DFCS: Remaining Crocker child 'doing well' in foster care; Effingham child abuse case goes against family-first trend

March 03--The decision to place a child in foster care isn't taken lightly in Georgia, but the youngest child in the Crocker family is being well taken care of by foster parents, Tom Rawlings, director of the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services said Friday.

"He's been placed in the same foster home he was in initially," when he was removed from the home in late December, Rawlings said in an interview with the Savannah Morning News.

On Dec. 20, Effingham County sheriff's deputies uncovered the bodies of siblings Mary and Elwyn Crocker Jr. buried in the back yard of a house in the Guyton area, leading to murder charges for four relatives and one of their partners. Neighbors said they hadn't seen Mary since October and many thought Elwyn Jr. had moved away from the area.

Since then, neighbors and others following the case have expressed concern about the surviving child.

"He's been taken off medication and is doing well apparently," Rawlings said. "He's improving."

Foster care challenge

Chatham County child advocates say a shortage of foster parents and insufficient resources could be why DFCS kept the Crocker case closed when a friend of Mary Crocker reported an abuse allegation in 2017.

A year later, the federal Family First Prevention Services Act took effect, which encourages keeping families in crisis together, but Savannah advocates continue to press for foster care in cases of child abuse.

"If there are obviously signs of abuse and things of that nature, they are moving children out. When there's not enough places to put children, that's going to slow down the process a lot," said Kate Blair, executive director of Savannah/Chatham Court Appointed Special Advocates. "So maybe that might cloud how you see the case because you know you don't have the resources to serve that child."

Rawlings repeated Friday that the case workers complied with DFCS policy at the time.

"The worker did follow policy," he said. The report of abuse was determined to be historical and not current. It was not "rising to the level of something we investigate," Rawllings said.

But "In retrospect, we've reviewed that policy and changed it," he said. "If we get an allegation of abuse, even if it's not the freshest, we need to check on it and follow up."

Home visit

In most cases, DFCS could consult with school counselors, but the Crocker children were being homeschooled. In the future, the agency might send a case worker to the house, Rawlings said.

"We realized because these children had been withdrawn from school we were not able to get information on them," he said.

Georgia state representatives from Rincon, Savannah and other areas are sponsoring House Bill 530 that would require parents to provide attendance and disciplinary records that local school officials would use to refer cases to DFCS.

Some say the legislation should go further to require more oversight of children who are homeschooled. In July 2012, Georgia legislation was enacted that moved the responsibility of homeschool reporting from the local school systems to the Georgia Department of Education.

Now the state Department of Education requires parents or guardians to complete an annual registration form for homeschooled students, but it does not provide any additional oversight.

Many people believe the system failed the Crockers. "If they were in foster care, there would be a system that would help," said Mandy Durden, lead advocacy coordinator at CASA.

When a child is removed from a home, a CASA volunteer is often assigned to advocate for the children's best interests. While a DFCS case manager is typically managing many cases, CASA volunteers focus on one child.

"It's one CASA volunteer assigned to that child who can really embed themselves in the child's life," Blair said.

Multiple factors

Durden and Blair say overworked DFCS caseworkers shouldn't shoulder the entire responsibility for the fact the Crocker children fell through the cracks, because the educational system also was a factor and substance abuse could have been involved.

"We get well over 140,000 complaints of abuse. We have to prioritize them in some way," Rawlings said. Georgia has about 13,000 children in foster care, he said. But most DFCS cases involve working with the family without removing children from the home.

Family preservation is the goal in most DFCS cases, as it was for the Crocker family when DFCS was involved in 2012 and 2013 because of substantiated child abuse. It closed the case in 2013 on the recommendation of the case worker after reports from the children's school counselors and administrators suggested the children were doing well.

"Our main task is to keep children safe while respecting the right and need of a child to be with his or her own family and continue in a setting that is comfortable," Rawlings said.

Family First Act

The federal Family First Prevention Services Act, signed into law in 2018, provides that federal funding previously earmarked specifically for foster care services also can be used for preventive programs and for qualified residential treatment programs.

"It will allow us to use federal funds to pay for substance abuse, mental health treatment and parent support services without taking the child into state custody," Rawlings said.

Before a child is placed in foster care, DFCS often will advocate for a relative caregiver.

"We provide for relative caregiving" with a daily support rate, Rawlings said. "If we can keep that child with someone who already has that bond with the child, it's just much better for a child's well-being."

But when children are in a dangerous situation, a foster care placement can be in their best interests, Blair said. "We do tell our volunteers it's family first, because that is where their identities lie, but we at CASA advocate for the best interests of the children, and sometimes that isn't the family."

Next best option

Rawlings agreed. If a relative or close family friend isn't available or appropriate, Rawlings said, a foster placement within the community is the next best option.

"It's a struggle," he said. "We don't always have those foster homes close to where we need them." Moving a child to another area means the child will have to adjust to a new school and community.

"Generally we focus our efforts on keeping our children in a family-like home," he said.

For Chatham County children, foster placement often means moving to another area, Blair said. Of 470 Chatham County children placed in foster care, half are sent to live in other counties. Moving to another county can cause a child trauma, Durden said.

But the Crockers' neighbors said if they had been aware of the extent of the family's problems, they would have helped.

"If we knew this was going on, I would have loved to take that little boy and girl. They were so precious," said Ruth Sikes, who lives across the street from the Crockers' home in unincorporated Guyton. "Me and my husband have been having a hard time ever since," she said.

Sikes said she hadn't seen "the stepmother and daddy" for quite some time, just the grandmother riding on the lawnmower.

Sikes said getting acquainted with the Crockers was no small task. "Those people were nasty. They were rude. They were not friendly at all," she said.

"You could wave to them and they would turn their heads," added Sikes' husband, Vernon. He recounted seeing a young couple with a baby walking past the Crocker house, when the Crockers' dogs came charging at them.

The Crocker children weren't allowed to play with the neighborhood kids, the Sikes said, so the girl was often out in the yard by herself raking or walking the dogs. "I thought my God, that child is always in trouble" to be doing chores every day, Ruth Sikes said. When she was raising her own children, Ruth said if they got in trouble, she would tell them to rake the yard.

But Gary "Donny" Bennett, who lives next to the Crocker house, said the girl lived in fear. "I seen her when she got off the bus. You could see fear," he said.

Bennett said the stepgrandmother who lived with the Crockers gave the orders. "She just worked the little girl like a dog. You don't work a little girl like that," Bennett said.

Neighbor recollections

But neither Bennett nor the Sikes said they ever thought they'd see bodies being pulled from the ground in their neighborhood. "I would never have dreamed of them killing their kids," Ruth Sikes said.

Vernon Sikes said he recalled seeing someone out in the yard with a shovel, but he assumed they were just digging a hole for a fence.

Bennett also noticed Elwyn Sr. raking and shoveling after a hard rain in the area where the bodies were found. "I saw where they dug and they dug right there where that man was doing all that raking and shoveling."

Other neighbors reported seeing people with flashlights at night in the wooded area where the bodies were buried, Bennett said. "If I knew something was going on, I would have called DFCS. But I didn't know," he said.

"These people need to pay for what they did to these kids," Bennett said. "That little girl didn't deserve it. She was like a perfect child. She never did no wrong."

Like the Sikes, Bennett said the children would have been better off in foster care. "Plenty of people would have taken them. I can't go out in the yard without looking at where that little girl and boy were buried. I see it every day. It bothers me."

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