I Speak For This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate (16 page)

Almost a year passed and he was returned to his family. Out-patient counseling was provided by the county mental health center, and Rich remained home until he started to attend Sawgrass Middle School. When his classroom work faltered in the middle of sixth grade, the school established an individual tutorial program for him, but his behavior became more disruptive both at school and at home so he was admitted to the Riverside Ranch for Boys, one hundred miles to the north, where he lasted the summer. To keep him closer to home, a space was found for him in a companion facility only five miles from his family. Amazingly, Rich remained there through the fall until the following Easter vacation, which he spent with his father, who then kept him at home. By August, though, he had been placed in an emergency shelter near the university, where he underwent a fresh series of tests. In the midst of these evaluations he attempted suicide by jumping out a third-floor window. After further therapy, a more “homelike” setting was recommended and he was sent to another foster family. But there was no mention of where he was presently living.

Once I had the raw chronology sketched out in my computer—the only way I could make sense of Rich’s peripatetic placements—I read every narrative, looking for the genesis of this child’s nightmarish journey through the world. Perusing the test scores over a ten-year period, I listed the IQ results next to the testing dates and noted that this measure of potential slid from a high of 103 to a recent score of 86. Every school, every hospital, every doctor, every teacher had rendered this boy’s mind stupider and stupider, yet they never offered him what he needed most: a warm, loving, accepting, permanent family.

My confusion was compounded when I found two birth certificates with different last names. Was Rich adopted? It took a while to discover the answer, but here is the simplified version of his background. Tammy Stevenson was the maiden name of Rich, Alicia, and Cory’s mother. When she became pregnant with Rich, she married the baby’s father, Richard Leroy Hamburg, a few weeks before Rich was born. (Apparently she had been married to someone else at the time of the conception, with the affair contributing to the grounds for divorce.) “Red” Hamburg’s first wife had died, the second disappeared. His marriage to Tammy Stevenson was his third. (Red claimed his mother had been a prostitute, and she had allowed him to observe her sexual alliances with customers, some of whom also abused him. He had never known who his father was.)

Tammy’s father, Jeremiah Stevenson, had managed his family’s boot factory in Vermont. When his father died, he sold the business, bought citrus groves in central Florida, and moved there with his adopted daughter, Tammy, but not his wife, who refused to leave her family in New England.

Tammy quit high school and ran off with the man who would become her first husband, but then she met Red Hamburg. Soon she was expecting their child. Jeremiah Stevenson welcomed Red Hamburg and even gave him money to invest in a boat repair business. Alicia followed Rich eighteen months later, and then Cory was born about a year after that. By this time little Rich was a hellion running barefoot through the groves, and Alicia had a digestive disorder that gave her the pervasive smell of vomit. Tammy’s approach to her children’s problems was to do the minimum possible, then run off to spend time with her friends.

Jeremiah began to think of what would happen if he died. Tammy was too flighty to ever manage the grove, and it would be twenty years before the grandkids could take over. There was Red, but he wasn’t legal kin. Then Jeremiah Stevenson had an idea: he would adopt Red and make him, and his kids, equal heirs with Tammy. Red was thrilled. At last he would have a father. The adoption documents were prepared, and at age twenty-six, Richard Leroy Hamburg, Sr., changed his name to Richard Leroy Stevenson. The children’s birth certificates were reissued to reflect the new name and Tammy Hamburg became Tammy Stevenson again.

Once I had this figured out, the various names on the paperwork made sense to me. More important, I had a sense of the family relationships as they had been in place during the crucial months when these children were very small, for this is the time that a child either learns to attach and trust or does not.

If there is a common microbe that festers in almost every household where abuse and neglect flourish, it is something that prevents caregivers from bonding to their children. But what is this ephemeral glue popularly called “bonding”? Bonding involves the emotional transaction from the parents to the child and actually it is nothing more than falling in love. Parental sensitivity to the child’s wants and needs is what signifies effective bonding. If you really fall in love, the person whom you love comes first. When a parent ignores, or is unable to meet, a child’s need for comfort and protection, bonding has not been successful. People who never made these attachments as small children have blanked out their feelings toward others as well as themselves. And they pass on the disconnection they suffered. If you have not been loved, you cannot love. Those denied empathy find themselves devoid of empathy and thus perpetuate the cycle of abuse.

Every child requires—and is entitled to—nothing less than the unqualified love and attention from someone who thinks she is the most important individual in the world. Only from this secure place can she function optimally in life. Unfortunately, many children have more tenuous attachments, which result in different degrees of maladjustment. When a parent offers affection in small doses, or is inconsistent in providing for the needs of the child, the result is a child who is anxious about what to expect and resistant to people. The next level of disturbed attachment occurs with parents who are actually insensitive to a child’s needs. This child may actually feel threatened by other people’s approach. Her anxiety may be coupled with avoidant behavior, with the child cringing, or avoiding the caregiver and others. In the worst cases, when the child is abused by the caregiver, the child is not only insecure but also so disorganized emotionally that she cannot function or develop normally. Sometimes parents are so immature that they turn to their child to supply their needs and blame the child for not being loving or caring toward them.

Attachment disorders, and their subsequent effects on children, are standards of psychological literature, but for some reason the basics are often ignored by courts, which focus on the narrow rights of biological parents rather than the essential entitlements of the child to have a safe, secure place to be. After months of piecing together bits of the Stevensons’ story, it became clear that these three small children had spent their first precarious years isolated in the groves with minimal parental love or attention. Tammy had given her babies only as much care as did not interfere with her social life. Her husband left home early in the morning and returned late at night to work at his marine repair shop, and his hobby, boat racing, often took him out of town on weekends. Jeremiah adored his grandchildren, but did not see himself as their primary caregiver. When I asked Jeremiah about these early years, he recalled stopping by to see his daughter only to find no adult in the house. Cory was in his crib and Alicia in her playpen, both with bottles of curdled milk and reeking with the smell of feces. Toddler Rich was locked in the house with some bread, juice, and a television to keep him company. When Rich could not tolerate the pestering sounds of his younger siblings, he would make feeble attempts to amuse or feed them. Sometimes, in confusion and frustration, he would whack them to shut them up.

Then, when Alicia was four and Cory was three, Tammy ran off with another man. They were gone for several weeks. When she returned and said she wanted to take the children away with her, Jeremiah stepped in. He warned Tammy that he didn’t trust her with the children and forcibly would prevent her from removing them. He offered Tammy part of her inheritance immediately if she would sign over the children’s custody to Red.

A few weeks before Rich was six, Tammy left Stevenson Groves for good. The date was 1977—precisely when the initial entry was made in Rich’s official file. It was clear from Rich’s history that he had never formed a secure attachment during the crucial period when children either learn trust or mistrust. From then on it was a slippery slope toward the wretched place where he was at the moment.

I reviewed the last eleven years of each of the children’s lives since Tammy left. Starting with Rich, every time it had seemed as though something might work out, another disappointment or tragedy reared up to destroy any progress he had made. The last notation in Rich’s file was perhaps the most pathetic. On the most recent Labor Day weekend, sixteen-year-old Rich and some friends went swimming in the creek. His best friend at the time was Sam, a boy who had been a success story at Rich’s latest rehabilitation program, and someone he admired. There are slightly different versions of what happened that afternoon, but everyone agrees Sam was on a log, reaching to grab a turtle, when both slipped into the water. Everyone laughed. Sam went under. Sam liked to kid around. Then there was a moment when Rich began to wonder. Rich jumped in and swam to the log. He dove once and thought he touched something, but when he pulled, it was only a tree branch. He dove again, this time more frantic. Rich came up sputtering and crying. By the time assistance arrived at that remote spot almost an hour later, Sam had not yet resurfaced. Divers did not find the body for several days.

No wonder Rich attempted suicide shortly afterward.

I couldn’t fathom how I could help Rich after so many crushing defeats, but before I faced that challenge, I first had to locate him. I called HRS and began to track him down. A clerk called me back and told me I wouldn’t have to worry about him because he was in a locked psychiatric ward halfway across the state and wasn’t “going anywhere for a long time.”

Once I knew where Rich was, I quickly determined there was not a pressing need to see him right away. It was clear he was safe. Besides, psychiatric placements were usually very short term. They’d probably move him back to our area in a few weeks. Better to see him in a foster home than in a psycho ward, I decided, and soon convinced myself that there was no rush to see Rich.

I would concentrate on Cory next.

If you studied a map of the district served by our courts and social service agency and attempted to triangulate the three farthest points, you could have pinpointed the locations where the three Stevenson children were living. Rich had special needs, but I did not understand why Alicia and Cory were in different counties, area codes, and school districts. Not only was this an inconvenience for the children, who almost never could arrange either to see or speak to each other, but it created more work for their caseworker, Mitzi Zeller.

I first encountered Mitzi Zeller when I arrived to read and copy the massive files she had accumulated about the Stevenson family. She had a mop of curly auburn hair that she kept trimmed to a sensible cap close to her head. Except when she went to court, she wore jeans or western skirts, plaid blouses with pearl snaps, and always cowboy boots. Her voice had a trace of a western twang and she had an easy, rolling laugh.

“What do you know about Tammy Stevenson?” was my first question.

“Not much. She’s been missing for about ten years. I understand she lived in this area for at least five of those, but never visited her children or her father. Eventually she married the guy she ran off with—or was it his brother? Anyway, they had a kid, a boy I think, then he went to jail for six years. Maybe you remember that case? The Jiffy Rapist, they called him.

“You mean Tammy managed to marry both a child molester and a rapist?”

“Looks that way to me.”

“What’s Rich like?”

“A Looney Tune, always was, always will be,” Mitzi said with a grunt. “I can’t count how many times I had to get up in the middle of the night to remove him from a foster care placement and sit it out with him until morning in this office.” Mitzi lit a cigarette and puffed tense little bursts of smoke. “Then I’d have to beg and plead for hours to find someone—anyone—who’d try him for a few more days. We have shelter homes that pride themselves on being able to handle any kid, yet good ole Rich managed to do them in. One place didn’t last until I drove back to the office.”

“After Tammy left, did Red marry again?”

“Don’t know what that guy has, but the women stand in line. There have been three wives since Tammy, and one or two before her. The last one didn’t bail out until Red was jailed. The one before that—Denise—left when she learned that he had been messing with her daughter, Sunny.”

“Sexually?”

“Yep. Kid was around nine. Red made Sunny sit on his lap with his bathrobe open and nothing on underneath and used his hand to move her up and down on him. She called her grandmother as soon as she could and said that ‘Daddy hurt my bum.’ Her grandmother brought Sunny into the hospital and the child was examined. There were some vaginal lacerations and bleeding, and they took a semen sample from her thigh, but for some reason Red wasn’t prosecuted. I guess Denise decided to get the hell out of there and took her daughter with her.”

“Did she leave Alicia and Cory behind?”

“They were
his
kids. Alicia was younger than the stepdaughter. From what I can tell that’s about the time he started diddling with her.”

“And there was no stepmother to walk in on him.”

“Not for a few months. But then number five—or is it six?—showed up. Her name is Vicky, and the kids seemed pretty attached to her.”

“Why aren’t Alicia and Cory with her now?”

“Vicky claimed she didn’t want any more to do with the Stevensons if she could help it, but Cory keeps asking for her.” Mitzi took a long drag on her cigarette. “So far those two are managing okay, but I’m holding my breath because they are still Stevensons. Alicia might stick it out with the Levys. Cory is at the MacDougals on a probationary basis because they once had Rich for two weeks and are worried he’s going to act like his brother.”