Foster care agency is shut down

Foster care agency is shut down

2-year-old was killed in home overseen by center

January 26, 2007

JACK KRESNAK

FREE PRESS

The state Department of Human Services on Tuesday shut down a private nonprofit foster care program that had placed a 2-year-old boy in a Detroit home where police say he was beaten to death last week.

The program was run by the Lula Belle Stewart Center in Detroit, which worked with more than 80 licensed foster homes and supervised nearly 150 abused and neglected children who are wards of the court, the center's interim director Janet Burch said last week. She did not return calls Tuesday.

State social service workers began visiting each of the Stewart Center's foster homes on Tuesday to check on foster children and to inform foster parents that their licenses were being temporarily assigned to the DHS, meaning the department will supervise those homes for now, said DHS spokeswoman Maureen Sorbet.

The DHS summarily suspended the Stewart Center's child-placing license and said it will seek to permanently revoke it.

The shutdown came less than a week after 2-year-old Isaac Lethbridge stopped breathing in the home of licensed foster parent Charlise Rogers, a single mother and retired autoworker who has been a foster parent for nine years. Isaac died during emergency treatment at Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit last Wednesday.

The Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office said Isaac was beaten with a blunt object or a fist. Detroit police, who are investigating, did not return numerous calls for comment Tuesday.

Sorbet said she could not comment on the investigation into Isaac's death.

"While we can't go into the specifics of the child protective services information, any time that there's something like this going on and the safety of children in licensed foster homes is questioned, then licensing has to move immediately to investigate and take appropriate action, which they did," Sorbet said.

Court records indicate that Isaac's 4-year-old sister may have been abused in the same home. She has been moved into a foster home in Washtenaw County where her younger sister was already living.

At an emergency Wayne County Family Court hearing Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Yasmin Abdul-Karim began by offering her sympathy to Isaac's parents, Matthew and Jennifer Lethbridge, who now live in Whitmore Lake. Then she told the parents -- who lost custody of Isaac and his 4-year-old sister last September -- that the DHS would soon ask a judge to terminate their parental rights altogether for the 4-year-old.

Two Washtenaw County judges already have terminated the Lethbridge's parental rights to their six older children who later were adopted by foster parents. The oldest of their children, Ashleigh Lethbridge, died of natural causes in her adoptive home in February at age 12. Court records said Ashleigh was born blind and had mental retardation as well as muscle and nerve conditions.

The Lethbridge children began entering foster care in 1997 and the parental rights for the older six were terminated because of environmental and medical neglect and the parents' failure to fix the problems that led to the children's removal from their home, according to court records.

The youngest girl remains a temporary ward of the court in Washtenaw County.

Attorneys assigned by the court to represent the Lethbridges asked Wayne County Family Court Judge Leslie Kim Smith on Tuesday to delay the hearing so they could subpoena Isaac's foster care case worker at the Stewart Center. Smith postponed the hearing until Aug. 31 to decide whether the case should be transferred to Washtenaw County and whether to accept the DHS' petition to terminate the couple's parental rights to the 4-year-old.

The Lethbridges left the courtroom in tears.

"My child was killed and now they want to kill my family," a distraught Matthew Lethbridge said after the hearing. "How is this protecting kids?"

The Lethbridges have hired the law firm of Geoffrey Fieger to sue the agencies, social service workers and foster parents involved in Isaac's death.

Contact JACK KRESNAK at 313-223-4544 or jkresnak@freepress.com.