I wrote a number of posts about Renee Bowman and the tragic stories of the three girls she adopted as the story broke  late in Septemeber 2008 when the final surviving girl essentially rescued herself by escaping her murderous and abusive adopter’s household.

As I wrote at the time, quoting a Washington Post article,

As for the seven year old who escaped with her life, she was a prisoner in her own adoptive “home”/hellhole:

“The investigation began Friday, after neighbors on Pawnee Lane found the 7-year-old who had jumped from the second-story window of the house on Buckskin Trail, a nearby street in the same subdivision. The girl was badly bruised and apparently beaten, authorities said today. Neighbors alerted the authorities, who transported the girl to Children’s Hospital and opened a child abuse investigation.

Some time later, Bowman came to the sheriff’s office after learning deputies had found her daughter. According to investigators, “she confessed to beating the victim with a ‘hard heeled shoe.’ ”

Authorities said Bowman told them the 7-year-old was rarely, if ever, permitted to leave the house. She was beaten “all over” and remains hospitalized, Evans said at the news conference.

Calvert authorities said there is no evidence that the 7-year-old was enrolled in Calvert County schools. Bowman does not have a criminal record and has not been accused of neglect or abuse in the past, they said.

Detectives obtained a search warrant for the house in an effort to find the shoe and other evidence. While searching the house, they found human remains in the freezer.

When found wandering the street, a neighbor asked the girl if she was alright, to which she responded:

“My mother just beats me. She just beats me to death.”

A later story went into further detail:

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.

Once the girls had been adopted out of DC foster care by Bowman, no one came to check on them.

Bowman had claimed they were being “homeschooled” which enabled her to hide her long dead adopted girls over the course of at least three years.

Their names were Jasmine and Minnet. They were biological sisters.

As this Baltimore Sun article pointed out:

Minnet would have been 12 now, and Jasmine would have turned 11 on Tuesday.

The freezer that contained their bodies was moved multiple times as Bowman moved around the state, but never in any school district was it anyone’s job to ensure the girls were still alive.

Even as their bodies lay frozen in the freezer, and even as the third girl endured starvation, isolation and beatings, Bowman continued to receive adoption subsidies, $2,400 a month for the three girls, with no strings attached, not even something as simple as being required to prove the girls were still alive.

At the heart of this case, far beyond the particulars of any one “family” lies a broken system.

A system that enabled Renee Bowman to adopt these three girls in the first place despite red flags along the way, such as the misdemeanor conviction for threatening to hurt someone, then after the adoptions, the use of a false name to cover previous entanglement with the Maryland Child Welfare Agency.

A system that enables parents to hide dead children behind claims of “homeschooling”. And a system wherein checks are mailed each month without even the most basic of requirements, that evidence that the child still exists, as a precondition to state money being given over.

The final surviving girl testified in court against the woman who adopted her only to incarcerate her in her adoptive “home” and beat her with a baseball bat and hard soled shoe. Refusing to look at Bowman the girl referred to Renee Bowman as her “ex-mother.”

Would that she could “ex” the system that did this to her as easily. Would that Maryland and the federal government could.

But sadly, the odds are, this will be treated as a case in isolation, as ‘justice done, after sentencing we can forget about it.’

The Maryland legislature is currently in session, but no bills have been introduced to ensure that children that parents claim are being homeschooled be checked in on every so often.

There’s no bill to ensure that kids adopted out of fostercare (even if DC foster care) receive any form of follow up visit. No conditions are being placed on adoption subsidies. No cleaning up the issue of outsourced background checks to streamline the process to ensure all information about a would-be-adopter appears prior to adoption (in this case, a DC problem, yet a Baltimore agency, still a lesson to learn.) No post placement monitoring systems. No nothing.

No lessons from this case have been learned, and nothing is being set in place to protect against a ‘next time’.

Nope, once adopted, these girls became no one’s responsibility other than Renee Bowman, and clearly Bowman was anything but responsible with the girls entrusted to her ‘care.’

I delved into the issue of the subcontracted home study done by the “faith based” Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church here earlier. It too, brings out uncomfortable systemic questions that have been swept aside as the case went forward:

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.

A big part of those systemic problems is that ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring the safety of the children post placement is not in anyone’s job description:

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’.

I ended my initial post about this case with this, still sadly just as true today as the day I wrote it:

Whatever eventually happens to the Bowmans, we need to look at far more than one “family” and one house and instead work to create systems of prevention. Systems where the kids come first, not their abusers.

Going forward, it is vital this region, and this country learns the lessons inherent to this case, that this is not merely a case about individual failings and murder, it is a case that exemplifies the weakness of the current adoption system and how easily Renee Bowman exploited them

…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

While the sentencing of Bowman may bring some sense of closure to some, unless and until the broken system is addressed and corrected, there will be no justice.

***

Again, for more on this case, please see my earlier posts on my Renee Bowman tag, start at the bottom of the page and read up to read them in chronological order.

The story is not getting a great deal of attention, but the Morgan case was the first of two similar cases in Maryland within four months of one another wherein adopted girls who had been allegedly locked in, deprived of food and beaten, managed to extract themselves from the horrendous situations they found themselves in at the hands of their adopters.

The Morgan case was from back in June ‘08, the second similar case was the Renee Bowman case from Lusby, Maryland in September ‘08. Renee Bowman’s seven year old adopted girl managed to climb out her window as well, and sought help. Her two adopted sisters, Jasmine Nicole and Minnet C., were not so “fortunate,” they were found stashed in a home freezer, long dead of asphyxiation, carried from Montgomery County to Calvert County when Bowman moved.

While the Bowman case has received a great amount of attention, no doubt due to the grizzly details of the case, (and the two dead adopted girls, as opposed to the “mere” abuse in the Morgan case) I am not finding a great deal of material to cite in relation to the Morgan case. Here are a few pieces I have managed to corral:

AP- (via Washington Post) Md. Mother Pleads Guilty to Abuse of Adopted Daughter,

Montgomery County police say that in June, Morgan tied her adopted daughter naked to a bed and beat her. Police also say the victim claimed that the 47-year-old mother locked her in her room without enough food. The girl eventually escaped through a window.

Officials say that on June 15, the girl flagged down a car and asked to go to a nearby McDonald’s. She was later treated at a children’s hospital.

Pound Pup Legacy has a copy of a local Fox/Faux news piece from last June

Note particularly,

Detectives say that their investigation led them to the girl’s adoptive mother, 47-year-old Hyacinth Beverly Morgan of Silver Spring. Morgan was arrested and she now faces charges of first-degree child abuse, first-degree assault, second-degree child abuse, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and false imprisonment.

Neighbors who live near Morgan’s Silver Spring home say she has spent the last decade building what appears to be a daycare facility which never opened. It’s a three-story treehouse with jungle gyms, playhouses, and even a bird coop that neighbors call an eyesore.

Here’s the Montgomery County Police blurb from last June, Police Make Child Abuse Arrest in Silver Spring, and a copy of the police press release from last June announcing the arrest.

Sentencing for Hyacinth Beverly Morgan is set for July 10th by Circuit Court judge Durke G. Thompson.

As for Renee Bowman, here’s a recent overview article updating readers on the status of the case* from the Washington Post. In October, she will face the charges in Calvert County,

Bowman will first face charges in Calvert. In October, she was indicted there on attempted murder and other charges in the alleged abuse of her surviving daughter, according to court records. She is scheduled to be tried Sept. 28.

Thereafter, she’ll be brought to Montgomery County,

After the criminal charges in Calvert are resolved, Bowman will be brought to Montgomery to face the murder charges, McCarthy said.

***

(* Just be sure to note my earlier commentary on the Post’s focusing on aspects of Bowman’s shopping habits as ongoing evidence that the Post would far rather focus upon Bowman herself as an example of a screwed up individual rather than directly address the issue of the screwed up system. Focus on Bowman’s eBay habits serves as a distraction from the real issues at the core of the case… writing such into the ongoing narrative is not news.)

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.

Authorities said they found what appeared to be the bodies of two children in a “drop-in” freezer Saturday in the basement of Renee Bowman’s home on Buckskin Trail in Lusby. Sheriff’s deputies had been searching the house for evidence in connection with the alleged beating of a third child, age 7.

In a news release issued this morning, authorities said Bowman, 43, told investigators that she had adopted three daughters from the District. One of the girls was found a short distance from her home on Friday morning after escaping from a locked bedroom by jumping out the window, the Calvert sheriff’s office said.

Bowman allegedly told investigators that she had beaten that child. She also allegedly said the bodies found in the freezer were the remains of her other two daughters, and had been in the freezer at least since she moved to Lusby from Rockville in February.

The other two girls, who appear to have died in Rockville (Montgomery Co, MD, a DC area suburban county) would have been ages 11 and 9:

Authorities said the two dead children’s remains were encased in a block of ice, and their identities likely will not be confirmed until the ice melts and autopsies can be performed. They said Bowman told them the girls were born in 1999 and 1997, and adopted by her four years ago.

(Baltimore Sun photo by Jed Kirschbaum / September 29, 2008)

As for the seven year old who escaped with her life, she was a prisoner in her own adoptive “home”/hellhole:

The investigation began Friday, after neighbors on Pawnee Lane found the 7-year-old who had jumped from the second-story window of the house on Buckskin Trail, a nearby street in the same subdivision. The girl was badly bruised and apparently beaten, authorities said today. Neighbors alerted the authorities, who transported the girl to Children’s Hospital and opened a child abuse investigation.

Some time later, Bowman came to the sheriff’s office after learning deputies had found her daughter. According to investigators, “she confessed to beating the victim with a ‘hard heeled shoe.’ “

Authorities said Bowman told them the 7-year-old was rarely, if ever, permitted to leave the house. She was beaten “all over” and remains hospitalized, Evans said at the news conference.

Calvert authorities said there is no evidence that the 7-year-old was enrolled in Calvert County schools. Bowman does not have a criminal record and has not been accused of neglect or abuse in the past, they said.

Detectives obtained a search warrant for the house in an effort to find the shoe and other evidence. While searching the house, they found human remains in the freezer.

A copy of the Calvert County (Maryland) Sheriff’s press release can be found here in PDF format.

Naturally, the Baltimore Sun is also doing major coverage, Children’s remains found in Calvert Co. freezer:

Renee Bowman, 43, has been arrested on allegations that she abused her 7-year-old daughter, who was found walking barefoot on a neighborhood street Friday night.

The neighbor recounted today that the disheveled girl told him: “My mother just beats me. She just beats me to death.”

Authorities said the girl “showed signs of extreme abuse and neglect” and had fled her home Friday by jumping out of a second-floor window after she was locked in her bedroom.

Renee Bowman

The girl sounds like she barely escaped with her life:

Phillip Garrett, who said he found the 7-year-old walking on a gravel road early Friday evening with no socks or shoes, described his shock in seeing the girl. Her pink nightgown was muddied and her pigtails, fastened with pink barrettes, were matted.

Garrett, 21, was smoking a cigarette with his neighbor on his front lawn. He called out to her. “I said, ‘What’s wrong? Are you OK?’ “

According to Garrett, the girl answered, “My mother just beats me. She just beats me to death.”

Garrett, who was walking his cocker spaniel, Cocco, today as reporters from across the region descended on the rural area, described seeing the girl walking along Pawnee Lane, which intersects with Buckskin Trail. She told Garrett and his friend that her mother had “locked her out” of the house.

“She was very brave,” Garrett said. “She definitely looked like she had been through a lot.”

Garrett, who is a fashion designer and lives with his parents, said he embraced the girl, who stood stoically. He carried her into his neighbor’s home and called 911.

The girl told Garrett that she had not eaten in days, and he ordered a pizza. She requested pepperoni and ham, he said.

As they waited for about an hour, he said the girl told him she had stayed outside the whole night and had tried to knock on people’s doors but no one answered. The girl told him she attended school in Indian Head. While she never cried, she repeatedly expressed opposite emotions for her mother and father, Garrett said.

“She kept asking, ‘Is my mother going to be arrested?’” Alternately, she expressed love for her father, Garrett said.

“She was very protective of her father,” Garrett said. “He was the only one that cared. He was the one that took care of her.”

Of her two sisters, Garrett said, “She said her siblings had been beaten to death and one day, they just didn’t come back.”

The above is interesting in that it contradicts the Post article, saying that she did attend school, this will be an important contradiction to follow as whether or not she attended school may have determined much of her level of contact with the world outside the house.

In the wake of the adoptions, it looks as though these kids just fell through the cracks, no one checking to see if the girls were even alive. Had the 7 year old not gotten herself out, I think we can all guess what might well have happened. She, like her adopted sisters was on her own, left to fend for herself against her adoptive “mother”:

The girl is being treated a children’s hospital in Washington, said Moore, who declined to describe her injuries.

“She’s a hero for saving her own life,” he said. “I don’t know what would have happened if she stayed in that environment.”

And as we keep seeing in adoption abuse and murder cases, there are also animals suffering in the home as well:

Moore described the house’s exterior as typical, but he said that inside, it was “just pretty much a mess,” with four cats and a dog who all had severe cases of fleas.

A neighbor was quoted as saying she never saw the Bowman’s girls:

Nancy Sears, 60, who has lived in a home across from the Bowman residence for 18 years, said a woman and man moved into the home in February. She said a previous owner had put a new roof on the home and added vinyl siding a few years ago.

“I never, ever, ever, the whole time, saw any children,” Sears said. “No kids outside.”

Lusby is in Southern Maryland, about 50 miles from Washington DC.

I will be following this closely and will write more as more details emerge.

Maryland is my (ahem) ‘adopted’ home state. It is a study in contradictions, being both the wealthiest state in the nation but also a growing poverty rate, and a growing wage gap between the wealthiest and the poorest that is worse than the national average, a state of haves and have-nots with rich counties and poor counties. Despite the wealth concentrated in some areas of some counties, not everyone benefits, and these inequities spill over into other areas such as social services.

I have many questions about the process of these placements, how did the Bowmans adopt the three daughters and from where (other than the District, i.e. DC), public, familial or private adoptions? Did anyone ever follow up on those placements, checking in on those girls? Were they a sibling group or three separate unrelated adoptions? Etc.

Ultimately, did anyone have any responsibility to ensure these girls were even still alive post placement, or were these girls just left to the Bowmans to do with them what they would? Up to and including allegedly storing two dead adoptees in a freezer for seven months and allegedly nearly beating the third to death after starving her and isolating her from the outside world.

“Maryland, my Maryland” indeed!

On a more personal note, I’m rarely reduced to tears while doing this adoption blogging, I’ve spent the past year wadding through the murky swamps of adoption related abuse, murder, starvation, and unending cruelty, I’ve tackled the ongoing saga of how states have taken up the encouragement of child abandonment, dump laws as policy, and I’ve looked long and hard at the process by which children enter the international adoption trade, be that through child selling or kidnapping, or worse, but through it all, I’m usually more angered than saddened. But this, in my own proverbial back yard has been difficult to write. Not because it’s local, but because seven year olds in the wealthiest state in America have only themselves to depend upon. She was abandoned to an adoption that nearly killed her. An adoption that killed her two sisters.

I’ve spoken repeatedly in my blog about the need to do better by the kids.

How things like allowing parents to opt out of public schools creates a way for children to simply disappear.

At the moment, there’s a shadow of a 7 year old in a hospital not far from here who deserved a hell of a lot better. The existing SYSTEM failed her.

Whatever eventually happens to the Bowmans, we need to look at far more than one “family” and one house and instead work to create systems of prevention. Systems where the kids come first, not their abusers.