Mom's effort brings charge

LAND O'LAKES -- Dona Faulkenberg says she is screaming for help with her troubled son.

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office says she is not taking proper care of him.

The 41-year-old mother is facing charges of felony child neglect after she refused on Monday to retrieve her son, who had been institutionalized for setting a fire. She posted $5,000 bail early Monday and was released from jail.

Faulkenberg adopted the boy, whose name is being withheld by the St. Petersburg Times, at 16 months. She says he needs intensive, long-term care for behavioral and emotional problems that have worsened during his 14 years.

Faulkenberg said she refused to take him home Monday because he is dangerous and needs more care.

"I needed him to be in a secure environment so he cannot hurt himself and others," said Faulkenberg, who also has a 6-year-old daughter.

A spokesman for the Sheriff's Office could not be reached for comment.

Faulkenberg said sheriff's officials contacted her late Tuesday afternoon to notify her of a shelter hearing before Circuit Judge Lynn Tepper at 8:30 a.m. today in Dade City. She hasn't been able to speak to the boy and has been told only that he is in protective custody.

"I don't know where my son is. I don't know who has my son," she said, adding that if he is placed in a foster home with other children, he could pose a danger to those kids.

The boy was placed in the Harbor Behavioral Health Care Institute in Dade City on Jan. 11 after setting a fire in his mother's van. It was the second fire he had set in three weeks, Faulkenberg said.

After a little more than a week in the facility, he was discharged.

Instead of picking him up, Faulkenberg got an order from Circuit Judge Linda Babb on Friday to keep the boy at the Harbor longer.

"I left him in a secure facility," she said.

On Monday, she said, the Sheriff's Office called to tell her to pick him up. She refused again and was arrested late that night.

"If fighting to save my child makes me a criminal, then there's really a big, big problem," she said.

Faulkenberg, a single mother, has been fighting for her children for years. After she was told she couldn't have children, she adopted two boys, ages 3 years and 16 months, in 1989. She later became pregnant with a daughter. She gradually learned that the boys' biological mother had abused drugs and alcohol during her pregnancies and was physically abusive to the boys, Faulkenberg said. "This is what happens to children when the biological mother drinks and self-medicates," she said.

A psychiatric evaluation of the 14-year-old details his violent behavior. Faulkenberg said he has been taking psychotropic medications since age 4. The school system considers him severely emotionally disturbed.

All these factors, Faulkenberg says, are an omen of what is to come: crime.

Faulkenberg knows because that's the path her older son followed. That boy, who's about to turn 17, is in a detention center after committing what his mother calls "a very, very, very serious crime."

She fears the same future for her younger son, whom she described as loving and smart.

"(He) is basically a good kid," Faulkenberg said. He loves to read, she said, and makes good grades in school when he's stable.

But he's had a fascination with fire since a young age. In December, he set fire to a plastic bucket inside the house.

Faulkenberg is worried about her daughter's safety and her own. She said her son is a danger to himself and that she will do whatever it takes to get help for him.

"I would much rather go to jail than be planning my son's funeral or my daughter's funeral," she said.

Even so, she's furious that instead of receiving help, she is being charged with a crime.

"I am not abusing my child," she said through tears. "I am not neglecting my child. I am screaming for help."

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