Lessons from the Life and Death of "Precious Doe"

My hometown has endured a gaping, open wound for over four years. Our local tragedy became a national tragedy when the death of a beautiful three year old girl made national headlines.

Her death was shocking, heinous and despicable. We were mortified, humiliated and embarrassed that something so savage could take place in our hometown. She had been decapitated, stripped naked and abandoned in a wooded area near a residential street. Thrown away like a piece of garbage.

Kansas City woke up to the news and we were outraged, shamed and determined to bring her murderer to justice.

Four years slid by. Artists drew her picture and forensic sculptors created the sweetest face anyone would ever hope to gaze upon. Press coverage was massive and the country was blanketed with flyers bearing her likeness. Her story appeared numerous times in the national and international news and on America’s Most Wanted. No stone was left unturned in the hunt for her killer.

Kansas City fell in love with the face of an angel and so we adopted this homeless, motherless child and named her Precious Doe. A child so precious no one could imagine how anyone could murder, mutilate, defile and abandon her.

A makeshift memorial quickly materialized as locals brought flowers, candles, baby dolls and stuffed animals to the place where she had lain. They would not let her memory be thrown away like garbage. And so we remembered.

Eventually, we buried her and gave her a permanent headstone which reads: “Precious Doe. Found April 28th, 2001. Please help keep Precious Doe’s memory alive.” And so we have.

Today we know at last who she is and how she died, through the tireless efforts of local citizens and police officers who would not let this go.

This precious little girl is Erica Michelle Maria Green. A beautiful name for a beautiful child; murdered in cold blood by those entrusted with her care; beheaded and thrown away. And now we will get justice for our adopted daughter.

Her life was precious. She did not die in vain. She changed a city. She made us more aware of just how precious children are, or should be, to us. She made us hold our babies a little bit tighter. She turned us into a family with a common cause that crossed the great racial divide in a racially divided city and united us in a way this city has never been united.

Her message to our country is that our children and the lives they lead are indeed precious. They should be loved, protected, nurtured and cared for. The safest place for them should be in their mother’s womb or in their mother’s arms. But these sanctuaries are now no longer safe. For many, these are the most dangerous places in their world.

What kinds of people destroy their own offspring and throw them away like trash? How low can humanity sink? Millions of other Precious Does are thrown into the garbage every day at abortion clinics.

Children are lost forever in our foster care systems, never to be seen or heard from again. Children are starved, neglected, abused and abandoned.

In America children are no longer sacred. They are in the way. They are inconvenient. They are destroyed by the millions through abortion, neglect and abandonment. They are abused sexually, emotionally and physically. America has become a very dangerous place to be a child, born or unborn.

Abortion does not spare the unwanted and the inconvenient from the terror of this world. It brings the horror and terror of this world into their sanctuary of the womb and kills them and maims them sooner. But they are killed and maimed just the same.

The treatment of our children carries over to our abuse and neglect of disabled adults and the elderly. We starve and dehydrate them to death if they become helpless. We abandon them in nursing homes, homeless shelters and on the streets.

American should learn a much needed lesson from the life and death of Precious Doe. She did not die in vain. She will never be forgotten. Not in this town.

Precious Doe case also solves Oklahoma mystery

BY JOE ROBERTSON AND LAURA BAUER

Knight Ridder Newspapers

MUSKOGEE, Okla. - (KRT) - Erica Green, the little girl known for four years only as Precious Doe, had a pink Easter dress waiting for her that she never got to wear.

"She loved her little dresses," said Betty Brown, 72, who cared for Erica after her birth.

But just a few weeks before Easter in 2001, Erica's mother took her on a trip. Brown never saw Erica, then 3 years old, again.

Brown, Erica's teenage babysitter and the neighbors who remembered the spirited little girl all kept asking about her.

"How's the baby?" Brown would ask Erica's mother, Michelle Johnson, when she saw her.

Johnson always had a story, Brown recalled. The child was in Chicago. She was in Kansas City. Someone was caring for her.

Then on Wednesday, before noon, a Kansas City police detective knocked on Brown's door. Brown remembers something about the detective asking if Erica had a certain birthmark on her shoulder.

"I can't remember what happened," she said. "My daughter says I screamed."

She knows now that the little child who loved the Teletubbies had been dead all along. It was Erica whose decapitated body was discovered four years ago in a wooded area of Kansas City.

"My heart is heavy," Brown said through tears on the porch of her home. "That baby was blessed, being around people who cared for her, who were going to protect her."

Erica was big for her age, but dainty, she said. And spirited.

One Sunday when she was barely 2, when seeing the older children singing in the choir at Evangelist Temple Baptist Church, she marched up and joined them.

"That's just the way she was," Brown said. "She was a smart child."

Brown said she had cared for many foster children over the years, and in 1997, Michelle Johnson needed help. She was pregnant with Erica - and in prison.

Brown said she knew Johnson's mother-in-law, Betty Green. She hardly knew Johnson.

She said she picked up the baby from an Oklahoma City hospital, and recalls signing paperwork that stipulated that the mother would be able to get her child after she got out of prison.

Brown said she raised Erica in her house, which still hosts many children after school. Like all the other children, Erica called her "Granny."

When Johnson was released, Erica remained in Brown's home. Brown said she even began talking to Johnson about adopting the child.

And that would have been the best for her, said Joseph Brewer, now of Tulsa, who was Brown's neighbor at the time.

"She was in a wonderful place," Brewer said. "They treated her like one of their own."

But in early April 2001, Johnson said she wanted to take Erica with her for a few days to go to a family reunion. Brown packed up a couple of outfits for her, with some extra dress shoes.

Within weeks, Erica was dead.

Jamesetta Russell, a friend of Brown, knew that Brown ached to see the child again. They saw Johnson again over the next few years, but never with Erica.

"We always wondered where she was," Russell said. "People at church thought she was just precious."

Russell paused. "They gave her the right name."

Erica's birth father says she wasn't the type of child to act up. "She wasn't a crybaby," Larry Green said Thursday in an interview with the Muskogee Phoenix in the Muskogee County jail, where he's being held on a parole violation. "She was the kind of girl anybody would like to have. She was so smiling."

Michelle Johnson had eight children, according to court records. At least three were younger than Erica.

Only one, an older brother, shared her last name. In 2000 he was in state custody and the Oklahoma's Department of Human Services wanted Michelle Johnson to pay child support.

The three younger children were all in state custody, according to court documents in 2003 and 2004, including a child born less than eight months after Erica was killed.

DHS officials said Thursday they could not comment on whether Johnson's children were in state custody, or even whether they had been aware Johnson had another child, Erica.

Esther Rider-Salem, programs manager with DHS' child protection services, said the agency launched an investigation after Michelle Johnson's arrest Thursday.

"Any time a situation like this comes up, we definitely go back and look at what our involvement is," Rider-Salem said.

Erica's short life gives some details on how she may have gone undetected by the system.

Rider-Salem said the department of child protection services doesn't automatically take children born to an incarcerated mother. It gets involved with a child only when a report is made.

"Just because a child is born in prison doesn't necessarily mean there's abuse or neglect," Rider-Salem said. "If a friend or relative is willing to take care of the child, we may never get involved. We may not be notified."

Added Dustin Pyeatt, DHS spokesman: "We can't keep track of every child born in the state of Oklahoma."

May you rest in peace, Erica.

Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

So true.

I attended a community awareness meeting about the scourge of crystal meth here in rural Minnesota. During the Q & A session, one grandmother stood up to ask the police officer a question that left me dumbfounded. The grandma said that her daughter and son-in-law were making and selling meth in their home, and she was worried about her grandchildren. She had had no success previously at getting law enforcement or Child Protective Services to do anything. She didn't know what to do. (The police officer said to call her local Police Dept. again.)

I couldn't stand it. I stood up and challenged her: "Why haven't you gone and TAKEN your grandchildren?"

She didn't answer.

"Those children are in danger. They could DIE. If you do nothing, it will be YOUR FAULT. You are their grandmother! You have every right to protect those children from your daughter. Go get them, bring them home, and do not let your daughter see them until she is clean and sober. What is she going to do, call the cops? She's a drug dealer! If I were you, those kids would be in MY home tomorrow afternoon."

Our society has become so wussified that people don't have the courage to take a stand and do what's right. Twenty years ago, no grandmother would have vacillated on such an obvious decision.

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