Child Protective Services

A coworker had a case of a baby who died. I don’t remember the exact age of the baby, but the child was probably around three or four months. The pictures of the infant told the whole story. The baby started out healthy: chubby, with glowing pink cheeks, nice smooth skin, and sparkling eyes. When you compared pictures of the infant just prior to the time of death, it looked like a holocaust infant. The child’s skin stretched across its fragile frame; ribs protruded. The face was all bone, the eyes dull and sorrowful. The stretched but wrinkly skin gave the infant a hard-core look, like an old person in a tiny body.

Here is the horrible story/truth behind the death. The mom had apparent mental health issues. Depressed after having her third child, she stopped feeding the baby or fed the infant too little for the child to thrive. The dad was a long-distance truck driver. While he did go home periodically, he was away much of the time. (You mean to tell me this guy was so robotic or unobservant that he didn’t notice his little girl whittling away, struggling to stay alive?) When my friend Brenda did the investigation, she noticed a pantry full of formula. That was part of the tragedy. The food was “within reach” but not a baby’s reach. Neither the eighteen-month-old or the just-turned three sibling could reach or prepare it for their sibling. CPS workers are taught that the most vulnerable ages for child abuse center around children age up to five years old.

The two well-fed siblings were removed from the home and were placed with relatives. Thank God for relatives who are able to step in, but where were they while the baby was being starved to death? (I believe they lived in Arizona but were not close to the family. Unfortunately, nobody had stopped over to visit, which might have prevented the death.) I don’t know if the parents were charged with child abuse, but I hope so. I do know it was Brenda’s last case. She quit and went back to nursing school. She was pregnant at the time and took the death very hard, maybe harder than the parents did.

It was one of the worse cases I knew of. I had been there a year and a half at the time. Another was Victoria’s case one or two years ago. The father killed his two-year-old; the evidence was in the text messages from Dad to Mom, trying to cover the murder. Mom had failed to protect, allowing the father to murder the child and then trying to help him with his alibi. Was the truck driver father who let the infant starve any better? Victoria’s murder case happened when I had been working at my job for eight and a half years.

Isn’t it a wonder I made it to ten years at the job? (And isn’t it understandable why the average worker will last a year, regardless of age, experience, and background, despite the workload, with all the nightmares of the job to contend with and the nightmare of the CPS parents they usually deal with, so forlorn and deficit.) ?)