Social Workers

Stepping across grass-tufted sidewalks on her way to the bus, Meredith Kensington passes sparkling lights and Christmas cheer. But she can't feel the holiday warmth. She wants to spend the holidays with three siblings she cannot find. She lost contact with her sister and brother 15 years ago when they entered the byzantine bureaucracy of the Los Angeles County foster care system. She never had a chance to meet one of her half brothers before he followed them into the system, soon after his birth eight years ago. Each holiday season, Kensington renews her effort to find Marilyn and Aubrey Langston and Eddie Sanchez.

Luis Ernesto Rodriguez eyed the metal door as he waited for his little girls. Now 6 and 5 years old, they were his only children, inseparable, with thick black hair and mischievous smiles that reminded people of little mermaids. More than two years had passed since he had last seen them. What would they be like now? Would they recognize him? He had shed 20 pounds during the long journey north. The door opened and his girls bounded into the tiny room. They shouted and laughed the same way they did when he used to carry one in each arm on the way to day care.

Leaders of Los Angeles County's embattled child welfare system believe they have solved one of their most intractable problems - finding a place for some of the most troubled foster children to lay down their heads at night. For more than a decade, thousands of children - - unruly teenagers, premature infants and others - have spent uneasy nights in a high-rise building's waiting room, cramped together without sufficient beds or food while social workers struggle to find them a place in foster care.

Re "A migration in reverse," Oct. 21 The case of American teenager Luis Martinez and his younger sister, who were taken to Mexico by their grandmother, was not one of children adrift because their parents had been deported. This is the story of a U.S. citizen who, when her husband was deported, took her young grandchildren - U.S. citizens both - to a country where they lacked basic survival skills. This resulted in having to smuggle those children through a desert to return them to their country of origin, where they received assistance from the Mormon Church as well as disability benefits, the same things the grandmother probably would have received had she kept them all in Utah.

Re "Court blocks property seizures," Sept. 6 The recent decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the property rights of the homeless has its roots in the seizure of four shopping carts provided by the group Catholic Worker. Since 1997, Catholic Worker has distributed more than 20,000 free shopping carts to the homeless. These are the property of Catholic Worker and cannot legally be taken by the police. These carts are pervasive around skid row, and they are the bane of the police and the business community.

Re "Where was help for Alesia?," Column, Sept. 8 As long as we as a society are comfortable with the decision we made to have law enforcement agencies be our front-line social service workers, we should not be surprised to see officers handle mental or medical emergencies like criminal acts. If you are disturbed by the story that a poor single mother is dead because leaving her children at a police station is considered "endangerment," or that the mentally ill continue to die at the hands of the justice system, perhaps it's time we recognize again that these are not crimes.

The official police account is terse and clear: Alesia Thomas left her two children, 12 and 3, outside a police station in Southeast Los Angeles in the middle of the night. When LAPD officers went to her apartment to find out why, she told them she was addicted to drugs and couldn't take care of the kids. They tried to place her under arrest but she "actively resisted" and a struggle ensued. A short time later, she was dead. A patrol car camera captured some of the action: She'd been wrestled to the ground and stomped.

Three years ago, Claudia Jacqueline Benjamin was one of hundreds of Los Angeles County foster children who preferred the chaos of the streets to the security of a stranger's home. She'd gone into foster care at 15, after a fight at school revealed problems at the home where she lived with her grandmother. But when she stayed away from her foster home one night, she was moved to another in a neighborhood far away from her family in South Los Angeles. She went on the lam for three weeks and landed in juvenile hall.

The law sounds logical, at least at first: If a parent caused a child's death through abuse or neglect, then the other children in that parent's care can be made court dependents, and child welfare workers can remove them from their home. Imagine a house in which a child was beaten to death, or died of starvation. It stands to reason that other children living there are at risk. The home is dangerous, and if government ever is justified in taking children from their parents, that's when it should be done.

Parents who transport a youngster without a car seat and lose the child in a fatal traffic accident may have their surviving children removed by social welfare authorities, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Thursday. The state high court ruled in favor of Los Angeles County social workers who placed two young boys in foster care after their 18-month-old sister, held on the lap of an aunt, was killed when a driver ran a stop sign and plowed into the car their father was driving.