Lost, Abused or Dead in the Kentucky Foster Care System

When children get hurt, birth parents are heavily scrutinized and charged with being harmful for the safety of their own children. But when it comes to foster parents, the same organizations who take children form parents for whatever reason, leave children in the care of foster parents where they also obtain injuries. Potential foster care abuses are ignored compared to birth parent potential abuses.

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A Kentucky media outlet, Wave News 3, has reported on the ongoing corruption of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. The report shows how one child died in foster care when taken from parents. Had the child been left int he care of their natural parents, that wouldn't have happened. They also report on a foster parent who is blowing the whistle on a lack of oversight in the foster care system where children often go missing. Again, had these children been in the care of their real parents, they wouldn't be missing.

Hunter Payton died in foster care at age 4. The child care workers said it was an injury, but investigations by the news station indicates it possibly wasn't an accident. Hunter's mother, April Payton, said "something hit him hard." Bruising was noticed and reported by the parents, but nothing was done. Then he died in an "accidental fall".

Months later, one of the foster parents in charge of Hunter, Billy Embry-Martin, 33, was charged with murder. The lawsuit accuses him and husband with "violent punishment, physical abuse and denial of food."

Attorney Ron Hines says "the Cabinet for families and children, the setup, is corrupt and incompetent. It’s no longer helping children, and just getting them a better jump start in life, nothing like that anymore. It’s a for-profit scheme" His investigation into the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services found that they were paying a private company to place childnre into foster homes.

Simply for finding people who want to be foster parents, these private firms are making so many dollars per head per kid, so it’s a vicious cycle. The more kids, the more money. That’s why it’s run rampant. That’s why the courts are swamped.

Again, this is showing how the foster care and adoption system that may sometimes be helpful to some children in need, is also being used heavily as a kids-for-cash system by the corrupt child welfare services. That's why I call CPS the Child Procurement Syndicate.

Foster parent Kim Campbell recognizes the deplorable state of affairs of the state's "care" system:

When these things happen, kids get lost, and they get hurt, they get killed, everybody scratches their head and says we don’t know how it happened. It starts like this.

She has accepted emergency placements for foster children. Her story shows how the state agencies don't do their job and don't check the competency of the foster parents they charge with the safety and wellbeing of children. A child was just dumped into her home simply to make the corrupt system keep turning. It had nothing to do with making sure the environment was suitable or safe for the child:

The problem is, they had never met us. They never laid eyes on us. And I know they’re supposed to come meet us to make sure we’re an approved home.

To show how bad this system is, they can't even keep track of where the children are, so they don't even exist int heir system, disappearing into a black hole with god-knows-wht to happen to them in the future. A state worker told Campbell: "I don’t even have you listed as having a placement."

We could have been anybody. We could’ve been very bad people. We could’ve done harm to her. We could have claimed she ran away, they wouldn’t have known, they didn’t lay eyes on her.

And after two months, they still had no information on the child, no medicare card, nothing.

We had moved. They didn’t know where we were. We told them we were moving and gave our address but they told my husband when they called him that we weren’t even in the system as being an approved home. So if we’re not in an approved home, why do we have your child for two months that you have not even come out to see?

CHFS state data shows that 128 foster children in Kentucky are missing. With 9,000 children in the Kentucky foster care system, they spend an average of 22 months moving between 3 different homes. Is that really a better situation than not taking these children and leaving them in the care of their parents in the first place?

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