How I helped let a seven-week-old baby die

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-i-helped-let-a-seven-week-old-baby-die/2017/07/07/92bfdd86-6253-11e7-a4f7-af34fc1d9d39_story.html

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Seven-week-old Trinity was pronounced dead on Christmas Day. Two weeks ago, her parents, Jay Crowder, 33, and Trishelle Jabore, 26, pleaded guilty in D.C. Superior Court to voluntary manslaughter and child cruelty in Trinity’s starvation-related death. Feelings of responsibility haunt me.

I never got to know Trinity. Never met her mother and father, either. And I had nothing to do with bringing her into this world. But I did have a hand in keeping her in that Southwest D.C. apartment where she was found by the D.C. Fire and EMS Department and the Metropolitan Police Department.

I helped make it possible for that little girl to live in a cluttered, dirty, drug-paraphernalia-strewn apartment unfit for a child of God. A child who weighed 4 pounds, 14.5 ounces at birth — and 10 ounces less at death. A child found emaciated with severe diaper rash, who breathed her last with 13 fractured ribs in various stages of healing and a fractured clavicle — broken bones consistent with constriction of the chest or blunt force trauma, according to a police affidavit in support of Crowder’s arrest warrant.

This was a child literally wasting away and with what appeared to be blood in her diaper, according a doctor at Children’s National Medical Center, where she was declared dead at 12:26 p.m. The D.C. chief medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.

Trinity could not have been where she was without my help.

As a D.C. taxpayer, and through my government, I provided Trinity’s parents with subsidized housing where they paid $9.80 a month in rent. From us, they received $778 a month in SNAP, or food stamps, and $217 in monthly Temporary Assistance for Needy Families payments, or welfare.

Our funds covered Trinity and her parents, plus a 1-year-old child that Crowder and Jabore had together, and one child that each parent had with different partners — a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old.

However, one government program was missing.

Jabore had received a Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) subsidy that provided vouchers for baby formula and food for her 1-year-old. But she lost it when she failed to take the child to medical appointments — a condition for receiving WIC help. Jabore never tried to get WIC funds to buy formula for Trinity.

If we had bothered to look in on Trinity, we would have learned, as the authorities discovered after she was dead, that much of the resources given to the family were going up in smoke, literally. Jabore, according to court papers, said she and Crowder smoked marijuana cigarettes most days, which cost $5 to $10 per joint.

Public resources intended for families and dependent children also left the home by another illegal route. Around Thanksgiving, Jabore and Crowder sold a family member their food-stamp card for $150 in cash.

If we had taken the time to look, we would have found that Trinity’s parents were providing her with a fraction of the recommended amount of baby formula, to make it go further. And when they weren’t giving her formula, they were giving their newborn evaporated and powdered cow’s milk, a liquid harmful to an infant’s digestive tract.

Authorities looking deeper into this tragedy asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to test a bottle found on the scene. “Their testing revealed the bottle contained mostly water and had very little nutritional value,” according to court filings.

Had we just followed up on the food stamps and welfare money, Trinity might not be dead today.

Why not look? Our city government inspects grocery stores, bars, restaurants, apartment buildings and dog parks in search of unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

What about a child?

Until the day that 911 call was answered, no city official knew that an infant car seat passed for little Trinity’s bed.

There’s enough blame to go around, and some of it lands at my feet. My quickest journalistic moves, it turns out, were too slow.

For the past several months, I have been chasing down stories about life behind the glowing numbers on homelessness and dependency produced by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and her Department of Human Services: reports that show reductions in homelessness, families moving from shelters to rapid-rehousing facilities, growth in the number of families on welfare who transition to self-sufficiency.

Indeed, there are welfare families who now get income from work. As there are people who are taking advantage of education and training programs, and people participating in case-management services that help steer them toward independence.

But social workers and service providers also complain about the Jay Crowders and Trishelle Jabores who stay on the rolls and do nothing but live off resources they get from the District. And children, on whose behalf this rant is intended, keep the city’s money flowing into those wretched homes. Until one of them ends up dead.

“Feed my lambs.”

Oh, how I failed poor Trinity.

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