Oh, the radio reports from the them were lies. This article says they knew he was dead.
Feb 3, 2004 6:53 pm US/Eastern
(1010 WINS) (CLARK, NJ) A couple has been charged with forcing their 13-year-old foster daughter to take meals to a dead man's room even though they knew the man had passed away, prosecutors said.
Police were called to the house in August and an autopsy determined that the 82-year-old man had been dead for several weeks in the room where the girl was sent every day with food.
Kenneth and Donna Keaveney were charged Tuesday with child cruelty and elder neglect following a five-month investigation, Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow said.
"They both knew the grandfather had passed away and was rotting to the point where the house reeked of death," Romankow said.
The decaying remains of Donna Keaveney's father, Nicola Lombardi, were found Aug. 28.
The 13-year-old and two other foster children, ages 11 and 4, who were living in the house, were immediately removed by the state Division of Youth and Family Services, said Andy Williams, a spokesman for the agency.
Assistant Prosecutor Robert O'Leary said the girl did not tell anyone about the situation.
The Keaveneys had been foster parents for almost five years, Williams said. It was not known how long the three foster children were living at the home before the body was found.
The Keaveneys were scheduled to make their first court appearance on the charges next week. O'Leary said the couple did not yet have a lawyer.
No one answered the door at the Keaveney home, even though a late-model Mercury SUV was parked in the driveway Tuesday evening.
Bill Megee, a 60-year-old retired electrician who lives next door to the Keaveneys in the solidly middle-class neighborhood, said the couple moved in to the blue, split-level home about 10 years ago with Lombardi and his wife. But the wife was killed in an auto accident four or five years ago, Megee said, and the family underwent drastic changes afterward.
Megee said he sometimes heard Kenneth Keaveneys ridiculing the older man. "You could hear his yelling and screaming, 'your father stinks -- can't you give him a shower?' " They treated Lombardi badly, the neighbor said.
Megee said for a day or two before the body was discovered, he noticed a stench coming from his neighbors' house. "I told my wife, 'there is something dead out here,"' he said believing it was probably the rotting corpse of an animal.
The troubling case is the latest involving children under the care of DYFS. A Collingswood couple was charged in October with starving their four adopted children.
That case caused outrage after DYFS officials said a caseworker was supposed to have been visiting the Collingswood home on a regular basis yet made no report that anything was wrong with the children.
Troubles at the agency previously had led officials to order a safety assessment of every one of the thousands of children under foster care in the state last year. Williams said it was not known if the Keaveney home had been visited as part of those assessments.
James Davy, the newly appointed human services commissioner, called the assessments into question last month and ordered that about half of them be repeated with DYFS caseworkers under the supervision of independent supervisors.
Kevin Ryan, the state's new Child Advocate, said the case in Clark "once again raises very profound questions about the safety assessments and whether children in foster care are safe. We intend to address that as part of our report that we plan to release to the public later this month."
Disgusting people.
I want to know why they needed a five-month investigation before charges were filed.
I think foster parents need to be required to bring children in to a state facility once a month or so, where the children can have a quick examination by a nurse, and an interview away from the foster parents. And the children need to be reassured that if they tell about a serious problem, they will not be going back to the home even for a minute. A lot of these caseworkers are deadbeats who are just going shopping or socializing because they prefer that to working, but the system pretty much assures that the pool of available social workers will be drawn from the dregs of society. People who don't want to work are attracted to jobs where they won't be supervised, and civilized people have better options than to take a job which involves frequent visits to dangerous neighborhoods and dangerous homes.