Post by Milisha on Dec 11, 2008 2:00:30 GMT -5
Childhood was never an option for Marleny Cruz. At the age of 9, she was sent from her native Dominican Republic to live in New Jersey with her father, a man she would later say abused her. When Marleny was 10, her mother was killed in her homeland in an argument over drugs, cheating the young girl of the reunion she longed for. By her early teens, Marleny had felt the pull of drugs and had made several attempts at suicide.
And at 14, she was dead -- battered, sexually abused and left in a gutter in the Fordham section of the Bronx. Her body was not identified until late October, more than eight months after she was found and nearly buried as someone else's child.
It was a brutal end for a girl whose prophetic fear, friends said, was that nobody would notice if she was gone. In retrospect, it seems that she was destined for that final cruelty. Perhaps she was. But it was only the last indignity suffered by Marleny, whose concluding years were spent in a rough passage through New York City's foster care system, one that friends, relatives and foster parents say, seemed to fail her at almost every turn.
Marleny was shuffled from foster home to foster home and, in perhaps the bitterest turn for a girl so desperate for the security of a home, was denied the chance to live with a family who wanted to adopt her. As a result, she frequently ran away, eluding those who cared for her but were not equipped to keep her life from falling apart.
Marleny's case may be more extreme than most, but it is not altogether unusual. According to the Administration for Children's Services, which oversees the city's foster care system, about one-third of the 40,000 children in their charge are teen-agers, many of whom are chronic runaways.
Most of these children disappear for only a few days, agency officials say, often to see a boyfriend or girlfriend or relative.
In some cases, though, they said, a repeated pattern of running away signals a deeper problem, either in the child or in the child's placement.
Although agency officials deny that the handling of Marleny's case is representative, critics say stories like Marleny's underscore an all-too-common failure by both the city and the private agencies that manage the foster cases to either properly care for their most difficult wards -- referred to by the agency as AWOL's -- or keep track of them as they meander through the system.
''They need to change the system for these kids,'' said Alice McLeod, Marleny's last foster mother, adding that her efforts to place the girl in drug treatment or another specialized program were rebuffed by Graham-Windham, the private agency that handled her case.
''The caseworkers need to stay on the cases of these kids that run away, but a lot of the time they don't,'' Ms. McLeod said. ''Often they just sit around and pass them off from foster home to foster home. Maybe now they will change the rules and do something right.''
Two weeks ago, city officials said that a review of Marleny's case records at Graham-Windham shows ''deficiencies in AWOL case practice procedures'' at the private agency, which contracts with the city.
They added that they were reviewing Graham-Windham's current AWOL cases and had received a plan from the agency outlining ways to improve its tracking of runaways.
''The AWOL problem is one that greatly concerns us,'' said Leonora Wiener, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, which says it has no way to calculate how many children in its care run away. ''We are doing what we can to help reduce AWOL's.''
Although the city would not provide details of Graham-Windham's plan, and the private agency forwarded all inquiries to the city, a city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that it calls for caseworkers to communicate regularly with the police when a child is missing, a practice not now in use.
City and law enforcement officials say such weak links in oversight may have contributed not only to Marleny's remaining missing for more than eight months, but also to the police's inability to link her name to the body they found shortly after her disappearance.
''We found a body but didn't have a record of a missing person coinciding with it,'' said Sgt. Nick Vreeland, a Police Department spokesman. ''We were lucky to have ever identified her.''
Hopes for a Better Life Are Quickly Dashed
This final calamity was but the last of many to befall Marleny, according to police records, as well as interviews with the girl's family, friends and foster parents.
Marleny's life began to unravel almost from the moment her mother sent her to the United States, hoping to give her child a better life than her native Dominican Republic could provide. It was the end of 1993, shortly after the child's ninth birthday, and her father had agreed to take her in at his home in New Jersey.
But about six months later, Marleny abruptly returned to her mother after telling her great-aunt, Maria de la Cruz, that her father had been sexually abusing her, the police said. It was a claim that Marleny would make often in the years to follow, both to friends and to the authorities. While the charges were investigated, they were never substantiated, police records show.
The girl returned to New York on Sept. 15, 1994, moving into Mrs. de la Cruz's apartment in the Bronx and waiting for her mother to join them. But a few months later, Marleny received word that her mother had been killed in a car accident.
At the graveside, Marleny found out from other relatives that her mother had actually been shot to death during an argument over drugs.
''She was depressed and she cried,'' said Mrs. de la Cruz, adding that Marleny's depression concerned her so much that she began sending her to a therapist. ''She asked why there were bad people in the world.''
Truancy, Thievery And Suicide Attempts
But after five months, Marleny refused to go. As more time passed, the girl who once loved to dance to flamenco music with her aunt became sullen and distant. By 1997, according to police records, Marleny, then 13, had stopped going to school and had begun to steal from her aunt.
She also began running away, and was hospitalized after several attempts at suicide. Mrs. de la Cruz looked to the Administration for Children's Services for help. ''I decided that I couldn't continue like this,'' she said.
However, Marleny's problems remained after she was placed in the Graham-Windham group home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., six months later. Most noticeably, she continued to run away, an administrator of the home said. He said the plan was to place her in foster care as soon as something opened.
Marleny did not wait. Friends said that in late September, she ended up at an apartment in Yonkers and found what would prove to be one of the few bright moments in her short life.
Alecia Lawrence, 16, had gone to the apartment to see friends and noticed Marleny in the corner. They began to talk, Marleny pouring out her childhood and crying that no one cared whether she lived or died.
''She was this abused kid being shipped from home to home, who didn't really care about herself and didn't think anybody else did, either,'' Alecia said. ''But something was telling me to bring her to my house. All she needed was love.''
Marleny followed Alecia home, and soon the two girls were inseparable, singing in the bathroom to rhythm and blues artists like Mary J. Blige and hanging out so much together they became known, with two other girls, as the Four Musketeers.
Alecia's mother, Angela, decided that she should try to keep the child and possibly adopt her. But when she inquired about it, Mrs. Lawrence said, the agency told her it would be impossible because she had not been licensed as a foster parent; police documents in the case support her assertion. Mrs. Lawrence said the agency also discouraged her from adoption, saying the process was too long and cumbersome.
''I was going to keep her,'' said Mrs. Lawrence, whom Marleny called Mommy, ''but they said there would be too much red tape.''
Graham-Windham took Marleny away in the middle of December, placing her instead in the care of Aggie Johnson, a foster parent in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Just two days later, the girl vanished after borrowing money from Mrs. Johnson. Although police officers later found the child huddled in a Bronx stairwell, Mrs. Johnson said that the agency never told her and instead transferred the girl to yet one more foster home, Mrs. McLeod's.
Mrs. Johnson said she did not know what happened to the girl until she read news stories in October about her body being identified.
''It is one sad story after another,'' said Marsha R. Lowry, the director of Children's Rights, a nonprofit child-advocacy group that is suing the city over what it says is chronic mismanagement.
''Youngsters are simply placed wherever there is an open bed, with no particular care about the child's needs,'' Ms. Lowry said. ''This is especially true when they are teen-agers, who are just written off.''
Leaving on an Errand, Never to Return
For Marleny, Mrs. McLeod's home would be her last stop in foster care. Last Jan. 29, as had been the case so often before, the girl left on an errand and never returned. Mrs. McLeod said she reported the girl missing the next day and called the agency for months to see whether Marleny had been found. She was worried because Marleny was a fragile girl, easily impressed by older men in the neighborhood and often addled by drugs.
Officers in the 46th Precinct in the Bronx found the child at the home of Clara Cabreja, a friend of Marleny's mother, on Feb. 6. They then called Graham-Windham to report finding her and closed the case, the police said. But Graham-Windham maintained that it did not receive the call, city officials said.
In either case, workers at the agency never retrieved the girl or checked on what they wrongly assumed was a continuing police investigation into her disappearance, said the officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Marleny simply left the woman's home after a day or two and vanished forever from the foster care system set up to protect her.
Mrs. Cabreja said she did not report the child missing because Marleny often came by, but rarely stayed long. When Marleny did not return, Mrs. Cabreja said she assumed that the child was back at her foster home.
On Feb. 23, police officers found the body of a sexually abused and beaten girl near Valentine Avenue and 183d Street. The body was taken to a city morgue, where it remained unclaimed for two months, until a family said it was their missing daughter's.
The family was holding a wake when Bronx detectives showed up at the funeral home and told them that the young girl was not theirs; their daughter was in fact alive.
With no other leads on their Jane Doe, detectives began to sort through school records of more than 500 habitual truants and then began showing a picture of the body to every foster home in the Bronx, the police said.
In late October, detectives knocked on Mrs. McLeod's door and showed her the photograph. It was not the pretty girl she had remembered leaving her home that day in her favorite blue plaid shirt and jeans, the one with the bronzed complexion, the dark curls and the ready smile. But it was Marleny Cruz.
''If she had stayed with me long enough, she would have realized that someone cared about her,'' Mrs. McLeod said.
''She was a sweet person who just got caught up in the system, like a lot of children out here,'' Mrs. McLeod said. ''If someone had been there for this one, she might still be alive.''
Marleny Cruz, who friends said most feared being unloved and unknown, now rests in an unmarked grave in Monmouth County, N.J.
And at 14, she was dead -- battered, sexually abused and left in a gutter in the Fordham section of the Bronx. Her body was not identified until late October, more than eight months after she was found and nearly buried as someone else's child.
It was a brutal end for a girl whose prophetic fear, friends said, was that nobody would notice if she was gone. In retrospect, it seems that she was destined for that final cruelty. Perhaps she was. But it was only the last indignity suffered by Marleny, whose concluding years were spent in a rough passage through New York City's foster care system, one that friends, relatives and foster parents say, seemed to fail her at almost every turn.
Marleny was shuffled from foster home to foster home and, in perhaps the bitterest turn for a girl so desperate for the security of a home, was denied the chance to live with a family who wanted to adopt her. As a result, she frequently ran away, eluding those who cared for her but were not equipped to keep her life from falling apart.
Marleny's case may be more extreme than most, but it is not altogether unusual. According to the Administration for Children's Services, which oversees the city's foster care system, about one-third of the 40,000 children in their charge are teen-agers, many of whom are chronic runaways.
Most of these children disappear for only a few days, agency officials say, often to see a boyfriend or girlfriend or relative.
In some cases, though, they said, a repeated pattern of running away signals a deeper problem, either in the child or in the child's placement.
Although agency officials deny that the handling of Marleny's case is representative, critics say stories like Marleny's underscore an all-too-common failure by both the city and the private agencies that manage the foster cases to either properly care for their most difficult wards -- referred to by the agency as AWOL's -- or keep track of them as they meander through the system.
''They need to change the system for these kids,'' said Alice McLeod, Marleny's last foster mother, adding that her efforts to place the girl in drug treatment or another specialized program were rebuffed by Graham-Windham, the private agency that handled her case.
''The caseworkers need to stay on the cases of these kids that run away, but a lot of the time they don't,'' Ms. McLeod said. ''Often they just sit around and pass them off from foster home to foster home. Maybe now they will change the rules and do something right.''
Two weeks ago, city officials said that a review of Marleny's case records at Graham-Windham shows ''deficiencies in AWOL case practice procedures'' at the private agency, which contracts with the city.
They added that they were reviewing Graham-Windham's current AWOL cases and had received a plan from the agency outlining ways to improve its tracking of runaways.
''The AWOL problem is one that greatly concerns us,'' said Leonora Wiener, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, which says it has no way to calculate how many children in its care run away. ''We are doing what we can to help reduce AWOL's.''
Although the city would not provide details of Graham-Windham's plan, and the private agency forwarded all inquiries to the city, a city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that it calls for caseworkers to communicate regularly with the police when a child is missing, a practice not now in use.
City and law enforcement officials say such weak links in oversight may have contributed not only to Marleny's remaining missing for more than eight months, but also to the police's inability to link her name to the body they found shortly after her disappearance.
''We found a body but didn't have a record of a missing person coinciding with it,'' said Sgt. Nick Vreeland, a Police Department spokesman. ''We were lucky to have ever identified her.''
Hopes for a Better Life Are Quickly Dashed
This final calamity was but the last of many to befall Marleny, according to police records, as well as interviews with the girl's family, friends and foster parents.
Marleny's life began to unravel almost from the moment her mother sent her to the United States, hoping to give her child a better life than her native Dominican Republic could provide. It was the end of 1993, shortly after the child's ninth birthday, and her father had agreed to take her in at his home in New Jersey.
But about six months later, Marleny abruptly returned to her mother after telling her great-aunt, Maria de la Cruz, that her father had been sexually abusing her, the police said. It was a claim that Marleny would make often in the years to follow, both to friends and to the authorities. While the charges were investigated, they were never substantiated, police records show.
The girl returned to New York on Sept. 15, 1994, moving into Mrs. de la Cruz's apartment in the Bronx and waiting for her mother to join them. But a few months later, Marleny received word that her mother had been killed in a car accident.
At the graveside, Marleny found out from other relatives that her mother had actually been shot to death during an argument over drugs.
''She was depressed and she cried,'' said Mrs. de la Cruz, adding that Marleny's depression concerned her so much that she began sending her to a therapist. ''She asked why there were bad people in the world.''
Truancy, Thievery And Suicide Attempts
But after five months, Marleny refused to go. As more time passed, the girl who once loved to dance to flamenco music with her aunt became sullen and distant. By 1997, according to police records, Marleny, then 13, had stopped going to school and had begun to steal from her aunt.
She also began running away, and was hospitalized after several attempts at suicide. Mrs. de la Cruz looked to the Administration for Children's Services for help. ''I decided that I couldn't continue like this,'' she said.
However, Marleny's problems remained after she was placed in the Graham-Windham group home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., six months later. Most noticeably, she continued to run away, an administrator of the home said. He said the plan was to place her in foster care as soon as something opened.
Marleny did not wait. Friends said that in late September, she ended up at an apartment in Yonkers and found what would prove to be one of the few bright moments in her short life.
Alecia Lawrence, 16, had gone to the apartment to see friends and noticed Marleny in the corner. They began to talk, Marleny pouring out her childhood and crying that no one cared whether she lived or died.
''She was this abused kid being shipped from home to home, who didn't really care about herself and didn't think anybody else did, either,'' Alecia said. ''But something was telling me to bring her to my house. All she needed was love.''
Marleny followed Alecia home, and soon the two girls were inseparable, singing in the bathroom to rhythm and blues artists like Mary J. Blige and hanging out so much together they became known, with two other girls, as the Four Musketeers.
Alecia's mother, Angela, decided that she should try to keep the child and possibly adopt her. But when she inquired about it, Mrs. Lawrence said, the agency told her it would be impossible because she had not been licensed as a foster parent; police documents in the case support her assertion. Mrs. Lawrence said the agency also discouraged her from adoption, saying the process was too long and cumbersome.
''I was going to keep her,'' said Mrs. Lawrence, whom Marleny called Mommy, ''but they said there would be too much red tape.''
Graham-Windham took Marleny away in the middle of December, placing her instead in the care of Aggie Johnson, a foster parent in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Just two days later, the girl vanished after borrowing money from Mrs. Johnson. Although police officers later found the child huddled in a Bronx stairwell, Mrs. Johnson said that the agency never told her and instead transferred the girl to yet one more foster home, Mrs. McLeod's.
Mrs. Johnson said she did not know what happened to the girl until she read news stories in October about her body being identified.
''It is one sad story after another,'' said Marsha R. Lowry, the director of Children's Rights, a nonprofit child-advocacy group that is suing the city over what it says is chronic mismanagement.
''Youngsters are simply placed wherever there is an open bed, with no particular care about the child's needs,'' Ms. Lowry said. ''This is especially true when they are teen-agers, who are just written off.''
Leaving on an Errand, Never to Return
For Marleny, Mrs. McLeod's home would be her last stop in foster care. Last Jan. 29, as had been the case so often before, the girl left on an errand and never returned. Mrs. McLeod said she reported the girl missing the next day and called the agency for months to see whether Marleny had been found. She was worried because Marleny was a fragile girl, easily impressed by older men in the neighborhood and often addled by drugs.
Officers in the 46th Precinct in the Bronx found the child at the home of Clara Cabreja, a friend of Marleny's mother, on Feb. 6. They then called Graham-Windham to report finding her and closed the case, the police said. But Graham-Windham maintained that it did not receive the call, city officials said.
In either case, workers at the agency never retrieved the girl or checked on what they wrongly assumed was a continuing police investigation into her disappearance, said the officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Marleny simply left the woman's home after a day or two and vanished forever from the foster care system set up to protect her.
Mrs. Cabreja said she did not report the child missing because Marleny often came by, but rarely stayed long. When Marleny did not return, Mrs. Cabreja said she assumed that the child was back at her foster home.
On Feb. 23, police officers found the body of a sexually abused and beaten girl near Valentine Avenue and 183d Street. The body was taken to a city morgue, where it remained unclaimed for two months, until a family said it was their missing daughter's.
The family was holding a wake when Bronx detectives showed up at the funeral home and told them that the young girl was not theirs; their daughter was in fact alive.
With no other leads on their Jane Doe, detectives began to sort through school records of more than 500 habitual truants and then began showing a picture of the body to every foster home in the Bronx, the police said.
In late October, detectives knocked on Mrs. McLeod's door and showed her the photograph. It was not the pretty girl she had remembered leaving her home that day in her favorite blue plaid shirt and jeans, the one with the bronzed complexion, the dark curls and the ready smile. But it was Marleny Cruz.
''If she had stayed with me long enough, she would have realized that someone cared about her,'' Mrs. McLeod said.
''She was a sweet person who just got caught up in the system, like a lot of children out here,'' Mrs. McLeod said. ''If someone had been there for this one, she might still be alive.''
Marleny Cruz, who friends said most feared being unloved and unknown, now rests in an unmarked grave in Monmouth County, N.J.