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player ready...Marie Campbell pursed her lips and turned her eyes away from the camera in Bond Court on Monday as a judge read the charge against her: child endangerment. She stood alone, without supporters, as she has for most of her life.
Campbell told investigators that she lost sight of her son after taking him to the Taste of Chicago festival June 30, said Assistant State’s Atty. Erin Antonietti. After waiting seven hours for his mother, the boy went with police to a hospital, where doctors found “marks from telephone cords” on his body, Antonietti said.
Campbell went to her sister’s house in Olympia Fields without trying to find her son or report him lost, the prosecutor said. Her sister’s family had been on vacation, and when they returned several days later, Campbell told them “the child was staying with friends in Chicago.”
Campbell turned herself in Saturday and was charged Sunday with felony child endangerment. On Monday she was ordered held on $200,000 bail and faces up to 3 years in prison if convicted.
Child-welfare workers said Monday evening that they planned to place the boy, now a ward of state, with a relative.
“Before DCFS makes any placement, a background check is conducted on all relatives who may be interested in caring for a child,” said Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. “At this point this child’s biological father is not eligible as a placement.”
Michael Green, the boy’s father, held a news conference in his attorney’s office Monday to say that he had been trying to gain custody of his son since 2000.
State documents reviewed by the Tribune show that Green came forward in 2003 when DCFS first had contact with the boy. When asked by DCFS to undergo random drug tests, anger-management classes and domestic-violence counseling, Green declined.
“Natural father showed up at court but left the facility when offered services,” according to state records. When asked to take a drug test, the father “refused and abruptly stopped making contact.”
Green, 36, who lives and works in downtown Chicago, said he had tried to find his son but didn’t know where to look. As for services: “I don’t think he needs parenting classes,” said his attorney, Jeffery Leving. “But if the court says he needs to, believe me, he will.”
Green’s attorney said DCFS had not contacted the parents before making a decision about where the boy would live.
“The dad loves his boy. The paternal grandmother loves her grandson,” Leving said. “Why couldn’t the child be placed with either of them, or at least [given] some contact or visitation?”
Some who have known Marie Campbell as an adult say she rarely has had anyone offering long-term emotional or financial support. And despite intermittent help from DCFS in the form of therapy and parenting classes, Campbell was not able to provide a stable home.
Campbell’s own mother gave her to the state two years after she was born, according to state records viewed Monday by the Tribune. Campbell became a foster child, then was adopted by a family she alleged verbally abused her and touched her inappropriately.
For most of her childhood, Campbell stayed in touch with her birth mother, she told caseworkers. When she was 12, her mother died in a car accident.
Campbell graduated from Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields in 1995 and was asked to leave her adoptive home at 19. She attended Suomi College in Hancock, Mich., for one year, state records show.
She was 23 when she met Michael Green, then a drug dealer, according to state records. Their son was born May 7, 2000.
Three years later, Campbell called the DCFS hot line, saying she had been locking herself in her bedroom because she was overwhelmed with her son but didn’t want to hurt him.
“His mother was stressed out and had no support system,” one report said. Her son became a state ward.
Campbell got him back in 2004 and brought him to Thelma Sutton, now 80, a retiree who ran a day-care facility from her home on the 7300 block of South Union Avenue, in Chicago.
Throughout 2005, Campbell often worked late, losing one job, then another, Sutton said. She collected unemployment, unable or unwilling to turn to anyone–including the boy’s father.
“He never was in the picture. At first, she said she didn’t want him to know where she lived,” Sutton said. “She said he was abusive to her.”
In September 2005, police found the boy alone in a filthy apartment littered with food and crawling with cockroaches. DCFS offered services to help the mother organize her life.
A year later, Campbell brought her son to Latasha McCaskel, who operates a day-care center in the 7400 block of South Langley Avenue in Chicago.
“She seemed like she was in a desperate state,” McCaskel said. “She just seemed unstable. … like she was trying to make it the best way she could. It was obvious the father was not active in their life.”
Indeed, as an emergency contact for her son, Campbell did not list the boy’s father or any relatives. Instead, she listed a friend.
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The boy told McCaskel that he and his mother were being evicted, and soon after, Campbell came to McCaskel with a flier that listed her furniture for sale.
As months passed into 2006, those who knew Campbell described her as increasingly troubled.
When McCaskel last saw Campbell in June, “she was truly, truly in a desperate state for money,” McCaskel said.
Just days before Campbell allegedly left her son at the Taste, she called McCaskel, looking for a day care to watch him.
Before Campbell’s name became public, Phyllis Asinyanbi, 47, who had first met Campbell at a shelter in 2002, said she had a haunting suspicion about the identity of the woman who left her son at the Taste of Chicago.
The two had remained friends, so when Campbell said she was looking for a job, Asinyanbi offered to help her with her resume. The last time Campbell came by Asinyanbi’s office, Asinyanbi noticed her friend was discouraged.
“She was saying she owed all this rent, and she didn’t know what she was going to do,” Asinyanbi said.
The revelation Sunday that Campbell was the woman accused of abandoning her son at the Taste of Chicago prompted Asinyanbi to ask herself if she could have done more to help.
“She was always a person who smiled a lot,” she said. “You know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul? To me she was really sad in her eyes. I just felt she was feeling very bad about her situation, and who wouldn’t be?”
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