Bob CollinsOne of these days, the Star Tribune’s Brandon Stahl is going to win a Pulitzer for his tireless coverage of the failures of Minnesota to protect its most vulnerable children.
Unfortunately, he seems to have an inexhaustible supply of failures to prove it, the latest being a particularly outrageous story.
A 2-year-old boy was found in a Bloomington “drug den” at a motel last week. His mother, Cynthia Kiewatt, 43, has been sought by child protection workers since May. There she was. There he was.
But Bloomington police granted the mother’s request to turn the boy over to family members, who passed him along to at least two other people.
The boy is missing, Stahl reports.
The child’s former foster parents, Erin and Pernell Meier, said this is only the latest in a series of failures to protect the child. Twice they warned child protection officials about the danger the boy faced, records show, but the Meiers, who want to adopt him, said they were ignored.
“Whenever we raised concerns, there was a closing of ranks, a dismissal of anything we had to say,” Pernell Meier said.
Bloomington Deputy Police Chief Mark Hartley said that if officers on the scene that night had known the boy was a missing child, they would never have turned him over to the family friend.
On Wednesday, the boy’s presumed father, James Salter, called the Star Tribune to say that he had the boy living with his family in Chicago, and planned to bring him to child protection.
“He’s not missing,” Salter said. “He’s fine.”
Two child protection workers had found she had mistreated her children four times. She had lost parental rights of two other children. A foster family had weaned the boy off drugs because he was born addicted.
But Hennepin County wanted to reunite the boy with his mother, who was in drug treatment. His foster parents objected.
In December 2013, the Meiers objected to the reunification, saying in a sworn affidavit that they saw Kiewatt with Salter, and feared both were abusing drugs. Yet in February 2014, a judge agreed with child protection’s recommendation that Kiewatt’s six months of sobriety was enough to close the abuse case. The Meiers said they had hoped she would stay in contact with them, but she never returned calls.
They continued to worry about the boy. In December, they googled Kiewatt’s name and phone number and found prostitution ads created that month. Photos showed Kiewatt posing in lingerie on a bed.
“Incall or out 24/7” one of the ads read. “Hi guys back in town call me.”
The Meiers sent the ads and everything else they knew about Kiewatt’s history to Hennepin child protection workers, hoping they would come to the boy’s aid.
A child protection worker said she couldn’t investigate, because the evidence provided doesn’t constitute abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect under Minnesota law.
The county was told the mother was back on heroin, and had brought the boy with her to a methadone appointment.
Three months later, the county filed a petition in court alleging that Kiewatt was a threat to her child, saying “her whereabouts are unknown.” In June, a child protection worker filed a missing person’s report with Minneapolis police. But no arrest warrant or public alert was issued, and Kiewatt dropped out of sight until Sept. 16.
… when the Bloomington cops found both of them in the drug den.
Bloomington Deputy Police Chief Mark Hartley said that if officers on the scene that night had known the boy was a missing child, they would never have turned him over to the family friend.
The mother told a judge this week when she’s released from custody, “I’m going to go look for my boy.”
Update: The child has been found, the father arrested. The boy wasn’t in Chicago, the Star Tribune reports.
