Pubdate: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 Source: Sacramento Bee (CA) Copyright: 2001 The Sacramento Bee Contact: http://www.sacbee.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376 Author: Mareva Brown Note: This article is Part 4 of a four part series entitled 'Broken Lives' about Dependency Court in CA BROKEN LIVES: MOM'S ADDICTION SHUTS OUT KIDS Maya's body was young and strong. And so were the babies who grew in her womb, despite daily doses of cocaine that Maya breathed into her lungs as desperately as she breathed air. She loved drugs more than she loved her body, which she sold on street corners or in crack houses to buy her next hit. Certainly she loved drugs more than she loved her men -- most of them had deserted Maya long before seeing their children emerge fat and beautiful from her body. But drugs and babies do not mix. Not in Sacramento County, which has one of the state's strictest child-welfare policies about drug abuse. Maya's five babies -- now ages 2 to 14 -- were swept into California's already crowded foster system, where officials estimate 60 to 80 percent of child welfare cases are drug related. So, one November day in 1998, Maya sat in dependency court wearing orange jail coveralls as a referee and seven attorneys debated whether to keep trying to get her off the drugs so she could get her children back. They decided there was no point. It didn't seem to matter much to Maya. Two days earlier, she had given birth at UC Davis Medical Center to her fifth child, a cocaine-exposed little girl named Allison who had immediately been whisked away to a foster home. The baby's most likely daddy, interviewed in jail by a social worker, said he told Maya to stay away from cocaine, but she ignored him. Days later in the same courtroom, social workers and attorneys decided not to give Maya -- whose name, like others in this series-has been changed -- a chance to get her new baby back. Maya, by then freed from jail, didn't even come to court. Her attorney made a prediction. "She'll have another one," he said. He was dead wrong. In the summer of 1967, Maya became the seventh of eight children born in poverty to a single mother who had fled rural Arkansas for a better life in California. The odds were against Maya and her siblings from the start, but several brothers and sisters became successful adults -- one manages a restaurant; another works for a state agency. Maya didn't succeed. She quit high school in the 11th grade and began dabbling in drugs, although she did attend church with her younger sister, Veronica. Maya's brother Oscar remembers the day Veronica prayed for a handsome man to come into her life through the church. He did. But he fell in love with Maya. Veronica's prayer brought the family no blessing, Oscar says now. Oscar believes that while Maya was being wooed by James, the man who would become her only husband, she met the love of her life: rock cocaine. At age 19, Maya gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Courtney. Nine months later, she married James, who was then on probation for battery and later would be arrested on suspicion of spousal abuse. They split before the year's end. Courtney's godmother had met Maya at church, too, and was herself the product of California's foster care system. But unlike Maya, the baby's godmother worked long hours as a nursing aide and had fallen in love with the tiny girl. By the time Courtney was 6 weeks old, she was spending more time with her godmother than with Maya. By the time she was 5 years old, she was living there full time. As Courtney entered kindergarten, Maya began having more babies. First came a daughter in May 1992, and then, 15 months later, a son. Neither child has ever met his or her father. Neither knows much of Maya. Both soon were living with Maya's mother while Maya intensified her affair with the rock. By then, Maya had begun prostituting herself for drug money. Along the way, she'd found a new boyfriend, Eddie -- a small-time felon who thought Maya was gorgeous. "I met a star," Eddie told his sister, Susannah, when he called to announce that he and Maya would visit her Central Valley farming town for a few weeks to avoid some trouble in Sacramento. When they arrived, Susannah realized both were addicted to drugs. "They were in their own little world," said Susannah, who fed the couple during the nine months they stayed there and tried without success to get Maya to return to church. Before long, Maya was pregnant. The baby would be her fourth, but it was Eddie's first, and he was excited. As Maya's belly began to grow, Eddie supported Maya by acting as her pimp as she turned tricks in a motel. "He needed a little guidance, and she was more dominant. She knew the streets a lot better," Susannah said. "It made him happy. He felt like he was a playboy or a pimp." Every day Maya and Eddie got up around noon and began hustling. When she could, Maya stole from her clients, too. Susannah fed them because they never had enough money to eat. "They would make a lot of money, buy a lot of drugs and (smoke) until it ran out," said Susannah's husband, who had fought his own battle with drugs. "When you're an addict, there is nothing more important than the drugs." The love affair ended when Eddie was sent to prison for stealing a purse, his third strike, and Maya returned home to Sacramento to work the streets. Her baby boy was born at home five months later. "I don't even think she named him," said Susannah, who'd begged Maya early in the pregnancy to let her raise the baby. "Her mind just wasn't there. She was all drugged out." It was the birth of that baby that finally caught the attention of Child Protective Services. Because her other children had not been living with her, Maya's arrests and intermittent homelessness had never prompted calls to CPS. When Maya arrived at a Kaiser Hospital in September 1997 with her hours-old, drug-exposed newborn, a hospital social worker called CPS, as she is required by law to do. The agency had no file on Maya so she was offered the option of voluntary counseling in lieu of dependency court. Maya agreed, and her sister Veronica took temporary custody of the newborn, Matthew. To keep her children, Maya had only to participate in a drug-rehabilitation program. But she didn't do it. And Matthew's high-pitched, drug-withdrawal screams soon proved too much for his aunt. By Thanksgiving, all four of Maya's children were in foster care. By then, 10-year-old Courtney had seen enough. It was a "bad environment, I know that," Courtney volunteered to a social worker. "People in and out." Social workers eventually sent the two middle children back to their grandmother's home, returned Courtney to her godmother and placed Matthew with his Aunt Susannah, who has since adopted him. Such "kin" placements are especially common in African American families like theirs, studies have shown. Maya wasn't worried, Susannah said. She knew her children were loved. "Relative placements are clearly the best thing for the children," said Jessica Katz, who represented all of Maya's children as an attorney for the nonprofit Sacramento Child Advocates. "But they're not necessarily the best thing for getting the parents off drugs because they have no incentive." Maya was dodging her social worker, Angel Jenkins. The social worker mailed pleading letters to Maya's various addresses warning that if she didn't sign a plan acknowledging her problem, agreeing to quit smoking cocaine and take parenting classes, she risked losing her children forever. In February 1998, Jenkins made a surprise visit to Maya's tiny apartment and discovered it had burned down. The Red Cross had provided Maya temporary shelter but had no idea where she'd gone. Law enforcement computers and other state data systems proved no help. Maya had vanished. Jenkins gave up looking. The system was no longer trying to reunite Maya with her children. "I don't think we, as a group, had any relationship with this mom," Katz said. "But I also don't think anybody could have forced her to clean up. She was too far gone." By then Maya had another baby growing in her body. She delivered Allison that fall at UC Davis Medical Center after going into labor in jail, where she was doing time for stealing a bicycle. Social workers had found Maya at last. Allison's daddy was a registered sex offender who had been repeatedly imprisoned for violent crimes. He told a social worker that he'd watched Maya smoke cocaine at least once a day throughout the first two months of pregnancy and knew she'd also used methamphetamine and alcohol. After that, he didn't know what she did because he was in prison. "Maybe she doesn't want to try," he told the social worker. Although the hospital lost Allison's drug test, Maya had been full of cocaine when she was sent to jail two days before delivery. It was enough for social workers to ask juvenile court Referee Dean Petersen to forgo Maya's right to get Allison back. "You have to have a parent who is willing," said Petersen, the lead dependency officer in Sacramento County. "And if they're not willing, you have to make a quick decision and say, 'This child is adoptable. She can have a reasonable life.' " It is an unusual step, one taken only in egregious abuse cases or when parents have failed efforts to reunite them with older children. But Allison qualified. Her case was sent directly to the adoptions bureau, and soon social workers were delivering the infant to the open arms of Maya's brother Oscar. In Oscar's home, Allison learned to crawl, laugh and annoy her 8-year-old brother. Despite a regular supply of cocaine while in her mother's womb, Allison has blossomed into an articulate and happy 2-year-old who today calls Oscar "Daddy," and Oscar's wife "Mommy." Some day, Oscar figures he'll have to tell Allison the story of Maya. But he doesn't want to tell her how the story ends. One night in May 2000, Maya drew her last sweet, deep breaths of cocaine. Her body was discovered in a Sacramento alley an hour after daybreak, clad only in a pearl necklace and a single white tennis shoe. She was nine months pregnant. Her sixth baby died with her. "It must have been a terrible, frightening way to be," said Joe Cushing, the city parks officer who was flagged down by a passer-by who found Maya's body. "Your last minutes alone, naked, on the street." On that spring morning, as a breeze rustled the leaves of a nearby oak tree and the dogs paced nervously in neighboring yards, homicide Detective Troy Woodward remembers bending over Maya. He noted her swollen abdomen. "It was mysterious," he said. Maya had no marks on her body, and while investigators later would discover she had a substantial amount of cocaine in her system -- as did the baby -- it was not a fatal overdose. A friend told Woodward that he'd seen Maya the day before she died. He said he'd smoked crack with her twice and driven her to Broadway so she could turn a trick to repay him $5 she'd borrowed for drugs. At midnight, when he pounded on the door of her rented room, Maya was lighting another pipe, he said. "Come back in an hour," she told him. But she wasn't there. Woodward theorized that Maya may have been turning a trick or smoking a crack pipe when she started having trouble, and that her companion may have dumped her out of fear. Coroner's officials said that if drugs caused Maya's heartbeat to speed up to a fatal pace there would have been no sign in death, unlike a heart attack which leaves scarring visible at autopsy. Her official cause of death is undetermined. On Mother's Day, Woodward -- a new father himself -- stood in an observation room at the coroner's office. He watched a forensic pathologist deliver Maya's baby -- 5* pounds and 18* inches long with a tuft of wavy black hair and tiny fingernails. "I thought he was a beautiful baby," Woodward said somberly. "He never had a chance." Later that week, as Maya's oldest daughter turned 13, Maya was buried with her last baby. He was nestled in her arms below the view of anyone who peered in her open casket. Together, they were laid in an unmarked grave beneath the spreading limbs of a pine tree. The social workers and attorneys, counselors and judges had done all they could to save Maya's children. But sometimes the system can't do enough. Maya kept this baby. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth