The death of a
child
August 30, 2006
What happened to
3-year-old Marcus Fiesel was an outrage. His death, the manner of
his death, violates one of the fundamental conventions any
respectable society holds about how children ought to be treated.
He was taken from his
natural mother this spring by child welfare officials who had opened
an investigation after the boy was found wandering the streets of
Middletown. Police reported that feces were smeared on the walls and
carpet of the autistic boy's bedroom, and that when he was taken
away his mother told them, "He's your problem now.''
In May, Butler County
officials contracted with a nonprofit social service agency to place
Marcus in a foster home in Clermont County's Union Township. Now,
those foster parents stand accused of killing him.
The details of what
happened to this child are what separate it from so many other,
equally terrible crimes against children. Police said Marcus' foster
parents wrapped him in a blanket with his arms behind him and taped
it tight, then left him in a closet for two solid days while they
went off to a family reunion in Kentucky. When they returned and
found him dead, police say, they took him to a farm in Brown County,
Ohio, and after several tries burned his body. Then they concocted a
cruel lie - that he had wandered off or been abducted during an
outing to an Anderson Township park - to explain his absence.
Other details that
have begun to emerge in published accounts raise disturbing
questions about Marcus' care, including the propriety of his
placement in the first place and the adequacy of followup checks on
his welfare. But the real tragedy is that this kind of child abuse,
this kind of neglect, this kind of institutional failure to protect
all our children, is so common.
Marcus' story is
different only in its gruesome details from hundreds of others that
are reported every year, in every state.
Nearly 20 years ago
this newspaper won state and national awards for exposing problems
in Ohio's foster care system. We told stories then about an
18-month-old child starved to death in her own home, about a
3-year-old girl who died of gangrene after being beaten repeatedly
for resisting potty training, about a 2-year-old boy beaten to death
for wetting his pants and urinating on a bathroom floor.
We can only hope that
Marcus Fiesel's death will trigger responses that improve conditions
for children, at least for a while. Surely child protection agencies
will tighten their procedures, take a harder look at prospective
foster parents; maybe they will be more aggressive about removing
children from environments believed to be dangerous.
But no child
protection system is going to work perfectly. Under the one we have
now, for example, there never seem to be enough foster homes. We
could, perhaps, return to building orphanages, maybe call them by
prettier names. But abuses occurred in such institutions in the
past, and in such an approach society would be giving up the chance
of a child's more normal development in a loving home.
The greatest
protection any child can have, of course, is caring, responsible
parents. But the plain, ugly fact is that some parents are not
responsible. So we're left, in the wake of Marcus' death, to condemn
those who caused it, to applaud the work of the law enforcement
officials who appear to have solved the mystery of his purported
disappearance, and to add our voice to the thanks to those in the
community who searched for a boy they believed was lost. May that
communal act of trying to help a lost child continue, in other
venues. It's too late to help Marcus. But maybe, if we all try a
little harder, we can help save some other endangered child one of
these days.
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