Officials failed to spot abuse in case of beaten, starved girl

Hilary Costa and John Simerman

Contra Costa Times

ANTIOCH — A breeze drifts in through an upstairs window, doing little to fade the acrid smell of fresh white paint in the empty bedroom.

The workers needed three coats, they said, to hide the splattered blood.

The carpet is gone, leaving strips of tacks lining the baseboards — bare reminders of the horrors that police say took place here. For 15 months or more, this was the 10-foot-square prison cell that Jazzmin Davis rarely left. Where she went from full-faced to scrawny. From bright to battered. From living to dead.

Tack strips like these were among a gruesome cache of makeshift weapons that police say Jazzmin's foster mother and aunt, Shemeeka Davis, leveled on Jazzmin and her twin brother, who shared the same room and brutal abuses as his sister, but survived.

Davis strafed the tack strips across Jazzmin's face and head, police say. If anyone saw the marks, though few ever did, she called it acne, or cat scratches.

Other times it was wire, or a padlock at the end of a belt, or a wooden dowel that eventually snapped. Often, the autopsy showed, it was a hot steam iron to the skin.

Nearly three months after her death, Jazzmin lies in an Oakley cemetery. Her brother is in county care, a battered, walking echo of his twin, and Davis sits in jail after pleading not guilty to charges of child abuse, torture and murder.

Davis declined interview requests.

How it could happen, and how welfare workers charged with Jazzmin's care could have missed it, are questions that may never be fully answered. But in interviews with family and classmates, with police, in court papers, a coroner's report and in hundreds of pages of foster care records obtained by the Times, a woeful sketch of Jazzmin's life emerges.

Difficult beginning

September 2001 wasn't the first time Shemeeka Davis admitted her tenuous hold as a foster mother. But it was the clearest signal of trouble to come.

"I am struggling to meet my parental obligation for all my children," she wrote on a child needs assessment form. "God willing we'll all make it."

While case workers at times questioned Davis' ability to cope, they never objected to the twins' placement with her. In the file, only one person expressed reservations: Shemeeka Davis.

The chain of events that culminated in Jazzmin's Sept. 2 death on Killdeer Drive began in 1993 with what seemed like an act of kindness.

The second of twins born in a San Francisco home to a drug-addicted mother and a father behind bars, Jazzmin barely survived her birth. Emergency workers found her in the breech position and performed a "difficult extraction of the head." Jazzmin was born limp, blue and not breathing — but alive. She weighed 5.6 pounds and tested positive for sickle cell trait, and for cocaine.

Two months later, with nobody to care for the twins, their father's sister stepped forward. Shemeeka Davis was a 22-year-old mother of two toddler boys, a family member willing to help — the kind of caretaker social workers hope for.

"She told me that she would very much like to care for the Davis kids," her lawyer wrote to San Francisco social workers.

San Francisco County commonly places foster children with relatives in other cities. On May 14, 1993, Davis took the 3-month-old twins home to her two-bedroom Pittsburg public housing unit. Despite the move into East Contra Costa County, the twins' case would stay with San Francisco. As a family member, Davis needed no foster care license.

The babies grew quickly and were eating solid food by 10 months old, filling out size 18-months clothes. Jazzmin began to walk before her first birthday. By early 1994, a case worker noted that "paternal aunt, Shemeeka Davis, is available to care for the twins permanently."

But problems had already emerged. Davis missed three social worker home visits within the first three months, and records show she rarely returned phone calls from the case worker, a pattern that would last.

Davis described Jazzmin, at 10 months old, as "mean."

"Shemeeka is very upset because the twins are very difficult & she feels she gets no support from" their mother, who had not seen them since giving birth. Yet Davis blocked collect phone calls from both of the biological parents.

Davis complained the twins developed behavioral problems early. They often wet the bed, roamed the house at night and hit each other. In 1998, when Jazzmin was 6, Davis complained she "does sneaky things" to get attention.

Jesse Davis, Jazzmin's great-grandfather, doesn't remember her that way from her visits to his Pittsburg house. She was a natural comedian who hammed it up, and roughhoused with her male cousins, he said. The 84-year-old World War II veteran can't pinpoint when he last saw Jazzmin, but he said he never worried about her care. Shemeeka was all bark, no bite, he said.

Now, "I think about Jazzmin 24 hours a day," he said. He visited Shemeeka in jail once after she was arrested.

"She said she was sorry about what she did and everything," he said.

Acting out

After the twins entered elementary school, case workers logged only cursory reports of periodic check-ins, punctuated by reports from Davis on Jazzmin's behavior. Almost from the start, the county saw the family every six months, instead of standard monthly visits.

At Antioch's Sutter Elementary School, Jazzmin began acting out. She was sent home from first grade for hitting and kicking another child; she stole food in second grade.

In a questionnaire for a Contra Costa County health clinic, Davis described her 7-year-old foster daughter as "bossy, aggressive with other children. She throws toys, cannot be still, loud, seeking to be the center of attention, whiny, destructive, cutting clothes, get upsets with discipline, does not like to be hugged, has never cried."

By 2001, Davis had given birth to a daughter and was raising five children. She also was dealing with the fallout of telling Jazzmin she was not her biological mother.

"She requires a very large portion of my attention more than I can give," Davis wrote on the 2001 assessment form.

Sworn to secrecy

The twins entered Antioch Middle School in 2004, when Jazzmin fell in with classmates Brittany Brackens and Treyanna Fonteno.

Treyanna said she knew Jazzmin was being abused as early as 2005. In notes passed in class, Jazzmin said her foster mother beat her. She hid her wounds with ill-fitting pants and turtlenecks, even in Antioch's autumn heat. She explained away the ones that crept up her neck as cat scratches. Once, she came to school with a black eye, said Treyanna.

"I think other people noticed but I think they tried to buy her lies."

Jazzmin swore her friends to secrecy, saying she had been punished in the past for confiding in another adult. It's a promise they now wish they had broken.

When Jazzmin didn't start at Antioch High in fall 2007, Treyanna questioned Jazzmin's brother, who was still in school. He said she had changed schools.

"I was suspicious but I didn't want to intrude," Treyanna said.

Because she dropped out in between school years, and between schools, "there would not have been a red flag," Antioch Superintendent Deborah Sims said. She was purged from the system through the automatic "data cleanup process."

Final months

On Killdeer Drive, Shemeeka kept neighbors from suspecting what police now say occurred: That the bedroom with the window facing the street became a prison for Jazzmin.

A woman, who requested anonymity, said she lived across the street for two years and often heard yelling from the house. She never called police — it could have been strict parenting. Tough love.

"I do know for a fact that they were fearful, those kids," she said.

When the neighbor stopped seeing Jazzmin, around June 2007, she said she asked and Davis told her Jazzmin had been sent to live with relatives.

Police believe Jazzmin was actually upstairs, where the 5-foot-7 girl, whom friends recalled as "thick," shrank to 78 pounds. Once Jazzmin was out of school, Antioch police Lt. Leonard Orman said, Davis apparently ramped up the abuse.

"This certainly appears that was the climax and where everything falls apart for her," Orman said.

Police say Davis was a crafty matriarch who took pains to prepare the house and kids for social worker visits. "It's clear that she was manipulating everybody," Orman said.

She kept the twins silent as she worked part time at a mall store, and she somehow got through a reported March 2008 family visit with the San Francisco social worker. That was the last before Jazzmin's death.

By that time, she was confined to the room, police say. Her brother joined her there when the school year ended. There, police say, the twins spent the summer, wasting away until Sept. 2.

Now the room is empty, but for a pastel blue rocking horse figurine that rests alone on the window sill. Another coat of paint in the closet will cover the last blood stains.

Somewhere else, a 15-year-old boy with scars across his body has a new, safer place to sleep.