A Family's Painful Journey

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)

Rieck called her daughter every day at the vast, turreted stone and brick hospital and took off work for family counseling.

One day in January, she drove past the Gothic gatehouse, up a winding lane through old trees shrouded in fog. Into the gray carpeted emergency entrance where Jessica arrived by ambulance, her mother carried Jessica's Christmas sweat suit, the one with "Angel" printed across the front, and her favorite pillow.

After the counseling session, sitting in her car in the rain, Rieck was shaken. "She needs more help than I can give her. I need somebody who can work with her all day and not worry about her stabbing them in their sleep," she said.

That January weekend, Rieck's marriage, already in trouble, broke up. Rieck gathered her other children and three heavy notebooks containing Jessica's 1,000-page medical history and found a house to rent. She knew Jessica's time at the hospital was running out.

On Jan. 18, a bitterly cold day two weeks after Jessica's admission, the hospital called. And Rieck was back where she was in November -- being charged with abandonment for refusing to take her daughter home.

Sheppard Pratt spokeswoman Bonnie Katz said she understands the dilemma families face. But, she added, "we have a legal, ethical and medical obligation to the children to enable them to leave."

Once again, after many desperate calls, Rieck found a solution. She worked with the Prince George's County school system to arrange a placement for Jessica in a residential treatment center in Leesburg. Her insurance would cover 120 days there.

If Jessica needs more time there, her mother plans to ask for a voluntary placement agreement, in effect sharing custody with the state of Maryland and letting Medicaid and a judge have a say in Jessica's treatment.

One recent weekend, Rieck loaded Jennifer and Jennifer's boyfriend and little Anthony into her battered red Ford Explorer. She stopped for gas and cigarettes and red licorice and nosed southward through a tangle of highways, down to where a parkway gave way to a suburban Virginia thoroughfare and then a country road.

She passed through a stone gate and turned up a long drive winding through old trees to a stately old house with a mansard roof and fenced-in modern wings.

Inside, her blue-eyed middle child was waiting.

"I'm going to come home. I'm going to do better, Mom," Jessica promised, her mother recalled. "Then I can be like a normal kid."