Dance of the Reptiles (22 page)

The following year, the Legislature made it a crime for police officers, teachers, and others who work with kids not to report suspected instances of abuse. A special hotline was swamped with phone tips, and the backlog of cases exploded from 4,000 to more than 50,000 in only two years. Meanwhile, more children under state supervision were dying than ever—a total of 60 in 1999 and 2000. The stories are excruciatingly familiar, as are the DCF’s dismal apologies.

Despite the tragedies, Florida still spends too little to protect its youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Caseworkers, many of whom are fiercely dedicated, remain underpaid and overloaded. Inevitably, a few are also lazy bunglers.

The caseworker assigned to Rilya Wilson, Deborah Muskelly, quit a few months ago after an audit revealed that she had falsified records and wasn’t making the required monthly visits to some of the children assigned to her. Evidently, no one checked on Rilya Wilson for a long time. The best-case scenario is that she was taken from Graham’s house by someone who truly cared about her, and that today she is leading a happy, settled life somewhere safe. The worst-case scenario needs no delineation.

So chaotic and haphazard is the child-care infrastructure that it’s possible Rilya was picked up by DFC workers and placed in a foster home, and the information simply wasn’t put in her file. Whatever really happened, one fact is indisputable: Rilya went missing because the state stopped paying attention.

As of this writing, the child hasn’t yet been located. However, she’s no longer just another name and number in the
data bank. Rilya is newly famous, her photo televised all over the country. Missouri police thought she might be the girl of similar age and size, known only as “Precious Doe,” who was found savagely killed near Kansas City. Palm prints thought to be Rilya’s didn’t match those of the dead child in Missouri, but authorities are seeking a DNA test to make sure.

Meanwhile, Rilya’s mother has surfaced in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is tearfully denouncing Florida officials for misplacing the daughter that she herself gave up in favor of dope.

Finally, Rilya Wilson has been noticed, and she didn’t have to make a sound.

All she had to do was disappear.

Note: Rilya has never been found, but she is presumed dead. On February 12, 2013, Geralyn Graham was sentenced to 55 years in prison for kidnapping and child abuse in the case. Graham was Rilya’s foster parent, not her grandmother, as she first claimed
.

February 1, 2004

“Utter Lack of Humanity” Killed Paisley

The prolonged, pain-racked death of young Omar Paisley is like a tale from the old Soviet gulags. That it happened only last year at the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center is an atrocity and a heinous stain on Florida’s justice system.

Grand jurors proclaimed themselves “united in our outrage,” and last week they indicted two nurses for manslaughter and third-degree murder. Yet the panel’s 50-page report, alternately chilling and sickening, goes far beyond the gruesome account of Paisley’s final days. It describes a facility
in borderline chaos, crippled by an inept bureaucracy and indifferent workers.

“At every turn in our investigation,” the grand jury wrote, “we were confronted with incompetence, ambivalence and negligence on the part of the administration and the staff of the M-DRJDC as well as the nurses employed by Miami Children’s Hospital [which provided medical staff for the detention center].”

Paisley, 17, had been charged with aggravated battery after a fight. He’d taken a plea agreement and was staying at M-DRJDC until he could move to Bay Point Schools, a live-in program where he would receive counseling.

On the morning of June 7, 2003, Paisley told staff members and other inmates that he felt ill. As required, he filled out a “Youth Request for Sick Call” form. “My stomach hurts really bad,” he wrote. “I don’t know what to do. I cand [sic] sleep.”

Paisley didn’t know it, but he was dying from a ruptured appendix. He would spend the next and final two days of his life in slow torture—vomiting, soiling himself, and begging for help. The licensed practical nurses who were supposed to treat him were Gaile Loperfido and Dianne Demeritte. The grand jury found their conduct “so outrageous as to rise to the level of criminal negligence,” and it indicted them.

The nurses say they’re innocent. Grand jurors say they are but two of “numerous individuals” who played roles in Paisley’s death.

To appreciate the prevailing culture at M-DRJDC, consider this: Rules forbade workers from calling 911 without the approval of a supervisor. Worse, when grand jurors toured the facility, they found that the phones in the housing modules were programmed to block even detention officers from dialing
911. If somebody had tried to help Paisley, they would have needed to use a cell phone—violating yet another regulation.

The true situation at the Miami-Dade lockup contrasted sharply with that portrayed by Larry Lumpee, the assistant secretary of the Department of Juvenile Justice. He told a legislative hearing that any detention officer can call 911 from any facility, whenever it’s necessary. Grand jurors were unimpressed by Lumpee’s testimony, which they said “failed to accurately portray the reality” at M-DRJDC.

Either the state was blind to the disarray at the jail or committed to whitewashing the crisis. In any case, the juvenile agency’s response to Paisley’s needless death has been little more than a shrug.

Last week’s grand jury report set forth 20 recommendations for M-DRJDC, many of them based on procedures successfully implemented in Broward.

None of the ideas are radical or frivolous. Among them:

* More staff, better supervision.

* An intercom system so that guards and staff members can communicate instantly in emergencies.

* Direct employee access to 911. (There’s a concept!)

* A video surveillance system with cameras and recorders that actually function.

* Twenty-four-hour on-site medical care.

* Rules requiring nurses to see an inmate on the same day that he or she gets sick, to keep complete charts, and to have those records reviewed by an actual physician.

Grand jurors also urged “immediate sanctions” against any jail worker who fails to give CPR or administer emergency first aid. Who would do such a thing, you ask?

Every detention worker in Omar Paisley’s unit was trained
in CPR, but not one tried to revive him when he was found without a pulse, collapsed over a chair outside Room 13.

It was the chair to which Paisley had dragged himself to wait for the help that never came. And that’s how the kid died, waiting.

Declared the grand jurors: “We were appalled at the utter lack of humanity demonstrated by many of the detention workers charged with the safety and care of our youth.” Such a searing censure kindled no obvious shame at the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice. Instead came a flat, written response from Secretary William G. Bankhead, displaying his customary reluctance to take action.

Bankhead said that an investigation of “administrative issues” has commenced and that the M-DRJDC workers have been “retrained” in emergency medical protocol. He also said he would enact the grand jury recommendations where “appropriate,” coldly implying that some were not.

It was a decidedly indecisive response to a homicidal act of negligence. You’ve got to wonder if that “utter lack of humanity” lamented by the grand jurors is leaking down from the top of the bureaucracy.

May 30, 2004

New Rules Trap Immigrants with Old Secrets

Sleep soundly, America.

Our government has finally tracked down Fidencio Resendiz and is diligently taking action to boot him back to Mexico.

Not that Resendiz, who came here 20 years ago, was terribly hard to find. He’s been living in Homestead, working construction jobs, and raising a family. In fact, he’d be a
model candidate for President Bush’s recent proposal to grant legal status to thousands of illegal immigrants now employed in the United States—except for one dark secret.

No, Fidencio Resendiz isn’t an agent of Al Qaeda. As far as authorities can tell, he’s never plotted a single act of terror or advocated overthrowing our government or even littered in a national park.

But 10 years ago, at age 23, he got caught with a single marijuana joint in his pocket. It was the first and last time he was ever arrested. This happened in Missouri, coincidentally, the home state of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Under his vigilant eye, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is avidly deporting noncitizens with criminal convictions, no matter how minor.

Interestingly, Missouri considers Fidencio Resendiz never to have been convicted at all. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor possession charge and received a suspended sentence. After a year on probation, his record was expunged by the state. However, by the time Resendiz applied for permanent U.S. residency, Congress had passed tough new immigration rules that made him and thousands of others retroactively eligible for deportation.

It is the same controversial law that ensnared Kari Rein, an Oregon woman whose outlandish case I wrote about in April. A Norwegian citizen, Rein has lived in the United States legally for 15 years. But last December, she was detained and then jailed by immigration agents as she returned home from Europe with her husband and two children.

The reason: A computer check had turned up a 1993 arrest for growing six marijuana plants. She and her husband had pleaded guilty, paid a fine, and served out their probations. The judge in that case had said there was no reason to
put Rein in jail because she was a productive member of the community and had no prior arrests.

Eleven law-abiding years later, the Department of Homeland Security decided Rein was a threat and that she should be sent back to Norway. She and her family were stunned. After three weeks, she got out on bail and began a legal battle that seems to have ended with a victory for sanity and common sense.

Last Monday, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski pardoned Rein for the 1993 pot conviction, wiping her record clean. Kulongoski made the decision after meeting with Rein and her family. A spokesperson for the governor told
The Oregonian:
“He was very impressed by her and the fact that she feels absolute remorse for the whole thing. He believes that she’s a very good citizen of Oregon.” The very next day, U.S. immigration officials said they would “terminate” their efforts to deport Rein to Norway. Because her conviction has been nullified, she’s finally free to apply for U.S. citizenship, which she intends to do.

Here in Florida, Fidencio Resendiz is fighting deportation by trying to point out the government’s own maddeningly inconsistent policies. In federal court, first offenders found guilty of simple possession of small amounts of marijuana may have their charge dismissed after a year’s probation, leaving no record. By law, the case cannot be considered a criminal conviction “for any other purpose”—including deportation proceedings. But, like most first-timers caught with a joint, Resendiz was prosecuted in a state court. At the time, though, U.S. officials didn’t typically go after illegal immigrants for small-time dope offenses.

Unfortunately, Resendiz didn’t apply for permanent residency until after 1996, when the new immigration rules were
enacted. A heavy crackdown began after 9/11, and since then, even first offenders in state drug cases have become targets for deportation.

Resendiz says he deserves the same break offered to first offenders in federal court. Immigration officials say he doesn’t qualify because he wasn’t prosecuted by the feds. In other words, not everybody in the same fix gets the same second chance. It all depends on your luck. When the ruling comes, it will impact many deportation cases.

If, back in 1994, Resendiz had been busted by a DEA agent instead of a Missouri cop, the immigration service wouldn’t be hassling him today. He could’ve had a clean pass as a federal first offender, and gotten a green card with no problem. His case was argued last week in Miami before a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. When the ruling comes, it will impact many pending deportation cases.

Whether it will stop the bumbling excesses of the so-called war on terror is doubtful.

At a time when we’re warned that more Al Qaeda fanatics are loose within our borders and planning another bloodbath, it’s idiotic to be spending a single penny of the federal budget—or a single minute of an immigration prosecutor’s time—pursuing the harmless likes of Kari Rein or Fidencio Resendiz.

Such cases will seem worse than foolish if the latest Al Qaeda threat proves real. They will seem tragic, for what was wasted.

August 15, 2004

State Fought to Keep Innocent Man in Prison

At 3
A.M.
Thursday, Wilton Dedge and his father took a walk. It was warm outside, but the air smelled glorious, and Dedge
couldn’t stop staring up at the crystal Florida sky. “It was just unreal,” he said, “just to go out at night and see the stars.”

Dedge hadn’t taken a walk with his dad in 22 years. Since May 3, 1982, every night had been spent under a prison roof, locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. He went away at 20 and came out as a middle-aged man, robbed of his youth by a colossal injustice.

Last week, the state of Florida admitted what Dedge has been claiming all along: He is completely innocent of the violent rape for which he was convicted.

His story is one of tragically mistaken identity, made worse by cold prosecutorial obstinacy. It’s awful enough that he spent more than half his life behind bars for something he didn’t do. More outrageous is the fact that prosecutors have known for more than three years of a DNA test pointing to Dedge’s innocence. Yet they tenaciously battled to keep that evidence out of court—and to keep Dedge imprisoned.

Dedge wrote to me in June, after I’d done a column about him: “Had you told me 22 years ago that our justice system would do what it has done to me, I would have laughed in your face.… But I can no longer do this and it truly saddens and angers me that I can’t.”