Beaten boy has waited all his life for justice, still delayed
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/30/2010
BONNE TERRE, MO. — Conner Zwierski was not yet 3 months old when doctors at two hospitals diagnosed him with a swollen and bleeding brain, a fractured skull and random bruises — including an indentation on his leg resembling a cord.
They did not believe the infant would live. His eyes failed to track light. He was put on a feeding tube and endured seizures. Brain tissue was dying. If he did survive, doctors doubted he would walk or see.
In only minutes, the same doctors at both Mineral Area Regional Medical Center in Farmington — and later, doctors at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital, where he was airlifted — concluded his devastating injuries on March 27, 2007, were no accident, state Children Division records show.
Just hours later, hospital social workers and investigators with the Children's Division and the St. Francois County Sheriff's Department narrowed their sights on one suspect.
Conner's father, Steven Roloff, then 19, had been alone with the infant at his home in Bonne Terre that afternoon, while Conner's mother, Megan Zwierski, then 18, was at her first day of work. Roloff did not give anyone a feasible reason why a relatively healthy baby suddenly had head injuries so grave he had stopped breathing.
Roloff so definitively flunked a voluntary lie detector test days later, the administrator told a Children's Division investigator it was unnecessary to send anyone else to take the polygraph, records show.
But almost three years to the day after prosecutors charged Roloff, 22, with felonies that could put him in prison for more than 30 years, he remains free on bond. Those who are rearing Conner wonder not only why Roloff's prosecution has been mired in bureaucratic delays, but why the state system charged with protecting children such as Conner failed to heed a critical warning.
"It just doesn't seem fair," said Chris Pyles, a companion of Conner's maternal grandmother, Ginger Brown. "He is out walking around free while Conner's been having all of these therapies and surgery."
Brown has formally adopted Conner. She believes her grandson's abuse could have been prevented if the state Children's Division had done its job properly. Six weeks prior to Conner's alleged assault, records show both she and his doctor raised red flags about Conner's safety that were not fully investigated by a caseworker. Instead of owning up to that mistake, Brown said, the state agency charged with protecting Conner sought to hide details of its substandard investigation.
It took Brown, 51, nearly a year — and a lawyer — to obtain Conner's records from the Children's Division, despite being legally entitled to them. But in those records, shared by Brown with the Post-Dispatch, passages were blacked out, including a sentence that indicated the investigator had failed to speak with the pediatrician who reported a prior abuse allegation pertaining to Roloff. Had she done so, Brown thinks, Conner might have been spared.
A spokesman for the Missouri Division of Social Services, which oversees the Children's Division, would not comment directly on the handling of Conner's case. Department Spokesman Scott Rowson said caseworkers made difficult decisions every day and must see an imminent threat before removing a child.
"If that doesn't happen, that simply means that the evidence did not meet that strict threshold," he said.
Brown is a former foster child from Virginia who said she spent most of her youth miserably bouncing around the system. The longer this situation drags on, the more she realizes her life has come full circle.
"It happened to me and nobody listened," she said. "And then it happened to my grandson, and I cried for him, and nobody listened."
WARNING SIGNS
Conner, now 3, has a wide, toothy smile that shows no hint that he has suffered.
He walks with just a slight limp. Yet his speech is delayed, and doctors worry that he may never fully catch up from the brain damage he sustained. This spring, a surgeon detached muscles from Conner's left eyeball to prevent it from wandering in its socket. The eye functions, but the part of the brain that decodes those images does not, so he is blind in one eye.
"After the surgery, I asked the doctor, 'Did you see any life in there? Any signs that he could see?' And the doctor said, 'Ginger, I told you that part of his brain is dead.'"
Brown had opened her home to her daughter, Zwierski, then 18, and Roloff in the months before Conner was born. But she soon had concerns about Roloff, and worried for the baby. On Feb. 12, 2007, Brown said, Roloff took Conner into the bathroom during a dispute. When he came out, Brown said, the baby had a bite mark on his cheek.
She immediately took Conner to the pediatrician, knowing the doctor was mandated by law to report suspicions of abuse.
Just after 3 p.m. that day, Farmington pediatrician Karl Killian did just that: He called the state child abuse hot line to report a human bite mark on Conner's cheek, records show.
Less than two hours later, documents show, St. Francois County children's division worker Christine Black arrived at Brown's house near Bonne Terre to investigate. When she got there, documents indicate she found the home in turmoil. Pyles, Brown's companion, was kicking Roloff out of the house. A sheriff's officer had been called.
In her 13-page investigation, Black categorized the incident as a "family feud" pitting Brown against Zwierski, Roloff and his parents, who lived next door.
Black wrote in her report that the group claimed, "Ms. Brown is always making wild accusations against them" and "is very controlling and wants to raise the baby herself."
Black took no definitive action.
"This may be a problem of lack of effective communication and encouraged all parties to get along with each other," she wrote in her report.
But Brown said Black was blunt to her.
"She told me to mind my own business and leave them alone," Brown recalls. "Then she left."
Black declined to comment. She no longer works at the Children's Division, an official said.
In her report, Black also quickly dismissed the bite mark. She wrote that she observed "a very small very light purple bruise on the baby's cheek. This bruise did not appear at all to be the bruise from a human bite on the face."
Her report made no mention of consulting with the pediatrician to get his opinion.
Killian, the pediatrician, said in an interview Thursday that he would have explained why he believed the bruise on Conner's face was an adult bite mark. He has seen plenty of child bites in his practice. This was far larger, and something that should cause alarm, he said.
"That's the reason I called them in the first place," he said. "It looked like a bite mark."
Black's failure to follow up with the pediatrician would later prompt St. Francois County Judge Sandy Martinez to openly chastise the Children's Division during one of Conner's early custody hearings, said people in the courtroom that day. Attorney James Willis said the judge was upset when she heard the pediatrician testify that he never got a follow-up call from the caseworker.
"And when he said 'no,' I was shocked, Conner's guardian ad litem was shocked and Judge Martinez started questioning the children's services on why wasn't anything done," Willis said.
DEMANDING RECORDS
Brown knows the full history of her grandson's investigation because she pushed the Children's Division for nearly a year for documents.
She secured a legal right to request Conner's files when a judge granted her full custody of Conner a year ago. Although state caseworkers had hoped to reunite Conner with his mother, Zwierski, records show she felt she was unable to raise her child properly and opted to terminate her parental rights. She has since married and moved to Arizona. Roloff's rights were terminated by the court.
Even after Brown had legal rights to Conner's case files, it took an appeal to the Missouri attorney general by Brown's lawyer before she would secure them.
Until then, officials with Children's Division in both St. Francois County and the state had refused, at one point telling her they were sealed because of the adoption. That position is contrary to state policy, which gives adoptive parents the right to such files.
There are reams of pages in Conner's files, including Black's 13-page report that concluded that the allegations in the pediatrician's hot line complaint were unsubstantiated.
In it, a state lawyer chose to redact several passages. They included parts of the pediatrician's account to the hot line worker of what he saw in his office that day.
Most troubling to Brown and her lawyer was another small passage blotted out with a marker — yet still legible.
It was Black's account of her failed effort to contact Killian, in which she referred to the pediatrician not by name but as "reporter" of the abuse. It read: "Reporter is not available due to reporters' job duties. This worker will contact reporter via letter with outcome of report."
Rowson would not comment specifically on the redaction.
He said the state was required by law to protect the identity of child abuse reporters. Yet nowhere in that redacted passage is Killian — the reporter — named.
Brown's lawyer, Koreen Gummere, said the state inked out the passage without legal justification to cover up the shoddy work of a caseworker.
WAITING FOR JUSTICE
St. Francois County Prosecuting Attorney Wendy Wexler Horn said justice would be served, but she made no apologies for the slow pace of Roloff's prosecution.
Wexler Horn, whose office covers four counties, said the region was overwhelmed with cases.
"In our circuit, we have two circuit judges, two courtrooms that are appropriate for jury trials and lots and lots of cases, and we need to have room for everything to be set."
Wexler Horn said she also had no control over a year-long legal battle over who should defend Roloff. Documents indicate Roloff's original attorney dropped him after Roloff refused to accept a 14-year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. Roloff then requested a public defender. But the Farmington district public defender's office, burdened with a backlog of cases, refused to take him. Officials cited a Missouri State Public Defender Commission policy that enabled them to deny representation to clients who previously employed a private attorney.
The issue went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. In December, the court threw out that rule, and a public defender was forced to take Roloff's case.
Several messages left for Roloff's current attorney, Benjamin Campbell, were not returned. Attempts to reach Roloff, now residing in Nixa, Mo., were also unsuccessful.
For Brown, the agonizing wait continues. A summer trial was canceled this month. A new date was set for late March — nearly four years after Roloff was charged.
Stormy Bennett, then the St. Francois County Sheriff's Department detective who built the case against Roloff, said it was a common strategy for attorneys to delay and ask for continuances.
"They hope everything will go by the wayside and people will forget," he said.
But Brown will never forget. Too many people and too many systems that should have helped her grandson failed him, she said.
She wants Conner to come first.
"Can you imagine that this child has no voice and nobody is hearing?" she said. "Can you imagine being the grandmother begging for help and nobody cares? Can you imagine this little boy laying up in the hospital at the hands of a man who could have been prevented from hurting him?"
Monday, May 31, 2010
Dad charged with beating 3-month-old son still free on bond 3 YEARS LATER--all with the tacit consent of DSS (St. Louis, Missouri)
Mom was at her first day of work, with Dad STEVEN ROLOFF as the designated "babysitter." Well, it seems we couldn't even get through the first day without the not-yet 3-month-old baby coming down with a fractured skull, severe brain damage, and bruising--all while under Daddy's loving care, of course. The baby's condition was so bad that at first, doctors didn't think the baby would live. Daddy flunked a lie detector test when officials tried to get to the bottom of the matter. Yet 3 YEARS LATER, even after Daddy has been charged with felonies, he is STILL FREE ON BOND and no trial has been scheduled. Sure appears that there is some funny business with the Missouri Department of Social Service's Children's Division, which doesn't want their earlier screw ups in this case to come to light. Whadda surprise. CPS bureaucrats who didn't do their jobs who are now more interested in covering their @$$es than allowing justice to be done. I'm just SHOCKED.
