Recommend extra screening for fostering special needs children

Child's death exposes failure
Mary McCarty, Dayton Daily News Commentary
September 17, 2006, Local pg A4

When Melissa Lemmon watched the Amber Alert for Marcus Fiesel, it was as if she was looking at the face of her own son at that age."He was a beautiful little boy," she recalls. "He looked so much like Stefan when he was 3."

Like Stefan, now 13, Marcus had autism. His foster mother, Liz Carroll, told authorities he had wandered off in a public park.

Lemmon wanted to leave her Washington Twp. home that very moment and join in the search for the boy. She knew how difficult it would be for Marcus to communicate. She could imagine his terror.

The truth turned out to be far worse. Marcus' foster parents allegedly left him in their Clermont County home for the weekend while they attended a family reunion in Kentucky. According to prosecutors, Liz and David Carroll left Marcus in a closet, bound in a blanket.

And when they came home to find the boy dead, prosecutors said, David Carroll incinerated the body. "Throwaway children," Lemmon says. "That is how a lot of people look at autistic children."

She seethes with rage against the alleged actions of the Carrolls, who used the very psychology of the autistic child to torture and subdue Marcus. "Wrapping these children in a blanket is a way that is often used to calm them," she says.

But in her mind, the Carrolls aren't the only people who failed Marcus. Lemmon blames Butler County Children Services as well as Lifeway for Youth, the private agency that placed Marcus with the Carrolls in May. Most of all, she blames a foster care system that fails to provide adequate screening or special training for foster parents taking care of special-needs children.

How could Marcus have been left with a couple with no outside income?

How could he have been placed in a home without a thorough criminal background check? How could both agencies have failed to make note of a third adult in the household?

How could David Carroll's June arrest on domestic violence charges fail to have been forwarded to Butler County Children Services? The charges were pleaded down, but there was plenty in the report to raise questions about the couple's suitability as foster parents. There was a paper trail on this family before Marcus was ever placed with them. In court papers as recently as March — two months before Marcus entered the home — Liz Carroll attempted to gain custody of several of her husband's children by other mothers.

Noted Lemmon, "Nobody would lease a Cadillac to that family. No one would give them a million-dollar credit line. Yet they were given a life that required a lot of care, a lot of extra responsibility."

Lemmon is looking for change, not blame. She believes that foster parents for special-needs children should be given extra scrutiny and special training.

Lemmon's son Stefan has blossomed so much from the nonverbal boy he was. He's a seventh-grader who works hard in school and loves to engage in mock pirate battles with his mother.

"I know I am a better person because of Stefan," Lemmon says, "and I know my life is a lot more fun."

Marcus will never have the opportunity to grow into that kind of boy, to make that kind of difference in the lives of others.

That's not only a tragedy for him. It's a tragedy for all of us who understand that every child is a God-given gift, that no child is a "throwaway."