Just one week before a 14-year-old Sauk Village girl is alleged to have suffocated her newborn daughter last month, child welfare officials had investigated her household on an unrelated complaint.
According to records obtained by the Tribune, state investigators found credible evidence that the teen’s adoptive mother physically abused her younger sister–because the 13-year-old sister had just had a baby of her own.
The documents offer a window into an ordinary-looking suburban home on the 21400 block of Peterson Avenue, where a 66-year-old single woman was caring for eight adopted children, ages 6 through 14.
Though there were few outward signs of trouble, records show the family had been rocked by the arrival of the first infant.
The “13-year-old minor states the adopted mother beat her after she returned from the hospital after giving birth to her baby,” according to an Oct. 18 report from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. “Adoptive parent told 13-year-old minor that the baby was a bastard and is not allowed in her home. Case was indicated and opened for services.”
Welfare officials removed the 13-year-old from the home, but returned her within days in hopes of keeping the family intact–unaware, apparently, that her 14-year-old sister was hiding her own pregnancy.
The older girl gave birth early Oct. 25 at home, in a toilet, officials said. She has been charged with juvenile counts of first-degree murder and concealment in the death of her daughter. The girl, who is not being identified because she is a juvenile, has a court date Dec. 14.
But investigators have linked the death of the second baby to the tumult in the house after the birth of the first.
“She was afraid to tell her mother that she was pregnant,” DCFS workers said of the 14-year-old girl, according to state documents created after the baby’s death.
The case has raised questions among some child welfare advocates about how many children in a home is too many–especially in a case where a 66-year-old adoptive mother was raising abused and neglected foster children.
A dangerous tally
A DCFS tally of the home in October indicates the mother had adopted at least six children from foster care, said a source close to the case. State documents show at least one of the children had a developmental disability. The DCFS does not place a limit on the number of children it will allow a parent to adopt, a spokesman said, but the agency does typically restrict the number of foster children in a home to six.
Others who work in the field said that even without knowing the details, the numbers do raise concerns.
“On its face, the more kids you have in the home, the more challenges,” said Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris. “Long story short: Too many kids and not enough supports make for a bad mix. They really need to assess the caretaker’s abilities.”
Eight children is too many when taking into account the abuse foster children endure in birth homes and in foster care, said Richard Calica, executive director of the non-profit Juvenile Protective Association.
“The lesson is to oversee how many kids are in any particular home. It’s always tempting to give them one more. It’s very difficult,” Calica said.
The adoptive mother in the Sauk Village case–who has adopted 14 children over the years, though some have since moved out–has not been charged with any wrongdoing. She declined on several occasions to speak to a reporter.
“She is a good mother to those children,” a Sauk Village police detective told DCFS workers, according to a state document. “The house is clean, and those children have everything they need.”
Nonetheless, on Oct. 26, DCFS took custody of all the children and placed them at a youth emergency shelter for one night, according to state records. DCFS spokesman Kendall Marlowe said his agency continues to investigate “multiple allegations” in the home, but declined to elaborate.
“We are very concerned about the safety and well-being of the children remaining in the home,” Marlowe said. “The department took protective custody of these children and presented the case to the state’s attorney. However, the states attorney determined there was insufficient evidence at that time to take the case into court.”
An Oct. 27 note from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office confirms that prosecutors declined to file a petition for the children in Juvenile Court, which would have allowed DCFS to keep custody of the children.
Though specifics of those proceedings were scant, state documents and police reports about the events of Oct. 25 give a detailed, if sometimes conflicting look at two teenage sisters-turned-mothers, trying to muddle through the first hours of an infant’s life without giving away their secret. Police said the younger sister went into a bathroom in the family home to discover that her older sister had given birth in the toilet.
The younger girl retrieved the baby, cut the umbilical cord and discarded the placenta. She cleaned the baby’s nose and mouth, the report indicates.
She said she was going to tell their adoptive mother of the birth, but the older sister asked her not to tell anyone. The younger sister agreed, but would later regret keeping that secret, according to state documents.
After the new mother was unable to breast-feed her baby, the younger sister fed the newborn some formula. The baby cried and coughed.
That cry would later be remembered by one of the girls’ brothers and his friend, who was sleeping over that night, according to state documents.
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The younger girl watched over the baby through the predawn hours, and helped her older sister with the baby between 6 and 8 a.m. At every stage, she later told police, the baby was breathing.
The 14-year-old told state workers she kissed the baby and then left for school. When she got home from school that afternoon, she told the investigators, she at first did not know where the baby was. Later, she recounted, her younger sister told her the baby was dead.
According to the 14-year-old’s account, she then found the baby’s body and put it in a plastic liner in a trash container in the garage.
The younger sister declined to talk to state investigators about the baby’s death, and her account to police is incomplete.
But in her version, she could not find the baby after her older sister left for school in the morning. The police report then skips forward to that evening, when the older girl took the body out of the trash bag and showed it to her younger sister.
Secret is revealed
Later that evening, as the family ate dinner, the brother’s friend asked if anybody heard a baby crying last night.
That was when the younger sister announced that her older sister had given birth, state documents noted, and showed her adoptive mother the body.
“My mother called 911 immediately and told them to come get this baby out of my house,” one sibling later told workers. “The whole family was crying because we could not believe [she] would do something like that. Nobody knew [she] was pregnant.”
The 13-year-old girl later blamed herself, records noted.
“She feels like what happened was her fault because she is the only one who knew that [her sister] was pregnant,” according to a state document. “She felt as though she should obey her older sister.”
News of the death and the charges sent ripples through the community, including to relatives of the two teenagers who had not seen the girls in years.
The girls’ maternal grandmother, who said she had not seen them in a decade, told a reporter that she was hurt and confused by the story. A sister who had grown up in a different house said she had never stopped thinking about her sisters, and wanted to find them now to talk about what happened.
The girl at the center of the case, who turned 15 in late October, awaits trial at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
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