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From: Jean
Date: 6/9/01
Time: 10:24:34 AM
Remote Name: 209.240.220.150
You keep missing the fact that the daughter reproted abuse and/or neglect. The neighbors also said that they had tried to get the authorities to check them out.
The older daughter also had stress fractures, that in itself is reason enought to check out the other kids.
Now the action of the kids of turning loose all these dogs and threating the police with guns is enought to be able to charge emotional abuse, no matter how physically healthy they appeared.
Under these circumstances, I would have taken the kids and I think a case of emotional abuse would hold up in court. After making a plan for the mother to get her act together and lots of therapy, then she might get them back if she completed the plan. If a social worker backed by the police had walked in and taken the kids it would have just been an everyday occurance. It happens everyday and is no big deal to anyone but the family involved.
If you had spent some time doing the work I did, then you would understand where they were coming from. I worked with kids that were emotionally abused. And we made cases with a lot less evidence than in this case.
Would it be better to have done nothing and take a chance of in a couple of months taking out the body of a starved kid. And they had reason to believe that this might be what would happen. Ever seen a staved kid from parental neglect, I have. Ever seen a kid with a butcher knife sticking out of his back, cause his mother was nuts, I have. In this case it was a rather wealthy professional family. They just didn't realize how sick the mother was. Only reason the whole family was not dead was that a 5 year old managed to escape and get help and by a miracle the knife missed the spine by a hair.