“These siblings are extremely relieved the defendants can never do to another child what happened to them,” attorney Elan Zektser said during a briefing outside the Riverside Historic Courthouse Monday. “But now they’re asking, what’s next? Each of them truly wants to see change.”

Zektser represents two of the girls from the Turpin family, while fellow attorney Roger Booth represents four other children — all of whom were placed with Marcelino Camacho Olguin, 65, his wife, Rosa Armida Olguin, 60, and their adult daughter, Lennys Giovanna Olguin, 39, after the victims were rescued from an oft-described “house of horrors” maintained by their parents in 2018.

The Olguins reached plea deals with the D.A.’s office, and on Friday, they were sentenced.

Marcelino Olguin admitted seven counts of lewd acts on a minor and one count of false imprisonment. He received seven years in state prison and was ordered to register as a sex offender for life. His wife admitted three counts of child abuse and one count each of witness intimidation, grand theft and false imprisonment. She received four years’ felony probation. The couple’s daughter admitted three counts of child abuse and one count each of false imprisonment and witness intimidation. She received four years’ probation.

Coordinating with placement agency ChildNet, county Child Protective Services placed the six victims with the Olguins despite complaints of prior abuse in their home, according to the plaintiffs. When CPS agents were alerted to the endangerment of the Turpin children, they failed to act, according to Zektser and Booth.

“The county and ChildNet told them, `Trust us; we got you,”‘ Zektser said. “Then they placed them with child abusers and molesters. I was the head of the sexual assault unit at the (Riverside County) District Attorney’s Office, and I can tell you, prosecutors there are sick and tired of dealing with these cases from CPS.”

The county Executive Office released a statement to City News Service Monday calling the Turpin siblings’ experiences “heartbreaking.”

“We remain committed to their wellbeing and their lifelong journey of healing,” the EO stated. “We appreciate our county and community partners, who collaborate with us to support this family, and every family, with services and resources.”

Zektser said instead of removing the victims from the house to take statements from them in late 2020 and early 2021, the minors were interviewed by agents in front of the defendants, causing them to clam up. It was only when the sheriff’s detective who had investigated the victims’ parents, Tom Salisbury, learned of the abuse allegations against the Olguins that the siblings were interviewed by “professionals,” culminating in a criminal investigation and charges, the attorneys said.

“Salisbury insisted they be removed from that home (in 2021),” Booth said.

Zektser characterized the abuse inflicted by the Olguins as “far greater” than what the victims experienced from their parents.

“They were treated worse than animals,” he said. “The Olguins made them sit in circles, and they would tell them, `No one cares about you. You are nothing.”‘

The attorneys’ consolidated civil complaint recited the following additional acts: “making the plaintiffs sit by themselves, sometimes outside, for many hours at a time”; “making plaintiffs recount, in detail, the horrors that they had experienced while living with their parents”; “verbally abusing plaintiffs, cursing at them, and telling them that they were worthless and should commit suicide”; “forcing them to eat until they began to vomit,” then compelling them “to eat their own vomit.”

Marcelino Olguin also repeatedly groped and kissed two of the girls. Money that was intended for the plaintiffs was sometimes pocketed by the defendants, the attorneys said.

Zektser said while his and Booth’s clients are “content with what happened” in the Olguins’ case, “they are continuously asking what the county is going to do.”

The attorneys said they hoped reforms to the foster care system proposed by former federal Judge Stephen Larson and the county Grand Jury in 2022 would net results.

“Things happen that you don’t know about,” Booth said. “Much of what happens in the system is shrouded in secrecy. There are lots of children being subjected to abuse, and no one knows about it.”

Zektser said if his clients, whose parental mistreatment gained international attention, can end up in conditions like those they encountered in the Olguin home, there’s “a bigger issue” that warrants resolution for the good of all minors in foster care.

“Money changes things,” the attorney said. “We are seeking a confidential amount. These now-young adults, our clients, need help. This (lawsuit) will also hopefully change how these agencies do business.”

A settlement conference is set for January. If there’s no pretrial agreement, the attorneys said they’ll be ready for trial.

County spokeswoman Brooke Federico said ChildNet is no longer utilized by the Department of Public Social Services.

“DPSS continues to address existing placement gaps and expand safe, available placements,” she said. “The county is dedicated to continuous quality improvement, and we are constantly reviewing our practices, procedures and policies. We have implemented many of the Larson report’s recommendations and are in the process of implementing several more.”

Only one of the 13 Turpin children, a girl who’s now 8 years old, remains in foster care. The others are in college, trying to procure employment and find paths forward, Zektser and Booth said.

District Attorney Mike Hestrin and the Larson report acknowledged the Turpin siblings had received some funds from hundreds of thousands of dollars in charitable donations made after they were liberated from their parents’ Muir Woods Road residence. How much of that money remains available has not been divulged.

The victims’ parents, David Turpin, 61, and Louise Turpin, 54, were each sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison in 2019 after admitting child cruelty charges.

They kept some of their children restrained most times of the day, forced them to subsist on peanut butter sandwiches and burritos, made them sleep up to 20 hours daily, and allowed them to shower only once a year. There was also physical abuse that resulted in injuries.

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SEATTLE (AP) — Leroy Pascubillo missed his daughter’s first step, her first word and countless other precious milestones. After being born addicted to heroin, she had been placed with a foster family, and he anxiously counted the days between their visits as he tried to regain custody. But because of the pandemic, the visits dwindled and went virtual, and all he could do was watch his daughter — too young to engage via computer — try to crawl through the screen.

They are among thousands of families across the country whose reunifications have been snarled in the foster care system as courts delayed cases, went virtual or temporarily shut down, according to an Associated Press analysis of child welfare data from 34 states.

The decrease in children leaving foster care means families are lingering longer in a system intended to be temporary, as critical services were shuttered or limited. Vulnerable families are suffering long-term and perhaps irreversible damage, experts say, which could leave parents with weakened bonds with their children.

The AP’s analysis found at least 8,700 fewer reunifications during the early months of the pandemic compared with the March-to-December period the year before — a decrease of 16%. Adoptions, too, dropped — by 23%, according to the analysis. Overall, at least 22,600 fewer children left foster care compared with 2019.

“Everybody needed extra help, and nobody was getting extra help,” said Shawn Powell, a Parents for Parents advocacy program coordinator in King County, Washington.

For months, King County, like many parts of the country, suspended nearly all hearings except emergency orders, which led to prioritizing child removals — sparked by child welfare reports or other red flags — over family reunifications. Adoptions slowed to a trickle. Services needed for reunification — psychiatric evaluations, random drug testing, group therapy, mental health counseling, housing assistance, and the public transportation to access these services — also were limited.

For foster care children, even doctor’s appointments must be approved by a judge, and frustrated lawyers say matters as routine as that were affected.

During the period examined in AP’s analysis, the total foster care population dropped 2% overall — likely a result of the significant decrease in child abuse and neglect reports, where the process to remove a child from a home typically begins.

National data show that the average stay in foster care is about 20 months, which means the children most affected during the early months of the pandemic were those in the foster care system long before the pandemic.

Those in foster care are disproportionately children of color and from poor families, national data also show. Those groups tend to have more contact with social service agencies that are mandated to report potential abuse and neglect, which means the pandemic has amplified not just the challenges of poor parenting but of parenting while poor.

“The systemic problems around racism and poverty in COVID and how people are treated in the child welfare system may be compounding,” said Sharon Vandivere of the national think tank group Child Trends, who noted that longer stays in foster care are inherently traumatic and make reunifications less likely. “It was bad before, and it’s probably made it even worse.”

For D.Y., a Black teenager living at a Seattle-area group home, the pandemic has magnified the loneliness and isolation of being in the care of child protective services. He’s been out of his mother’s custody since 2016, after an abuse report found she physically disciplined her children. He had visits with her in the years following, and lawyers expected his mom would regain custody and D.Y. could go home in the fall of 2020. Then the pandemic hit and rocked his case and life.

Because of new COVID-19 protocols and staffing shortages, already-limited privileges at the institutional group home were scaled back or revoked. In-person visits with his mom ended. Group activities all but disappeared. Inside, he resented wearing a mask and washing his hands constantly. With each exposure scare in the living facility, he and others had to quarantine.

When he resumed in-person school, he hoped officials would find it safe to see his mom again, too — but that didn’t happen for months. He watched helplessly as his sister – who was placed with relatives and had a case further along in the system when the pandemic began – was returned home to their mom last summer. D.Y. was happy for them, but he wants the same: to taste his mom’s cooking, to make eggs in his own kitchen, to sit on the couch with his family with no masks.

“I still want her to baby me,” the 13-year-old boy said of his mother, who declined to comment for this story while the cases of D.Y. and her third child remain active. “I can tell she has high faith of when I’ll come home. I don’t know if it’s going to happen anymore.”

The AP is not naming D.Y., instead referring to him by the initials used in his lawsuit against the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families. The lawsuit accuses the state of providing inadequate care as D.Y. was bounced through 50 placements before the pandemic, some days housing him in a motel or the agency’s office building. The state declined to comment on his case and lawsuit.

But Frank Ordway, chief of staff at the state’s child welfare agency, blamed the court system’s closures for the drop in reunifications and implored those that still haven’t fully reopened to prioritize cases like D.Y.’s.

“When those systems aren’t working, those families and those children are left in limbo,” Ordway said. “Our job as an agency is to help keep those families together and to get them together. Not being able to do so because of the pandemic was a wrenching experience.”

King County Superior Court Commissioner Nicole Wagner, a presiding judge in the family court system, said court staff, attorneys, social workers and counselors did their best, but that no one knew how to address unprecedented issues in the pandemic. For example, she said, she wanted in-person visits for children but couldn’t order social workers with underlying conditions to monitor them when required by law.

Wagner said she hopes lessons from the pandemic will help redefine how the system supports already struggling families in the process of reunification.

“It’s scary, it’s overwhelming, it’s frightening. And it’s about the most important things in your life: your children,” Wagner said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the pandemic absolutely, 100% has disproportionately impacted the more vulnerable populations.”

Illinois was the only state that kept apace on its foster care exits. Others in AP’s analysis acknowledged a significant drop but said that each foster care case has unique circumstances beneath the numbers.

Many states, for example, extended its support to those on the cusp of aging out of state care during the pandemic. This policy change effectively protected foster care youths from being kicked out of their living arrangements if they still needed a place to stay, but it also affected the number of foster care exits.

Connecticut — which had one of the largest drops in exits, at 36% — waited until May 2021 to fully return to in-person visits, which serve as a key metric to judge whether parents are prepared to regain care and custody of their children.

The state “never stopped serving children and families, and we found that conducting some of our work virtually is both more efficient and, in some cases, preferred by our clients,” a Connecticut Department of Children and Families spokesman said in a statement.

Leroy Pascubillo, now 51, had used drugs over the course of four decades, but said he started working toward sobriety immediately after his daughter’s birth in February 2019.

The court put him in the only drug rehab center in the Seattle area that allows children to stay on site with their fathers. He had a few in-person visits with his daughter each week, and he was told that if he got through the initial stages of the program, she could join him there in March 2020 while he completed treatment. The pandemic upended that plan.

“You start building that relationship, and then it’s taken away and you try to start it all over again,” he said. All the more painful was that he knew his daughter, now 2, also had no contact with her mother. Pascubillo said she hasn’t participated in the custody case, and she couldn’t be reached by the AP.

Once courts began to hear existing cases again, Pascubillo was able to reunite with his daughter, complete rehab and land a Seattle apartment with the help of state and nonprofit services. He wants to work as a parent advocate to help other fathers find their way back to their kids. He still weeps over the time he’s lost and the four-month delay in reuniting with his daughter.

“It felt like 40 years. I figured she would have forgotten me. But as soon as I looked at her and sang ‘baby, baby, baby,’ she started kicking like she was in the womb,” Pascubillo said. “We have this bond.”

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The U.S. foster care system has been plagued with challenges for more than a decade, with the number of children in the system due to parental drug use more than doubling since 2000.

The downstream effects of the opioid crisis on children cannot be overstated. Yet, while the particular impact of the epidemic on the foster care system has received some attention, the interplay between the two is not well-understood. Now, layer on yet another test for vulnerable children and their parents: a global pandemic.

Recently, the foster care system was beginning to show glimmers of progress. The number of children entering care and the number in the system dropped by 3,788, to 437,283 in the 2018 fiscal year, down from the 441,071 in the fiscal year prior, according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS).

Additionally, a “record number of children” were adopted from foster care, according to the Pew Research Center, with the share of children leaving foster care for adoptive homes rising from 21% to 25% from fiscal year 2014 to 2018.

That was before the pandemic.

As the coronavirus swept through the country and stay at home policies inflicted a different kind of pain — financial, psychological and emotional — those struggling with addiction may have succumbed, leading to a surge of suspected overdoses. While temporarily clouded by all- consuming concerns over the virus, these problems will almost certainly affect children’s well-being and could lead to more challenges for the child welfare system.

Child abuse is also a rising concern.

The volume of calls for domestic violence against children has fallen in some states, which at first-glance appears to be a win. But calls resulting in emergency department visits are going up, according to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Fewer but more severe calls indicate a hidden epidemic of violence during stay-at-home orders.

The drop in call rates is likely due to children going unseen by police officers, lawyers, doctors and, overwhelmingly, teachers — who made 21% of the 4.3 million referrals in 2018, according to federal data.

Our project for the 2020 National Fellowship will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related stay-at-home orders on children and young adults in the foster care system, with special attention to their physical, emotional and psychological well-being, and the potential to create or worsen adverse childhood experiences.

Children’s advocates, pediatricians and other experts worry that there may not be enough families willing to take children in, given the continued risk of infection. Older adults and families with immunocompromised members, especially, are unlikely to take in children at the same rate as they were pre-pandemic.

And for biological parents, court closures in states with the most stringent lockdown measures paused all “nonessential” filings for a time, creating a backlog of cases. Also delayed are reunification visits, which one expert characterized as “the single most important factor related to whether the child remains in out-of-home care,” in a briefing conducted by Families For Our Children.

Even agencies that allow in-person reunification visits do so with social distancing measures in place, which could leave children feeling ignored or rejected.

In certain other states, stay-at-home measures can isolate these families from many of the resources for foster parents that help them support foster children. Programs like partial hospitalization for children with serious behavioral health needs and community mentoring programs — which would typically help foster children by teaching them coping mechanisms and giving foster parents a chance for respite — have been disrupted by the pandemic. Even obtaining food, prescription drugs and basic supplies like diapers puts foster parents at risk of exposure.

Despite all of the problems with the foster care system, many young adults turning 21 during the pandemic want to remain inside the system, as exiting risks losing a vital connection to any sort of support and stability. In one of the largest studies to track outcomes of youth who age out of foster care, between 31% and 46% were homeless at least once by age 26.

More than half of the states in the country have gained approval for federal funding to enact extended foster care programs, including transitional living programs, for youth ages 18-21, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

But many do not have leeway for aging out kids, and advocates are asking for this age group to be able to reenter with as few restrictions as possible during the public health emergency.

Our project will zero in on the wave of challenges children in foster care face, from enforced social distance visits to delayed reunification, to aging-out at a time when the support of a foster family and service providers is critical.

We also plan to spotlight the unique challenges for foster parents who are seniors or grandparents caring for young children and adolescents at a time when most public health experts have warned them to isolate, even from family.

These are the stories we plan to tell, but we don’t yet know our own “blind spots” and are committed to hearing the untold stories and unseen challenges from sources in these communities that may influence or completely redirect our path.

-Elizabeth Hlavinka and Shannon Firth

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