A Union County Sheriff’s deputy was headed to a five-acre farm in North Carolina, responding to a complaint about a hog running through a community not far from the state’s southern border.
But when he arrived at the property in Monroe, the deputy was pulled into a shocking and heart-wrenching situation: An 11-year-old boy with cuts and bruises and a broken wrist was chained to the front porch, with a dead chicken tied around his neck.
The boy was a foster child who was being punished, authorities believed, for killing a chicken at the farm.
Inside the house, prosecutors said, four adopted children were found living in squalor.
According to statements reported by the Charlotte Observer and CBS affiliate WBTV, the home was filled with dogs and fleas. Floors were coated in urine and animal feces. The children were filthy and not allowed to bathe.
The 11-year-old told WBTV about the moment the deputy found him in November 2013.
“He came up to the porch and, well, I don’t know what he said at first, but he saw the handcuffs and he said, ‘Why are you handcuffed to the porch?’ and I said, ‘Because they didn’t want me to run away,’ ” the boy, identified only as “Michael” by WBTV, told the station last year. “I knew they wouldn’t believe it, which they didn’t, so they asked where the parents were, and I said, ‘They’re inside.’ ”
The boy’s foster mother, Wanda Sue Larson – a social worker and supervisor for the county’s child protective services – was taken into custody.
So, too, was her boyfriend, Dorian Lee Harper.
Both Larson and Harper pleaded guilty in the child abuse case.
In 2015, Larson was sentenced to a maximum of 17 months behind bars – a sentence that ignited emotional protests in Union County; adults criticized officials for “lax” standards on child abuse, and a child waved a sign proclaiming “My Life Matters,” according to the Charlotte Observer.
“Seventeen months is not enough justice for the kids,” the boy’s biological mother, Maria Harris, told NBC affiliate WCNC. “They went through a lot, especially my son.”
Days after sentencing, Larson was granted time served and released, according to WBTV.
Harper, a nurse at Carolinas Medical Center, was sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison. Prosecutors said he was more culpable, according to the Charlotte Observer.
Now, three years after the rescue, the boy and his mother have brought a lawsuit against Larson as well as Union County and the Union County Department of Social Services for failing to remove him from an abusive environment. The suit, filed last month, seeks compensatory damages for personal injury.
The lawsuit claims that Larson was negligent in her duties as his foster mother, failing to report the “dangerous home environment” that resulted in the boy’s injuries.
The suit has been served to the county and its social services agency, but lawyers are still in the process of serving Larson, attorney Randall Phillips told The Washington Post.
“Considering what he has been through, I think anybody would admire what he has done but it takes a lot of work and he requires a lot of therapy and, of course, the love of his mother,” Phillips said of the child, who is now 14. “They’re getting through it the best they can.”
The county’s attorney, Patrick Flanagan, could not immediately be reached for comment. It’s unclear whether Larson has an attorney in this case.
The lawsuit, which references the boy as “J.G.,” reveals very few details about the case, and Phillips said he could not disclose them, noting that the child “needs his privacy to heal.”
But the story has spilled out over the past several years from police and prosecutors as well an account from the victim himself.
When the boy was nearly 4, Harris, his mother, lost custody on allegations of neglect, according to court documents. Harris told WBTV that her toddler was taken from a relative’s home in Gaston County when social services officials were looking into an abuse case that involved one of the boy’s cousins.
“From there they said he had some rotten teeth, so they put as just dental neglect,” she said. “That was it.”
The social services department has not provided details about why the boy was removed from his mother’s custody and kept from her so long.
But according to court documents, he was placed with Larson, a social worker, in 2006 and remained in her care until he was 11, the year he was found injured and bound with the dead chicken around his neck.
He is now back with his mother.
“His mother believes that he never should have been taken from her in the first place,” said Phillips, her attorney.
Beginning in about 2009, while in Larson’s care, the boy was “consistently rebellious of her separation from his mother” and was “increasingly subjected to punishments for his misbehavior,” according to the lawsuit. It states that social workers performed the required assessments at Larson’s home but that she used her “connections” as a child protective services supervisor to manipulate his custody.
The lawsuit alleges that the boy’s environment became “increasingly more dangerous for J.G. due to the escalating, dangerous behavior, conduct and activity of the other parent in the household.”
As WBTV reported, prosecutors said Larson’s boyfriend, Harper, would withhold food from the boy and force the children in the home to sleep on dirty blankets on the floor – chaining the boy’s ankles to a railroad tie.
Prosecutors said Harper burned the child with electrical wires and cut his pinkie finger with pliers.
But the boy said in an exclusive interview with WBTV that Larson also played a part in the abuse.
“She’d whip me; sometimes she’d use – like Dorian, one time he used a pair of wire cutters on my finger,” he told the news station last year. “And Wanda Sue also used the wire cutters to pinch my fingers. And she’d whip me with a belt. And just – one time she was cooking dinner, she had a stick, like a little stick, and she hit me with the stick.”
He added: “A lot of times, I would bleed. Sometimes they wouldn’t clean it up; sometimes they didn’t care – they’d just leave it bleeding. Sometimes, Dorian, he’d stitch it up. Like, I got hole in my head, different times. And he’d either stitch it up or use doctor medical staples to heal it.”
After his rescue, it took time for him to open up to his mother about what he had been through, the boy told WBTV.
“I don’t want her to feel sad and hurt,” he told the station. “I just love my mom and family. And I want them to be happy.”
“I just want to tell the children how sorry I am I couldn’t have protected them better,” she told the court, according to the Charlotte Observer. “There’s no excuse. I should have done more . . . and I apologize.”
Larson, who had served 16 1/2 months in jail during her legal proceedings, was granted time served and released just days after she was sentenced to 17 months in prison, according to the newspaper.
Larson, a social worker, and Harper, a nurse, both lost their jobs, the Observer reported.
After the incident, the Union County Department of Social Services fired five workers, demoted a manager and promised to revamp its internal operations, according to the newspaper.
Phillips, the attorney, said the lawsuit is intended to help with the boy’s medical and therapy bills and to help his mother provide continuous care.
“We’re hoping to be able to take care of this child,” he said.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Lindsey Bever
