Last month, 2-year-old Timothy Dodge Jr. and his baby sister Serenity were taken from their parents’ Adams County apartment and placed in foster care for their safety.
Now police are investigating whether Timothy was physically abused and badly hurt in state custody. In a foster home supervised by a private agency with a long history of regulatory trouble, he suffered a severe head injury that left a blood clot on his young brain.
For two weeks, Timothy has been a patient at Children’s Hospital in Denver, where his parents say that to relieve swelling in his brain, doctors temporarily removed a section of his skull.
The parents also say child protection workers falsely accused them of using methamphetamine before taking their kids, and ignored complaints from them that their children were abused in foster care.
“He’s never going to have a regular childhood now,” said the toddler’s father, Timothy Dodge Sr. “It’s going to be years and years till we can actually tell what kind of damage has been caused.”
Timothy’s battle for survival raises new questions about Colorado’s foster-care system and the safety of children within it.
Colorado operates a two-tiered system, with some foster homes licensed and supervised by county agencies and others supervised by private child-placement agencies licensed by the state.
Although Timothy and his sister lived in Adams County, they were placed two counties away in a Douglas County foster home certified by the private Maple Star Colorado child-placement agency.
Four years ago, a Denver Post series on foster care identified Maple Star as an agency with a lengthy list of regulatory violations and critical incidents, including sexual abuse of children in its foster homes. A subsequent state investigation found Maple Star needed to improve foster-home quality studies, health and safety inspections and background checks on foster parents.
Timothy is also the fourth Adams County child in five years who has died or nearly died in a foster home supervised by a private child-placement agency.
In 1999, Miguel Arias-Baca was killed in an All About Kids home by a foster father who was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 2000, Jimmy Wood died of an apparent drug overdose in a Community Care home, and Mollie Gonzalez died five days later of a drug overdose in a Synthesis home.
Debi Grebenik, Maple Star’s executive director, declined to comment on the incident that injured Timothy.
She said, however, that Maple Star’s network of about 90 homes and 180 foster children in Colorado has greatly improved its compliance with state regulations in the last four years.
“Absolutely,” she said. “All you have to do is look at the state audits of our programs.”
Michael Gallegos, manager of the Colorado Department of Human Services office that oversees child-placement agencies, agreed that Maple Star has changed significantly.
Grebenik led “a drastic turnaround, and they did improve,” he said.
But he also confirmed that there had been five allegations of problems at the Douglas County foster home where Timothy was injured. The state was aware of only three, he said, because two others were screened out at the county level.
Donald Cassata, Adams County’s social services director, declined to comment directly on Timothy’s case.
But he said he wished his county had enough foster homes to avoid out-of-county placements with other agencies.
“From a practical point of view, we would like to have all of our foster children placed in Adams County,” he said.
Adams County child-protection records, provided by Timothy’s paternal grandmother, show that different caseworkers reached different conclusions about the risks he and his sister faced in their parents’ home.
In November, caseworkers received a referral on Timothy and his 1-year-old sister that alleged “police have been to the home a lot responding to loud voices, things breaking and the children crying.”
The November visits noted missing doors, holes in the walls, a messy home and a previous domestic violence incident, “but no safety hazards were observed,” a social-services court petition noted. The parents “both agreed that they might benefit from counseling.”
Those visits did not result in the children’s removal. But in January, a new caseworker drew a much grimmer picture of the home where Timothy and Serenity lived.
She wrote that children were allowed to plug in and unplug electrical devices, carpentry tools were accessible to them, many doors were off hinges, many holes were in the walls, and “there is also a tremendous amount of clutter and filth in the house.”
She also reported that the children “exhibited the worst behavior this writer has ever witnessed for this age group.”
The caseworker described the parents as illogical, hyperactive and showing “dilated pupils and dark circles under their eyes” during the visit. “Suspected methamphetamine use by both parents is also a grave concern,” she wrote.
In interviews, the parents denied using methamphetamines and called the report a grossly exaggerated account written by a caseworker after a single one-hour visit. Mother Misty Anderson produced a subsequent lab report showing she had tested negative for amphetamines.
“I’ve never had a drug history, nor will I,” she said.
However, she and Dodge acknowledged they have occasionally smoked marijuana. “Usually just when the kids are gone to Grandma’s, just kicking back at home,” he said.
He called their children happy and loved and denied that the home environment was unsafe.
Dodge said he has a hyperactivity disorder, not a methamphetamine habit. “The problem is they (social services) had no way of supporting these accusations,” he said. “Both of us are security guards. They do background checks and everything else.”
With a judge’s consent, Adams County placed Timothy and Serenity in foster care. They were taken to the Castle Rock home of a couple certified as foster parents by Maple Star.
The foster father said he and his wife would not discuss Timothy’s case. He referred questions to a lawyer who could not be reached over the weekend for comment.
The biological parents say they complained after their first visit with their children two weeks later that they saw signs of abuse.
“I have never seen my children so hungry in my life,” Anderson objected in a handwritten letter to social services, and “my son had a big bruise on his cheek and was not even saying words and sentences like he has been for the last year.”
On Feb. 2, three-and-a-half weeks after he was placed in foster care, Timothy was flown to Children’s Hospital with a head injury.
According to a report filed with the state, he “apparently fell and hit his head on a nightstand. Foster mother found him sitting on a floor” and saw no injuries. But as she took him downstairs, she noticed that “he began to get weaker, his eyes were closing, and that he was going limp.”
Vern Myers, a Castle Rock police detective, said in an interview that doctors found “a severe subdural hematoma,” a head injury “obviously far more severe than a fall off a bed.”
Timothy’s injury “is not consistent with a fall off a bed or a nightstand,” he said. “We’re treating it as obviously suspicious, and we’re investigating possible child abuse.”
Timothy’s mother and Dee Contreras, his paternal grandmother, say the surgery that saved his life left a huge C-shaped scar across the top and right side of his head. They say he will need a second operation to replace the missing section of his skull, and they expect he will be in the hospital on his third birthday next week. His sister was moved to a different foster home.
Citing patient confidentiality, the hospital declined to comment on the case.
To his relatives’ relief, Timothy has begun to walk and talk again. One day last week, his mother and grandmother say he told them this: “I got in a fight. I got an owie.”
