Notes of Despair
On a D.C. Court Bulletin Board, Pleas for Vanished Parents And Stories of Foster Kids' Damaged Worlds Come to Life

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 4, 2007

It is a bulletin board of silent screams.

In a windowless corner of the District's Superior Court, up where the escalators end, the Family Court bulletin board hangs -- pinpricked, pockmarked and covered with two dozen public postings that no one sees.

They look like haphazard rows of tacked-up legal files. Their messages, summed up, read like social commentary.

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a 6-month-old girl who was born HIV-positive with cocaine in her veins. Her mother has abandoned her. The people in whose care she was left had no idea, for days, how to give her the "several medications" required to treat her HIV.

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a newborn son whose schizophrenic mother ditched him at the hospital and moved into a Travelodge in Northeast. She told the social worker who found her: The baby's father was " 'Nino' from 'the Bronx' who was 'not dark' and who could be reached by contacting 'Chief Ramsey.' "

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a 1-week-old daughter. UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a 13-year-old son. UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a newborn whose mother has six other children; none of them lives with her. UNKNOWN FATHER, your 1-year-old has been found with an ankle burn and such hunger pains that when she was finally fed, she did not stop to chew. UNKNOWN FATHER, your child's mother has told social workers she "has problems remembering where she leaves her baby."

The capital letters shout, as if in fury and frustration, as if the legal announcements' bold-faced, double-spaced type could roar beyond the confines of the clerk's office, where the few people who see these documents are the court employees tacking them up and the lawyers who double-check that they've been posted.

Each document provides the slightest of glimpses into the lives of children in foster care, one of the most secretive and confidential -- by necessity, for the sake of those children -- systems in the city.

Last year, the foster system chased after 702 vanished parents. Although 87 percent were found, sometimes on the barest of personal details, there were still 94 stories to be publicly posted in a tradition that, in general, dates back hundreds of years. Court officials no longer tack notices, of any kind, to the courthouse door, and they especially don't do so with notices about children's lives and the devastatingly private details of them.

"Kids in the system suffer a stigma," says Jim Toscano, deputy general counsel for the District's Child and Family Services Agency, "and there's a balance between making that known and maintaining confidentiality."

The postings must stay up for two weeks, but they often linger much longer, as if on the bulletin board, as in life, these children's stories remain invisible and easily forgotten.

A Microcosm

"That bulletin board is more than just a bulletin board," says the District's Jonetta Rose Barras, author of "Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl: The Impact of Fatherlessness on Black Women."

"That bulletin board is a statement of what we're actually dealing with in this city: The incarceration of parents. Poverty. Drugs. Drug abuse. HIV-AIDS. Poor educational achievement. It's crime. It's teen pregnancy. It's a statement of all the social pathologies and dysfunctions. And how do you make sure that some kid, when they become an adult, doesn't become: to the unknown father of?"

Miracle. Praise. Prince. Diamond. The names of the children tacked to the board suggest at least a moment when someone -- either the mothers or a hospital nurse left holding a just-abandoned baby -- christened these newborns with promise: Their lives would be better. Their lives would be celebrated. Their lives would be different.

Seeking Parents

Yet here they are, children facing neglect hearings and guardianship proceedings and, in the happier circumstances, the prospect of adoption. These children are, for the most part, either entering or leaving foster care, and their mothers and fathers might be on the verge of having all parental rights terminated.

And the mothers and fathers have a constitutional right not only to take part in the care, custody and control of their child, but also to know when and where they can come to court and say: None of what those social workers, or hospital officials, or other family members of mine are saying is true.

But the parents can't always be found. The ones who show up on the board have disappeared entirely from their children's lives.

Each mother is named in full, outed by the public records created when she gave birth: A mother's identity, it seems, cannot vanish as easily as the mothers themselves.

Many of the fathers are named in full, too. Yet the fathers' stories are trickier. With each posting announcing only a father's first name, or his nickname, or, simply, UNKNOWN FATHER -- in those cases where the mom didn't know the name of her child's father or would not tell -- comes a sharp reminder that not everything in Washington glitters like the Capitol's marble steps or a Penn Quarter martini bar at happy hour.

"You'd be surprised how many times people don't know the people they're sleeping with's last name," says Michael O'Keefe, president of the Family Court Trial Lawyers Association.

You'd be surprised, too, how many times mothers don't know the father's name at all. "If we don't have a name," says Derrick Russell, supervisor of the city's Diligent Search Unit, "then it's impossible to find this unknown dad."

The mother might know only the father's nickname -- "Mike," Russell says, or "C.Lo." But that meager shard can mean everything to Russell: With that, plus a physical description and favorite hangout, Russell and his team can often track him down.

And when they do, he says, "the majority of the fathers we do locate were unaware that they had a child. . . . Some are just surprised. Some deny it. Some say, 'There's no way that's my child.' " Still, he says, "we've had some situations where the father was just unaware that he had a child, and he wanted to be a part of this child's life."

He can't say how many men who make a noble speech about fatherhood when they're served with court papers actually appear in court -- the diligent search unit isn't there when the gavel brings these cases to order -- but he has faith that among these fathers are men who fight to keep their child from becoming another of the 2,300 children residing in the District's foster care system.

Not Found

The men Russell's team of 11 searchers doesn't find or can't find -- and "they can find people on scraps of information," O'Keefe says -- are the ones who wind up on the board, up where the escalators end, in that windowless fourth-floor corner of Superior Court:

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a newborn girl whose mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, believes she is "a Secret Service agent who came to Washington, DC, from California to protect George Bush and Nancy Reagan." She also believes that the father of her very-much-alive baby "didn't matter as the baby was dead."

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a baby girl born seven weeks prematurely and already addicted to cocaine. Your baby's mother is homeless, and while at the hospital, she would leave, several times a day, "allegedly to use drugs." When your child was 2 days old, her mother left and didn't come back.

UNKNOWN FATHER, the postings cry to no one, you are hereby notified.