Teen ordered home to live with victims

His mother makes a desperate plea to keep him away from brothers he sexually abused.

By COLLEEN JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
Published July 25, 2007

TAMPA -- The 13-year-old got suspended from school for destroying bathroom doors, but his mother said she discovered him doing something much worse on his first day home.

She found the North Tampa teen sexually assaulting his half-brothers, ages 4 and 7. He admitted he had done it before.

Yet after he served 21 days in a juvenile detention facility in March on charges of sexual battery and lewd and lascivious molestation, authorities sent him home to live with the victimized siblings.

When she balked, the mother said, protective investigators threatened to charge her with child abandonment if she didn't let him return.

Now her husband sleeps with the two younger children on a pallet of blankets in the living room to guard them at night.

"You cannot return perpetrators back to the homes with victims," the frustrated mother said Tuesday. "Nobody is healing out of this process."

The St. Petersburg Times is not naming the teen or his mother in order to protect the identities of the sex abuse victims.

State officials scrambled Tuesday to find a better solution for the family after a juvenile court judge ordered the teen to be released from his latest detention, this time for violating the terms of his pretrial diversion program by running away from home.

His mother, 35 and pregnant with her fifth child, wants the teen placed in a residential treatment program for youthful sex offenders. He has been on a waiting list since June for one of the state's 490 beds.

Until officials told her Tuesday that they were bumping her son up on the list, she considered seeking new charges to keep him in detention.

Meanwhile, she worries about getting pinned with child endangerment charges if the younger kids get abused again.

"We don't want to put a parent in that position," said Nick Cox, regional director for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Things have been tough most of the teen's life. State social workers took him and his older brother from their parents for nine months after law enforcement accused their mother of aggravated child abuse in 1993.

The mother said Tuesday that her ex-husband threatened to kill her and the children if she didn't take the fall for injuries he inflicted. She pleaded no contest and served five years of probation, court records show.

Her husband sent the kids to his mother in Mexico. The boys' mother said she didn't know where they were for much of the next five years, during which she suspects the children were physically and sexually abused.

Her eldest son, now 14, does not seem to have lingering problems, she said. But the 13-year-old is troubled.

She said he has been diagnosed with a litany of mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, reattachment disorder and borderline personality disorder.

She first caught him physically abusing his half-brothers, who are her children with her second husband, a painter. Social service workers visited the home to offer guidance.

"They said, 'Just have the big P word,'" the mother recalled Tuesday. "Patience."

She found the 13-year-old sexually abusing his younger siblings on March 1. He has been involuntarily committed to mental health facilities eight times under the Baker Act and returned to juvenile detention for another 21 days after additional instances of the boys' sex abuse were revealed, the mother said.

Court officials put him on a Walker plan, a pretrial probationary period that if successfully completed can result in juvenile charges being dismissed.

The plan allowed the teen to return home instead of more incarceration. Authorities gave his mother an alarm to put on his bedroom door.

He runs away often, she said. About a month ago, he landed at the doorstep of a neighborhood church. "He was crying, saying, 'Please, I need help,'" said Tom Atchison, pastor of New Life Pentecostal Church of God.

The teen asked to be locked up, Atchison recalled Tuesday.

"He knew what he had done, and he didn't want to do it again," the pastor said.

Last week, the teen ran again. Four days later, law enforcement found him living in Copeland Park in Sulphur Springs.

Because he had violated his probation, he went to a crisis stabilization unit and then a detention center, his mother said. She went to court Tuesday to plead for her son's next stop to be some place other than home.

"I'm putting my other children at risk," she said, choking up. "I can't put them at risk and lose them."

But Hillsborough Senior Judge Perry Little said the court had no lawful reason to detain the teen.

Putting juvenile sex offenders under the same roof with their victims is not the preferred living arrangement, said a Florida Department of Juvenile Justice spokeswoman. The department monitors but does not assign placements for juvenile offenders on pretrial probation in Hillsborough County.

"It is not typical," spokeswoman Samadhi Jones said, speaking generally. But "if there's no other family for the youth to go to, then it could happen."

Also speaking in general terms, Cox said DCF worries equally about providing safeguards and services for both the juvenile defendant and the victims.

A busy day of negotiating ended Tuesday evening with this: The mother planned to pick up her son, assured by DCF that he will have placement in a six-month residential treatment facility within 14 days and respite care until he goes.

An eight-month stay at a group home will follow. Then, the teen goes home to a mother who prays he will be cured.

[Last modified July 25, 2007, 00:53:07]