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chronicled in the Child Study. She told us that Detective Mark Holste had made the call from the Plant City Police Department. He and his partner first saw the DCF employee standing by her car in the yard, crying. She had gone inside to find the child and told the officers that it was the worst case she had ever seen. They went into the house to question the mother and see the little girl. It was Detective Holste who carried Danielle out of the house and told the DCF worker to let her supervisor know she would be taking Danielle to the hospital.
Garet said that police photographs used as evidence in the hearing showed a clapboard shack, dingy and mud-spattered, with peeling paint and a rusted tin roof. Inside was a tiny living room with broken-down furniture and a carpet so covered with roaches, dead and alive, that it actually crunched under Detective Holste’s shoes. Everywhere he looked, ashtrays were overflowing with cigarette butts, with more crushed out on the floor. The kitchen and the bathroom were vile—more dead cockroaches, food-encrusted dishes, greasy pans, a cat litter box and feces, and black mold over every surface of the bathroom.
But it was the photos of Danielle’s room that Garet said horrified everyone the most. The room was in the rear of the house, dark, with one window boarded up, and the other broken in half, the jagged edge of glass halfway up the frame. On the floor was the bare mattress where Danielle spent her days and nights—soiled, stained, moldy, its sides ripped open, stuffing and springs popping out onto the floor. Piles of clothes and mounds of trash were on another mattress overlapping the one Danielle lived on. Except for a table with a small television, there was no other furniture in the tiny room, which was smaller than a walk-in closet.
When Detective Holste took Danielle from the home, she was wearing only a dripping diaper, and the clothing in the house was so moldy and dirty, it couldn’t be worn. He wrapped her up in a blanket, got her one of the stuffed animals he kept in the squad car trunk to comfort frightened children, and sent her to the hospital with the social worker.
In my mind, I was seeing Detective Holste as the action hero who swooped in and rescued Danielle from the evil stepmother, the deplorable house, the cockroach colony, the bug bites and scratches, the cat urine and dog feces, the cigarette smoke, the matted hair infested with lice, the lack of clothing, toys, and decent food. Danielle was a nearly seven-year-old speechless child, clothed only in a dirty diaper and hidden away in a filthy bedroom on a soiled mattress.
It took all of that misery, Detective Holste, and whoever placed that last call to the hotline before an appropriate response was made and Danielle was taken out of the hellhole she had endured for almost seven years.
This mother’s utter indifference to her daughter’s well-being and her skill at scamming the system merged with the complete dysfunction of Florida’s DCF and nearly resulted in another story about a child falling through the cracks and turning up dead.
I didn’t believe Danielle fell through the cracks. She was pushed—by her mother, by her brothers, and by the agency charged with protecting children. For the first seven years of her life, Danielle existed nowhere but in her own world. It had to have been better than the world her mother imprisoned her in.
Chapter 8
Into the System
We were on page eight of the Child Study , which was fourteen pages in all. I had lost my appetite altogether. I excused myself to go the restroom and get a little break.
I splashed some water on my face and looked in the mirror over the sink. It occurred to me that if we were able to adopt Danielle, she would be the only person in our house with brown eyes. Bernie, William, and I all have blue eyes. My boys Paul and Steven have blue eyes.
I had to laugh at myself. Of all the things we
Garet said that police photographs used as evidence in the hearing showed a clapboard shack, dingy and mud-spattered, with peeling paint and a rusted tin roof. Inside was a tiny living room with broken-down furniture and a carpet so covered with roaches, dead and alive, that it actually crunched under Detective Holste’s shoes. Everywhere he looked, ashtrays were overflowing with cigarette butts, with more crushed out on the floor. The kitchen and the bathroom were vile—more dead cockroaches, food-encrusted dishes, greasy pans, a cat litter box and feces, and black mold over every surface of the bathroom.
But it was the photos of Danielle’s room that Garet said horrified everyone the most. The room was in the rear of the house, dark, with one window boarded up, and the other broken in half, the jagged edge of glass halfway up the frame. On the floor was the bare mattress where Danielle spent her days and nights—soiled, stained, moldy, its sides ripped open, stuffing and springs popping out onto the floor. Piles of clothes and mounds of trash were on another mattress overlapping the one Danielle lived on. Except for a table with a small television, there was no other furniture in the tiny room, which was smaller than a walk-in closet.
When Detective Holste took Danielle from the home, she was wearing only a dripping diaper, and the clothing in the house was so moldy and dirty, it couldn’t be worn. He wrapped her up in a blanket, got her one of the stuffed animals he kept in the squad car trunk to comfort frightened children, and sent her to the hospital with the social worker.
In my mind, I was seeing Detective Holste as the action hero who swooped in and rescued Danielle from the evil stepmother, the deplorable house, the cockroach colony, the bug bites and scratches, the cat urine and dog feces, the cigarette smoke, the matted hair infested with lice, the lack of clothing, toys, and decent food. Danielle was a nearly seven-year-old speechless child, clothed only in a dirty diaper and hidden away in a filthy bedroom on a soiled mattress.
It took all of that misery, Detective Holste, and whoever placed that last call to the hotline before an appropriate response was made and Danielle was taken out of the hellhole she had endured for almost seven years.
This mother’s utter indifference to her daughter’s well-being and her skill at scamming the system merged with the complete dysfunction of Florida’s DCF and nearly resulted in another story about a child falling through the cracks and turning up dead.
I didn’t believe Danielle fell through the cracks. She was pushed—by her mother, by her brothers, and by the agency charged with protecting children. For the first seven years of her life, Danielle existed nowhere but in her own world. It had to have been better than the world her mother imprisoned her in.
Chapter 8
Into the System
We were on page eight of the Child Study , which was fourteen pages in all. I had lost my appetite altogether. I excused myself to go the restroom and get a little break.
I splashed some water on my face and looked in the mirror over the sink. It occurred to me that if we were able to adopt Danielle, she would be the only person in our house with brown eyes. Bernie, William, and I all have blue eyes. My boys Paul and Steven have blue eyes.
I had to laugh at myself. Of all the things we
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