Trial to begin in DCF refusal to pay for abused child’s care
Staff at the Miami Children’s Hospital were worried about the toddler from Lake Worth.
When she was admitted in December 2000 with mysterious medical problems and an old bone fracture, her mother couldn’t explain.
Marissa Amora, 6, formerly known as Moesha Sylencieux, was severely beaten at age 2, a month after abuse reports were made to DCF.
They said the mother spanked her sick baby in her hospital bed. She called her 2-year-old daughter “hardheaded.”
Hospital workers alerted child abuse investigators at the Department of Children and Families. Increasingly insistent, they asked the state not to send the child home until a full investigation could be done.
That didn’t happen.
A month later, the girl named Moesha Sylencieux was beaten nearly to death.
Investigators believe she was held by her feet and shaken, probably by her mother’s boyfriend.
A Palm Beach County jury will now decide whether the state of Florida should pay the brain-damaged girl’s therapy and medical expenses for the rest of her life.
Experts estimate her care will cost between $8 million and $25 million.
Fifteen years after brain damage put Terri Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state, the Florida Department of Children and Families went to excruciating lengths to block the removal of a feeding tube that was sustaining her. Fifteen days after a toddler was beaten nearly to death despite DCF cataloging numerous alarming signs of abuse, the agency began seeking a Do-Not-Resuscitate order for her.
“I thought she would potentially live in a vegetative state,” DCF’s chief medical director told The Post two months after examining 2-year-old Moesha Sylencieux on Jan. 26, 2001.
Then-DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney had sent Dr. Eric Handler to Palm Beach County to assess Moesha, who was admitted to Bethesda Memorial Hospital in Boynton Beach on Jan. 11, 2001, and transferred to Delray Medical Center’s trauma unit the next day. She was unconscious with a swollen brain, bruised liver, broken bones and black-and-green welts. Some breaks and bruises were old — having been detected, though unexplained, during a monthlong stay at Miami Children’s Hospital that had ended just weeks prior, with doctors and nurses pleading that DCF not release Moesha to her uninterested mother.
……The girl DCF gave up on four years ago has been spending recent days in her wheelchair in Palm Beach County Courtroom 11B, as lawyers for DCF try to convince a jury that the agency should not have to pay for her continued medical care. Often referred to in DCF records as the “V/C,” for “victim child,” Moesha has been renamed Marissa Amora.
……At 56 pounds, she wears a diaper, she cannot walk, and her brain does not tell her to swallow foods. So, she can handle Froot Loops, M&Ms and other melt-in-your-mouth treats but not meals. “She’s never going to be able to have kids,” her mother says. “She’s never going to get married.”
……Gov. Bush has appointed two more secretaries to lead DCF since the agency initially mishandled Moesha’s case under Ms. Kearney, but an unfair practice of valuing some lives more than others continues to hurt some of the neediest and most fragile Floridians. In 2003, after failing to protect a severely mentally retarded woman from being raped while in state custody, DCF fought to save the woman’s fetus. Similarly, late last month, after failing to protect a 13-year-old in state custody from becoming pregnant, DCF fought to save the girl’s fetus. While the state was fighting fiercely to save the unborn, it continued quietly fighting — using private lawyers — to avoid financial responsibility for a living child, one irreversibly harmed while dependent on the state for protection.
Ms. Amora deserves to know why DCF abandoned Marissa. “Is it because she was black or because she was a political embarrassment or because they screwed up?” she asks, with as much sadness as anger. “Why?”
When the agency sought to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, a DCF spokeswoman told one newspaper: “We have a duty to protect the vulnerable and investigate allegations of abuse.” President Bush urged “all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others.” In January, Gov. Bush vowed his all to help keep Terri Schiavo breathing: “I will do whatever I can do within the powers that have been granted to me by law and by statute. I’ll do whatever I can.”
Why don’t they care as much for Marissa?
Time it took President Bush to issue a public statement on the shooting
in which a 16-year-old (American Indian) boy killed nine people and then himself on a Minnesota Indian reservation. Monday’s rampage by Jeff Weise was the worst U.S. school shooting since 15 people died in the 1999 Columbine massacre.
- Five days.
Time it took President Bush to issue a public statement on the death of Terri Schiavo -
Two hours and thirty minutes.
…I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected…
Of course, by “all Americans,” he meant “some Americans, namely pale Christian death cultists, and certainly no foreigners.”
I guess that selective compassion thing runs in the family.
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Good poor black child |
Potentially good – trial underway |
Isn’t it funny how we can afford to continue to spend hundreds of billions to keep killing brown skinned people, but we never seem to have the cash to keep a poor black child alive?
Get more from CNN. Oh, wait…
Note to the news media–with an emphasis on the cable networks: Enough is enough.
Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.
The latest missing woman to dominate the airtime of the cable networks was Jennifer Wilbanks, from Duluth, Ga. Like Dru Sjodin, Chandra Levy and Elizabeth Smart all before her, Wilbanks is young, white and attractive. Wilbanks, as it turned out, ran away of her own volition from her impending marriage. As a Maryland police official told me after Wilbanks turned up in New Mexico, “the media’s non-stop focus on the possible abduction of Wilbanks forced the local officials and police departments to spend thousands of dollars they would not otherwise have spent.”
Define racism. One could certainly make the argument that the cable networks that continually focus on these missing white women, to the virtual exclusion of minority women, are practicing a form of racism. The racism in this case, however, while predicated on color, does not concern itself with the color of one’s skin. Rather, it is based on the color of money, ratings points and competition. Would an African-American woman who went missing days before her wedding receive the same (or any) coverage as that of Wilbanks? Not likely.