Va. Parents Trying to Unadopt Troubled Boy

If she got sick, he'd make her soup and rub her feet. At school, if he heard an ambulance, he'd be beside himself until school workers let him call home to make sure Briggs was okay. She understood, she said. So many people had abandoned the child.

As she was signing the adoption papers, she remembers nothing about a background briefing, as required by state policy. Only a caseworker asking skeptically, "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes," she recalled answering. "I love him."

When the boy came to her, he was taking medications for mental illness, depression, delusions, seizures and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He was considered a "therapeutic" foster child, one that comes with extra emotional, medical or behavioral baggage and a heftier monthly subsidy.

Some case workers think she must have known, records show. One wrote that Briggs wasn't being "entirely honest." However, nothing in the case file indicates she was given an oral briefing or a written summary of the boy's background, or access to his records. In some reports, details such as his psychiatric hospitalizations and sexual abuse are left out.

There are also notations of alarm when Briggs began taking the child off his medications, that perhaps she did not understand the gravity of his condition.

Briggs said she thought the medications were for hyperactivity. When the child began complaining of headaches, she took him to a psychiatrist caseworkers recommended. She asked if the boy needed all the pills. The psychiatrist, records show, said no.

"When he told me he was hearing voices, I told him it was just his conscience talking," she said.

Records show that caseworkers are vehemently against Briggs terminating her parental rights. "At least, if his parents win the lottery and die, he will inherit," one wrote in an e-mail. Some think she has rejected the boy because she needs the money she gets from foster children.

"That's a lie," Briggs said angrily.

A religious woman and active in her Sword of Spirit Deliverance Ministry Pentecostal Church, Briggs said being a foster mother is a calling. She's on disability, she explained, so it's one of the few things she can do to supplement her husband's blue-collar wage.

"The system needs to be revised. That's why I'm doing this," she said. "I should have known about the child. Because people get hurt."