Legal loophole prevents oversight in baby death
The state took Lakesha Haynie's first three children away from her and she gave up custody of a fourth. But nobody from the Department of Social Services knew she had become pregnant again -- and now she's charged with killing her newest son, Rajahnthon, and burying him in Druid Hill Park.
A new law took effect in October to prevent just this scenario, but because Haynie (left) became pregnant before then, it didn't apply. So social workers who now have to check up on women who had babies taken away to determine if they're pregant with more couldn't check on this woman.
It's a gaping loophole that is now closed but doesn't help this dead infant, as the Baltimore Sun's Brent Jones reports in today in a follow up to the killing and the murder charges filed against Haynie.
Brent wrote that Rajahnthon's death - he was at least the 11th child to die of abuse-related causes in Baltimore since 2004 - is the latest in a series of incidents some activists have called preventable:
In June 2007, 2-year-old Bryanna Harris died after being given a lethal dose of methadone and being beaten by her mother, Vernice Harris, whose older children were in state custody. Harris was arrested in the toddler's death.
Three years earlier, Emonney and Emunnea Broadway, twin girls who were less than a month old, died of malnutrition while living with their parents in an abandoned rowhouse. Six months earlier, the girls' parents lost custody of a 2-year-old girl removed from their care for abuse.
Legislators introduced bills in 2006 and 2007 that would have matched up caseworkers with troubled families before, or shortly after, a new child was born. But those bills died in committee because of several factors: political disputes between state and city officials, budget woes and concerns that they might prove too invasive for families that had rebuilt their lives.
Support built in the General Assembly, and the law to extend parental supervision passed in 2009. Although the law's backers say it should keep unfit parents from raising children, social-services workers stopped short of saying a removal in all cases would be imminent.
