MOM LEARNS DEAD BOY IS HERS

WOMAN HAD HOPED TO RECLAIM CHILDREN FROM FOSTER HOME

Rocky Mountain News

Odelia Baca walked into a courthouse Thursday morning hoping to win back her two young boys.

Instead, she found out one was dead - the victim of a beating suffered while staying at a foster home."He was a joy," she said of her son, Miguel Humberto Arias-Baca. "I have my memory still, but now I don't know - how's he going to look when he grows up?"

She paused to bury her face in her hands.

"I'm going to miss all that," she finally said through tears.

The hunt for Baca had been going on for 10 days, ever since Feb. 1 when 2 1/2-year-old Miguel was taken to a hospital with head injuries and other wounds. His foster parents, Ricky Haney, 37, and Evon Haney, 31, claimed he fell off a toilet during potty training.

He died the next afternoon. An autopsy found he suffered severe head injuries in a beating.

Westminster police have told Ricky Haney he is suspected of first-degree murder. He has not been arrested, and no formal charges are expected until at least next week.

Numerous attempts to reach him for comment have failed.

The Haneys also were caring for three other foster children, including Miguel's younger brother, 14-month-old Oswaldo Arias-Baca

Odelia Baca, 19, said Adams County officials took her children in October because she was using drugs. Since then, she said, she's undergone counseling and random drug tests and has stayed clean.

At Thursday's hearing in Adams County Court, she hoped to persuade a judge that she was a fit mother, that her children could come home. She has a steady job at a hamburger restaurant, she said, and a home she's sharing with family members in Aurora.

Instead, she was asked to accompany police and officials with the Department of Social Services to an office.

"We've got some bad news for you," someone told her.

Then she was told that the little boy she'd read about in the newspaper was her own. She said the stories had frightened her, but one detail didn't fit - Miguel, she said, did not have fetal alcohol syndrome, as had been reported by police.

"Right when they told me, I started crying and crying - not my son, not my baby, not my Miguel," she said Thursday evening.

Almost immediately, Odelia and her family began asking questions.

They didn't get answers.

They want to know how the system could fail so miserably - how a child that had been taken from them for his own protection could suffer a violent death.

They want to know how the Haneys could be foster parents when both their driver's licenses had been suspended.

They want to know why Miguel apparently wasn't taken to the hospital for several hours after he was injured.

They want to know about the marks they saw on Miguel during a recent visit. They were told the marks were remnants of a permanent felt-tip marker.

"A little boy - 2 1/2 years old - dead," said Odelia's mother, Anita Baca. "He's supposed to be taken care of there."

The system should work better, family members said.

"When the state puts a child in somebody else's care, they should know what they're putting them in for," said Tom Velasquez, Miguel's great-uncle. "They should be putting them someplace better."

Sadness punctuated all the questions.

The father of the two boys, Humberto Arias, 27, said he was too distraught to talk.

But Odelia Baca and her mother tearfully reminisced about a little boy who loved to run around the house or sip a soda pop or play with a Hot Wheels car.

"They said I was a bad parent," Odelia Baca said, "and look what they put him through."