Abuse Case Leaves 2 Adopted Girls in Limbo

Abuse Case Leaves 2 Adopted Girls in Limbo

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

As the case against an Arizona couple accused of abusing their newly adopted Russian daughters on a flight to New York City drags into its fifth month, the girls have been on their own strange odyssey in the United States. They have had to make six moves among four foster homes in two states, staying in two of the homes for only a few days.

The girls, who are still Russian citizens and have learned little English, are technically in the custody of New York City's sprawling child welfare bureaucracy, the Administration for Children's Services, which oversees 42,000 children in foster care. But because the parents, Richard and Karen Thorne, are from Phoenix, the girls, now 4 and 5, are living in a foster home in Arizona while New York City courts consider abuse charges against the Thornes and decide whether and how to reunite the family.

Every day that the case goes unresolved is another day in foster care, which takes its own toll on the girls, who were previously unrelated and had spent all their lives in a Russian orphanage. Adoption and foster care experts say that the longer the girls are not living permanently with a family, the more psychological damage can occur.

''These are children who are extremely 'at risk' because of their early experiences in life,'' said Victor Groza, a social-work researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a specialist in both international adoption and foster care. ''To keep them bouncing around in the system is to do them no service.''

Nicholas Scoppetta, Commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services, said in an interview Friday that the city's goal was to protect the children. ''Foster care is clearly second best to being in a home where the child is getting the attention and unqualified support and love of one or more parents, for sure,'' he said. ''But during the pendency of this proceeding -- when the Thornes are charged with abuse and there are five witnesses with no apparent ax to grind or ulterior motives testifying that there was abuse -- it seems only prudent to keep the children in foster care.''

He added: ''It's unfortunate that it's taking so long. We want to be fair to the Thornes, but we can't ignore the testimony of five witnesses,'' some of whom missed their connecting flights to make statements to the police against the Thornes.

One reason for the delay is that the city has so many other pressing cases, with 11,000 new children, some of them in imminent danger, coming into the system every year and 53,000 cases under investigation at any one time.

Judge Joseph M. Lauria, who is presiding in the Thorne case in Family Court in Queens, is overseeing 1,108 other abuse cases. He hears about 40 a day, and his own calendar is already blacked out solidly with hearings through January.

Each case requires medical and psychological evaluations and other investigations. Judge Lauria said in an interview that most cases take about a year to resolve, and only 32 of his cases are more than a year old.

''It's an administrative juggling act to prioritize the cases every day,'' he said. ''It's amazing to me that the system functions as well as it does.''

Meanwhile, the Thornes' contact with the girls is restricted to one two-hour visit a week, under supervision.

One central problem, particularly for older children who have spent a long time in orphanages, is that they have trouble learning to trust anyone. Moving from home to home can perpetuate that lack of trust and make it harder for the girls to bond -- or ''attach,'' in child-development parlance -- to the Thornes later.

''We know from long experience in child welfare that children growing up in orphanages or institutions tend to do less well than children who don't, and some of them can have trouble bonding with parents who come along late in life,'' said John Mattingly, a senior associate at the Annie Casey Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Baltimore that is trying to improve the nation's foster-care system.

At the same time, he said, ''It's easy to look back and say that each move was wrong, but they are driven by the difficulty of the situation.''

The city removed the girls from the Thornes when their plane landed May 28 at Kennedy International Airport. The Thornes had them in their own custody for several days until the 10-hour flight from Moscow.

Flight attendants and passengers on the plane have testified that the Thornes screamed at the children, slapped them and told them to ''shut up.'' The parents testified last week that all of the witnesses misinterpreted their actions.

For example, the Thornes said, what passengers had described as a slapping sound was actually the sound of the parents clapping to music. They said that one of the girls had not wanted to be adopted in the first place, screaming from the moment they met, and both went wild on the plane. Mrs. Thorne testified that after the girl who did not want to be adopted had slapped her face five or six times, she was angry, frustrated and embarrassed, and slapped the girl on the hand.

When the plane landed, the parents were jailed and charged with child abuse, neglect and endangering the welfare of children. Those charges are pending in Criminal Court, while Family Court considers whether abuse took place.

The girls were placed in a foster home in Queens. A few days later, they were moved to another home, where officials believed, incorrectly, that the family members spoke Russian. The girls were then returned to the first family, which officials said was what the girls wanted. It is not clear what role the girls' own behavior may have played in the moves.

On July 24, after the legal cases had gone into hiatus over the summer, child welfare officials allowed the girls to be moved to a foster home in Arizona near the Thornes' home. Shortly after the girls arrived, their new foster mother became ill and the girls were moved to another Arizona home. The mother has since recovered and the girls were moved back to the first Arizona home.

Specialists said it was easy to second-guess city officials now, but still they ask: Were the girls in such imminent danger that they should have been removed from the Thornes in the first place? At what point should the city decide that foster care is counterproductive and seek a permanent family? It takes a year to terminate parental rights.

Mr. Groza, of Case Western Reserve, said that New York officials might have been too quick to remove the girls from the parents.

Granted, he said, the parents had acted in a way that made them conspicuous on a plane with at least eight other families who were bringing back newly adopted children. And New York's child-welfare agency, which has received negative publicity for failing to prevent other children from being abused, would naturally be sensitive to the case of an affluent white couple who received vast media attention, he said.

Still, Mr. Groza said, children are sometimes taken from their parents too casually. ''The treatment on the plane might have been bad by our standards,'' he said, ''but it may have been better than the treatment they got in the orphanage.''

Others say that the girls' interests in getting a permanent family soon should override the Thornes' interest in adoption. ''The children's interest may be less linked to the adoptive parents' interest,'' Mr. Mattingly, of the Annie Casey Foundation, said. ''To set up reunification plans that could drag out for years, when it's not clear that they are good for these kids or the kids are good for them, can make things worse.''