ST. CHARLES — Something happened in 2013 that caused a 3-year-old boy to be removed from his home and placed in state care. The records that would explain why are not available to the public.
As is often the case, a relative stepped up to be the child’s foster parent until the situation was resolved.
“I was just doing it with the hope that the parents would reunify with their child,” said the great-aunt, 58, who isn’t being named here to protect the boy’s identity.
With help from the state safety net, she got the boy into services to address some of his challenges. She said he seemed traumatized. He bit things and didn’t speak.
Still, she wasn’t expecting a long-term commitment. She’s a single mom in St. Charles with two grown children of her own. After two years, the boy was placed in a different foster home and bounced around from there, apparently without consistent services or the right balance of medications.
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His case, one of many handled each year by family courts throughout the state, shows obstacles that can get in the way of meeting the needs of vulnerable children, including those who grow up in the system, have disabilities and become increasingly physical.
Ten years after he was removed from his home, the 13-year-old boy is still in limbo.
“Now, he is just an explosive teen, and he’s just uncontrollable,” the great-aunt said.
She came back into the fold to help in 2020, after reunification wasn’t an option and parental rights were formally terminated.
“He was just so overly medicated to the point he couldn’t stay awake at 3 or 4 o’clock (in the afternoon),” said the great-aunt. “The grandmother tried to take steps to get him back, but of course her addiction prevented that.”
The great-aunt adopted the boy and worked out a plan to get assistance from the grandmother, who is her sister. The great-aunt said she was also promised support services from the Missouri Department of Mental Health, or DMH. She said she was told that the boy’s disability check would be redirected from the Missouri Department of Social Services to her for financial assistance.
But she said no program support happened. She said she later found out that she wouldn’t be eligible for financial assistance based on her income. She’s a federal employee.
“It really has been a total nightmare for me,” she said. “Honesty would have been better.”
The pandemic, which spurred schools to turn to remote learning, amplified matters.
“What do you do with a kid who has autism and his school is shut down?” she said. “What do you do with them every day?”
But she said she’d requested services from DMH before the pandemic hit. By Jan. 17, 2023, two months after the lack of follow-up from a team meeting about the matter, she was desperate, according to an email to mental health workers and officials:
“I’ve sent all requested documents to support the need for support. I need your help to move my case for admin approval. What else do you need? The holidays are over it is a new year and I NEED HELP AND SUPPORTS. ASAP! This has been going on since 2020 and I am at my wits end with the waiting and nonresponsiveness of the DMH staff.”
Apart from services in school, which she said he often slept through, she was seeking additional speech, physical, occupational and music therapies for the boy, as well as a behavioral identification assessment to address layers of past trauma, recreation reimbursement and dental sedation, according to emails.
“You have to beg, beg them, to do their job,” she said in an interview. “It’s ridiculous.”
‘I feared for my safety’
In April, the boy was finally approved for a personal assistant to help out in the home for four hours a day, seven days a week. By then, the great-aunt said his weight had significantly ballooned, he was failing in school and new mental health struggles seemed to be emerging the older he gets. Apart from autism, she said, he suffers from post-traumatic stress and mood disorders. He’s supposed to take medications.
She said he’s had numerous breakdowns that resulted in trips to the hospital, including one around Halloween. Police and an ambulance were called to his grandmother’s house in Bellefontaine Neighbors. The boy was taken to SSM Health DePaul Hospital in Bridgeton to be stabilized. He went home the same day to the great-aunt’s in St. Charles. She said he was having loud conversations with himself at night. She said she locked her bedroom door for safety.
One night soon after, the great-aunt said the boy sucker-punched his personal assistant in the face before bedtime.
“She doesn’t want to work with him anymore,” the great-aunt said. “Nobody wants to be punched and hit by a 300-pound person.”
Two nights later, with a police escort, she said she took the boy to the emergency room at SSM Health St. Joseph Hospital in downtown St. Charles because he was in a “psychotic state.” She said he was evaluated by a pediatrician and an off-site psychiatrist, who handled the matter via computer. She said the psychiatrist said the boy was fit to go home. The great-aunt disagreed and left her adopted son there.
“I refused to sign him out of the hospital because of his mental state,” she said. “I feared for my safety.”
She said the hospital called an emergency hotline run by the Children’s Division, which also oversees the foster care system. Meanwhile, she said, the hospital released the boy to his grandmother the next day.
“You released him without my consent to someone who wasn’t authorized to pick him up and look what happened within an hour of his release from the hospital,” said the great-aunt. “Do you expect people to live in fear in their own home?”
A hospital spokeswoman didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The grandmother said in an interview that the boy became combative on the way to her house from the hospital. She pulled over at a Hazelwood McDonald’s. She said her grandson got out of the car in a rage and ran toward her in the driver’s seat, alerting a bystander familiar with autism who jumped into the fray: “Looking dead in his eyes, she said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. That’s your grandmother.’ She defused it by talking. She knew what to do.”
The boy calmed down. He was taken to DePaul Hospital. The grandmother picked him up after a week, but peace didn’t last long.
“He just flipped out because there was something he wanted right then and there and didn’t get it,” the grandmother said.
She said he wanted cologne.
The grandmother said the boy hit her in that incident. Authorities were called once again. He went back to DePaul.
“He’s a loving little boy — young man,” said his grandmother. “But he’s got a fuse in him that’s bad.”
She said he kept calling, begging to be picked up from the hospital. She held off several days. But she said authorities couldn’t find a placement for him in residential treatment. On Tuesday, she brought him home to Bellefontaine Neighbors. As of Friday, she said, the situation was still calm.
“He can do well as long as he’s stable and his needs are met,” she said.
The grandmother, who said she’s been drug-free since 2019, went ahead and let him open a Christmas present early: cologne.
‘It’s our job’
Also last week, in St. Charles County Family Court, the abandonment case spurred by the St. Joseph Hospital hotline call was continued until Jan. 10. The great-aunt said Children’s Division caseworkers have been calling, hoping she’ll take her adopted son home again. She wants her parental rights terminated.
“They are not trying to get down to the reason why I want to terminate my parental rights,” she said. “They are scrambling.”
She said if the state wants adoptions to work, it should have better services after its finalized, especially for children with mental health challenges.
“His needs, his background, his condition is why he spent so much time in the foster care system,” she said.
State leaders are aware.
“Improving services and supports for children is a key priority for the Department of Mental Health,” Debra Walker, spokeswoman for the agency, said by email. “System enhancements to strengthen the collaboration with Department of Social Services and other key partners supporting children are fundamental to making these improvements.”
Per House Bill 402, which was signed by the governor earlier this year, she said DMH “is actively engaged in ongoing discussions with stakeholders to identify recommendations for system improvements to better meet the mental health needs of children.”
Melanie Scheetz, executive director of the Brentwood-based , said there are many obstacles.
“The systems that we have in place to support children with mental health, developmental disabilities, are very disjointed,” she said. “Even those of us who have been in the field for a long time have difficulties navigating all those systems.”
She said her agency has tried to help the family in this case and is trying again.
“Nobody adopts to be in this place, so it’s our job to support this family to figure it out,” she said. “We have to work alongside the family.”