In 43 Days, a Future Shattered
D.C. Agency Absent as Foster Mother Severely Beat Infant

By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 23, 2007

Rafael Pearson will never know how close he came to a normal life.

He was going to be adopted by his extended family. He was going to grow up in a nice home in the suburbs. He was going to be loved.

All he needed was a safety net in his first fragile weeks, after he was taken from his troubled mother.

Instead, a few days after he was born, he ended up in the hands of Tanya Jenkins.

When Rafael was taken from her 43 days later, he was nearly dead, the victim of a desperate foster parent and a dysfunctional child welfare agency. Beaten and shaken by Jenkins, the baby suffered catastrophic brain damage. He was on life support for days, not expected to survive.

Today, he is 19 months old. He has doughy cheeks, carefree curls and a sweet spot for anyone who'll rub his back.

He also is profoundly disabled. He cannot see. He cannot walk or talk. He cannot hold his head up. He has the mind of a child of two or three months. He is likely to develop cerebral palsy. He lives in a Dunn Loring nursing home for disabled children.

And little change is expected.

Convicted of cruelty to children, Jenkins, 38, will go before a judge in D.C. Superior Court today, facing the possibility of years in prison for what she did to Rafael in fall 2005.

Rafael's story, assembled from interviews and court records, including a review of trial testimony, is larger than Jenkins. There is his mother's history of drugs and the three children she has brought into the world. And there is the child welfare agency, long beset by problems, that did right by the first two children but failed terribly with the third, neglecting to visit even once in the three weeks before the abuse came to light.

And there is the family that has rallied around all three children, not the least Rafael, shrouding him with affection, fighting for his future and calling for meaningful changes in the District's child welfare bureaucracy.

"I want Raffy to make a difference," said his grandmother, Sylvia Pearson.

She looked down at the boy, nestled on her lap in the family room of her Fairfax County home.

"Is that your purpose, Raffy? To look out for the other babies?"

A Mother's Troubled Life

Back in 2005, all Sylvia Pearson wanted was a healthy grandchild.

Earlier that year, she learned that her daughter, Renee, was pregnant with her third child. Pearson had adopted the first of the children; Renee's brother had adopted the second. And now it appeared that the third child, too, would be raised by the rest of his family, once the courts cleared the way.

Rafael was born Sept. 9, 2005, in a motel in Northern Virginia. Later that day, his mother took him to Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. The baby weighed 5 pounds, 14 ounces. He had traces of cocaine in his blood but was not addicted and was healthy and thriving, according to the testimony of a pediatrician who examined his birth records and helped oversee his care.

Three days later, the hospital contacted the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency with concerns about the mother and her baby. A social worker said she would need to see the home where the child was going to be living. But upon arrival at the rowhouse in Northwest Washington, no one was home. The social worker made a call to Sylvia Pearson.

Pearson had watched her daughter's troubled adolescence give way to an even more troubled young adulthood, defined, she said, by a drug problem.

"You need to take the baby," Pearson told the social worker.

And with that, Rafael was in the hands of the District, pending further court proceedings.

Renee Pearson could not be located to comment for this report. Sylvia Pearson said her daughter has again dropped out of contact; she is not living at either of the most recent addresses listed in court records.

The foster placement should have been the first step toward saving Rafael. Instead, he was placed with Jenkins, who lived with her boyfriend and 2-year-old son in an apartment in Southeast Washington. Jenkins became a foster parent earlier that year after undergoing a home study, a medical screening and a background check, said a Child and Family Services spokeswoman, Mindy Good.

Jenkins was 37 and had been unemployed for months, although her boyfriend worked, Good said. Rafael was her second foster child. The first, a baby girl, had been placed with her earlier in the year. But Child and Family Services took that child back five weeks later. Jenkins told the agency that her health problems were making it difficult for her to care for the infant, Good said. She told a friend that she was tired of taking care of the baby, the friend would later testify in Jenkins's trial.

Five months later, the agency turned to Jenkins again. Finding a foster family ready and willing to take in a child often isn't easy. It can take one call after another before a social worker finds a foster parent who says yes.

Jenkins said yes. But, according to a supervisory social worker, she said she didn't have the money to care for the child.

It is not unusual for foster families to rely on help from the government. Without it, the system wouldn't work. The day after Rafael arrived, Jenkins was given a Giant gift card and the promise of additional assistance, Good said.

But she was struggling already. During the trial, a neighbor testified that Jenkins told her that the money from the city would help save her from eviction or having her utilities turned off.

Rafael's arrival brought stresses of its own.

"She couldn't get no sleep. She was tired all the time. It was wearing her down," neighbor John R. Threadgill testified.

One day, as she was returning home with Rafael, her frustration boiled over, Threadgill said.

Jenkins was trying to give the baby a pacifier to calm his crying, but he spit it out and kept wailing. Suddenly, Jenkins picked up the bassinet, with Rafael still in it, and slammed it to the ground. Then she picked it up again, Threadgill testified.

"I thought she was going to hurl it," he testified. "I said, 'Don't do it.' "

Meanwhile, the child welfare agency wasn't keeping close track of what was going on in the home.

After Rafael was placed with Jenkins, his social worker returned once during the six weeks the baby was in the home. Under court-ordered rules, a social worker must visit weekly during the first eight weeks a child is with a new foster family.

The social worker made her only visit to Rafael on Oct. 3, according to Good. No one from the child welfare agency would see Rafael again until it was too late.

On Oct. 25, Rafael, then six weeks old, was rushed to a hospital -- the victim, prosecutors said, of repeated beatings.

During the trial, the defense argued that no one saw Jenkins abuse Rafael, that she called 911 and that her boyfriend tried to resuscitate him.

But in court papers, prosecutors said Jenkins told police that she shook Rafael and struck him in the face on six different days and that she dropped him on his head more than once, albeit, she said, by accident.

Little Progress Since Suit

It was the sort of failure that was supposed to have been fixed by years of litigation.

The social worker "should have made weekly visits and did not," Good said. "Tragedies like this, no matter how rare, cause us to search our policies, procedures, practices, actions and souls," Good said.

Advocates had sued the District in 1989, saying the city's child welfare system was a wreck. The Washington Post later reviewed cases from 1993 through 2000 and documented the D.C. government's role in the neglect and deaths of 229 children placed in protective care.

In 1995, the child welfare system was placed in court receivership. It stayed there until 2001. But its efforts, catalogued in voluminous reports by a federal court monitor, have been slow in many areas.

"They haven't even met the goals they've set for themselves," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, who pressed the suit.

Sylvia Pearson would learn how far the system still has to go.

After Rafael was taken from his mother, his grandmother told social workers that she was going to be involved and asked when the case would be in court. She was never told, she said, and that first hearing was held without her. Weeks passed without any movement or any opportunity to see the infant.

The baby's social worker reassured her, Pearson said, telling her that Rafael was fine and living with a good family that liked him so much there was talk of adoption. "I was thinking he's in a loving environment and he's safe," she said.

Then she got a call from another social worker.

"She said a terrible thing had happened, and Rafael is at Children's Hospital," Pearson said.

Rafael had suffered severe head trauma and was not expected to live, Pearson said. At the hospital, she saw a "cute" little boy hooked up to the machines that were helping him hold on to life.

"I was thinking he was going to die, and I had never met him," she said. She talked to the baby. Whatever he needed to do, live or die, he should do, she said. But if she had a choice, she told him, she wanted "a little miracle."

Soon, he didn't need life support. A few weeks later, he was moved to the HSC Pediatrics Center, widely known as the Hospital for Sick Children. There, the scope of his injuries -- and the limits of miracles -- came into focus.

Rafael had bled heavily around his brain and behind his eyes. An MRI showed that his cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain, was full of holes, where cells had died. The brainstem, which controls basic body functions, was not as badly injured.

So Rafael can breathe and swallow, and his heart beats. He can make sounds and respond to voices around him. But his condition is not expected to change.

A couple of times a week, he is taken from the nursing home to his grandmother's home, set on a large lot in a secluded corner of Fairfax Station. He eats ice cream and applesauce and yogurt, surrounded by his sisters, ages 2 and 6, absorbing the sounds of his family. It is the sort of love and comfort that Pearson hopes he will always have.

But she knows that at 54, she might not be around to provide it or even push for it, and that is why she ultimately hired two lawyers and plans to take the District to court in a civil lawsuit seeking damages.

She wants to know that Rafael will have the best possible care.

"He didn't ask for this," she said. "He didn't deserve this."