After one life turns around, another is lost

Patricia Wen

Boston Globe

Carrying a balloon and a potted plant, a young woman approached the small concrete slab that covered the burial plot of 4-year-old Dontel Jeffers.

"This is it?" said Danielle Walton, 21, at the Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park on an April day. "He doesn't even have a headstone?!"

Walton is a former girlfriend of the boy's father. On this day, which would have been the boy's fifth birthday, she tied the helium balloon to a rock and placed the plant beside it. They were the only markers for the boy's grave.

Dontel died March 6 in a Dorchester foster home, a place he ended up after a series of decisions about his care that were triggered, inadvertently, by Walton.

Like so many who cared for the boy, Walton that day was full of second-guessing about her role in his short life.

Looking into the dirt where Dontel was buried, she said quietly, "I'm sorry, Dontel. I'm sorry."

From the start, Dontel Jeffers's childhood was full of unpredictability. His parents split up before he was born. He had nine homes in nearly five years of life. He lived his first few months in a homeless shelter with his mother. He learned to play as easily in emergency shelters as in the homes of relatives.

But his childhood was also rescued, if only for a time, by the least likely of candidates: his father. Elary Rohan Jeffers had a long criminal history and had never shown any interest in the everyday routines of raising children. But his love of Dontel helped the man turn his own life around, and father and son were close for much of the boy's life.

These are the two powerful ironies in the story of Dontel Jeffers: He was killed violently in the care of the state agency dedicated to protecting vulnerable children. And he spent perhaps the best times in his life thriving under the care of a man written off by many as a wild derelict.

'This is my son'Before Dontel was born, his father was a hot-tempered Caribbean immigrant who trafficked in drugs, threatened police officers, and solicited a prostitute at least once, records show. He was also a construction laborer whose outgoing personality attracted many women, and he had volatile relationships with some of them.

Dontel entered his father's life on a summer day in 2000. The father heard frantic knocking on his front door, then an alarmed neighbor in the apartment hallway yelling, "There's a kid outside!"

Jeffers looked out to see a baby boy bundled in a car seat left in the hallway. He immediately knew it was the boy's mother who had left him there, Jeffers recalled. Picking up the 4-month-old, Jeffers told the neighbor, "This is my son."

Jeffers, from the island of Nevis, was 31 at the time, starting to tire of the street life. He began to buy diapers. He applied for welfare and food stamps. He enjoyed dressing Dontel in stylish clothes.

With Dontel in his life, he decided to become a new man. He volunteered for a time in his child's day-care center. He grew increasingly comfortable as Dontel's caretaker, often the only man in a homeless shelter for single parents.

"He took care of his child better than many women here," remembered Fannie Stewart-Gibbons, who runs a shelter for homeless families in Dorchester.

He became so enamored of his new father-and-son routine, Jeffers became alarmed when Dontel's mother, Christal Claiborne, went to court in August 2002, requesting custody of the boy. After a hearing, a family court judge chose to keep the boy with his father.

Though deeply relieved by the ruling, Dontel's father would go on to have another legal tangle -- this one involving a regrettable day with his then-girlfriend, Walton.

Argument and accusation

It was an evening after Christmas in 2003, and Jeffers and Walton got into an argument. Walton raced to the police station and accused Jeffers of "pushing her against the wall." She told police she feared for her life.

In recent interviews, Jeffers denied ever "putting my hand on any woman," and said Walton made the accusation out of jealousy and rage. Walton, however, insisted that he beat her that day and one other time.

Even while describing Jeffers as sometimes violent toward her, Walton said he never behaved that way toward his son.

"That's how it was," she said. "He was abusive, but he took care of his son."

Walton said she soon regretted filing the police report, which ultimately triggered a court employee to notice old records showing that Jeffers had an outstanding deportation order from a drug conviction in the early 1990s.

On May 12, 2004, unaware of what had popped up from his past, Jeffers was set to go to Dorchester District Court, hoping to clear up the domestic violence charge. Just before he left for the courthouse, Jeffers recalled, Dontel turned to him, saying, "Daddy, can I come with you?"

"No," he remembered replying. "I'll be right back."

Jeffers spent that night behind bars at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, as officials processed his deportation order. Dontel never saw his father again.

Into foster careWithout his dad, Dontel found himself in a swirl of custody battles between his paternal grandmother, Agatha Jeffers, and his mother, Claiborne. For the rest of 2004, the boy was at the center of Suffolk County family court hearings -- some lasting no more than 15 minutes. His mother claimed she should be the boy's caretaker; his grandmother accused his mother of abandoning Dontel and being "unfit."

Judges ruled in favor of the mother, a decision that ultimately proved to put the boy at risk. Last fall, the Department of Social Services began receiving complaints that the mother was neglecting Dontel, as well as his half-sister, Ayanna, and they discovered that she was using cocaine.

By November, a month after Elary Rohan Jeffers was deported to Nevis, social workers concluded that Dontel and his half-sister should join nearly 10,000 other children in Massachusetts foster care.

Eleven daysBy late February of this year, after Dontel spent a few months in a residential evaluation center, DSS officials placed him in the home of Corinne N. Stephen, a foster mother whose previous experience was primarily caring for adolescents and teenagers. In a blue three-decker on Ballou Street, she would care for her own 2-year-old son, as well as Dontel. The 24-year-old graduate of Madison Park Technical Vocational High School was young by the standards of most foster parents in Massachusetts, though she had passed the background checks required by DSS.

Dontel spent 11 days in Stephen's home. According to prosecutors, the boy was repeatedly beaten while in her care. He suffered two severe blows, they say, one of which caused fatal internal injuries. They said she used a telephone cord to tie the boy up. They said his body temperature was only 94.1 degrees when Stephen brought him to the emergency room of Caritas Carney Hospital -- a sign that he had probably been dead for several hours.

On Thursday, Stephen was arrested for second-degree murder.

'From earth to glory'Many of those who loved Dontel Jeffers are not only grieving his loss. They are also wondering, sometimes painfully, whether they or anyone else could have done more to save the boy.

Some have found it difficult to follow the urging of the Rev. William Dickerson, who stood before the boy's wooden coffin at his funeral and told mourners: "This is not a time to point fingers."

The minister urged everyone to remember Dontel's electric smile and boundless energy. He told them the boy had found his final home with the Lord.

"Dontel made it from earth to glory," Dickerson said. "Why do I know it? Because he's in the hands of a just God."