[duplicate] to delete Death of a child not just an abstraction [opinion]

Behind the Headlines / Ask the JS

CROCKER STEPHENSON, CRIMINAL COURTS REPORTER

Death of a child not just an abstraction

Nov. 30, 2008

Crocker Stephenson

Fatal Care: Fostering reform in child welfare

Certainly you need not have children of your own to be appalled by the beating death of 13-month-old Christopher Thomas and the months of torture suffered by his 2-year-old-sister.

But I have four.

Their pictures surround my desk in the Journal Sentinel newsroom.

Mixed among the pictures of my children are pictures of Christopher Thomas and of his sister.

A small child's vulnerability is not an abstraction to me. A small child's trust is not an abstraction. A small child's innocent and helpless love is not an abstraction.

Christopher, whose unbreathing chest I touched as he lay in his child-sized casket, is not an abstraction.

It was all too easy, as I read the medical examiner's report and the criminal complaint charging the siblings' aunt/foster mother with their calamity, to imagine the suffering these children endured.

To read such things is to break one's heart.

And though it is a reporter's task is to be objective, I believe objectivity is a discipline; I believe a disciplined reporter can write objectively about atrocities and feel - as I felt as I wrote my initial stories about Christopher and his sister - outrage.

I still feel outrage.

Readers feel it, too.

Few stories in my career have generated as many e-mails, phone calls and letters.

Most people want to express their sorrow and pain.

Many, many readers want to tell me their own nightmarish stories about Wisconsin's child welfare system.

And just about everyone wants to know who in the child welfare system will be held accountable for what happened to Christopher and his sister.

Denise Revels Robinson is the director of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, the agency responsible for placing and monitoring Christopher and his sister in the home where she suffered and he died.

I've never had the pleasure of talking to Robinson. Not for lack of trying.

A public servant whose salary is paid by you and me, she has yet to see fit to return our calls.

That ticks me off.

One day I called her office and asked to speak to her. Christopher's body was still at the morgue, yet to be claimed. When her secretary found out it was a reporter calling, she immediately told me Robinson was in a meeting.

How long will she be in the meeting, I asked.

I don't know, I was told.

Will she be in the meeting for another two hours, I asked.

I don't know, I was told.

Three hours? Four hours? Will she still be in the meeting five hours from now?

There was a pause and a sigh on the other end of the line.

I'll tell her you called.

Her secretary no longer even bothers to take my messages.

I do not understand how the director of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare can have a baby beaten to death and a toddler tortured and not feel an obligation to appear in public to express her pain, to extend her condolences, to explain what happened and what she is going to do about it.

But as a father and as a journalist, I will do my best to find this out.

This and other questions raised by Christopher Thomas' death.