Meet Garry Brown, currently a guest of the Florida
Department of Corrections, gets 3 hots & a cot:
Posted on 04/22/2010 9:17:52 PM PDT by Iron Munro
TAMPA - The din of Room 168 at the Economy Inn on East Busch Boulevard occasionally drowned out conversation.
Twelve children ranging in age from 6 months to 11 years old spent the past week there, scrambling across the floor, bouncing on beds. Their eyes filled with resignation Wednesday morning; they were hungry and dirty - wearing the same clothes as the day before and the day before that.
Angel Adams, the mom, was asking for help as the children rambled about the room. She was homeless and hopeless, she said. A relative paid for the motel room for a week, and after that, who knows. Her fiance is in prison.
With measured indignation, Adams said somebody owes her.
By the end of the day Wednesday, help had arrived.
Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children & Families, paid Adams a visit and, standing outside the motel room with all 12 children present, offered a solution. He said there was room at A Kid's Place in Brandon, a cottage large enough to house a family of 12. Though wary of the offer, Adams agreed.
The lifelong Tampa resident said she wants justice from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office child protection team that took her kids away from her two years ago and from Hillsborough Kids Inc., which got her kids back six months ago.
"What do I do?" she said earlier in the day. "I have no answers. My family has been railroaded. Someone needs to pay.
"Nobody's helping me."
She doesn't trust the system, she said. It was a system that despite all the good intentions landed her in the motel, in this fix, in the first place, she said.
Wednesday morning, in the dingy motel room, Adams handed out a list of her children's names and ages. Across the top: "Three fathers. One Mother. Fifteen Children."
One of them, a 1-year-old, is named John the Baptist Brown.
Ten of the children, she said, were fathered by Garry Brown, currently serving a five-year prison term for dealing cocaine. A sampling of his kids' names: Garry Nesha, Garry Brown Jr., Garry Lethia, Garryiell and Garry Rick.
Cuban sandwiches and packaged noodles were donated during the motel stay. In the room, a microwave sat on top of a small refrigerator. No stove. One sink. One toilet. One shower. Everyone walked barefoot over a grimy green carpet.
The smell of dirty diapers filled the room. Jerome, 11, gave Andrew, 6 months, a bottle. "This is not comfortable," Jerome said.
The baby coughed and spit up on Jerome's hand. He didn't flinch and patted the baby on the back.
"The girls sleep on one bed," Adams said. "The boys sleep on the other. I just crash on the floor."
The 12 kids are the youngest of 15, she said. Three have "aged out," meaning they have turned 18 and are on their own, no longer a part of the child welfare system.
"I can have as many as I want to," she said. All her kids, she added, "are gifts from God."
The 37-year-old mother doesn't work. "This is my work," she said, gesturing toward the bunch. "I do this all by myself. I don't know what I'm going to do. This is a revolving door going nowhere."
She said her problems began two years ago when Brown was arrested and the money dried up. Right after that her children were taken away and put in foster care over allegations of neglect, she said.
Hillsborough Kids stepped in and took the case, eventually returning the children to her and Brown. Before Christmas, the couple took a two-bedroom apartment off North Boulevard near Columbus Drive.
Hillsborough Kids agreed to pay the $800 a month rent after caseworkers inspected the apartment and, although finding it a bit cramped, said it was OK.
The landlord, who evicted Adams in March, thought differently.
Sandy Chiellini said Adams showed up to sign the lease with Brown and one child. She didn't learn until later that there were 11 other children. There were problems with plumbing; downstairs tenants were flooded. There was noise. Occasional visits from police. Other tenants were complaining. Some left.
She said Adams' apartment was trashed. Clothes and food were scattered everywhere. Screens were broken out. Chiellini began eviction proceedings. Adams failed to show up for two eviction hearings.
Chiellini said Adams and her children left on April 15, taking only the clothes on their backs.
Cox said opinions about Adams aside, the children are the main concern. He said she loves the kids and they love her, and the department does not want to split the family.
Lodging at A Kid's Place is temporary, and department caseworkers will have to figure out how to place the Adams family in a permanent home. That's down the road, he said. For now, at least they are out of the hotel room.
"My children fear DCF," Adams told Cox outside the motel room Wednesday afternoon. "I do, too."
"I want to make sure right now you and your kids are not living in a hotel room," he responded.
Still, Adams was hesitant. She wanted to know about the long term.
"I need money," she said. "I need transportation. My children need a place to live."
Hillsborough Kids spokesman Elaine Olszewski said her agency has been working with Adams for months, and there is a system of support at work behind the scenes.
Case managers have been in constant contact with Adams, Olszewski said.
Typically, single moms in similar situations have frequent visits by caseworkers, who work with charities in the community and coordinate grant money to pay for services.
"It's on a case-by-case basis," she said. "It's not that we would financially support them, but we are connected to community partners that provide assistance."
The goal when children are removed from the home is to get them back with their parents, she said, and caseworkers try to work to that end.
"Children always are better with their biological parents," she said. "Once we determine they are safe and everything is appropriate, there's a six-month period when they still are technically in the system. We continue to monitor the kids."
She said all the children of school age are enrolled and going to school, although Adams said they have not attended classes since she took up residence in the hotel. She said she can't get them to school.
"There's a lot of support out there," Olszewski said, "and we kind of direct them. She has the support from the community, churches and family members."
I hope people don’t misunderstand my stance as saying the government should always be able to decide what to do with kids.
But I do think there are times that they have to.
As with many issues like this, the question is always...where do we draw the line on what they can do?
Everyone can agree that at one end of a spectrum is a nuclear family raising healthy and well adjusted kids that have every chance in life to succeed.
At the other end of the spectrum is a single woman with no husband and no family who has axe murdered one of her ten children for being too rambunctious.
Where do we place the line?
Baby mama needs to be fixed so she cannot spew anymore kids.
This is a sad story for the kids and the rest of society that’s having to pick up the tab. We’re paying for the father too since he’s cost our legal system a lot of money as well as our prison system.
Their all named Garry.
When she wants to address just one of them she
calls them by their last name. ;<)
While that would seem a safe bet, this kind of thing cuts across all lines. It may be more prevalent in one race or another, but does exist in most.
Pictures should always be posted here.
I know of a situation where the mother was pregnant with her son’s twins.
That was enough even for DSS in this state. She lost custody, the twins were the only ones with a chance as they were put of for adoption shortly after birth.
The son, while not a bright bulb, was functionally intelligent. The middle child I suspect was probably potentially intelligent enough but endured such poor upbringing by her (in reality) mentally retarded mother who was not capable of the task of mothering and was molested by her mother’s boyfriend and his cronies who passed through, that I seriously doubt there was any hope for her. At age 5 she could BARELY talk. Most two year olds were more verbal than she was.
These children were NOT better off with their biological mother. They would have been better off with ANYONE else.
The 37-year-old mother doesn't work...." This is a revolving door going nowhere."
No kidding. And now she thinks that she is entitled to be supported by the tax payer because her uterus is also a "revolving door".
She is nothing more than a parasite.
The article says she got the kids back 6 months ago. It doesn't exactly sound like during the eighteen months that the state had her kids that she worked two jobs, and saved money so that when/if she got her kids back that she would be able to provide at least something for their care.
It doesn't sound like she got any kind of job training during that eighteen months, so that she'd be able to help provide for them when/if she got them back. It does sound like she had two kids during the child free time.
BTW, am I math/biology impaired? It says she has a six month old and a one year old.
This reminds me of a joke I once came up with when my wife was in the maternity ward at Providence Hospital in Anchorage.
There was a single woman, pregnant, alone, in the room next door. Every conversation was an invitation to her private soap opera. Problems, problems, problems. Finally, once, she said, “And I accidentially got pregnant.”
I looked at her and said, “So, did you slip and fall on a penis?”
A priceless moment. I agree with Dennis Miller on this one - “I’m all in favor of assisting the helpless, but I’m a little burnt out on helping the clueless.”
Yeah, in an ideal world the government shouldn't be in that position, but this isn't an ideal world and sometimes something needs to be done and the government, at this point, is the only entity with the legal authority to do that.
Put her in jail and put the kids up for adoption as orphans. Once the parents are in jail for law breaking, the kids CAN'T be left on their own.
Three Fathers?
One sold cocaine?
Can you say “crack whore”?
I feel bad for the children, not for her... She is a certified idiot, with a moral judgment problem.
Reverend Jesse Jackson
Reverend Al Sharpton
Reverend Jeremiah Wright
The man in the photo seems to prefer action over words.
Did you know, that phrase now has its own punctuation mark>? The interrobang, aka the spork of punctuation
. It's an official Unicode punctuation mark. Just type ‽ in your post.
WTF‽
1) Back in the day, some states would sterilize a woman if she repeatedly became pregnant and was dependent on welfare.
2) I noticed she is bottle-feeding. Nursing a baby for at least a year or longer acts as a natural spacer and contraceptive.
No one owes this woman a thing.
searching for answers? She should have been searching for birth control.
"I can have as many as I want to," she said. All her kids, she added, "are gifts from God."
Then why is she demanding help and saying someone owes her? Why doesn't she depend on God to take care of them?
I love (actually hate) how some people use an argument bringing God into the picture like she has the divine blessings from God to stupidly be bringing children into the world that she cannot support.
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