THE UNTOUCHABLES

Miami Herald, The (FL)
June 12, 1988
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Everyone knew it was illegal to keep Baldy in jail -- the judge knew it, the social workers knew it, Baldy knew it -- but there was no other place to put him.

Baldy wasn't charged with a crime. He's just a boy. The only thing he did was run away months earlier from a state foster care shelter that he didn't like. He ran home.

His mother lived in Overtown. His brothers, who are also his best friends, had already run back home from state institutions, so that when Baldy showed up the family became complete again except for the father, who was in prison for murder. Baldy tried to behave himself. Months went by. Then on the night of Jan. 18, his older sister got mad at him and called the police. The police computer showed a pick-up order -- similar to an arrest warrant, though without any criminal allegation -- for Baldy and his two older brothers, Dump and Black. When the cops showed up at the Overtown apartment, Dump and Black jumped out the window and escaped, but Baldy got caught coming out of the bathroom.

So he went to jail.

They took Baldy's clothes and put them in a bag and took the bag away. They made him take a shower, with the special soap for lice. They gave him a uniform so he would look like all the other boys. The shirt said Dade Juvenile Detention Center. They put him in what they call the Shorty Unit, the one for the littlest boys.

Eight weeks passed.

He never went to court.

He had no lawyer.

His social worker never came to see him.

Other kids, charged with crimes like armed robbery and even murder, came and went while Baldy, charged with nothing, stayed in the lock-up.

He had his own cell in the Shorty Unit. The walls are cement block coated in paint, the bed just a concrete slab with a heavy fireproof mattress. There is nothing movable or detachable in the cell -- there used to be normal, wire-frame beds, but kids would tear them apart and fashion weapons and hurt themselves.

Baldy waited. He went to school inside the jail and was allowed to watch television. On Feb. 1, he saw Dump and Black; the cops had picked them up, too. The three brothers were put in different units, so they only saw each other in passing during the lunch hour.

Many more weeks went by. Sometimes Dump and Black would be summoned to the juvenile court that is attached to the jail. They'd come back and tell Baldy that it was the same old stuff -- the judge and the social workers and everybody else talking about how there wasn't any place to put the boys, and so they'd just have to stay in jail. Baldy didn't even get to go to court. He'd been forgotten.

The judge on the case, Rosemary Usher Jones, allowed the state to keep the boys locked up, in violation of their constitutional rights. She felt the jail was a safer environment than their home in the inner city. She pressed the social workers to find a good foster home or therapeutic institution for troubled kids, but the social workers said there was no funding. Jones was under the impression that only two children were in the jail.

The presence of the third boy, Baldy, was discovered on March 18 by retired Judge Adele Faske, sitting in for Jones that day. The hearing began with Faske addressing Anthony Jennings, the case worker for the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS). Dump and Black were sitting in the courtroom.

"What are we going to do with them?" Faske asked.

"Your Honor, we still don't have any answer, whatsoever, your Honor," Jennings said.

"Do they have any delinquency cases?" the judge asked.

"No, your Honor."

"Well, why in the world do we have to keep them in Youth Hall?"

Jennings explained that the boys had a history of running away from the foster care shelters.

Dump raised his hand. The judge let him speak.

"I just wanted to say, they had separate us, that's why we ran away, want to see each other," Dump said.

Black also spoke up.

"They put us in different homes. And we don't want to -- we don't want to be split up. We want to try to be together."

The judge noticed the name of a third boy on the paperwork in front of her.

"Where is the other brother?" she asked.

"Downstairs," Dump said.

"He down," said Black.

Meaning, in the detention center, one floor below.

"What?" the judge said. "What's he doing downstairs?"

"He's been here two months," Dump said.

"How come he's downstairs, not sitting here with you?" Faske said.

"Cause he came here 'fore us," Dump said.

"Huh?" said Faske.

"He came here before us," Dump said.

That made no sense, and so Faske ordered Jennings to go downstairs, find Baldy and bring him up to the courtroom. When Baldy showed up, Faske said, "Where you been hiding?"

"Nowhere," Baldy said.

"How long you been downstairs?"

"About two months."

"Has anybody talked to you?"

"No."

"Has anybody talked to you, at all?"

"No, Ma'am."

"How old are you?"

"Who me? Thirteen."

Faske turned to Jennings, and said, "What we going to do with them?"

The social worker replied, "At this time, all I can report, is that we have requested, you know, placement for them, to the Case Review Committee, and there are no funds for placement."

Faske said, "If these boys had a track record of one delinquency after another, and, you know, that type of thing, their -- their posture in the court system would be different. But, just to lock them up down there. . . . "

She turned to the children. There would be another hearing in a few days, she said.

"I did the best I could, boys. You know that," she said.

"Yes," said Baldy. "Thanks."

Baldy, Black and Dump are the street names of three Miami boys. They are not criminals or juvenile delinquents. Along with their older brother Man, they are what the state calls "dependent" children. Meaning: needy, neglected, abused or emotionally disturbed. Everyone agrees that it is illegal and improper to keep such kids in jail -- but in practice, it's convenient. The state of Florida routinely uses the Detention Center as a substitute for a foster home.

"I didn't even do no crime," Black, the 15-year-old, said. "People that do crime, they get out faster than I do."

Jail-as-foster-care is part of a larger fiasco: Florida's child welfare system.

The public, acting through the government, has arrogated to itself an awesome power: to remove children from their homes, from their families. There is usually a good reason. The family unit can no longer be considered sacrosanct when a child is discovered with cigarette burns on his chest or covered with dirt and feces or abandoned in an apartment without light or heat. These sorts of cases make up the daily grind at Juvenile and Family Court.

And yet the public in the 1980s also has insisted on less taxes and less government. The first mandate -- save the children -- is at war with the second -- spend no money. The result is that the state routinely takes children from their homes and then doesn't have any place to put them.

Florida spends less per capita on social services than any other state in the nation. What money there is goes largely to helping senior citizens, who wield a lot of political power. Children don't vote.

To be sure, thousands of kids are helped by government programs. But for many, like Baldy and his brethren, becoming a ward of the state is like joining a family of lunatics -- no one knows who you are, no one knows why you're there and if you were to disappear tomorrow, no one would care.

The fate of children is decided by people who don't even know their names: Is it Bernall? Darnell? Ferrill? The names vary from page to page in the HRS records, as though they're indeterminate, just another unsolvable mystery. Barnel? Sometimes the names of two boys are so perfectly blended that no one knows who's who. Darvell?

It really makes no difference in the case of Baldy and his brothers, because usually they are treated interchangeably, even though only two of the boys, Dump and Black, show severe psychiatric problems. If one of the boys dares to speak up in court he is sure to provoke confusion: Which one are you? But usually the adults speak as though the boys are not there. The judge will poll the courtroom to see which boy was the first one put in the jail. Baldy, someone will say. No, Dump. No, Black. Whoever speaks last wins.

These troubled boys behave far more logically and with greater consistency than the government that is trying to save them. When they are put someplace they don't like, they run away, go home, reunite with one another and resist further intrusion into their lives. The pattern always holds. At home, at least, no one is going to forget Dump's name, no one is going to lock up Baldy and then forget about him for 61 days. At home, the authority figure -- Mama -- is always the same, but the judges they see at Juvenile Court keep changing -- it's Jones, no, Faske, no, Ferguson, no, Gelber, no, Gladstone -- and the HRS case workers come and go with the seasons: first Johnny Passmore, then Peter Laufer, then Mohamed Abdi, then Anthony Jennings. Of this latest one Black says, "I don't even know how he passed the test to be a counselor. He never seen us when we was in detention. He's never in the office when we call. What kind of counselor that is?"

The answer is: A counselor who makes $17,500 a year and has 35 cases to deal with at any given time.

"There's just not enough time in the day to provide the immediate attention to a lot of cases," Jennings said. "A lot of the complaints about the system are valid complaints."

Juvenile Judge William Gladstone, nationally known as an expert on dependent children, is outraged by what he sees: "I think our dependency system is probably the worst in the country. It is in a state of utter collapse." He gives examples: Foster parents are paid $8.91 a day for taking in a child, less than what a good kennel charges for a dog. What happens is that people start cramming children into their homes. Five kids is the legal limit. Last summer, Gladstone discovered a house with 13 foster children. He couldn't believe it.

"Is that horrible?" asks Gladstone. "Is that the worst in the world? No, it's not, because I found another with 18 children."

To Gladstone, it all comes down to a simple point, if only people would listen: "The state of Florida is guilty of child abuse."

Baldy, Dump, Black and Man were the subject of a lengthy article in the Aug. 24, 1986, issue of this magazine, headlined Suffer the Children. It was partly a story of the freakish edge of the inner city underclass -- a family so disturbed that the father commits a brutal murder in front of his children and then makes the boys dispose of the body -- and partly a story of how police and social workers struggled through the maze of Juvenile Court to get those children away from their pathological environment and into the care of the state.

But as it turns out, when the four boys were declared "dependent" that August, they left one crazy world only to enter another.

The family lived at 7301 NW Fourth Ave., a county- subsidized duplex two blocks east of I-95. King, the father, was the son of a Georgia sharecropper, and never made it past the seventh grade. He worked in construction and on farms, and sometimes played harmonica in a band, but in the mid-1960s he hurt his back, and gradually slipped into passivity and alcoholism. Social Security gave him a monthly disability check. In 1968 he had married an orphan girl named Martha. She gave birth to their first child, Priscilla, in January 1969, and their sixth, Baldy, in November 1974. "I had six because he didn't believe in birth control. Sanctified people are like that. He's real religious," Martha said. Though King and Martha say they never stopped loving one another, at one point during the 1970s he moved out so the rent at the duplex would remain free.

In 1976, HRS investigated the first of several complaints about unsupervised children, excessive corporal punishment and truancy, and at one point the children were briefly placed in a foster home. King became afraid to discipline his kids -- he thought that HRS would come and put him in jail. His kids stopped respecting him. Once, his second-oldest boy, Black, said, "I dare you to put a hand on me. I'll call HRS."

In 1985, when Baldy was 10, he learned an easy way to make money for himself: Allow adults to do things to his body. Dump and Black taught him all about it. They stood in the alley behind the McDonald's at Biscayne Boulevard and 79th Street. They charged five bucks, 10 bucks. Once Baldy did it for 75 cents -- enough to catch a bus home.

On Feb. 11, 1986, a cocaine base-addict and career criminal named Tyrone Lawton dropped by the duplex to see his cousin, King. Lawton needed a place to crash. He had a six-pack of beer, a fifth of vodka and a base pipe for smoking cocaine. Tyrone and King played some checkers and drank. When Tyrone started to lose he became upset, and then an argument broke out; he poured beer on Martha's head and knocked her down. Tyrone then went into the kitchen, lay down and said he was going to fall asleep.

King -- for reasons no one can really understand -- took a butcher knife out of the closet, turned to his children, said, "Let's kill Tyrone," and then did it. He used a baseball bat to drive the knife deep into the man's chest. Then, while his children watched, he mutilated the body. The boys loaded the corpse into a shopping cart and wheeled it down the street to a trash dump, where it was discovered the next morning.

King went to prison for murder. The kids hit the streets.

On June 26, 1986, police found Baldy and Dump living in a South Dade motel with their oldest sister, Priscilla, a prostitute. They were like feral children, operating on instinct, incommunicative except in their own private, unspoken language. The boys were taken to what the state calls Youth Hall, a.k.a. the Dade Juvenile Detention Center, a jail by any other name. Black and Man were later picked up at their grandmother's house.

The case was assigned to the court of Rosemary Usher Jones. The next day she held the first hearing. Martha showed up. She was ready to give the boys up.

"My four boys, since my husband's been in jail, are past, past, past, past ungovernable. What I'm saying to you, and whoever else I have to say it to -- for you all, for the state to just take custody of them."

It took six weeks. Five judges handled the case at one point or another. At the end, with King sitting in the courtroom in leg irons and handcuffs, Judge Gladstone declared the boys "dependent." King said to his wife, "You turned these kids in to get a raw deal like this?"

The judges who handled the case did not know that King and Martha had six, not four, children, nor that they also had an infant granddaughter. Priscilla, the prostitute, was 18 and already too old to be included in the dependency process. But Veronica, known as Pig, was only 16 and mentally handicapped, and she had a baby girl, Tutu. The father had been killed while holding up a flea market. Veronica was simply ignored by HRS. And it would take a tragedy, more than a year later, to get Tutu in state custody.

The four boys were put in emergency shelters. Baldy went to Miami Bridge, an old, one-story building squarely underneath Metrorail near the Civic Center. The three older boys landed in the county's only other shelter for teen-agers, Bridge South, in Kendall. These were supposed to be temporary homes, for just a few weeks.

Months passed.

Nothing happened.

HRS couldn't find a home for any of them.

The boys needed to go to either a good foster home or a therapeutic institution with intensive counseling, but instead they languished in facilities that were not much more than what they claimed to be -- shelters from the storm. Any and all kinds of kids showed up -- runaways, crazies, the abused and the neglected -- and they were all thrown together without distinction. Baldy slept in a bunk bed in a room with 11 other boys. A teacher came every day and taught the whole group, whether they were at third-grade level or 12th.

"We're taking children without any criteria," said Jeanne James, director of Bridge South, now known as Children's Home Society. "If anybody ever asked you to write a proposal for a grant to take children who are physically and sexually abused, neglected, emotionally disturbed, sometimes psychotic, ungovernable and many with past delinquent problems, probably nobody would ever fund it -- and yet that's what shelter is."

But the shelter experience helped the kids, James said.

"They came in as rotten street kids, every other word was f --- this, f--- that, and just by being nice to them they changed," she said. "They stopped cursing. They learned to express themselves in a more appropriate manner."

On Sept. 19, 1986, Dr. Roger Rousseau tried to question Dump, Black and Man at Bridge South. They were uncooperative. They blamed police for their problems. Rousseau's evaluation stated, "Their main defense mechanisms were massive denial, intimidation, projection and aggression. Thinking process dealt with the exclusive desire to go home. Insight and judgment into their problems were very poor. They admitted poor impulse control, poor tolerance to frustration and inability to postpone gratification."

Baldy scored better in his evaluation. Psychiatrist Lloyd Richard Miller pronounced him a "relatively animated and pleasant child." He knew the name of the president. He knew the date. He knew a lot about sports. At Miami Bridge he performed chores, ate and slept well, watched TV with other kids and played Monopoly.

"His eye contact and reality contact were good," Miller said.

Baldy was finally placed in foster care on Nov. 23, five months after he was picked up at the motel. But his brothers remained in the shelter -- until they ran.

Black ran Dec. 19. Dump ran 11 days later. Man ran in early February. Baldy ran from foster care in March. In time they were all picked up and put back in the jail.

HRS put Dump in Miami Bridge, Baldy's old home. In two days his behavior "began to deteriorate," HRS records state. He refused to do chores, he told lies, he used vulgarity and finally had to be removed from the shelter classroom for "wild and uncontrollable" behavior. Two days later Dump was found hiding under a bed, trying to skip school. A few days after that Dump created such a disturbance that school was canceled completely. Finally, Dump solved the problem by running again.

The next time police picked up Dump, HRS decided to keep him in jail rather than release him to a shelter and allow him a chance to run again. HRS tried to get him admitted to the excellent Eckerd Wilderness Camp, with no luck.

"For these programs that have some quality to them, it's like trying to get your kid admitted to Harvard," Juvenile Court Judge Seymour Gelber said.

HRS also made a pitch to a fine facility called the Biscayne Bay Marine Institute. But there was a problem: The institute takes only kids who have committed crimes. Dump wasn't criminal. So there was no choice but to leave him in jail.

On March 6, 1987, Daniel Collins, M.D., interviewed Dump in the detention center.

"His main response to the whole thing seemed to be puzzlement," the doctor wrote. "He is judged to have below
average intelligence, though probably not retarded. There is no doubt that he is a very untrusting and suspicious individual, and those qualities certainly contributed to the paucity of his verbal and nonverbal responses and the absence of any voluntary contributions on his part. When asked to give the names of any five cities, he was not able to come up with any, and it was convincing to me that he did not know what a city is. . . .

"He admitted that on many occasions he has had the thought that he wished he had never been born."

That spring, HRS finally succeeded in placing the kids. Black was put in the Montanari Residential Treatment Center in Hialeah, a quiet collection of cottages near the center of town, mostly filled with mentally retarded youths. Dump went to a foster home in Liberty City.

Man and Baldy lingered in jail for many weeks. The exact length of Baldy's incarceration is not detailed in HRS and court files, nor is there any mention of where he was eventually sent. Jennings, the HRS case worker, said, "It looks like he was in the detention center from March until May."

Man had been in jail 40 days when he was transferred to the Child Psychiatry Unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital. This greatly annoyed Dr. Fred Seligman, the unit's director.

"Our staff is concerned," Seligman wrote to Judge Gladstone, "that sometimes Jackson Hospital receives court- ordered children or teen-agers for evaluation that seem to come here not because they need a sophisticated diagnosis and disposition plan, but because there seems to be no other place to place the individual, particularly when they have been in Juvenile Hall a specific length of time. A case in point: I am told that on Friday, May 8, 1987, (Man), age 15, was admitted to Jackson . . . having been in Juvenile Hall, according to the patient, for 40 days. This lad arrived without any medical or psychiatric information, or even a description of his behavior at Juvenile Hall."

Seligman added that after five days, an HRS counselor called and told him to discharge Man to the Manatee Palms Treatment Center in Bradenton.

"Our recommendations were not even solicited," Seligman wrote. "In fact, our evaluation was not even complete."

Man has remained in Bradenton since. HRS says his behavior and personality have improved.

On July 2, 1987, Black ran from the Montanari center during a field trip to a bowling alley. Paul Hague, associate director of Montanari, said, "Although we watched him closely, you can't treat an emotionally disturbed child by keeping him under lock and key. Basically (Black) is a pretty sneaky person, and he gained our trust and slipped away."

Black told Tropic, "I got tired of staff treating me wrong. They be cursing us and all that. Wash these damn dishes and all that. They be talking about if I don't wash dishes and all that, they be throwing me out the door."

Then Baldy and Dump ran from their shelters. All three boys were picked up by police in mid-August and put back in foster care, but Black and Dump ran again the same night, and filtered their way back through the city to their mother. Baldy remained in the Kendall shelter for several more weeks -- but on the night of Sept. 29, a car pulled up with Black and Dump inside.

They took Baldy home.

So the family was back together, almost. King was still in prison, Man still in Bradenton, but the three younger boys, their sister Pig, and Pig's baby Tutu were together with Martha in a tenement in Overtown. It was as though the whole process -- the original trouble with police, the many appearances in Juvenile Court, the declaration of dependency, the shelter homes, the psychiatric reports, the hospital visits -- had been just a phase to get through, a bad trip through a strange place. They were home. They were back to the way they had always been.

"They were like angels," Martha said.

They did not go to school. They played in the street, right where the crack deals were going down, where older boys carried baseball bats and crazy men sometimes shot at one another. The building, at 240 NW 21st St., is a known center of drug activity. It is the kind of place where a young teenager, obviously of school age, can ride his bike around at 9 or 10 or 11 in the morning and never worry that someone will stop him and ask why he is not in school.

The boys stopped selling their bodies, Martha said.

"They didn't do that no more. That's washed out. When they came to me all they care about is eating, playing football and this mess" -- indicating the music video channel on television -- "video, boom-boom music."

Martha claims that she called HRS to come pick them up. "All the social worker said was that as long as they didn't get in no trouble and commit no crime, it was OK."

Jennings said he went to the address in the file for Martha, up in Liberty City, but no one there knew where she was. That was the extent of the government's search for the boys still legally in state custody. Jennings never tried to check the records of the Social Security Administration, which sent checks to the family, nor did he contact King in prison and ask where the boys were.

There was another clue. Tutu, the baby, was admitted to Jackson Hospital with fingernail marks on her face. No one ever established who abused her. But HRS' failure to include the baby in the original dependency proceedings for the boys suddenly seemed foolish: If it wasn't a good home for teen-age boys, how good would it be for an infant whose mother is retarded and grandmother emotionally unstable?

HRS declared the child dependent. The baby stayed in Jackson for six months while HRS looked for a place to put her. Martha visited regularly, and was in constant contact with foster care workers at HRS -- but not Jennings. At HRS, one hand didn't know what the other was doing.

"I had no knowledge of the daughter whatsoever," Jennings later testified.

Pig, meanwhile, got pregnant again. The father?

"Who knows?" Martha said.

One day in the winter Black and Dump decided to go to Winn Dixie to buy groceries. They were heading outside when they heard a sharp noise. A moment later Black felt a pain in his arm. He was bleeding. A bullet had passed through his body.

On Jan. 18, Pig became angry with Dump and called the police. That's when Baldy was captured and put in jail. Two weeks later, on Feb. 1, Martha called police late at night to come get the other two boys.

"I waited until them children went to sleep, and I called HRS. I did that so them children can get an education," Martha said.

She never visited them in the detention center. "I was letting them know, without Mama beside them, they didn't have no one."

When Judge Faske realized that Baldy, a dependent child, had been in jail for two months without a court appearance, it surprised even the hardened troops of Juvenile Court.

"I want them in the Bridge as of today or tomorrow," assistant public defender Marlene Montaner said to Judge Jones on March 21. "There's no reason to keep them out back."

Jones exploded: "We'll put them in the Bridge, and we'll afford them their constitutional rights, and tomorrow night, when they escape, and they're on the streets, they're going to be running with their constitutional rights, and then you're going to have to say your prayers and hope they don't get killed till we pick them up again. That's the sad part, right? I mean, I'm all for their rights."

In addition to the two main types of Juvenile Court cases -- delinquency and dependency -- there is a third, somewhat vague, highly controversial category, called "status offenders."

That's what the boys were. By running away from foster care they had violated their "status." They can be held in contempt of court and sentenced to six months in detention.

That requires a trial. But there was no such trial in the courtroom of Judge Rosemary Usher Jones. Why not?

"That's a hard question. Had it been done, they would have been kept here six months, right? And I suppose I was directing my attention to getting them placed. God!"

Jones blamed HRS. She said she couldn't let the children out of jail until HRS found a place to put them.

"I couldn't very well release them when they tell me there's no place to put them," Jones said.

"The thing that amazes me," the judge said, "is that they could slip in another kid and I didn't pick up on it. I feel a little dumb."

The handling of the case stunned Judge Gelber, the administrative judge of Juvenile Court.

"We don't normally lock up dependent kids," he said. "If they're held beyond 24 hours, that's a red light that comes up. . . . They should have been placed in shelter."

Pete Digre, deputy director of HRS in Tallahassee, promised a full investigation of the case. He was appalled when informed by a reporter that dependent children were being kept in detention upwards of two months.

"It just sounds outrageous," Digre said. "It sounds like a hideous violation of their rights."

March 30, another hearing -- the 68th since the youngest two boys had been picked up at the motel nearly two years earlier. Only Baldy was in the courtroom. Two days earlier Black had been released from jail and put in the Montanari school, the same place from which he had run the previous summer, and Dump had been dumped at Jackson Memorial Hospital for a psychological evaluation.

Attention turned to Baldy. What to do with him? Jones contemplated a radical move: Give the boy back to his mother. He seemed to be happiest with her. He loved her. But HRS still doubted Martha's ability to nurture her children. She had never gone to parenting classes or psychiatric counseling. She hadn't visited Baldy in jail. And she had one other major defect: No home. She'd been on the run since the murder. Lately she had been staying in the crowded apartment of a friend. The government didn't like that -- but of course, after King murdered his cousin it was the government that evicted the whole family from the duplex on Fourth Avenue.

"Life is a bitch out here, I've just been hanging on," Martha had told Tropic.

She said the boys have changed. "They're not nothing like they used to be. I would like to have my family back, so we can be back together, go to church. . . . "

Jennings had seen her two days before the March 30 hearing, and he told the judge he didn't think Martha was capable of caring for any of the children. The HRS attorney, Esther Blynn, recommended that Baldy be placed again, temporarily, in the Children's Home Society in Kendall.

"Excuse me."

Baldy was talking. His asthma was acting up and so he spoke softly, wheezing like an old man.

"Can I say something? I don't want to go there."

Jones shot back, "Let me tell you, every one of you come here to court and tell me what you don't want to do."

Baldy, unfazed, said he'd rather stay in the jail than go to the shelter.

"How did you get along from August until February?" Jones asked the boy.

"All right."

"And what did you do?"

"Me?"

"Uh-huh."

"What I'd do at home?"

"Uh-huh."

"Mostly a lot of stuff."

"Mostly what?"

"A lot of stuff. Watch TV. Clean up the house."

"Why didn't you go to school?"

"I don't know why."

"How far have you gone in school?"

"How far? Six grade."

"And how old are you?"

"Me? Thirteen."

Jones sighed.

"Well," she said, "the court is not thrilled with how everything's been handled, but fortunately there's been no disasters."

After directing some criticism at HRS she turned to Baldy again.

"Do you want to go home?"

He answered inaudibly.

"Is it fair to say you don't know what you want?" the judge asked.

"He wants to go home," said the public defender.

"I didn't ask you!" the judge said. To the boy she said, "You want to go home to your mother?"

"Yeah."

"Have you attempted to call your mother?"

"I don't have no phone."

"Have you attempted to write your mother a letter?"

"I don't write no letter."

"I'm placing you in the Children's Home Society."

"I don't want to go over there."

"And I'm asking you not to run."

"I want to go back home."

Baldy went to the shelter.

He had spent 73 days in jail, but he needn't have spent more than a few hours. The Children's Home Society would have taken him 73 days earlier. The director, Jeanne James, said all that anyone had to do was call.

There were more hearings, more psychiatric reports and, as it became known that another lengthy newspaper article would appear on the family, the courtroom began to get crowded with HRS supervisors. Jones went so far as to appoint, at taxpayer expense, private attorneys for each of the boys, as well as the father, the mother and Pig.

HRS finally found a place to put Dump: an institution near St. Petersburg. First he would be evaluated at another hospital, Grant Center, in the Redland. But he never got that far. On his way to Grant Center he was left temporarily in an HRS office -- and he bolted out the door.

Jones issued a pick-up order. As usual, no one did anything.

At Montanari, Black wrote a letter to his mother:

. . . I am a newbon babby and i went to tell you when you get my radio out of the shop I will like you to put it on a Big Box in mile it to me with my tapes . . . the resend why i want my radio cause it will keep me from doing bad thing and i am reading my bibble 3 time a day so when i get out i can go to Sunday school in learn about god and stop hanking around the bad crew cause i learn my lessing when you put me in this plases but i am praying for all of us to get back to get there so we can start all bock over but please mile me my radio so i can keep out of trouble.

He signed the letter, "from your faver son."

Black lived in a cottage at Montanari, and slept in a room with a deaf-mute boy named Timothy Melton. One night Timothy became upset and created a disturbance. Workers at Montanari arrived and gave him an injection to sedate him. The next morning Timothy was found dead. School officials said the boy received a safe dose of the sedative. The coroner turned up no evidence of foul play or mistreatment and said the cause of death was a mystery. Black saw it differently: The boy only slammed a door, and then three or four staff members barged in the room and "yanked him out of bed" and gave him the drug.

"It wasn't his fault," Black said.

Black was not long for Montanari himself. He had a "medical problem." He was quickly transferred to a foster care facility in Hollywood.

Black has the AIDS virus. He had been tested four times at Montanari and each one came up positive. The boy does not yet have any signs of immune deficiency. He could live for years. But the disease is always fatal. The tricks that Black had turned on Biscayne Boulevard and 79th Street -- $5 here, $10 there -- had finally exacted their true price.

It is tempting to shrug off the isolated and private disasters of a big city like Miami, to view these children as hopelessly star-crossed, as inevitable victims of social Darwinism. But this case is not comfortably isolated. In a city where one in four children live in poverty, and many without anything resembling a proper home, the story of Baldy's family is a fair portrait of our child welfare system.

Much can be done immediately to change that portrait. One of the most obvious places to begin would be to create a foster care system that treats children better than dogs. If foster parents were rigidly screened and paid more than $8.91 a day, and if the five-child limit were reduced and strictly enforced, then maybe children wouldn't be lovelessly warehoused on a diet of rice and beans. Foster care workers are not supposed to have more than 25 cases at one time, but they average 34. And they're paid worse than garbage men, an average of $14,820. It's no wonder the turnover is close to 100 percent a year.

Beds: There aren't enough at any level of the system. Neglected kids shouldn't have to sleep on the floor of HRS offices. On any given day there are 275 children needing shelter but only 164 available beds, and the extras are often packed into foster homes that already have too many kids. There are also about 130 sick children in Florida waiting to go to a psychiatric facility, and they often wait for months.

More money is needed for grass-roots services such as day care, crisis counseling, substance abuse treatment, emergency housing and parenting classes. Such programs already exist, but most are absurdly overburdened. In Dade County 8,000 children are waiting for day care. There is no post-natal residential care for teen mothers like Pig.

A new Dade County study titled "Children in Need: A Social Crisis" portrays a child welfare system that fights an inferno with a squirt gun. What money there is goes to handling the latest crisis -- never to prevention. Prevention means helping young parents. And helping young children before they turn to drugs or drop out of school or start hooking on the Boulevard. "Prevention means preserving families," the report states.

The family is still the most ingenious mechanism for raising children, far superior to the artificial environments created by the government.

Most of these things cost money. But they also require the attention, energy and involvement of the community. If thousands of children are to be rescued from the holocaust of poverty, crime, drug addiction, prison, disease and early death, then we all will have to dig a lot deeper.

"Ultimately what we need is a broader tax base. I'm going to get it or go down screaming," Judge Gladstone said. "How dare we describe ourselves as a civilized society when we are literally eating our children?"

As soon as Black was transferred out of Montanari, Baldy was placed in his brother's slot.

"He's functionally retarded through deprivation and lack of education and nurturing," school founder A.J. Montanari said of Baldy after a few weeks. "He could explode any minute. I'm surprised he's still here."

Black had been at the Hollywood foster care ranch only a few days when all the children went on an outing to Bayside in Miami. When they arrived, Black announced, "I'm going home to my mama." The foster care workers told him he couldn't without permission from HRS. Black knew that HRS would never allow it. So he just took off. Caught a bus home.

Dump showed up at the duplex the same night.

The brothers were back in business -- free again.

Black told Tropic, "All I want to do is go back to school. I'm tired of going through something I'm not supposed to be going through. . . . We didn't do no crime. Why should we have to go through all this? My mama can take care of us."

Jennings showed up a couple days later. Everyone gathered in the living room. Come with me, Jennings told the boys. They refused. The boys knew that Jennings had no power to arrest them. And they were bigger now, adult-sized -- no one could push them around.

"I'm going to stay home and help my mom," Black said.

Dump stood up and announced that he had to go to the bathroom, then walked into the kitchen and burst out the back door. Jennings leaped to his feet and ran out the front to the chain link fence.

But the man-child was too fast; there was no way to catch him.

"Look at him," the counselor said. "He could have been a track star."

The figure of Dump grew smaller and smaller and then finally vanished, lost again for another day, someplace in the inner city

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 1
Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald