Broken, bloodied and bruised…
In May of 2016 The Columbus Dispatch released a story about abuse while in the foster care system. Three boys and two girls, the Ferguson children, suffered years of horrific abuse from their foster parents. There were several different kinds of abuse, such as, beatings with baseball bats and hammers until they bled, burnt with irons, starved and forced to drink urine, duct taped to their beds, held under water, placing them in running clothes dryers, and dangling them over a banister and then dropping them. These children were also threatened that if they ever said anything about the abuse that their siblings would receive far worse abuse. Jermaine, one of the children, stated “There’s a lot of foster kids and not enough foster and adoptive parents; I get that, but in our case, there were some red flags, and someone needed to try to decipher that.” (Price). If you would like to read more about this story, please follow the link below.
Another story that I would like to bring to your attention is about a young girl named Logan Marr. Logan was taken away from her mother due to her not being able to follow rules that were laid forth for her by Department of Human Services (DHS). Logan’s mother Christy, was very young when she gave birth to Logan. Christy was very dependent on her mother for support, but her mother actually initiated the call to DHS about concerns she had about her daughter and the care of Logan. DHS had asked Christy to terminate her relationship with her mother and tried to assist her with support. Christy tried several different times to make it on her own, she even moved down to Florida where she tried to reconcile things with her own father. Things did not work out down in Florida and Christy was forced to move back home with her mother.
After DHS had heard of Christy moving back in with her mother they immediately moved forward with removing the children from her care. Logan and her sister were soon placed with a DHS case worker named Sally Schofield, who was also a licensed foster care parent. Logan still had supervised visits with her mother Christy and would tell her during these visits that Sally was being mean to her. Christy tried to speak to DHS about these incidents and was promptly told that they were not going to discuss this with her.
On January 31, 2001, Logan was to have a supervised visit with her mother, but the visit was cancelled due to a snowstorm. This would also be the night that Logan died. According to Sally, Logan was having a fit and she proceeded to place Logan in her highchair down in the basement where she could scream all she wanted. Sally left Logan down there for about one hour and when she went to check on her found her on the floor still in her highchair, DEAD.
Police questioned Sally and found in the basement where Logan passed, large amounts of duct tape that sometimes stretched forty feet in length. The duct tape was sent to be analyzed and they found small chunks of Logan’s hair that were still stuck to the tape, and that the tape had been wrapped around Logan’s body and mouth. An autopsy also showed that Logan did not die from a hit to the head but from asphyxiation. Sally was convicted of murder and manslaughter and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. If you would like to see the whole story, the link is below.
We wake up on a Sunday morning to find on the front page of the paper a new case of a child suffering abuse while in the custody of a foster parent. We are told all the time that the child was taken away from their parents because they were concerned for their well-being, but yet they have to suffer from the abuse of the people that we are suppose to believe will take care of them. Fortunately, not all foster parents behave the way that the two stories above portray. Later in this blog we will discuss success stories for children in the foster care system and talk to a new foster care parent and all that they had to go through to become a licensed foster care parent.
