[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 200 (Friday, December 15, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18686-S18689]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CHILD ABUSE
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday I spoke here about the Interior
conference legislation. I talked some about the issue of child abuse,
particularly with respect to native Americans, and about some of the
difficulties that I have witnessed and held some hearings about.
I described Tamara DeMaris, who was placed in a foster home at age 3
and severely beaten. Her nose was broken, her arm was broken, her hair
pulled out by the roots. Why? Because one person was handling 150 cases
and did not have time to check where they were putting this 3-year-old
kid, so this poor 3-year-old was put in an unsafe foster home where
drunken brawls ensued and this child was beaten severely.
We need to do better than this. That was the point I was making
yesterday. Children cannot deal for themselves. They are not
responsible for themselves. We are responsible to help children in this
country who are helpless, to give hope to children who are hopeless. It
is our responsibility.
I read a few days ago a piece in Time magazine that I wish to read to
the Senate, not in its entirety, but I would ask all of you to read the
article in its entirety, because it, too, relates to the question of
what are we doing to protect children in this country. I am not talking
about the children that go to bed safe and secure at night in a good
home, that is warm, having just had a good meal. I am talking about
children who come from circumstances of poverty and neglect and abuse,
and who cannot help themselves.
On the cover of Time magazine was a picture of a young girl named
Elisa Izquierdo. Let me read part of the magazine article to you
because it describes something we all must understand--behind all of
these discussions about policies and numbers are people, some of whom
are desperately reaching out for help.
``Little Elisa Izquierdo liked to dance, which is almost too
perfect,'' the article says, this article written by David Van Biema in
the December 11 Time magazine. It says:
Fairy tales, especially those featuring princesses, often
include dancing, although perhaps not Elisa's favorite
merengue. Fairy-tale princesses are born humble. Elisa fit
that bill: she was conceived in a homeless shelter in the
Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and born addicted to crack.
That Elisa nevertheless had a special, enchanted aura is
something that the whole city of New York now knows.
``Radiant,'' said one of her preschool teachers, remembering
a brilliant smile and flashing black eyes. ``People loved
her,'' adds another. ``Everybody loved her.'' And, unlikely
as it may seem, there was even a prince in Elisa's life: a
real scion of Greece's old royalty named Prince Michael, who
was a patron of the little girl's preschool. He made a
promise to finance her full private school education up to
college, which is about as happily ever after as this age
permits.
Fairy tale princesses, however, are not bludgeoned to death
by their mothers. They are not violated with a tooth brush
and a hair brush, and the neighbors do not hear them moaning
and pleading at night. Last week, two months before her
seventh birthday, Elisa Izquierdo lay in her casket,
wearing a crown of flowers. The casket was open, which was
an anguished protest on someone's part; no exertion of the
undertaker's art could conceal all Elisa's wounds. Before
she smashed her daughter's head against a cement wall,
Awilda Lopez told police, she had made her eat her own
feces and used her head to mop the floor. All this over a
period of weeks, or maybe months. The fairy tale was
ended.
[[Page S18687]]
This is a story of desperation and a story of one murder. Twenty-
three thousand people are murdered in this country every year. This
little 6-year-old girl is one, murdered by her mother. But let me read
some of the description of what the girl went through. The reason I am
describing this is that we failed, the system failed, the child welfare
agency failed, and the programs failed to help this girl.
``Drugs, drugs, drugs--that's all she was interested in,''
says neighbor Doris Sepulveda, who watched the Lopezes trying
to sell a child's tricycle outside their building. Another
neighbor, Eric Latorre, recalls seeing the whole family out
at 2 a.m. as Awilda [the mother] sought crack. . . . [Her
mother] reportedly had come to believe that little Elisa,
whom she called a mongoloid and a filthy little whore, had
been put under a spell by her father--a spell that had to be
beaten out of the child. Neighbors, some of whom say they
called the authorities, later told the press of muffled
moaning and Elisa's voice pleading, ``Mommy, mommy, please
stop! No more! No more! I'm sorry!'' Law-enforcement
authorities have provided a reason for those cries: they say
Elisa was repeatedly sexually assaulted with a toothbrush and
a hairbrush. When her screams became too loud, [her mother]
simply turned up the radio.
Elisa stopped attending school, and neighbors say they saw
less and less of her. On November 15, Carlos Lopez was jailed
again for violating his parole agreement. On November 22, the
day before Thanksgiving, all that was twisted in Awilda
apparently snapped. One of her sisters, quoted in the New
York Times, reported a chilling phone conversation with her
that night: ``She told me that Elisa was like retarded on the
bed, not eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. I said,
'Take her to the hospital, and I'll take care of your other
kids.' She said she would think about it after she finished
the dishes.''
The next morning Awilda called Francisco Santana, a
downstairs neighbor. ``She was crying, `I can't believe it,
tell me it's not true,' '' he says. When he arrived at her
apartment, she showed him Elisa's motionless body. He put his
hand to the child's cold forehead, pronounced her dead and
spent the next two hours pleading with Awilda to call the
police. When he finally called himself, he says, she ran to
the apartment roof and had to be restrained from jumping.
When the police arrived, she confessed to killing Elisa by
throwing her against the concrete wall. She confessed that
she had made Elisa eat her own feces and that she had mopped
the floor with her head. The police told reporters that there
was no part of the six-year-old's body that was not cut or
bruised. Thirty circular marks that at first appeared to be
cigarette burns turned out to be impressions left by the
stone in someone's ring. ``In my 22 years,'' says Lieutenant
Luis Gonzalez, [the police lieutenant], ``this is the worst
case of child abuse I have ever seen.''
. . . an aspect of the tragedy's aftermath [according to
this magazine article] . . . has also dumbfounded the [people
of New York who shared in this tragedy]. The people of New
York could do nothing about Awilda's drug-induced delusions
or her timid neighbors. But they wanted an accounting from
the CWA [Child Welfare Agency].
This story describes report after report after report that was made
to the Child Welfare Agency.
Instead, Executive Deputy Commissioner [of the Child
Welfare Agency] Kathryn Croft has steadfastly maintained that
the state confidentiality laws designed to protect
complainants prevent her from revealing any details of the
case. Thus the public may never know how many cries for help
the agency actually recorded or what it did about them. It
may never know whether the CWA really made an extended effort
to observe Awilda before [returning that child to this
mother].
Mr. President, I have not read all of this article, but it is
sufficient to describe what happens to some children in this country. I
described several of them yesterday. This is another, a little 6-year-
old girl from New York who was failed by our system.
I am investigating at the moment to find out why a child welfare
agency would not be willing to disclose what exists in these files. Who
contacted them? When did they contact them? Who failed this child? Who
did not follow up? Why did they not take this child away from a mother
who was torturing her? Why is this child dead?
Confidentiality laws apply to protect people from disclosure of
sensitive information about a family that is dealt with by the child
welfare agency. It is not a confidentiality statute designed to protect
the agency from an investigation. I am trying to find out what kind of
Federal circumstances exist that can pry open the child welfare
agency's records to find out, how did this happen?
At the end of this story, it describes again a common problem. It
describes city, State, and Federal Government budgets that have cut
one-sixth from the child welfare agency's budget. The head of the child
welfare agency estimates that her caseworkers' caseload is going up.
They simply cannot do enough investigations.
It is what I described yesterday. The caseload on the reservation in
North Dakota was so high that the social worker who was in charge of
those cases put Tamara DeMaris, a young and innocent 3-year-old girl,
in a home where she was beaten severely, in a foster home that was not
safe. Here, we have a caseload apparently that does not permit a
welfare agency to deal with issues of life or death for 6-year-old
girls in New York City.
There is something fundamentally wrong. The reason I bring this to
the floor is because we are talking about all of these spending areas,
all of these areas of Federal spending, and we get phone calls and my
colleagues get phone calls saying we have got to cut Federal spending.
I do not disagree with that. We have to balance the budget. I do not
disagree with that.
Does anybody in this Chamber under any circumstances, or any anybody
in any State legislature or in any city council, believe that a 6-year-
old does not deserve the protection that society must give her when she
is being sexually abused and beaten, and, yes, threatened with murder?
Does anybody believe that is not our responsibility?
This country fails these children when we do not decide to debate
these kinds of issues in the context of what we must do to protect
these kids? It is not a question of anybody that thinks it does not
matter or whether you have enough social workers to protect these
children. In my judgment, we are not doing any service to public
service in this country. We must, it seems to me, ask the question: How
do we do this job? Not whether, but how do we do this job? What does it
take to make sure we protect these children?
I hope everyone reads this article. There are dozens and dozens and
dozens of cases like this all over the country. My only point is, we
can do much better and must do much better. When systems fail, we must
find out why. When children, innocent victims, find themselves in
circumstances like this, someone ought to be willing to stand up and
assume responsibility, to say we are going to help.
I told the Senate yesterday about a stack of folders on a floor,
where I saw reports of sexual and physical abuse against children on an
Indian reservation that had not even been investigated because they did
not have the investigators to go out and investigate. I was appalled,
just appalled to understand that in that stack is a young child living
in a circumstance where they have been sexually molested. There is an
allegation of sexual misconduct or allegation of physical misconduct by
a guardian, and it has not even been investigated. We must do better
than that.
I hope that as we discuss and think our way through this notion of
how do we balance the budget, we ask, what are our priorities? Is it B-
2 bombers, is it the school lunch program, is it a dozen or 100
different things? I hope none of us will ever decide that it is
discretionary on our part whether we protect children like Elisa.
Elisa did not have to die. We failed. We all failed Elisa, and I hope
as we develop our priorities for the years ahead, we will decide, at
the very least, that those who cannot help themselves, those children
in harm's way, those children whose lives are threatened deserve and
require our help. I hope there is no disagreement on any side of the
political aisle on that question.
I recognize the Senator from Minnesota has been waiting. I appreciate
very much his indulgence.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
the article to which I referred in my remarks.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Time, Dec. 11, 1995]
Abandoned to Her Fate
(By David Van Biema)
Elisa Izquierdo liked to dance, which is almost too
perfect. Fairy tales, especially those featuring princesses,
often include dancing, although perhaps not Elisa's favorite
merengue. Fairy-tale princesses are born humble. Elisa fit
that bill: she was conceived in a homeless shelter in the
Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and born addicted to crack.
[[Page S18688]]
That Elisa nevertheless had a special, enchanted aura is something the
whole city of New York now knows. ``Radiant,'' says one of
her preschool teachers, remembering a brilliant smile and
flashing black eyes. ``People loved her,'' adds another.
``Everybody loved her.'' And, unlikely as it may seem, there
was even a prince in Elisa's life: a real scion of Greece's
old royalty named Prince Michael, who was a patron of the
little girl's preschool. He made a promise to finance her
full private-school education up to college, which is about
as happily ever after as this age permits.
Fairy-tale princesses, however, are not bludgeoned to death
by their mothers. They are not violated with a toothbrush and
a hairbrush, and the neighbors do not hear them moaning and
pleading at night. Last week, two months before her seventh
birthday, Elisa Izquierdo lay in her casket, wearing a crown
of flowers. The casket was open, which was an anguished
protest on someone's part; no exertion of the undertaker's
art could conceal all Elisa's wounds. Before she smashed her
daughter's head against a cement wall, Awilda Lopez told
police, she had made her eat her own feces and used her head
to mop the floor. All this over a period of weeks, or maybe
months. The fairy tale was ended.
America dotes on fairy tales and likes to think it takes
action on nightmares. When the story of Elisa's death hit the
news last week, New Yorkers and people across the
country remembered the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964, and
took to task all the neighbors who had known too much and
said nothing. But, it turned out, many others had not been
silent: Elisa's slow, tortured demise had been reported
repeatedly. Over the six years of her life, city
authorities had been notified at least eight times. And so
outrage focused on the child-welfare system. How did it
happen, the public wondered angrily, that Elisa's case was
known to the system, and yet the system so shamefully
failed her?
The Child Welfare Administration, which handles cases of
abuse in New York City, first heard of Elisa on Feb. 11,
1989, the day of her birth. Her mother was a crack addict
whose addition was indirectly responsible for her pregnancy:
she had lost her apartment, and in Brooklyn's Auburn Place
homeless shelter she began a romance with Gustavo Izquierdo,
who worked at the shelter as a cook. As her pregnancy
progressed, Awilda was so lost in the pipe that relatives
managed to wrest custody of her first two children, Rubencito
and Kasey, from her. The social workers at Woodhull Hospital
took one look at Elisa's tiny, crack-addicted body and
immediately assigned custody to the father. Following
standard procedure, they also alerted the CWA.
Perhaps to his own surprise, Izquierdo--who had emigrated
from Cuba hoping to teach dance--turned out to be a wonderful
father. At first there were panicky calls to female
acquaintances about diapers and formula, but eventually he
mastered the basics. Every morning he would iron a dress for
Elisa and put her beautiful hair into braids or pigtails.
When she was four, he rented a Queens banquet hall for a
party marking her baptism. Says a friend, Mary Crespo: ``She
was his life. He would always say Elisa was his princess.''
It was through her father's efforts that the princess found
her prince. Izquierdo took parenting classes at the local
YWCA, and he enrolled one-year-old Elisa in the Y's
Montessori preschool. She was a favorite pupil. Says the
school's then director, Phyllis Bryce: ``She was beautiful,
radiant. She had an inner strength and a lot of potential for
growth.'' So fond of both father and daughter were the
Montessori staff members that when Izquierdo fell behind on
tuition, they recommended his daughter to Prince Michael of
Greece.
Michael will probably never ascend his country's throne,
since the monarchy was abolished in 1974. But he still
dispenses royal charity. After an aide established a
connection with the Montessori school, the faculty introduced
Michael to Elisa. On the day he arrived in Brooklyn, he would
later remember, ``[Elisa] jumped into my arms. She was a
lively, charming, beautiful girl. She was so full of love.''
The prince visited several times, bringing stuffed animals or
clothes; the little princess responded with thank-you notes
and pictures. Michael's most handsome offer arrived in late
1993: he would pay Elisa's full tuition, through 12th grade,
at the Brooklyn Friends School.
In 1991 Awilda petitioned for, and was granted,
unsupervised visitation rights with her daughter. The mother
had already regained custody of her two older children; she
seemed to have effected a miraculous recovery. In December
1990 social workers signed an affidavit stating that she had
given up drugs, married a man named Carlos Lopez and settled
at a permanent address. ``Both [Lopezes] are willing to go
for random drug tests,'' the affidavit read. ``They never
miss appointments with the agency, and they are always on
time. Mr. Lopez is supportive . . . He appears to be gentle
and understanding.''
That last was a grave misjudgment. Carlos Lopez, who did
maintenance work, was solicitous only in public. At night
neighbors heard dishes, pots and pans crashing against walls.
In January 1992, a month after Awilda gave birth to his
second child, Carlos stabbed her 17 times with a pocketknife,
putting her in the hospital for three days. According to a
neighbor, the attack occurred in front of Elisa, during a
weekend visit. Carlos served two months in jail and then,
neighbors say, resumed beating his wife--and his visiting
stepdaughter.
Elisa's life became an excruciating alternation of
happiness and horror. The four-year-old took the Friends
School's screening examination and passed. But according to
Montessori teacher Barbara Simmons, she also began telling
people that her mother had locked her in a closet. On one
occasion she volunteered, ``Awilda hits me. I don't want to
go to Awilda.'' Montessori principal Bryce says she reported
suspected abuse to both the Brooklyn Bureau of Community
Services and a child-abuse hot line--the CWA's second
warning about Elisa. In response, Bryce has said, child-
welfare workers made several visits to the Lopez home,
``and then stopped, as they usually do.''
Izquierdo apparently knew about the mistreatment. A
neighbor told the New York Times that Elisa would wake up
screaming in the night, that although toilet trained, she had
begun to urinate and defecate uncontrollably and that there
were cuts and bruises on her vagina. In 1992 Izquierdo
petitioned the family court to deny Awilda custodial rights,
but fate intervened before the court could act on his
request. By late 1993, already ill with cancer, he was
planning to take Elisa to Cuba, and perhaps hoping to leave
here there permanently. Tickets were bought, but he became
too ill to travel and on May 26 Izquierdo died.
Awilda immediately filed for permanent custody. A cousin of
Izquierdo's, Elsa Canizares, challenged the petition,
alleging that Lopez was insane and abused the child. Bryce
wrote in a letter to family court judge Phoebe Greenbaum that
``Elisa was emotionally and physically abused during the
weekend visitations with her mom. Teachers' observation notes
are available.'' Bryce also enlisted the help of Prince
Michael, who added his own letter.
Canizares arrived for the June 1994 custody hearing alone.
Awilda, by contrast, brought a small army. Her lawyer that
day was from the Legal Aid Society, which maintained that its
caseworkers had visited the Lopezes and found that ``Elisa
expressed a strong desire to live with her mother'' and her
siblings. Also backing Awilda was the CWA, which Judge
Greenbaum has indicated had been monitoring the family for
more than a year--the agency's third contact with Elisa.
Finally there was Project Chance, a federally funded
parenting program for the poor run by a man named Bart
O'Connor.
When O'Connor met her in 1992, Awilda had seemed ``an
easily excitable woman,'' but one who was ``very lively, very
vibrant and loved her children beyond belief.'' She dutifully
attended parenting classes and sought extra advice. There
were setbacks, during which she returned to drugs and
abandoned the children. But she recovered--``The kids seemed
happy, and the house was immaculate.'' When Awilda asked
O'Connor to help her get Elis back, he had his doubts: ``She
was just learning to handle five kids. I thought another kid
might be too much.'' But, after all, he had just given her a
progress award, so he vouched for her to the court. In
September Judge Greenbaum awarded full custody to Awilda,
directing the CWA to observe the family for a year. Last
week, hounded by the press, Greenbaum released a statement
that read in part, ``It is any judge's worst nightmare to be
involved in a case in which a child dies.''
Especially, it can be assumed, when a child dies slowly, by
torture. In September, Awilda removed Elisa from the
Montessori school and enrolled her in Manhattan's Public
School 26. The Daily News reports that on arrival, she
seemed a fairly happy girl, one who shared make-believe
bus trips with other children during lunch hour. But she
soon folded up into herself. The school's principal and
social worker, noting that she was often bruised and had
trouble walking, reported the matter directly to a deputy
director of CWA's Manhattan field division, in what would
be CWA's fourth notification. School district spokesman
Andrew Lachman says the official allegedly replied that
the case was ``not reportable'' owing to insufficient
evidence. School staff then visited the Lopez apartment.
To their surprise, Awilda ``was very happy to see them,''
says Lachman, and there were no signs of abuse.
O'Connor, however, was regretting his recommendation to the
judge. He received a series of hysterical phone calls from
Awilda complaining that Elisa was soiling herself and
drinking from the toilet and had cut off her hair. Finally
she asked O'Connor to take Elisa away. Convinced the girl's
symptoms had existed prior to her contact with Awilda but
were now driving her mother over the edge, he rushed to the
apartment. ``You could smell urine and see she had defecated
everywhere,'' he says. ``Her toys were thrown around. There
were feces smeared on the refrigerator.''
O'Connor claims he called Elisa's CWA caseworker, who told
him he was ``too busy'' to come by. Moreover, O'Connor says
the caseworker never responded to this fifth appeal to CWA,
despite repeated subsequent calls. O'Connor took the Lopezs
to a city hospital for psychiatric counseling, and Awilda
seemed to calm down somewhat. To O'Connor's dismay however,
she repeatedly avoided signing a release that would allow him
to send his observations to the city agency. By last July she
had dropped out of touch entirely.
There was a reason for that. ``Drugs, drugs, drugs--that's
all she was interested in,'' says neighbor Doris Sepulveda,
who watched the Lopezes trying to sell a child's tricycle
outside their building. Another neighbor, Eric
[[Page S18689]]
Latorre, recalls seeing the whole family out at 2 a.m. as Awilda sought
crack. Awilda had reportedly come to believe that Elisa, whom
she called a mongoloid and filthy little whore, had been put
under a spell by her father--a spell that had to be beaten
out of the child. Neighbors, some of whom say they called the
authorities, later told the press of muffled moaning and
Elisa's voice pleading, ``Mommy, Mommy, please stop! No more!
No more! I'm sorry!'' Law-enforcement authorities have
provided a reason for those cries: they say Elisa was
repeatedly sexually assaulted with a toothbrush and a
hairbrush. When her screams became too loud, Awilda turned up
the radio.
Elisa stopped attending school, and neighbors say they saw
less and less of her. On Nov. 15, Carlos Lopez was jailed
again for violating his parole agreement. And on Nov. 22, the
day before Thanksgiving, all that was twisted in Awilda
apparently snapped. One of her sisters, quoted in the New
York Times, reported a chilling phone conversation with her
that night: ``She told me that Elisa was like retarded on the
bed, not eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. I said,
`Take her to the hospital, and I'll take care of your other
kids.' She said she would think about it after she finished
the dishes.''
The next morning Awilda called Francisco Santana, a
downstairs neighbor. ``She was crying, `I can't believe it,
tell me it's not true,'' ' he says. When he arrived at her
apartment, she showed him Elisa's motionless body. He put his
hand to the child's cold forehead, pronounced her dead and
spent the next two hours pleading with Awilda to call the
police. When he finally called himself, he says, she ran to
the apartment roof and had to be restrained from jumping.
When the police arrived, she confessed to killing Elisa by
throwing her against a concrete wall. She confessed that she
had made Elisa eat her own feces and that she had mopped the
floor with her head. The police told reporters that there was
no part of the six-year-old's body that was not cut or
bruised. Thirty circular marks that at first appeared to be
cigarette burns turned out to be impressions left by the
stone in someone's ring. ``In my 22 years,'' said Lieut. Luis
Gonzalez, ``this is the worst case of child abuse I have ever
seen.''
O'Connor sits in his Brooklyn office and fields calls from
the media. ``We made a mistake,'' he says grimly. ``We will
try to make sure this never happens again.'' Looking back, he
says, ``I should have thrown bombs in the CWA's doorway.''
The initials themselves infuriate him. At least, he says,
``we will say our mea culpa. We're not going to run behind
confidentiality laws and not admit we've made a mistake.''
He is referring to an aspect of the tragedy's aftermath
that has dumbfounded the city. The people of New York could
do nothing about Awilda's drug-induced delusions or her timid
neighbors. But they wanted an accounting from the CWA.
Instead, Executive Deputy Commissioner Kathryn Croft has
steadfastly maintained that state confidentiality laws
designed to protect complainants prevent her from revealing
any details of a case. Thus the public may never know how
many cries for help the agency actually recorded or what it
did about them. It may never know whether the CWA really made
an extended effort to observe Awilda before making a
recommendation to Judge Greenbaum--or whether a caseworker
was really ``too busy'' to return a call.
What the public could surmise, however, was that something
was amiss. Last week someone leaked an Oct. 10 letter from
CWA Commissioner Croft to Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, complaining
that city staff cuts make it impossible for her to train
child-abuse caseworkers or even measure their competence. And
that is the least of it. The city, state and Federal
Government have cut one-sixth from CWA's $1.2 billion budget.
While Croft estimates her average staff member's case load at
16.9, some workers at the agency's Queens branch put theirs
at 25, a number that almost precludes meaningful long-term
investigations. ``There are no bodies available to do the
work,'' says Bonnie Buford, a supervisor in a Queens child-
protective-services unit. Claims Gail Nayowith, executive
director of the Citizens' Committee for Children: ``Case
loads are rising. Investigations take longer, and some very
important programs don't exist . . . This child and her
family should have got services. With appropriate
interventions, services and follow-up, [Elisa] would be
alive.''
But she is not alive. At her funeral, the Rev. Gianni
Agostinelli told mourners that ``Elisa was not killed only by
the hand of a sick individual, but by the impotence of
silence of many, by the neglect of child-welfare institutions
and the moral mediocrity that has intoxicated our
neighborhoods.'' Later, Elisa was laid to rest in the Cypress
Hills Cemetery in Queens. There had been discussion about her
body: the Izquierdo side of her family wanted to determine
its fate, but so did the Lopez side. And it seems that
mortuaries, like city bureaucracies, have rules for such
situations. Regardless of the circumstances, the custody of
the body goes to the mother.
Mr. GRAMS addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
____________________