Foster family says state kept boy’s troubled past hidden

LONGVIEW, Wash. – A foster family says they were only trying to help kids in need but in return they say the state let danger into their home.

The family says they should have been warned about their foster child’s troubled past.

According to court documents, the teenage boy grew up in harsh conditions and was a victim of abuse himself.

The state is paying nearly a half-million dollar settlement to the foster family.

The court documents say the 16-year-old boy admitted he had “sexual contact … about 30 times” with his foster mother’s 9-year-old daughter.

“We loved him,” said the foster boy’s mother whose identity is being protected by KATU News. “He was charming; he was likeable. He, nobody suspected, nobody saw this coming.”

The court documents are graphic. They reveal the boy’s biological mother was involved in “prostitution” and regularly subjected him to “adult sexuality.” There had been “15 CPS referrals, regarding being abused and neglected by his mother.”

The boy’s foster mother said she believes the state didn’t tell them about the child’s past “to make a difficult placement easier. If they’d come to me and told me, ‘Here, we have a kid who’s sexually deviant, we have a kid who’s been physically violent, I would have said, ‘hell no!’

An investigator for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services concluded “it was poor judgment not to disclose more information about (his) past.

DSHS spokesman Thomas Shapley said there’s dispute over what information about the boy’s background was withheld.

“But what we have determined is that the social worker involved in the case did not follow all the appropriate steps,” he said.

The foster mother says her daughter has “ongoing nightmares and has a lot of anxiety still. She’s afraid of seeing him in public, afraid of retaliation.”

The boy lived with the family for nearly two years until the abuse was discovered in 2006.

The social worker still works for the state and was counseled and retrained. Shapley wasn’t able to say if the social worker holds the same job.