Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006

The girl who never had a chance; the forgotten boy

VENICE - The empty, shotgun-style house at 218 Kerr St. is still without electricity or running water.

In its shabby interior two and a half years ago, Jaki Ingram delivered a full-term baby girl into a toilet.

"The baby just dropped out," she told a paramedic, who needed a flashlight to find his way to where the newborn had suffocated.

Police spotlights illuminated the house, which reeked of human waste, as neighbors watched from the street. The scene marked the end of Ingram's five years of involvement with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

But it was the beginning for Ingram's 5-year-old son, Emmit. For most of his life, his mother dragged him from house to house, staying with relatives or friends.

When police finally seized Emmit after his newborn sister's death, he was still in diapers and had not learned to talk. Authorities immediately placed him in foster care.

More than a year later, a 35-page report by the Office of the Inspector General for the DCFS outlined in precise detail how a supervisor and a caseworker failed to provide meaningful help to the mentally ill and homeless mother and her son.

Emmit was "virtually forgotten" by child protection workers who did not attempt to place the boy in protective custody, the report stated.

"The department failed Emmit Ingram during the first five years of his life," a state child death investigator's report stated.

Though such reports are usually kept confidential and unavailable to the public, this rare look into how DCFS workers mishandled a case became possible after former East St. Louis office supervisor Lorene Floyd challenged her 29-day suspension.

The detailed document, usually not available even to DCFS officials, became a public record after authorities entered it into evidence during Floyd's unsuccessful appeal of her suspension before the Illinois Civil Service Commission.

The report and interviews with Ingram's friends and relatives revealed a mentally handicapped woman desperate to escape an existence that sometimes caused her to publicly scream, cry and pull her hair out.

The only thing that soothed her, according to those close to her, was the rocking of a public bus.

With an IQ of 58, Ingram was ill-prepared to care for herself, much less her children, friends and relatives said.

So she rode the bus -- sometimes all day. It didn't matter where. In a bus, Ingram felt protected, her friends said. On the street, she devised her own mental armor -- angry, violent outbursts that sometimes landed her in jail.

In November 1998, the state removed Ingram's oldest son, Shaquille, and placed him in a foster home. Emmit, who was born in January 1999, was allowed to stay with his mother, even though hospital officials were reluctant to release him to her.

In August 1999, state psychologist Dr. Bernice Collins described Ingram as childlike and sincere, even if her stories seemed unbelievable. Did she really cut herself all over with a knife? Police would later ask, had she really delivered two other children into a toilet, one while she lived in Milwaukee?

Collins warned that Ingram should not be left alone with children. However, because Shaquille had been placed in foster care, the psychologist assumed that Emmit had, too, according to the inspector general's report.

Instead, the little boy and his mother wandered Venice's dangerous streets, staying with friends wherever they could. On days when her state aid check arrived, men would make her buy them beer, then steal the rest of her money, friends said.

Collins learned that even though Ingram loved her children, she beat them, drugged them with cough syrup to put them to sleep, and ignored them.

"This young mother does not have minimal skills necessary to provide adequate parenting," Collins wrote.

When child welfare workers took Shaquille, then 3, into state custody in 1998, a few months before Emmit's birth, Ingram had threatened a DCFS caseworker.

"She began jumping up and down and tearing her hair out. She got down on all fours and banged her head against the television set," the report stated.

The DCFS accused supervisor Floyd, of Swansea, of falsifying a record, ignoring her own supervisor, and failing to properly assess the Ingram case. It later dropped the falsifying charge but upheld the suspension.

The agency also suspended caseworker Cheri McCottrell-Wade, of Fairview Heights, for 29 days -- the maximum suspension allowed without involving a more complicated disciplinary process. It was her sixth suspension, according to testimony during Floyd's appeal hearing.

Floyd declined to comment, other than to say, "If one person was disciplined, we all should have been disciplined." McCottrell-Wade declined to comment.

During the five years of DCFS' involvement with Ingram, the case was riddled with mistakes and neglect, according to the 35-page internal report.

"The case had inappropriate actions and failures to act, but was mainly plagued by the inactions," the report concluded.

For example, it said caseworkers failed to place Emmit in a special program for delayed children under 3. When they finally got him in similar classes for older children, he attended only one day. The program dropped him after he missed 38 consecutive sessions.

McCottrell-Wade testified during Floyd's hearing that Ingram, despite her mental disabilities, showed her competency to care for Emmit because she knew when and where to catch a bus.

But Frances White, of Madison, Shaquille's foster mother, said anybody who knew Ingram knew she got on the bus when she felt particularly bad and just rode.

During her civil service hearing, Floyd told Judge Andrew Barris she believed Ingram provided adequate care for Emmit. Barris challenged Floyd's assertion that there was "nothing" she could have done to prevent Ingram from delivering her baby into a toilet.

When asked why she hadn't arranged for Ingram to give birth in a hospital, Floyd said she didn't know Ingram was pregnant because "she always looked pregnant."

Without ever having received prenatal care, Ingram delivered the baby girl at 8:20 p.m. on April 28, 2004.

Ingram told police she saw the full-term, 5-pound, 5-ounce infant "kicking in the water," but did nothing to help her.

A police report described conditions inside the house as "horrendous." The family brought in buckets of water from a neighbor's for drinking and to flush the toilet.

A few months earlier, according to her notes, caseworker McCottrell-Wade had visited the same house on Kerr Street and saw no problems.

Four days after giving birth, police arrested Ingram and charged her with first-degree murder. In September 2005, a judge found her incompetent to stand trial and sent her to the Alton Mental Health Center until 2024.

Before her arrest, Illinois State Police found Ingram wandering along a Venice street carrying a shopping bag that contained only beer. They asked whether she was going to make funeral arrangements. Ingram agreed and later gave the little girl born into a toilet an identity.

She chose the name of her favorite bus driver -- Vanessa.