Government crucified for our sins
You may or may not have heard of the welfare mother squatting in an abandoned building in southeast DC who eventually murdered her four daughters. By the time the police found the drug addict’s children’s bodies four months later, they were so badly decomposed that no cause of death could be determined. Rightly, the citizens of DC are outraged – outraged that it could happen under their noses, so to speak. Outraged that the city government failed to follow up despite calls from school officials and neighbors. Outraged that the city won’t hold anyone responsible.
Well, the city finally fired six welfare workers – yesterday an administrative judge returned three of them to work (Washington Examiner link);
An administrative hearing officer has ordered three fired child welfare bureaucrats put back on the job, overturning a decision by Mayor Adrian Fenty who blamed them for failing to help four sisters whose bodies were discovered last month.
The employees, whose names were withheld, were ordered back on the job because Fenty had violated their due-process rights by summarily sacking them amid the Banita Jacks scandal, the hearing officer ruled.
Jacks is charged with murdering her four daughters. She and her family were reported to welfare agencies for years, but nothing was done to help them. In late April 2007, a school social worker begged a child welfare hot-line worker to take action, saying Jacks was holding her daughters “hostage.”
But the case was closed because no one answered the door of the row house in which Jacks and the girls had been squatting.
Now, relatives of the four victims are filing charges against the city (Washington Post link);
Relatives of the four girls whose decomposed bodies were found last month in a Southeast Washington rowhouse have hired lawyers to pursue claims against the D.C. government for failing to prevent months of neglect and abuse.
The lawyers served the city notice as the children’s mother, Banita Jacks, remains jailed without bond on murder charges. In letters to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), two lawyers used the mayor’s public statements to make a case that city agencies had warnings that the children were in trouble but failed to act aggressively to get the girls away from their mother.
Lawyers formally set the groundwork for legal claims on behalf of Jacks’s mother, Mamie Jacks, and Jessie Fogle, grandmother of the two youngest children. In addition, a lawyer for the estate of the second-oldest daughter was retained by her father, Kevin J. Stoddard. The lawyer said yesterday that he plans to sue the city on behalf of the estate.
The bodies remain at the D.C. medical examiner’s office, yet to be buried after their discovery Jan. 9 by deputy marshals serving an eviction notice at Jacks’s Sixth Street SE address. The medical examiner’s office was unable to say what led to the deaths of the girls — ages 5, 6, 11 and 16 — but the case was ruled homicide. Jacks, 33, has told police that the children were possessed by demons and that they died in their sleep, authorities have said.
Where is the shame? If a relative of mine lived in an abandoned building with her four daughters and a crack habit and I didn’t do anything about it, I’d expect someone to bring charges against me for neglecting my familial responsibilities. In my family, we take care of each other – we don’t expect an unfeeling and broken bureaucracy to care for our family.
For one thing, the whole welfare department should be fired, because there’s apparently a culture within that fostered the whole situation from the beginning. Secondly, the family should have done something long before the lawyers came along and convinced them that it wasn’t their fault (the whole court process is the family’s way of washing their hands of responsibility).
We hear constantly that government fails the people that it claims to represent, yet we continue to think of government as a solution to all of our problems. But all government has become is a scapegoat for absolving us of our personal responsibility for all of our bad choices. The judge that lets this case go forward is only perpetuating that illusion.
Category: Society
