DeclinetoState
02-11-2006, 12:33 PM
This will make your blood boil.
Grr!
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>Ma who starved adopted kids to dine on prison food
</TD></TR><TR><TD>STAFF AND NEWS SERVICE REPORTS
</TD></TR><TR><TD><!-- Component: NYDailyNews : component/story/picture.comp --><TABLE cellSpacing=10 cellPadding=0 width=50 align=right border=0><TBODY></TBODY></TABLE><!-- Component: NYDailyNews : component/story/picture.comp -->CAMDEN, N.J. — Four boys whose adoptive mother withheld food from them told a judge Friday about a childhood she wrecked by not taking them to a doctor, serving them only water for dinner sometimes, not letting them play outside and even not letting them bathe.
All four boys, now thin but no longer the gaunt figures they were in pictures made public when their plight was discovered more than two years ago, appeared in the courtroom to see Vanessa Jackson sentenced to seven years in state prison. She could be eligible for parole in about two years. Vanessa Jackson sat motionless throughout the 2-1/2-hour court proceeding and chose not to speak. It was the first time in the boys’ ordeal that they have appeared in public.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/390456p-331234c.html
Another take on the story (from a couple of years ago, when it first came out):
Hell House Revisited
Vanessa and Ray Jackson are being prosecuted for starving their adoptive sons. But the kids may have starved themselves—as the state of New Jersey looked on and did nothing.
A few weeks ago, Raymond and Vanessa Jackson—the New Jersey couple accused of starving their four adoptive sons—received a plump envelope from the state’s Division of Youth and Family Services. The Jacksons are used to such communiqués. The state is seeking to terminate their adoption rights over the four boys; it has also removed two adopted girls and a foster daughter from their large home in Collingswood, a comfortable village near Camden. But the envelope contained none of the now-familiar legal notices or court filings. Instead, the Jacksons found four handmade greeting cards forwarded from Keziah, 13, one of their adopted girls now living with a foster family. The cards marked events long past: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, an anniversary, and a birthday. It’s been more than a year since the Jacksons have seen Keziah, whom they adopted when she was less than a week old. As a condition of bail, a judge ordered them not to communicate with any of the children or come within 500 yards. It had taken the state this long to forward Keziah’s greetings.
<!--begin paragraph-->
“We couldn’t answer the letters, because of the restraining order,” Raymond Jackson told me earlier this month, going public for the first time since the couple’s legal odyssey began. “She has no idea how much these meant to us.” He reached for the envelopes, which were festooned with heart-shaped stickers and girlish affirmations like MISS YOU! and SUPER PARENTS!
<!--begin paragraph-->
“She wrote, ‘Have a good Father’s Day without me. Don’t worry too much about me, I’m doing great,’ ” Jackson read out loud, his voice breaking noticeably. “ ‘I still love you very much. Sometimes I cry about you. Hugs and kisses, Keziah.’ ” He reached for another card, on which Keziah had written, “I still love you very much, no matter what happens—I love you till the day I die.”
<!--begin paragraph-->
Keziah’s package has arrived at an especially charged moment. Indeed, in the next few weeks, a family-court judge is expected to sever parental rights over the adopted children. And sometime next year, the Jacksons will stand trial on 28 counts of assault and child endangerment. They could spend the rest of their lives in prison.
<!--begin paragraph-->
The star witness against them will be their oldest adopted boy, Bruce, who launched the Jacksons into tabloid infamy last year when he slipped out of the family home on a late-night mission to scavenge food from neighborhood trash bins. He was disoriented, shoeless, cold, and extremely malnourished. At the time, Bruce Jackson was 19 years old, but no one knew it to look at him. When Collingswood police officers arrived on the scene, they estimated he was 7 years old; he stood only four feet tall, and once they took him to a local hospital, they learned he weighed all of 45 pounds. Later, when police arrived at the Jackson household, they found three other stunted and scrawny boys. The combined weight of all four—Bruce; Keith, 14; Tyrone, 10; and Michael, 9—was just 136 pounds, about as much as a full-grown Rottweiler. Some had head lice and badly rotting teeth.
<!--begin paragraph-->
As investigators looked more deeply into the Jackson home, the pattern of maltreatment appeared to take on a malicious cast. Everybody else in the very crowded, Evangelical household was obviously well-fed, in some cases even overweight. State officials soon surmised that this was a gruesome, Cinderella-like story: In a scheme to bilk adoption subsidies, the adopted boys were being systematically deprived. “This is the most horrible, most significant child-abuse case we’ve ever had,” Camden County prosecutor Vincent Sarubbi said this summer when he announced the indictments. The parents argued that the boys suffered from eating disorders that kept them from developing properly, but the media discounted that scenario in favor of the more lurid, and seemingly more empirical, one of perverse parental neglect. After a reporter for the New York Post peered into the disheveled Jackson home, a headline writer there delivered the bywords that have stuck to the case ever since: INSIDE HELL HOUSE. Even the usually sober New York Times jumped right past journalistic convention, confidently bypassing “allegedly” to assert in an editorial that the four Jackson boys “had been systematically starved by their adoptive parents over a period of years.”
<!--end paragraph-->State inspectors hailed the Jacksons as accomplished foster parents who were “doing an excellent job”and providing a “nurturing, stable environment.”
But if this were so, why would an adoptive daughter—also deemed a “neglected child” in the indictment because of conditions in the home—still think of the Jacksons as “super parents”? It could be a vicarious instance of Stockholm syndrome—unwarranted emotional identification with her brothers’ captors and tormentors. Or the 13-year-old might have been party to the Jacksons’ alleged scam, blissfully gorging herself as her brothers starved.
<!--begin paragraph-->
But a sustained look at the Jackson case suggests that the parents’ initial explanation of events—and Keziah’s portrait of the mood within the family—may be closer to the truth.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/10425/
:blah: :blah: :blah:
Blame the victims.
I believe the mother pleaded guilty, but may only serve a minimum of two years. (The seven-year sentence is the maximum amount of time she could serve in the pokey.)
Grr!
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>Ma who starved adopted kids to dine on prison food
</TD></TR><TR><TD>STAFF AND NEWS SERVICE REPORTS
</TD></TR><TR><TD><!-- Component: NYDailyNews : component/story/picture.comp --><TABLE cellSpacing=10 cellPadding=0 width=50 align=right border=0><TBODY></TBODY></TABLE><!-- Component: NYDailyNews : component/story/picture.comp -->CAMDEN, N.J. — Four boys whose adoptive mother withheld food from them told a judge Friday about a childhood she wrecked by not taking them to a doctor, serving them only water for dinner sometimes, not letting them play outside and even not letting them bathe.
All four boys, now thin but no longer the gaunt figures they were in pictures made public when their plight was discovered more than two years ago, appeared in the courtroom to see Vanessa Jackson sentenced to seven years in state prison. She could be eligible for parole in about two years. Vanessa Jackson sat motionless throughout the 2-1/2-hour court proceeding and chose not to speak. It was the first time in the boys’ ordeal that they have appeared in public.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/390456p-331234c.html
Another take on the story (from a couple of years ago, when it first came out):
Hell House Revisited
Vanessa and Ray Jackson are being prosecuted for starving their adoptive sons. But the kids may have starved themselves—as the state of New Jersey looked on and did nothing.
A few weeks ago, Raymond and Vanessa Jackson—the New Jersey couple accused of starving their four adoptive sons—received a plump envelope from the state’s Division of Youth and Family Services. The Jacksons are used to such communiqués. The state is seeking to terminate their adoption rights over the four boys; it has also removed two adopted girls and a foster daughter from their large home in Collingswood, a comfortable village near Camden. But the envelope contained none of the now-familiar legal notices or court filings. Instead, the Jacksons found four handmade greeting cards forwarded from Keziah, 13, one of their adopted girls now living with a foster family. The cards marked events long past: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, an anniversary, and a birthday. It’s been more than a year since the Jacksons have seen Keziah, whom they adopted when she was less than a week old. As a condition of bail, a judge ordered them not to communicate with any of the children or come within 500 yards. It had taken the state this long to forward Keziah’s greetings.
<!--begin paragraph-->
“We couldn’t answer the letters, because of the restraining order,” Raymond Jackson told me earlier this month, going public for the first time since the couple’s legal odyssey began. “She has no idea how much these meant to us.” He reached for the envelopes, which were festooned with heart-shaped stickers and girlish affirmations like MISS YOU! and SUPER PARENTS!
<!--begin paragraph-->
“She wrote, ‘Have a good Father’s Day without me. Don’t worry too much about me, I’m doing great,’ ” Jackson read out loud, his voice breaking noticeably. “ ‘I still love you very much. Sometimes I cry about you. Hugs and kisses, Keziah.’ ” He reached for another card, on which Keziah had written, “I still love you very much, no matter what happens—I love you till the day I die.”
<!--begin paragraph-->
Keziah’s package has arrived at an especially charged moment. Indeed, in the next few weeks, a family-court judge is expected to sever parental rights over the adopted children. And sometime next year, the Jacksons will stand trial on 28 counts of assault and child endangerment. They could spend the rest of their lives in prison.
<!--begin paragraph-->
The star witness against them will be their oldest adopted boy, Bruce, who launched the Jacksons into tabloid infamy last year when he slipped out of the family home on a late-night mission to scavenge food from neighborhood trash bins. He was disoriented, shoeless, cold, and extremely malnourished. At the time, Bruce Jackson was 19 years old, but no one knew it to look at him. When Collingswood police officers arrived on the scene, they estimated he was 7 years old; he stood only four feet tall, and once they took him to a local hospital, they learned he weighed all of 45 pounds. Later, when police arrived at the Jackson household, they found three other stunted and scrawny boys. The combined weight of all four—Bruce; Keith, 14; Tyrone, 10; and Michael, 9—was just 136 pounds, about as much as a full-grown Rottweiler. Some had head lice and badly rotting teeth.
<!--begin paragraph-->
As investigators looked more deeply into the Jackson home, the pattern of maltreatment appeared to take on a malicious cast. Everybody else in the very crowded, Evangelical household was obviously well-fed, in some cases even overweight. State officials soon surmised that this was a gruesome, Cinderella-like story: In a scheme to bilk adoption subsidies, the adopted boys were being systematically deprived. “This is the most horrible, most significant child-abuse case we’ve ever had,” Camden County prosecutor Vincent Sarubbi said this summer when he announced the indictments. The parents argued that the boys suffered from eating disorders that kept them from developing properly, but the media discounted that scenario in favor of the more lurid, and seemingly more empirical, one of perverse parental neglect. After a reporter for the New York Post peered into the disheveled Jackson home, a headline writer there delivered the bywords that have stuck to the case ever since: INSIDE HELL HOUSE. Even the usually sober New York Times jumped right past journalistic convention, confidently bypassing “allegedly” to assert in an editorial that the four Jackson boys “had been systematically starved by their adoptive parents over a period of years.”
<!--end paragraph-->State inspectors hailed the Jacksons as accomplished foster parents who were “doing an excellent job”and providing a “nurturing, stable environment.”
But if this were so, why would an adoptive daughter—also deemed a “neglected child” in the indictment because of conditions in the home—still think of the Jacksons as “super parents”? It could be a vicarious instance of Stockholm syndrome—unwarranted emotional identification with her brothers’ captors and tormentors. Or the 13-year-old might have been party to the Jacksons’ alleged scam, blissfully gorging herself as her brothers starved.
<!--begin paragraph-->
But a sustained look at the Jackson case suggests that the parents’ initial explanation of events—and Keziah’s portrait of the mood within the family—may be closer to the truth.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/10425/
:blah: :blah: :blah:
Blame the victims.
I believe the mother pleaded guilty, but may only serve a minimum of two years. (The seven-year sentence is the maximum amount of time she could serve in the pokey.)