and the District have no post-adoption monitoring systems, experts said.

We also get a glimpse of the DC scope of the federal adoption subsidies:

As of last month, 2,295 people who adopted from the District were receiving the tax-free federal subsidy of $800 a month per child, said Mafara Hobson, spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D).

And a snapshot if you will of Bowman’s recent work history:

A spokeswoman for Suburban Hospital in Bethesda said Bowman did secretarial work there from September 2004 to June 2006. She worked as a patient appointment scheduler at the Center for Ambulatory Surgery in the District from May 1989 to June 1993, then again from May 1998 to December 2000, according to a spokeswoman for the facility, which recently changed its name to MedStar Surgery Center.

Most importantly, the Post has dug out the details of the the incident that led to the misdemeanor conviction:

In 1999, according to D.C. Superior Court records, Bowman, in a vehicle, pulled alongside a 72-year-old man’s car and angrily demanded that he pay her for damages to her car caused during an earlier accident. The man, who was with a woman, quoted Bowman as yelling: “I want my $900. . . . If that [expletive] wasn’t sitting next to you, I’d whup your [expletive] right now.”

He said Bowman continued to follow him and threaten him that day, at one point saying she would “get the drug boys around the corner” to break into his house and beat him. Bowman received a 6-month suspended sentenced and was put on probation for a year.

The Post article also contains new details about Bowman’s boyfriend who has been questioned by the Police:

When the 7-year-old spoke with Calvert authorities Friday, she said her mother had beaten her, but she spoke kindly about a man she considered to be her father. He is not her biological father, authorities said, but her mother’s boyfriend.

The girl “thought the world of him,” Detective Sergeant Moore said.

Officials identified him as Joe C. Dickerson and said he was cooperative during an interview. They would not say what he had told them when asked about the bodies in the freezer. They said he visited Bowman at her home frequently but did not live there.

At yesterday’s custody hearing:

The 7-year-old was placed in the custody of the Maryland Department of Human Resources after a court hearing that was closed to the public. The girl remained in the hospital late yesterday afternoon, and she was scheduled to be placed with a Calvert foster family, officials said.

The Department of Human Resources said it had found no records of any child abuse or neglect complaints about this family.

***

Today more details are emerging. The Washington Post article, Md. Mother Jailed After Bodies Of 2 Children Found in Freezer, for example, contains a wealth of sad new details.

With Bowman in jail, charged with child abuse, and investigators working to piece together what happened, the case again shined a spotlight on the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, which recommended Bowman to a D.C. Superior Court judge as a suitable adoptive parent in 2001 and 2004. The girls had been wards of the D.C. government.

Secrecy in adoption is leaving many questions unanswered:

Yesterday, myriad questions about Bowman’s adoptions went unanswered as city and court officials in the District, citing confidentiality laws, declined to reveal details of a background check of Bowman that was performed by a private contractor. They said they were unaware of her 1999 misdemeanor conviction in the District for threatening to hurt someone.

We learn two of the girls, the surviving 7 year old and the 9 year old were biological sisters as well:

The missing children would be 9 and 11, officials said. They said the 7-year-old girl is a biological sister of the 9-year-old. All three were foster children of Bowman’s before she adopted the oldest child in 2001 and the other two in 2004, officials said.

There are no records of the three girls having been enrolled in public school in three Maryland Counties Bowman has lived in:

Many neighbors near Bowman’s beige ranch-style home in Lusby and at her former residence in Rockville said they had never seen children at her home and were unaware that she had any. Authorities in Calvert and Montgomery County — and in Prince George’s County, where she lived for a time — said they could find no record of the children being enrolled in public schools.

More details are emerging of the abuse the 7 year old adopted girl endured:

Bowman was being held yesterday on charges of child abuse in connection with injuries to the 7-year-old. The girl escaped from her locked bedroom Thursday by jumping out a window, police said.

Bowman admitted beating the girl with a “hard-heeled shoe,” the sheriff’s office said. The girl told police her mother beat her with a white shoe to the point that it was covered in blood, officials said.

The child had “extensive open infected sores and open lesions,” several injuries to her feet and knees, and ligature marks and extensive scarring on her neck, according to charging documents filed in court.

Clearly if there was “extensive scarring on her neck” her abuse and neglect had been ongoing.

A second Post article details the search for evidence at the former residence in Montgomery County, see Detectives Scour for Evidence in Case of Dead Girls. It also reveals even further insanity, the freezer with the dead girls may have been moved not once, but twice:

Starks said Bowman left Rockville in October or November of last year. She lived in Charles County briefly before moving to Calvert, officials said.

The chronology, which differs from information made public yesterday, raises the startling possibility that the bodies of the children might have been moved not once but twice.

All of which sits firmly in the context of D.C.’s Banita Jacks case from earlier this year and the aftermath. (A snapshot of the Jacks catastrophic failure can be found in articles such as this CBS news piece from last January, D.C. Woman: “Demons” Possessed Slain Girls, it also dealt with issues of kids being in and out of school and lack of follow up to determine the children’s welfare. But then she’s a research topic unto herself.) The disastrous outcome led to ongoing work trying to clean up the mess that is DC Child and Family Services Agency (see articles such as this, Court Orders CFSA To Do Obvious: Get A Plan, from the Washington City Paper for example.)

The case has again shined a spotlight on the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, which recommended Bowman to a D.C. Superior Court judge as a suitable adoptive parent in 2001 and 2004. The girls had been wards of the D.C. government.

The child welfare agency came under fire in January after social workers failed to investigate reports of alleged child neglect by Banita Jacks, a Southeast Washington woman now charged with killing her four daughters in their home.

The Bowman mess also brings to the fore the issue of background checks being outsourced to private contractors:

…myriad questions about Bowman’s adoptions went unanswered as city and court officials in the District, citing confidentiality laws, declined to reveal details of a background check of Bowman that was performed by a private contractor. They said they were unaware of her 1999 misdemeanor conviction in the District for threatening to hurt someone.

In the midst of these remarkable circumstances, (DC) Mayor Fenty had this to say:

“It would be too premature, too irresponsible, to say someone along the chain messed up,” Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said at a news conference.

(Fenty has been busy covering his own ass in all this, pointing out repeatedly that the adoptions took place before he came to office.)

Again, rather than blaming individuals and saying any one given person let these girls slide, I think we have to look systemically. After the adoption, were there follow up visits? Were there supposed to be any? (Further down in this post I’ve come across a quote which seems to imply that once a child is placed, the job is in all meaningful ways ‘done’.)

Was it ANYONE’S job to ensure these girls were getting any kind of education? Were they ever enrolled in any school anywhere? Do kids who are not enrolled just fall through the cracks? Is anyone tasked with making sure they are in some form of schooling if they are not in public schools, or do parents just get to opt out completely and no one cares? (Further does that mean federal adoption subsidies can be given to parents who opt their kids out of education?) Apparently it’s no one’s job to make sure these girls were getting education of some kind, they’re not in county schools, but no one checks to see if they’ve moved to private, or homeschool? Do they just fall off the edge? If it’s not already, then it’s long past time for it be added to someone’s job description.

The article continues:

Authorities in Calvert and County – and in Prince George’s County, where she lived for a time — said they could find no record of the children being enrolled in public schools.

(I’m still trying to determine when were the Bowmans living in Prince George’s? Before or after their time in Montogomery? How many of Maryland’s twenty-three counties were touched by this case?)

Through all of this the moves, the lack of any evidence of these girls being given any kind of education, heck the lack of evidence that these girls were even still alive, the checks kept rolling in. Federal “special needs” adoption subsidies to the tune of $2, 400 a month. Yes, thousands of dollars without so much as ever asking, oh by the way, the girls are still alive, right?

Adoption subsidies for frozen corpses.

Keep up the ‘good work’ money, no evidence of post placement children required.

In Montgomery and Calvery Counties, just as I suspected, some neighbors were unaware Bowman even had kids:

Many neighbors near Bowman’s beige ranch-style home in Lusby and at the Rockville residence said they had never seen children at her home and were unaware that she had any.

Moving from Rockville/Aspen Hill in Montgomery Co. to Lusby in Calvert Co. Bowman claiming to be in failing health, apparently left a mess in her wake:

A few months before moving out, Bowman complained of back pain and said she had cancer, according to neighbor Shirley Knapp.

After Bowman moved to Calvert, the landlord complained to Howard Knapp, Shirley’s husband, about the mess that had been left behind. “They were pigs,” he recalled the landlord saying. “They trashed the house, and there was at least one dead cat in there.”

So again, I ask, in the wake of the adoptions, where were the follow up visits? Was the house in similar condition through the time the Bowmans lived there?

Today, (Tuesday), the autopsy for the dead sisters was scheduled. Details are likely to be forthcoming soon. In light of this paragraph from early on in the article:

The Calvert sheriff’s office said in a statement that Bowman told investigators the remains in the freezer were those of her older two adopted daughters. She told them she wrapped one of the children in a plastic garbage bag and the other in a rug, officials said.

I am GUESSING that the two girls may have died in perhaps separate incidents. Had they died at once, Bowman would have been more likely to treat the two bodies similarly. As one was in a garbage bad and the other in a rug, there’s the possibility that we could be looking at two separate events.

As for the final surviving daughter, forced to save herself, she’s apparently going into the Maryland system:

The Maryland Department of Human Resources will file a petition in court today to gain custody of the 7-year-old.

A third article in today’s Post, Woman Met Adoption Requirements, D.C. Officials Say details the adoptions of the girls and the “special needs” adoption subsidies Bowman was receiving:

D.C. officials said yesterday that Renee D. Bowman followed the proper procedures for adopting three children and passed the background check and home study required for adoptive parents.

“Based on my review of the evidence today, all that happened,” said Peter Nickles, the city’s acting attorney general. He said that as part of a federal program for parents who take in “special needs” children, Bowman received a total of $2,400 a month for the three girls.

The special-needs designation can mean that children are part of a sibling set or a racial minority group, have a learning disability or were relinquished to the state by their biological parents, among other things.

Despite a previous conviction a misdemeanor that was clearly pertinent, Bowman sailed on through the process:

The city’s adoption process involves an investigation into the prospective parent’s background and home life, a child-rearing class, interviews and other evaluations. The final approval comes from a judge in the Superior Court’s family division.

Bowman cleared the hurdles despite a 1999 conviction on one misdemeanor count of “threats to do bodily harm.” She was given a six-month suspended sentence and put on supervised probation for a year, according to Superior Court records.

D.C. officials said at a news conference that they were unaware of the case and did not know whether a misdemeanor conviction would prevent an adoption .

As the District had outsourced the background check, they are now claiming ignorance of the misdemeanor conviction. This brings us to our next question, how many other people were allowed to adopt with prior convictions and what are the implications for the children they adopted?

Worse, they admit, they don’t even know whether or not the conviction would have disqualified her, or whether the adoptions would have gone forward anyway had they known!

As I continue to say, SYSTEMIC problems.

Fortunately, we do at least get the name of the private contractor:

The private agency that did the background check, the Baltimore-based Board of Child Care, did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Which is to say they’re ducking this one and hoping attention goes elsewhere. That would be the Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church. (Get yer ‘faith-based’ homestudies here!) The BOCC tries to be one stop shopping, providing everything from home studies to “all of the required post-placement services.”

Which brings us around to Adoptions Together, (yet another topic unto itself) from two directions, both the Post article with the quote below indicating that those with a misdemeanor conviction have gotten children in the past:

“Whenever there’s any kind of a criminal history, it’s always carefully evaluated,” said Janice Goldwater, executive director of the nonprofit Adoptions Together, which works with government agencies in the Washington region. “But there are people that adopt children that have misdemeanors.”

and by way of the Board of Child Care adoption page, which makes it clear Adoptions Together isn’t merely familiar with the broader DC adoption milieu, the Board of Child Care is in “partnership” with Adoptions Together:

The Board of Child Care is licensed as a child placement agency in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Through an established partnership with Adoptions Together, a comprehensive array of adoption services are available, including adoption counseling, home studies, assistance in the waiting period, full placement services, reunion services, and all of the required post-placement services.

The real bottom line is that ‘the buck’ appears to have stopped nowhere.

After placement, apparently the job is done:

“Once the court decides a family is fit, once it takes place, that ends the jurisdiction of the state or D.C,” said Mayor Fenty.

In other words, a clusterfuck of no one stepping up to the plate to say ‘damnit, someone somewhere in one of these systems needed to step forward to say it WAS their responsibility or their departments’ responsibility to ensure kids are still alive post placement’.

***

Lots of other factors played into this mess, communication between DC and MD, outsourcing of background checks leading to deniability, lack of follow up once a kid is placed, homeschool laws that place less scrutiny on families when a child is no longer in public schools (based on assumptions that the kids must be getting something somewhere else), adoption subsidies that go out whether the kids is provably alive or not, and as always, the lack of budget, time, personel, etc to do what really should have been done every step of the way.

To do what kids need to ensure their very lives.

The SYSTEM failed these adopted girls. It’s past time to start re-evaluating from the ground up.