Investigator: Plant City Abuse Case 'Worst I've Ever Seen'
By LANE DeGREGORYST. PETERSBURG TIMES
Published: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 12:01 a.m. Last Modified: Monday, August 4, 2008 at 12:10 a.m.
PLANT CITY The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.
MELISSA LYTTLE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.
Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.
The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.
The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.
Months went by. The face never reappeared.
Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house - and one stumbled back out.
Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.
Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child-abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.
They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.
"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."
The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.
"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces - dog, cat and human excrement - smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."
There were so many roaches that "It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"
While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter …
The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.
At his feet, something stirred.
SHOCKING DISCOVERY
First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked - except for a swollen diaper.
"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."
Holste picked her up and asked, "What's your name, honey?" The girl didn't seem to hear.
He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."
Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?
"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,'" the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can (stinks)!'"
He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss, he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.
So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.
"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."
ALMOST 7 AND TINYHer name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.
She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.
Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, had never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."
Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.
She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold - or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.
Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.
But whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.
Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor thought, that she had withdrawn into herself.
FERAL CHILDThe authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.
The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts - some fictional, some true - of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."
The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.
Danielle's case - which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media - raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?
And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities - where had they been?
But the most pressing questions were about her future.
When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.
Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.
WHAT OF HER FUTURE?
Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child-abuse charges.
Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes.
In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.
"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone."
By Thanksgiving 2006 - a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care - her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.
That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery - a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home. In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?
COUPLE OVERWHELMEDBernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster-care event.
But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.
Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."
That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.
Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.
Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."
They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.
But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.
She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.
They couldn't forget those aching eyes.
When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.
Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.
He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.
Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.
That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.
IGNORED ADVICEEveryone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.
So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.
They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts - a baptism into their family.
"It was a disaster," Bernie said.
They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.
She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.
All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen.
When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.
GRADUAL PROGRESSIn time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her antipsychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and to help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.
Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.
She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.
In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.
BIG CHANGESIt's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.
After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.
All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.
The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress.
She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.
Her father hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least to live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's OK, too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."
For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection.
MOTHER'S STORYShe's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned, Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere.
None of this makes any sense without her.
Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens.
She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.
"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.
The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.
"Part of me died that day," she says.
Michelle had two sons at a young age. Her husband, a Vietnam veteran, died from Agent Orange in 1997.
Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.
"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."
For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.
Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces.
Between then and the child's removal from Plant City, there were child-abuse investigations and documents. Somehow, incredibly, nothing was done. Michelle seems to have felt helpless to care for the unusual child, and to have quit trying.
'IS SHE OK?'She says she misses Danielle.
"Have you seen her?" Michelle asks. "Is she OK?"
Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She's tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.
In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.
Chelsea Gates, 10, left, tells a story to her siblings Destiny, 13, Andy, 16, both on first row; second row, Kody, 13, Tyler, 6, and Toby, 13, and her parents Denise and Terry at their home in Varnell. None/Misty Watson
, begins with Dave's early memories of being abused by his alcoholic mother beginning somewhere around the age of four. The second book, 
is about Dave 
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