Florence SnyderIt’s not every day that a divorce lawyer reports her own client to the state’s child abuse hotline. But that’s what John Jonchuck’s lawyer did on January 7, when Jonchuck showed up at the firm’s office dressed in pajamas and toting his five-year-old daughter Phoebe, along with a Bible which he incorrectly believed to be written in Swedish. Jonchuck’s lawyer told the Hotline that her client was “out of his mind delusional,” and that Phoebe was in danger.
The Hotline advised Jonchuck’s lawyer to call the truancy police at the Department of Education.
The closest Phoebe would get to the police was 12 hours later, around midnight, when her father was racing toward the Sunshine Skyway Bridge at 100 miles an hour. A St. Petersburg policeman pulled him over…and looked on in horror as Jonchuck threw the little girl into the dark, chilly waters of Tampa Bay.
In a now familiar ritual, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) has investigated itself and “taken responsibility” for “failing to offer services” over the course of multiple calls to the Hotline and multiple looks at the parents whose trifecta of parenting problems – mental illness, drug abuse, and domestic violence – would end in Phoebe’s death.
To DCF’s way of thinking, the agency could neither have foreseen nor prevented Jonchuck from murdering his daughter.
In the zombie-speak of DCF’s Orwell-inspired Critical Incident Rapid Response Team, “Though there was a well-documented history of concerns related to this family, there was nothing in the preceding several years that could have reasonably been interpreted as predictive of such an event.”
Granted, even the sickest people on DCF’s docket generally have enough impulse control to refrain from throwing their children off a bridge in the presence of a police officer with his gun drawn.
But DCF’s definition of foreseeability is narrow enough to cover nothing and nobody.
Not every parent or paramour who beats a child over a soiled diaper will end up killing the child. And not every drunk driver who gets behind the wheel will end up killing his passengers.
But cops at a DUI checkpoint don’t let an impaired driver get a second chance at the wheel. For that, we can thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It’s a different story at DCF, which needs, but does not have, a watchdog with clout.
The people manning the telephones and making home visits are not stupid, and they do care. They are well aware that children like Phoebe, who was visibly afraid to leave the lawyer’s office, are in foreseeable, predictable danger. They deal with crushing caseloads and are paid barely a living wage to make life-and-death decisions on behalf of Florida’s endangered children and elders.
DCF’s better-paid public relations people have a more leisurely work schedule, recycling their endless, empty emoticons like, “That any child’s life would end as Phoebe’s did – at the hands of her own parent – is terrible beyond words.”
DCF Secretary Mike Carroll claims he “will not tolerate anything less than 100 percent for the children we are charged with protecting.”
He could prove it by getting rid of the DCF Writers’ Room. We have too much self-serving babble about Carroll’s “commitment to the ongoing strengthening of our overall practice model and its individual components” and too little money to fill the 25 perpetually vacant child protection slots in Hillsborough County.
Florence Beth Snyder is a Tallahassee-based lawyer and consultant. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
One comment
Mark Clancey
February 18, 2015 at 12:46 pm
A person who sees a child in clear and imminent danger has a duty to call the police, immediately, not an “abuse hotline” of an infamous government department with a history of tragic outcomes. The divorce lawyer for Phobe’s father should have called 911, and he should have stayed with the little girl, even at his own risk, until help arrived. The poor baby deserved a whole lot better than the indifferent “child-welfare practice model” of an inert bureaucracy.
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