Foster dad found the ‘perfect prey’

Editor’s note: In the wake of high-profile child abuse cases in Lane County during the past year, The Register-Guard begins an occasional series looking at challenges facing Oregon’s child welfare and foster care systems. Today: The abuser. Monday: The state’s process for reviewing the most severe abuse cases.

In the past year, two horrific child abuse cases appalled Lane County residents.

One involved the Dec. 9 death of 15-year-old Jeanette Maples of Eugene — allegedly at the hands of her own parents. The girl previously had been in foster care in another state, and probably should have been kept in foster care. The other involved the brutal abuse and torture of a 9-year-old boy last spring by his adoptive parents, whose Blachly home the boy entered as a foster child.

These cases were the first in Lane County to be investigated under the state’s Critical Incident Response Team — or CIRT — law, a six-year-old mandate under which the Department of Human Services must review Oregon’s most hideous child abuse cases, try to find their fundamental causes and propose solutions.

But another horrifying abuse case that concluded last year not far from Lane County also has roots in the foster care system overseen by DHS. However, despite the prosecution and conviction of a longtime state-approved foster father, the case garnered scant state scrutiny or media attention.

Kirk Garrison Sr., a 48-year-old Waldport man to whose home the state sent more than 100 foster children between 1996 and 2006, was sentenced this summer to 44½ years in state prison.

A Lincoln County jury convicted Garrison of repeatedly raping, sodomizing and sexually abusing two of his adopted foster children — a developmentally disabled daughter and a son — and sexually abusing two of his other foster children.

Garrison’s trial in Newport lasted 11 weeks, from March to June, one of the longest trials in Lincoln County history. At least a dozen DHS employees — caseworkers, supervisors and others — were called to testify. The disturbing facts brought tears and sobs from many who crowded the courtroom on the day of Garrison’s sentencing.

Yet so severe are the worst abuse cases in Oregon that the Garrison case doesn’t stand out in the minds of top officials at the DHS Children, Adults and Families Division, which oversees foster care. The state did not designate the Garrison case for CIRT review.

Four months after Garrison was sentenced, Erinn Kelley-Siel, who heads the Children, Adults and Families Division, and two of her top assistants, Lois Day and Jerry Waybrant, said in an interview with The Register-Guard that they were not familiar with the criminal case against Garrison. They noted that the abuse itself occurred before all were in their current jobs and before Kelley-Siel joined the DHS in 2008.

After checking to see how DHS handled the Garrison abuse investigation, DHS spokesman Gene Evans said the case was dealt with as a “sensitive case review” by DHS staff in Lincoln County.

On learning of the criminal case from The Register-Guard, Kelley-Siel said that if she had been in her current position when allegations against Garrison surfaced in fall 2007, she would have recommended DHS conduct a discretionary CIRT on the case.

CIRT review is only mandatory when children in state care — or those for whom a child welfare assessment has been done in the past year — die from suspected abuse or neglect. State officials also have the option of launching CIRTs in other cases.

Many involved in the Garrison case said it was as bad an example of foster care gone wrong as they had ever seen.

“This is kind of a poster child for bad decisions,” said Lincoln County Deputy District Attorney Michelle Branam, who prosecuted Garrison.

As he pronounced sentence on Garrison, Lincoln County Circuit Judge Thomas Branford said: “This case will go down as one of the most tragic I’ve ever heard. It makes you wonder how pervasive this problem is.”

A lack of foster homes

Statistics provided by DHS say incidents of abuse in foster care have decreased in recent years. There were 100 abuse incidents in 2007, 83 in 2008 and 55 last year, according to the agency. Garrison, a former school bus driver for the Lincoln County School District, committed his crimes from 2002 to 2006, according to court records.

However, it is difficult for DHS caseworkers to detect sexual abuse, said DHS official Waybrant, a deputy assistant director in the Children, Adults and Families Division. “There’s not a definitive outward indicator (as with physical abuse or neglect),” said Day, administrator of the DHS’ Office of Safety and Permanency for Children.

“Primarily, we have to rely on a disclosure of some sort by a child that then is investigated,” she said. “So it’s significantly different than physical abuse, where you would see an injury.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Alexandria, Va., asserts there is much more foster care abuse nationally than official statistics show. “There is enormous incentive to hear no evil and see no evil when it comes to abuse in foster care,” he said.

The DHS’ Kelley-Siel defends the agency’s ability to uncover foster home abuse.

“I don’t think it’s right to say that there’s all this foster abuse that’s happening out there that we don’t know about, because we’re tracking it all the time,” she said.

Aside from illustrating the difficulty of detecting sexual abuse in a foster home, the Garrison case illustrates a further severe difficulty DHS is facing: a shortage of people willing to take in foster children. The state placed so many children with Garrison and his wife, Lela Garrison, over so many years in part because it had so few other people willing to take them in.

“I felt so happy”

On July 19, the short 21-year-old woman with shoulder-length brown hair tentatively makes her way to the courtroom table where prosecutor Branam sits, along with Garrison, her adoptive father, and his court-appointed attorney. The woman begins reading from a statement she wrote on a piece of lined notebook paper.

She talks about not liking her first foster parents, about throwing fits so she could be moved to another foster family. She and a younger brother, who had been placed in the Garrison home as foster children in the late 1990s, were adopted by the couple in November 2001.

“I felt so happy … that I could have a mom and dad like I never had in my life,” she says, reading haltingly. “That I could have a safe life that I never had before. I wanted to be successful and have a good life and be successful like Kirk Sr. I wanted to trust that Kirk Sr. could be a good dad to my brothers and sisters and me. I can’t believe I trusted him. He was supposed to protect us. But Kirk Sr. did the opposite. Kirk Sr. raped and abused (my brother) and me.”

The woman, sexually abused and raped by Garrison between the ages of 12 and 16, according to court records, says she wanted to find the right man and get married, but the way she lost her virginity and was abused has crushed those innocent dreams.

“Because of what he did, I don’t know if I can ever trust other guys in my life,” she says.

Sounds of crying fill the small courtroom. Jurors have tears in their eyes.

“I will never, ever consider Kirk Sr. my dad,” she says.

Foster case files are confidential under Oregon law.

But transcripts and audio recordings of the Garrison trial reveal a disturbing image of the foster home — a four-bedroom manufactured double-wide trailer — packed at times with as many as 12 special needs children — most of them having suffered previous physical and sexual abuse before they came into the home, most of them having some sort of behavioral or mental health issue, many of them considered “unadoptable.”

The home on North Bayshore Drive in Waldport where the Garrisons lived was considered by DHS as an emergency respite care home where the agency could at any time take children needing immediate foster care, DHS workers testified at the trial. Most DHS employees who testified said they had little concern about placing children in the home.

The Garrisons “had an ability to take kids in and accept them, and the kids seemed to do well in the home,” Debora Veronneau, an adoption worker in the Lincoln County office whose first contact with the Garrisons was as a caseworker in 1999, said under questioning. “They could take difficult kids and do pretty well with them. And the kids felt loved when I saw them.”

Veronneau, like other workers, testified she had no inkling that any sexual abuse was occurring in the Garrison home. “We wouldn’t have placed any children in there if we had concerns about them being sexually abused,” Veronneau testified.

Other workers, however, testified that they did have concerns about the sheer number of children in the home.

“The Garrison foster home was one that would take kids that others wouldn’t,” testified Alicia Reynolds, who had been a DHS worker in Lincoln County. “At times, I had concerns about placing kids there due to the number of kids in the home, and the special needs of the kids in the home.”

A total of 22 children were placed in the home in 2004 alone, she said.

“Do you recall a time when there were 12 children in the home?” Branam asked.

“It’s possible,” Reynolds said. “It seems like a lot of children in a small space.”

DHS rules allow a maximum of seven children, including a couple’s own children, in a two-parent foster home. But DHS often waives the limit, according to a 2007 federal review of Oregon’s foster care system.

Allegations surface

One of the most common reasons DHS grants waivers is to keep siblings together, DHS’s Waybrant said. While the number of children in Oregon foster care has dropped in recent years, from more than 16,000 being in foster care for at least a day in 2005, to about 13,000 last year, the number of foster homes also is diminishing, DHS said. There were 5,373 homes certified for foster care in Oregon in 2005, compared with 4,432 last year, mainly because it’s hard to persuade families to take in foster children. Although the state raised reimbursement rates for foster parents last year, it still struggles to recruit new parents, DHS officials said.

“When you have a dearth of homes, the tendency, of course, is to try and find a place for those children (who need care),” Waybrant said.

The adopted daughter whom Garrison sexually abused and raped came into his home as an 7-year-old foster child with her 6-year-old biological brother, according to court records. She now lives in a group home in Monmouth for developmentally disabled adults.

The adopted son Garrison was convicted of raping between the ages of 9 and 15, who is now 20, came into the home as a foster child along with a younger brother, also adopted by the Garrisons. The younger brother, now 19, testified that he was physically abused — slaps and hits to the face — by Lela Garrison, now 60, during his time in the home.

Sexual abuse of minors is difficult to detect unless a child comes forth with disclosure, Waybrant said. “Oftentimes, the perpetrator selects a victim that’s not likely to be believed,” he said, for example a child who is very young or has a disability. It’s difficult for a young child to testify against an accuser in court, Waybrant added. The abuse is more likely to be disclosed when the child becomes a teenager or young adult, he said.

Kirk Garrison Sr. was arrested in fall 2008 after a yearlong investigation by the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office. A family member had called school officials to report the alleged sexual abuse, according to court testimony.

Lela Garrison testified through tears during the trial that her adopted son, years after the abuse had begun, blurted out one day in 2007 during an argument that turned into a wrestling match: “You let that son of a bitch rape me!”

“I don’t think it’s unusual that children don’t disclose that they’ve been sexually molested,” Veronneau testified. Plus, she said, a sexually abused child might not tell a caseworker, for fear the state would remove the child.

“For foster kids, caseworkers are seen as somebody who moves you,” Veronneau testified in court.

“So if a child discloses something that’s going on in the home, and you couldn’t make that home safe, you would actually remove that child from the home, correct?” prosecutor Branam said.

“Correct,” Veronneau replied.

Foster home shut down

Highly damaging testimony to Kirk Garrison Sr. came from Ed Maeurer, a retired mechanic from Washington state who said he had worked undercover cases for the federal government in previous years and lived in Lincoln County for eight months in 2008 and 2009.

Maeurer landed in the Lincoln County Jail for a few weeks in November and December 2008 after he was arrested on charges of possession of a stolen motor vehicle of a forged vehicle title. The state later dropped all the charges, citing lack of evidence.

Maeurer said he befriended Kirk Garrison Sr. in jail and they talked through the walls of their jail cells, and at meals and exercise.

Garrison said he preyed on very young children, Maeurer said.

“ ‘If you start a kid really young, it just becomes normal play,’ ” Maeurer said Garrison told him.

Maeurer said Garrison also told him his defense would be that he was unable to become sexually aroused, due to anti-anxiety medication he took. Lela Garrison testified that she’d had no sexual relationship with her husband since 1997 but found Viagra and Levitra, drugs for enhancing sexual performance, in a dresser drawer.

Maeurer said Garrison told him that he got the children to have sex with him by putting “the fear of God in ’em. Give ’em a look. Tell them they’d go to a worse place (to live).” He also mentioned touching children on the school bus, that he “played” with the younger foster children in his home and that he made his adopted daughter and son have sex with each other so he could watch.

Maeurer said encouraged Garrison to tell him more. Then, Maeurer wrote to former Lincoln County District Attorney Bernice Barnett in December 2008 telling her what he knew.

DHS had decertified the Garrisons as foster parents in 2006, according to Lela Garrison’s testimony. DHS removed foster children from the home because of allegations of physical abuse by the couple that included spanking and other inappropriate hitting, testified Linda Tudico, a former Lincoln County DHS child welfare worker who had recertified the Garrison home in 2004 and 2005. However, children the Garrisons already had adopted were left with the couple. Four of them still live with Lela Garrison in a different home in Waldport now, according to her testimony.

When Branam asked Tudico why DHS left those children in the home, Tudico responded: “They had developed a relationship with the Garrisons over time and … in a preadoption plan, birth parents rights had been terminated.”

“The perfect prey”

During the July 19 sentencing, Branam talks about how Garrison’s adopted daughter was the “perfect prey.” How Garrison knew she “had three prior abusers, knew she was deemed unadoptable.”

As for the adopted son Garrison was convicted of raping, Branam said: “He knew that this child was born at 24 weeks with fetal alcohol syndrome and palsy.”

Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his grayish-brown hair sticking straight up, Kirk Garrison Sr. lifts his 6-foot, 200-plus-pound frame to a standing position in front of Judge Branford, who glares down at him. The small courtroom is packed with more than 40 people, those who can’t find seats standing in the back. All but one of the 12 jurors, plus all four alternates, also have come to see the case to its end, but knowing they may never shake it from their memory.

Before announcing sentence, Judge Branford asks the defendant if he has anything to say. Garrison shakes his head no.

The judge mentions that all of Garrison’s victims were “subject to horrible abuse before they ever met you.” He says the children were “easy pickin’s.”

He says it was Garrison’s method and plan to take in foster children, kids so damaged they could never be adopted.

“You and Lela represented the last chance these kids had to have a family,” Branford says. “You are a pedophile. The jury has confirmed this. Instead of giving them love, you gave them rape and sodomy and sexual abuse. You could not have been more barbaric or degrading or disturbing.”

“There’s nothing I can do to make life better for (his adopted son and daughter). We can only hope that they can do something to salvage some good in their lives. It’s going to take the rest of their lives.”