Posted on 04/17/2003 6:12:40 PM PDT by Gamecock
Foster Mother Arrested For Using Duct Tape On Kids Three Children Have Been Placed With Other Families
POSTED: 11:58 a.m. EDT April 17, 2003 UPDATED: 2:04 p.m. EDT April 17, 2003 LEVITTOWN, Pa. -- A Levittown, Pa., woman, honored last year for her work as a foster mother by a local organization, is now under arrest for allegedly wrapping up her foster children with duct tape. Middletown Township police said Colleen Broe, 34, was charged Wednesday with felony counts of endangering the welfare of children and false imprisonment for restraining the children by using duct tape.
Her husband, Neil Broe, 41, was also charged with endangering the welfare of children by documenting his wife's activity for months without reporting it to authorities, police said.
Police said that digital photos of the children they obtained showed the children with their ankles, wrists, torsos and other areas taped, and some pictures depicted the children so severely taped up that they look "mummified."
Police also said that a search of the couple's home Wednesday morning at 82 Cobalt Ridge Drive East revealed pieces of children's clothing and evidence of duct tape that matched the manner in which they were depicted in the photographs.
A 2-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl were allegedly taped up over the course of several months by Colleen Broe in order to keep them from taking their diapers off and crawling out of their cribs, police said.
Police said Broe's husband, Neil, took more than 30 pictures in order to document the abuse, after the couple started having marital difficulties.
Investigators said Neil Broe passed some of those photographs on to an acquaintance who then gave them to police.
Police said the couple's biological son, 5, told detectives he had been taped, as well.
A Feb. 15, 2002 article in the Bucks County Courier-Times reported that the Bucks County Children and Youth Social Services Agency based in Doylestown, Pa., had honored the couple for its efforts as foster parents.
The article quoted Roxanne Watkins-Hall, a placement resources supervisor for the agency, saying that, "The Broes were spotlighted because we wanted to recognize a couple who is fairly new to the program, and they've also proven to be very good foster parents." All children have been removed from the home for their safety, police said, and the girl still had small pieces of duct tape stuck to her ribs and back area when she was taken away.
All three children have been placed with other families, police said.
Colleen and Neil Broe were arraigned Wednesday before District Justice John Kelly and remanded to Bucks County Prison in lieu of $250,000 bail each.
"They call Tom DeLay "The Hammer," but do you know what he talked with Marta and [me] about the other night? Ninety percent of the table conversation [at the dinner for newly minted Congressmen] was about foster kids and all the [orphanages] around the country he is trying to set up. That's his charity. He knows what matters to the nation he serves -- and it's not winning a few House races."
Don't you just love it? A delinquent collecting welfare bennies. Hey now, some kids are really being abused, but they're the ones who don't report it because of fears of reprisals. It's the brats with the emotional and behavioral problems who set up Mom and Dad because they don't get things their own way.
As Lady Eileen reported, they're indoctrinated with this stuff at the government schools.
Parents these days are forced choose between "free" education for their kids and protecting them from state socialism.
In economic terms, the taxes wasted on socialist education are "sunk costs." One reason we keep our kids in government schools even though we know better is that we want to get something for our money. But when we take this approach we overlook just what that something is.
You will find the members of the invisible church working to do the very things that God commands. They are working to prevent this type of horrible abomination.
This distinction is useful for a many theological issues but not, in my opinion, very helpful for clarifying matters of public witness. It's similar to the die-hard Marxist, watching the changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, continuing to insist that those countries didn't practice real socialism or real communism, and so their failure doesn't mean much.
Non-believers should be able to accept, more or less at face value, the public everyday witness of the visible church rather than be asked to first accept the visible/invisible distinction.
Otherwise, all that happens is that the question simply shifts to: Why don't individual members of the invisible church, i.e. true believers, publicly rebuke, and call for the repentance of, visible church leaders who teach falsely and ignore the plight of the widows and orphans? These false teachers' sin is public; so should their rebuke be.
Some may say that invisible church members, by definition, don't have the platforms or positions that visible church members do. That's true, but surely at least some of the visible church leaders are also members of the invisible church. Thus they are not only able but also, presumably, willing to speak out for truth and justice in a public way.
That only a handful of such men is currently speaking out on the wickedness of foster care issue (and, correspondingly, on the wickness of the church for neglecting the issue) is, in my mind, extremely telling. It means that the invisible church does need to repent. Not only of this injustice but also of the equal or greater injustice of permitting the visible church to drag Christ's name in the mud with so little opposition. The real church isn't impotent, after all: "If God is for us, who can be against us?"
The conclusion of the matter, then, is that we members of the real church need to (1) repent of blaming others for our disobedience, (2) repent of that disobedience, and (3) start obeying again. If we do that, we'll quickly recapture those parts of the visible church worth saving, and God will bring destruction on the rest.
And threads like this on Free Republic will receive considerably more attention than they do presently.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.