VT mom who lost custody of child kills DCF worker, officials say

WCVB ^ | 8/9/15

[markomalley]

A woman who was upset about losing custody of her daughter used a hunting rifle to fatally shoot a child-welfare agency worker who had handled her case, authorities said.

The shooting happened Friday outside a state office building that houses the Department for Children and Families, Gov. Peter Shumlin's office said. The mother, Jody Herring, was detained by people in and around the building after the shooting, police said.

Barre City Mayor Thom Lauzon said the worker's shooting death was a tragedy not just for his city, which has about 10,000 residents, but for the state.

"My heart goes out to the victim and the victim's family," he said.

The Department for Children and Families worker, Lara Sobel, had been involved in a case that saw Herring's 9-year-old daughter taken into state custody, officials said. Sobel had just left a DCF office on Friday afternoon when she was shot twice, authorities said. She died at the scene.

Herring was in police custody on Friday night and couldn't be reached for comment. A home telephone number listed for her had been disconnected. She will be arraigned on Monday, police said.

The DCF has dealt with recent criticisms over its handling of cases, which prompted a new law.

A special legislative committee was set up to investigate the state child welfare system after the deaths last year of two toddlers who had been involved with DCF, 2-year-old Dezirae Sheldon, of Poultney, and 15-month-old Peighton Geraw, of Winooski. Murder charges are pending against Dezirae's stepfather and Peighton's mother, who have pleaded not guilty.

The new child safety law shifts the state's priority in protecting children, focusing on their well-being instead of on an imperative to reunite them with their families.

Shumlin said DCF employees deal with challenging family situations and do their work "out of their dedication to the children and families of this great state."

"To lose one of our own in the course of that duty," he said, "is shocking and heartbreaking."

Department for Children and Families staff members were directed to go out this weekend only on emergency calls and accompanied by law enforcement.

The DCF worker's shooting happened on the last day of work for state police director Col. Tom L'Esperance, the Burlington Free Press reported. A retirement dinner for him was taking place in South Burlington, about 40 miles away, when reports of the shooting were broadcast, and troopers left to go to the scene, the newspaper said.

[Crazieman]

Having been involved in absolute BS DCF engagements, I feel zero sympathy.

More of this government agent vs common citizen interaction will crop up as the country continues to de-evolve.

[mythenjoseph]

Not knowing the specifics of this particular case I can’t comment. but overall I consider the states ability to take children far to easy....one thing is for sure this dead case worker is not going to do it anymore.....

[Paladin2]

The root cause is higher up the breaucratic food chain.

[Paladin2]

Bernie Sanders fault.

[Gaffer]

I’d guess that there are egregious cases of DFCS incompetence and criminal negligence in every state. I know for a fact there are in mine. They certainly do seem to have an awful lot of power for a person whose job qualifications don’t seem to be very rigorous.

Your comment about “this case worker isn’t going to do it anymore” is insightful in a way. This case will at least give some of the other case workers left on the job the caution that they are not God.

[jospehm20]

I agree with you.

[Joe Boucher]

I am surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen much more often.
Government hacks destroying people with impunity?

[Popman]

Don’t know the specifics here, but my daughter got investigated by Florida DCF for reporting a child she was babysitting because the child stabbed her dog.with a fork....

The kid had mental issues and it’s mother wasn’t doing a thing about it... Too busy whoring around...

The little mini tyrant though because she Home schooled her children it was a valid investigation...

Very little sympathy here until the facts come out...

[Chickensoup]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[The Working Man]

I do not know anything about this case. With that said, I’m not at all surprised to read that this DCF case worker was killed by an ‘irate’ parent. I had my own run-in with these people decades ago. They were arrogant then and I’m sure have not gotten any better in the time between then and now.

I have been quietly predicting that both them, judges and other lower level government functionaries and bureaucrats would eventually tick off the ‘wrong’ people, aka the common citizen. Any person... even a staunch ‘law-abiding’ person can be pushed just so far. And then the counter-push will happen.

On a different subject I see the same thing with the groundswell of support for Donald Trump. It’s a push-back against the politicians and the bureaucrats.

[Smokin' Joe]

I concur. I am sure this woman was not the first, nor will she be the last to feel such temptation. I find it unfortunate that she gave in to it, because the CPS types will use this to push for the preemptive disarmament of anyone they are 'investigating'.

For those who don't know, the quality of evidence necessary to be investigated involves nothing more substantial than anonymous hearsay repeated to a Social Worker, and countless families have been put through hell over such anonymously posted complaints.

Essentially, the accused has virtually no rights whatsoever, they can take your children, and the repercussions of their actions will ripple into your workplace and beyond because people will assume you are guilty until you prove you did not abuse nor neglect your child.

Keep in mind that "neglect" may include such things as not administering school prescribed medication, antidepressants, or other medical treatment the parent may deem excessive or dangerous, or something so simple as your kid jumping in mud puddles on the schoolyard and coming in grubby as a result for a few days.

[Thumper1960]

Knowing cases where the state apparatchiks thirst for personal power and their own sense of what should be resulted in miscarriages of justice, I feel no sympathy or sorrow for the dead or the dead bureaucrat’s family. You sleep with slime, you get disease. Sometimes, when you threaten a mother and child bond, you end up dead. The “social worker” learned a hard lesson of life and the laws of human/child bonds.

[Crazieman]

Or ‘abuse’, which consists of making them run circles in the backyard while they bawl their eyes out.

[Renegade]

Pissed off the wrong person.

[sharkhawk]

Mom Accused of Killing Aunt, Cousins, Child's Social Worker

Saturday, in nearby Berlin, the bodies of Herring's aunt, 73-year-old Julie Falzarano, and her two cousins, 48-year-old Rhonda Herring and 43-year-old Regina Herring, were found in a home. Shumlin said Jody Herring is thought to have gone to the home on Airport Road first, fatally shooting her three family members, before heading to Barre to kill Sobel.

Obviously her family deserved to die too. Some people need to have their children taken away.

http://www.necn.com/news/new-england/Vt-DCF-Worker-Shot-and-Killed-321099451.html

[Smokin' Joe]

With the sweeping definition of abuse, that might include feeding them things not on the Approved Mooch School Menu (or, for that matter, feeding them that stuff).

With the vague criteria, the law means what they say it means when they say it means it. They may not all lie, but the few I have had the misfortune to meet did, with only one exception.

A case I know of involved a child dropped off in her old neighborhood by a playmate's mom. By the time relatives tracked down the child's whereabouts and went to get the child, they were detained on the scene by police while the child was taken by Social Services. It took over a year and a half for her mother to regain custody, during which time the child was run through a series of foster homes where she got scabies, lice, had all her personal property taken from her, and was told she had to work to get her stuff back. The work involved cleaning (7 year old), and the child got chemical burns on her hands from the cleaning fluids.

She would never have received such treatment in her home. The 'neglect' charges were BS, and the child was treated far worse by the Social Services.

The ordeal ended when the family announced it had enough material to get the Social Worker's license revoked, the Social Worker slid into a different Govt. job, and the child was finally released to her parents within 60 days after that.

[DakotaGator]

Barre City Mayor Thom Lauzon said the worker's shooting death was a tragedy not just for his city, which has about 10,000 residents, but for the state.

Do not know details of the incident. But if Mayor Lauzon actually said the above, he spoke nonsense. This is only a tragedy for the worker's family, not the city or the state.

Again should this statement be accurately attributed, it says much about a local government's arrogance.

[kearnyirish2]

“The new child safety law shifts the state’s priority in protecting children, focusing on their well-being instead of on an imperative to reunite them with their families.”

This is a bit creepy; there may be “married” homosexuals lining up to take these children in. My biggest issue with these cases is the double standard applied in dealing with white & black children; the threat of removing children from black homes is practically non-existent. Public assistance and housing may be threatened if school attendance is sub-par, but removal isn’t even discussed for them; in the meantime, any scratch or bruise on a white child is cause for investigation. Black childrens’ deaths have been undetected because social workers have fabricated visit reports (using the “overworked” excuse), and the “black community” expresses no outrage. Too often just another case of role reversal, where public servants think we work for them...

[Smokin' Joe]

I won't deny there are very real cases of neglect and abuse out there. One can always say that because the woman killed these people they were obviously right.

We don't know what series of events prompted the actions on the part of the defendant. Everyone has a breaking point, and the experience of being deprived of family members while bearing the onus of heinous accusations which are unjustified will lead to lack of sleep. Constant resentment/anger, and the combination of sleep deprivation, being maligned at ever turn, and that festering outrage could well drive someone we might consider 'normal' to strike out. This woman had lost custody, and may have considered at that point that she had nothing left to lose.

For all we know, the family issued the complaints which led to the events. Motives are many in such cases, and not always for the benefit of the child, but sometimes for the 'foster care' money the states allocate to the foster home.

Other spats can lead to someone using Social Services against a relative or acquaintance, and it is a common gambit in divorce/custody proceedings.

The accused is put in the unenviable position of having to prove their innocence, an inversion of normal jurisprudence.