Even as a baby, Jessica screamed in a way that scared her mother. By the time she was 3, she was lashing out. At 5, the girl was hearing voices, Rieck said. A variety of diagnoses followed, with doctors settling on bipolar disorder. Yet there was a time when her mother did not feel so alone.
When the Navy family was living in Philadelphia, wraparound services were available for Jessica, provided by the state of Pennsylvania. Support was there every day: a team of professionals counseling, accompanying Jessica to school, coaching her family at home.
Dawn Rieck worries about money on the way to visit her daughter Jessica at a facility in Leesburg. Son Anthony, 4, is in the back seat.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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When the Navy transferred the family to Maryland in 2001, the real nightmare began, Rieck said. Last year alone, Jessica was hospitalized four times for a total of six weeks. In November, Rieck was charged with abandonment because she would not take Jessica home without support. Rieck said she didn't feel safe.
"She's got too much rage, too much anger," she recalled telling the staff at Children's National Medical Center.
After many desperate phone calls, Rieck got Jessica a two-week respite placement in a therapeutic foster home in St. Mary's County. Then on Dec. 1, her 11th birthday, Jessica came home.
"A ticking time bomb," her mother said, watching her play with dolls the day after Christmas.
Eight days later, the military police were in the house, physically restraining Jessica.
The call came when Rieck was at work at her office manager's job. She had left 18-year-old Jennifer in charge of Jessica and Anthony, who was sick in bed. Jessica got home from school and asked to go outside. But Jennifer, who had to mind Anthony, said no.
Jessica lost control. Jennifer called her mother, terrified. "Call the MPs," Rieck told Jennifer, already halfway out her office door.
By early the next morning, Jessica was locked in the children's unit at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Md., without her dolls or her family.
