The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck

January 8, 2016 7:23 AM

"He was a schemer who used the courts for profit and revenge. He was a paranoid, angry meth addict who had been arrested for battery and domestic violence seven times. He had been involuntarily committed, by his family’s count. And yet, in its report on Phoebe’s death, the Florida Department of Children and Families concluded, “There was nothing in the preceding several years that could have reasonably been interpreted as predictive of such an event.”
posted by roomthreeseventeen (13 comments total)

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posted by aetg at 7:52 AM on January 8, 2016

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The state of Florida has a terrible DCF system and so many children have been neglected and abused and even murdered and the state has failed to protect them.

It doesn't help that people move to Florida in a last-ditch effort to right lives that have gone horribly, horribly wrong. For some reason being in a place that's sunny all the time appeals to people who are at their wit's end.

The system is over-burdened and the workers don't have the necessary tools to do their jobs effectively. It's so common that a search yields so many little lives destroyed.

Nubia Barahona
Trysten Eli Frank Adams
Elizabeth Holder

This is clearly a huge problem, and Florida doesn't put resources in place to do a good job with it.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 7:57 AM on January 8, 2016 [13 favorites]

The system is over-burdened and the workers don't have the necessary tools to do their jobs effectively.

The obvious solution is another tax cut.
posted by Gelatin at 8:16 AM on January 8, 2016 [22 favorites]

For folks who are fuckups who still have some financial wherewithal Florida is attractive because its bankruptcy protection covers a home no matter how opulent. So you get folks like OJ Simpson facing impending bankruptcy who flee there to quickly buy something before they have to file, allowing them to shield millions. These are likely not the sort of people you're talking about here but it's a phenomenon that contributes to the whacko image.
posted by phearlez at 8:19 AM on January 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

Man, that is a heartbreaking story. I feel especially bad for the lawyer who seems like the one who tried the hardest to stop things, despite lots of people having better information that her, but who feels guilty because she didn't agree to take a young girl home that she had just met.
posted by Lame_username at 8:24 AM on January 8, 2016 [11 favorites]

I live about 5 minutes away from the Sunshine Skyway bridge, and while it's a beautiful landmark, it's also a siren call to those who would do themselves, or, in this case, others, harm.

While I will never forgive the Times for changing their name to "The Tampa Bay Times", they have some amazing reporters and brilliant writing.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 11:17 AM on January 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is a horrible, awful story but it should not be used as an excuse to take children away from parents merely for drug use *without* all the zillion other signs people like this guy show of being dangerous. Because states do not fund these agencies well enough, because they also take kids away from parents for smoking pot and for testing positive for medications that are legitimately prescribed in addiction treatment, because they so-often focus on substances rather than behavior, the system gets overwhelmed and you get cases like this.

Studies that compare case workers who err on side of keeping families together to those who err on side of foster care show that the children kept at home in the "not clear what to do" cases overwhelmingly do better on measures like delinquency, teen pregnancy, educational achievement, mental illness and yes, addiction. In other words, wrongly putting a kid in foster care tends to be more dangerous than wrongly leaving him or her with iffy parents.

These kinds of stories tend to produce panics that put more kids in foster care and so overall result in *more* child abuse, not less. There are many wonderful foster care parents but there are also many people who take foster kids for money or to have access to children to sexually abuse and abuse is more likely in foster care, not less, unfortunately. There are obviously cases— like this one— where kids need to be taken away but it is not simple and swinging from one extreme to the other is not the answer.
posted by Maias at 11:53 AM on January 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

There are many wonderful foster care parents but there are also many people who take foster kids for money or to have access to children to sexually abuse and abuse is more likely in foster care, not less, unfortunately.

This really reads as if you're saying that those folks comprise more than a percentage point or two of all the foster parents and I think that's a pretty awful - and wrong - thing to say. The rate of abuse in foster care is four times higher than it is in society as a whole, but that's a long long way from it being probable. Putting kids in foster care has a risk but let's not make it out as if they're climbing into a van where someone is offering them candy.
posted by phearlez at 2:19 PM on January 8, 2016

I wonder if nobody could actually take effective action against the guy because they were terrified of how he'd kill them.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:50 PM on January 8, 2016

What a terrible story, but very well written and affecting.

I hope it changes something. However, Florida.

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posted by guster4lovers at 12:30 AM on January 9, 2016

It feels like the place where the system really failed was in getting him either committed or imprisoned due to all the domestic violence. With his daughter, there was no evidence of abuse or even neglect, really, so the system didn't have anything to go on until the very end where he basically went crazy (and that was fast, so it was hard to act). On the other hands, it sounds like there was loads of evidence of violence against his mother and his ex-partner, and that could and should have been actionable. It was mentioned several times that the police were called but the victims declined to press charges; didn't we already address this problem, at least in most states? Charges should be automatic on evidence of domestic violence; there are significant and well-understood problems with having it be up to the victim.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:12 AM on January 9, 2016

I wonder if nobody could actually take effective action against the guy because they were terrified of how he'd kill them.

That's how I understood the lawyer's dilemma. Sure, I could agree to babysit this girl who doesn't know me from Adam... but her dad is clearly unstable and his main trigger is people trying to come between him and his kid, so who knows what will happen when he gets back? Her calls to 911 and DCF and horror at their (lack of) response devastated me.
posted by Flannery Culp at 2:53 PM on January 9, 2016

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posted by sallybrown at 8:50 PM on January 9, 2016