Confidentiality is not in the best interest for this former foster child

'I want to know what happened to me'
Fulwood, Sam. Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 9, 2007, pg. B1.

In 1954, when Leon Edinger was 3, his father died and his widowed mother could no longer afford to care for her children. As was the custom in those days, faceless and unknown bureaucrats declared Leon and his brothers - Bobby, 6, and Randy, 2 - wards of the county and placed them in the notorious Winifred Fryer County Children's Receiving Home.

Now 56, Leon is a troubled and unhappy man. He's been married - and divorced - three times.

He has trouble sleeping, convinced something unspeakably horrible happened to him all those many years ago while he lived at the home. His memory of the group home is a hazy, dream-like image of small rooms and stern authorities.

He thought he was there only a day or two. His brother Bobby reminded him that they all lived there for a year.

"Bobby said I was put in isolation because I was so unruly, that I couldn't be around other children without hitting them," Leon said, hanging his head in shame. "He said I tried to ride away on my tricycle and that I had climbed out of a window to escape."

The home was, indeed, an awful place. An investigation conducted in 1966 by two Plain Dealer reporters showed crowding, physical abuse and lack of psychiatric care for the children. The paper condemned the home as "a place where ordinary children are transformed into youthful savages."

The home, on West 10th Street, closed a year later.

"If I was there for a year, I want to know what happened to me," he said. "I've seen several psychologists, and they all tell me the same thing. They say I need to find closure."

But so far, that's not been possible. The county won't let him confront his past. Although the group foster home closed in 1967, officials at the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services hide Leon's half-century-old records like state secrets.

Jim McCafferty, director of the county Childrens and Family Services, won't sign off on releasing Leon's entire file to him because lawyers say he shouldn't.

"I understand what you're saying," McCafferty said. "But that's the law. It's a tough situation, and we do feel for this man."

Of course, if he felt enough, he could do the human thing and show Leon everything. Foster care records are kept private, but state law allows county officials to grant written permission to anyone with a legitimate right to view the records.

Instead, county officials successfully fought off Leon's legal challenge to force them to let him see the entire files on his family's foster care case. An archivist with the county welfare system told Leon his file is a dusty, 4-inch-thick stack of papers.

Why not let him see the file? What's the harm? Does the county have something to hide? Whose privacy is being protected? This could be cleared up so simply. Just allow Leon to see his files. It might be the answer to his doubts, worries and questions.

Yet, for a briefcase full of legal excuses, the documents are off limits to the only person who cares or who has a right to see them.

"What's a human being's life worth?" Leon pleaded when we talked about his thus-far unsuccessful effort to learn about that lost year of his childhood. "Shouldn't I be allowed the privilege of seeing whatever it is they have on me?"

Damn right, he should.