This case has been keeping me awake at night. I was a foster kid from crappy parents, and I have seen and heard evil- but not to the extent that these poor kids have! I am compelled to become a CASA volunteer in my area. I have often thought of doing so, but am really interested in it now. Kids in the court system need people who will be there to truly help determine their best placement, who listen to them and can be their voice.
In all of this, I can't help but feel sorrow for and irritation at simultaneously for Shaun and Delylah's father. I haven't been able to verify for sure that he's still incarcerated while awaiting parole violation. I can tell he loved his kids by his FB, but you also see a broken man who was fighting addiction and didn't seem to have any true trade- other than being a criminal.
I do genealogy in my spare time, and was able to piece together the Tara family tree. Shaun and Delylah's grandfather died in 1993 when he was in his mid 30s when their father was 9 years old, so it seems that the kids' Dad didn't have a man in his life to show him how to behave. This is an all too common family dynamic in today's world. I'm not sure what happened to the now 10 year old's father- but she does have a different father than Shaun and Delylah. It's kind of odd that she ended up with her step-father's family instead of her Mother's parents, don't you think?
I think you've hit on a lot of points that helped to set the lay of the land for this to happen
From seeing the FB page of Shaun Tara, he seemed to adore the children...I can only imagine that he must be utterly broken to know what happened and that he chose to send them to this evil woman.
I can't entirely single parenting for this. Boys who lose their father usually have other male role models in their life, uncles, grandfathers, neighbors, teachers...they don't suddenly enter a man-free world and have no examples to follow. And sometimes the natural father, or the father-figure they grow up with can be a bad role model for husbanding, parenting and related skills.
I do think that there's a lot of focus on criminals being punished in some way and not always enough on rehabilitation and ongoing support, and what is available is often offered in a punitive manner. Any parent who suddenly loses their partner and suddenly has sole care of three young children needs support around them. The world has changed a lot in the past 70 years or so, people don't live so close to family any more, we live in huge cities surrounded by millions of people who we don't know. I'm not saying small towns are immune from any of this, but I think this is a new societal dynamic that we are not evolved for, and there are many cracks that people can fall through, whether it's mental health issues, family issues, low-level criminal behavior, etc.
Shaun, Delylah and Frankie's mother has been described in very positive terms, but there have also been slight mentions that she had problems too, drugs and partying and leaving the older children to care for the babies...but she wasn't abusing the children.
Why didn't CPS allow the three children to be moved to their grandmother's when those complaints of neglect and lice were made? That might not be a situation where natural children would be placed in foster care, but these children weren't her natural children, and they had a relative who wanted them...I think it's a key issue for me that they weren't moved at that time to depressure the family unit in the Huntsman home so she could focus more on caring for her own children.
One of those articles says the investigators tried to visit once and no one was home, then the next time the children were either doing homework or sleeping...does that mean that the three youngest were sleeping and not even fully physically observed (for things like weight loss or obvious marks), or observed in the family dynamic, or talked to?
I've seen some people say it's not CPS's fault when this happens and that headlines saying they've dropped the ball are wrong -- it's the parents/caregivers who dropped the ball. But the point is that CPS are there to support families that aren't coping and to be a safety net when the parents/caregivers are vile individuals who don't parent well. It's not the fault of CPS (or any other acronym) it's that the safety net didn't deploy in the way that it should have, in the way we all want it to. Children who don't have the people who should be looking out for them treating them right, they need that safety net, and it's in everyone's best interest for it to work as well as it possibly can. There was also a mention in one of the articles about homeschooling, and many people are feeling defensive over this, too. But you can't ignore that 'bad' parents can and do use homeschooling to fall under the radar just because 99% are using in a positive way.
