Christy
(sorry about the funky format)
The foster child thought she had nobody left to love her, but
she was wrong
By Nancy Cambria
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Sunday, Oct. 25 2009
ST. LOUIS - The search begins inside a sparse office in a corner of the St.
Louis family court.
Carlos Lopez, a 6-foot private investigator with a disarming smile, and his
partner Sheila Suderwalla sit at a computer side by side, scouring court
records, police files, motor vehicle records, occupancy permits and mug shots -
any clue that would lead them to a woman named Karen.
Karen is not a wanted criminal. And the partners are not looking to solve a
crime.
Suderwalla, a petite social worker with a driven passion for the underdog, and
Lopez are on the trail of something far more elusive: a lost relative with a
heart big enough and bloodlines strong enough to change the life of a
15-year-old foster child.
Her name is Lisa, and she feels as if she has nobody.
Lisa doesn't know it yet, but she is at the center of a groundbreaking $2
million federally funded St. Louis program called Extreme Recruitment, one of
the first programs in the nation that partners social workers with private
investigators in a gumshoe effort to reunite foster children with long-lost
family members.
For generations, finding permanent homes for many teenage foster children such
as Lisa has been largely a futile exercise because few are willing to adopt
older children. So caseworkers often settle for a hodgepodge of foster care
placements.
Extreme Recruitment takes a different approach.
When Suderwalla and Lopez were handed Lisa's case, they plunged headlong into a
fast-paced forensic search through her past.
They dissected the slim list of her known relatives, researched them and used
any connection they could to build a list of people who might potentially step
up for Lisa.
For two weeks they have knocked on doors, chased clues and hit dead ends. Now
they have a fresh lead: a woman named Karen who they were told might know a lot
about the girl's past.
The partners also have something else: a proven track record.
In as much as 70 percent of cases, Extreme Recruitment has permanently reunited
foster children with relatives. In almost all other cases, the program has at
least helped children reconnect with family.
It happened for Dereck, 17.
When Lopez and Suderwalla got his file, he had lived in 16 places. He was weeks
away from graduating from high school with just a caseworker to attend the
ceremony. The partners found a great-aunt in Indiana who began calling
relatives in St. Louis. By Dereck's graduation he had eight family members in
the audience.
"I was able to tell him, I want you to know you have some stand-up people in
your family, " Suderwalla said.
Extreme Recruiting has been so successful, it has teamed up with the Missouri
Children's Division and 19 private agencies to expand. In four years it aims to
connect 150 St. Louis foster teens with willing relatives.
"You can only sit behind a desk for so long, " explained Melanie Scheetz,
executive director of the Foster & Adoptive Care Coalition, which created the
program. "That is the big difference between our program and most everything
else that is going on around the country."
THEIR FIRST LEAD
Everything Suderwalla and Lopez know so far about Lisa they carry in an
overstuffed leather folder.
Inside is a white sheet of paper that holds a growing blueprint of Lisa's still
mysterious family tree.
They call it a genome, and the pair is building it, branch by branch, with
every clue they find. It already holds 60 half brothers and sisters, distant
cousins, aunts and uncles. Some are dead. One is in prison. Another is a
wealthy uncle who'd fled his past.
Somewhere amid the branches is a spot for Karen. But where? And the tree holds
other mysteries. There is a nickname they've heard that lingers as a clue.
Somewhere out there is a relative named Peaches.
And yet Suderwalla and Lopez cannot ask Lisa for help - they have yet to even
meet her. The program does not want to raise a child's hopes too soon.
They know enough about Lisa from her case file and others to worry. They were
told she was living in residential care because her foster placements had
failed. She was losing faith in adults.
Suderwalla and Lopez were warned that too many adults had let her down. She was
the last of her siblings without a home. If something wasn't done, she was
likely to "age out" of foster care with no family ties.
"If we just continue to have her in foster care until she ages out, she is
going to look for a sense of belonging, and most likely it will be with the
wrong influences, " Suderwalla says.
Suderwalla is used to diving into causes. She graduated from Principia College
in Elsah and headed a West Coast activist group on homelessness and poverty for
years. Later, she found working with minorities in foster care her calling. Few
understand that they are just kids needing the same unconditional love she got
growing up in Toronto, she said.
"I can't imagine a child not having even a little bit of what I've had, " she
says.
For a decade, Lopez had been a St. Louis detective assigned to juvenile crime,
winning trust with an upbeat voice and friendly handshake that played down his
role as a cop. Once he solved a kidnapping where the key clue was a Mickey
Mouse ring with a missing ear. But Lopez says cracking cases was a Band-Aid for
problems that needed surgery. This, he says, "is something where we can
actually fix something."
"It's healing, " adds Suderwalla.
As Suderwalla and Lopez sit, eyes on the computer screen, they rule out several
different Karens who had the same last name. Some are the wrong race; one is
the wrong age. None leads to Lisa.
Within a few keystrokes, the pair has a hit. A Karen with the correct last name
appears in an arrest report of a young man. He has listed her as an emergency
contact.
"Wait, " says Suderwalla. "He's on our genome."
Suderwalla plucks Lisa's family tree from the leather folder.
She runs her nail along several branches. Her finger stops. Yes, she nods her
head. He is also on Lisa's family tree. This is their Karen - and next to her
name is a recent address.
"She has got to be a connection on the dad's side of the family, " Suderwalla
says. If she can't take in Lisa, she might lead them to the person who could.
KNOCKING ON DOORS
There are three doors next to each other in the apartment complex. The one with
Karen's address stands in the middle. The partners don't hesitate to knock.
They have done this before.
Once Lopez told a woman she had a younger sister she'd never met who had been
put into foster care as a baby. Her sister had died. But she had a son who was
now a teen in foster care.
Some people cry, but many are angry.
"They see it as, 'Well, you've ripped our family apart, and now you want us to
help fix it?' So we have to tell people we're not the system, " Suderwalla
says. "We have to apologize."
Sometimes they find people such as Yolanda "Neicy" Walker, who hugged them when
they came to her door. For years she prayed for the return of a lost second
cousin who disappeared into foster care a decade ago.
Walker now plans to adopt the girl. She said her family always had room for the
child, but no one in the system ever asked. "It messed us up, " she said. "I
didn't get a chance to be asked if I would or wouldn't."
Lopez knocks on the middle door several times; nobody answers.
They knock on the other doors. One of them opens, revealing the silhouette of a
teen. A minute later the pair jog back to the car. The teen is Karen's
daughter.
"She said, 'That's my momma, ' and gave us Karen's phone number, " Suderwalla
says almost breathlessly. Within minutes they are on Karen's doorstep.
Karen smiles widely and lets them right in, but she is guarded.
"If we don't find someone that's appropriate for her to connect with, you know
what's going to happen, " Lopez says gently.
Karen nods. She recounts what she knows about Lisa's past.
Karen's aunt and uncle had taken in Lisa and her half sister when they were
toddlers, she says. Their birth mother had abandoned them. Lisa and her sister
were folded into a huge blended family. Karen's aunt had taken in at least 10
foster kids and formally adopted about half.
But Karen, a frequent visitor, witnessed more at her aunt and uncle's than any
social worker could. She says the younger children, including Lisa, suffered
years of mistreatment.
She and Khristine hated going over there, she says. They were appalled at what
they saw.
"Khristine?" Suderwalla asks.
She is sitting by a coffee table, adding new names to Lisa's family tree.
Khristine was a cousin who had just moved back to St. Louis from Chicago, Karen
says. The pair had an arrangement, Karen says. She'd call Khristine and tell
her the things she'd seen in their aunt and uncle's home. Khristine would call
Missouri's child abuse hot line.
"I was the eyes, " Karen says. "Khristine made the calls."
But it wasn't until three years ago, after Karen's aunt had died, that the
children were removed permanently from the home by the children's division,
says Karen. By law, the Missouri Children's Division cannot comment on any
foster child's case file, though Suderwalla's agency has confirmed that the
surviving parent lost custody in 2006.
There is a brief pause. A television drones in the background. Karen smiles
again, but she looks tired from talking. She's just gotten off work. It's a
good job. She has five children. A grandchild plays on her knee.
"We really apologize about what happened, " Suderwalla says.
Suderwalla and Lopez can see Karen's heart is in the right place. She can
certainly help. But can Karen's busy life take on another child? Suderwalla
asks who else might be willing to help Lisa.
"Talk to Khristine, " Karen says confidently and writes down her phone number.
Three days later, Suderwalla and Lopez meet with Lisa's formal team of social
workers, therapists, advocates and court officials for a weekly update on her
case. Suderwalla carefully tells the group about Karen and Khristine.
She does not ask why Khristine's hot line calls were dismissed or how a
state-licensed foster home that was abusive could take in so many children for
so many years.
Extreme Recruitment isn't about assigning blame for the past, Suderwalla would
say later, but making connections for a foster child's future. This was a group
who had been working with Lisa for years and shared current information and
opinions about who would be right for her. On this day something clicks.
At least one social worker knows of a family member called Peaches, but
Suderwalla had not put the two names together until now. Suddenly it makes
sense.
"It sounds like Peaches is Khristine, " Suderwalla tells the group. "And
Khristine is someone that (Lisa) trusted."
ARMS OF AN ANGEL
They find her at a Family Dollar store.
Khristine Williams, 40, a mother of two grown children, reluctantly returned to
St. Louis after being laid off from a longtime job in Chicago. She was getting
back on her feet and took a job at the store because it had health benefits.
It would have been easier to turn Suderwalla away when she called her cell
phone this morning. Khristine had for years distanced herself from her extended
family. She had told only a few of her relatives that she had moved back to
town. Some of them blamed her for breaking up her aunt and uncle's family. Did
she really want to open this door?
But Lisa was a part of her past she just couldn't shake. She had taken Lisa to
Chicago for visits. Lisa called her Peaches.
So here she stands, in the middle of a store full of tube socks and hair
scrunchies, with two strangers.
She grips a nearby shopping cart. She fears they are going to tell her that
Lisa is pregnant. But Suderwalla has something else to say.
"She's the last one, " Suderwalla says. All of the other children with her aunt
and uncle have been successfully placed in homes.
Khristine brushes the copper and gold braids from her face and takes a quiet
breath. For a moment she looks angry, but her eyes grow sad.
It was unfair that Lisa was all alone- the younger children in that home
suffered, she says.
She says Lisa's birth sister was locked in the closet for hours at a time. Once
Khristine set up a hairstylist for the girls, but later found Lisa's sister's
hair ruined. Someone at the home had thrown water on her head and told her she
was ugly. A slut. The girl was 12.
Khristine starts to cry.
Lopez turns quickly and walks off, returning with a handful of paper towels.
Suderwalla draws in closer.
Khristine takes the tissue and wipes her eyes. "I'm sorry, " she says. "I was
abused as a child."
She says she told adults about it, but was ignored. It was the same way with
Lisa and the other children, she says. Police came to her aunt and uncle's door
many times, but nothing ever happened.
"Why would they just leave?" Khristine says, her voice rising. "Those kids had
to ask, 'Why do they just leave?' They knew. These kids just knew. It wasn't
right."
When the state took custody, Khristine says, she tried to help.
"I wanted to adopt them, " she says of Lisa and her sister. A social worker
told her it would take three years because she lived in Chicago.
"No, no, no, " mutters Suderwalla, shaking her head so her hair swings. "More
like three months."
They stand fixed in a triangle at the center of the store. It is quiet, but for
a song on tinny speakers.
"In the arms of an angel far away from here, " the singer lulls. "In the arms
of an angel; You may find some comfort here."
Lopez thinks to himself, it's a sign. He and Suderwalla try not to put their
hopes in one person. But they usually know when they've found the one who will
take charge of the destiny of a child. Have they found her here?
It is time to ask.
"Would you be willing to be a part of her life?" Suderwalla says.
Khristine Williams sifts the question in her mind.
Her life had already taken her far away from here. She had only reluctantly
come back to St. Louis. There are no guarantees she can make it work with Lisa.
But now she knows she is deeply needed here.
"Yes, " she says. "I will."
AT THE VERY BEGINNING
It is a week later, and Suderwalla clips in high heels into a conference room
crowded with 13 social workers, therapists, court advocates and others. Lisa's
case is far from closed. There will be family counseling, visits, weeks of
meetings and court dates before Khristine can take Lisa home. The target date
is December.
Suderwalla clutches a new case file.
"OK. We're not going to look back, " she tells the group as she stands near a
blank flip chart, ready to record the first clues. "And we're not going to lay
blame or ask what should have been done differently."
The group begins.
This foster child is 11. She has lived in 11 different placements.
The girl has few friends. She is seeking approval from older girls. She is
dressing promiscuously. She is traumatized. She had seen her mom kill her dad.
Suderwalla stops. She needs them to start at the very beginning.
"OK, " she says. "Who knows how to spell her name?"
W.O.W. Incredible! This is a really needed article, thanks Christy!
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