Children at Bunker Hill Elementary School play at recess on the playground. Ina Rose attended the school until June 2004. The following year, the 8-year-old who was abused was kept out of school away from teachers who had been concerned about her well-being. World Photo by Lou Sennick

It was Monday, June 13.

Samantha Haskinson and John Berven were sentenced in Coos County Circuit Court to 12 years in state prison for the torture and starvation of 8-year-old Ina Rose.

Berven and Haskinson’s sentences also included prison time for the medical neglect of their three other children, ages 4, 2 and 1.

At the time Ina Rose was taken into state protective custody on March 4, she weighed 31 pounds. She survived cruel treatment at the hands of Haskinson and Berven, who initially had been charged with attempted murder prior to a plea bargain. She was placed in a foster home able to care for a medically sensitive child.

An arrest warrant affidavit and comments in court by Coos County Assistant District Attorney Colleen Cerda told of Ina Rose’s story before her rescue. She was locked away in a trailer with feces and trash on the floor. She slept on a bathroom floor. She wasn’t allowed to eat with the family. While they ate, she was forced to sit in a chair and stare at the wall. They stuffed rags in her mouth, with duct tape wrapped around her head. There were ants, and Ina Rose’s legs were red with insect bites.

Ina Rose attended area schools at times in kindergarten and first grade, last at Bunker Hill Elementary School through June 2004. But, Cerda said in court, Ina Rose didn’t return after a teacher confronted the family about why the girl didn’t have shoes or underwear.

During sentencing, Cerda told people assembled in the courtroom, including family members and former grand jurors, that Ina Rose had to be one of the bravest little girls imaginable to point out this horror.

“No one had the nerve to report what was going on until March 1 (2005).” Cerda said.

But that’s not true.

Who knew?

While she has been protected from the proceedings, Ina Rose has been pulled down a long, legal trail. It has meandered through the Coos County courts and public assistance system since long before March.

The state Child Welfare department officially opened its case into the abuse of Ina Rose on March 1, 2005, according to state officials and agency records. That day, Haskinson’s brother, Thomas, called the agency.

The following day, Child Welfare caseworker Deb Keeler and Coos County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert VanZelf knocked on the door to the family’s trailer in Greenacres. Tommy Haskinson had called because he was worried about all of the Berven children, particularly Ina Rose. He said she was usually naked and not allowed to go outside. He said they treated her worse than they treated their dog.

Two days later, when authorities found Ina Rose, she was taken to Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay. She was bruised. Her hair was falling out, her teeth rotting. She was suffering from bone problems and malnutrition. She weighed 31 pounds, which was how much she weighed in February 2002.

But public officials knew Ina Rose needed help 10 months before Tommy Haskinson’s phone call.

According to public records obtained from the Coos Bay School District, Bunker Hill Elementary School officials contacted and met with Haskinson and Berven and Child Welfare workers on April 8, 2004. They expected a Child Welfare caseworker to stay involved.

The plan

Bunker Hill Principal David Laird, who has since retired, and kindergarten teacher Cindy George were there, as was a Child Welfare caseworker/screener and department facilitator.

Together, out of the family decision meeting, they came up with a plan. There even was a case number written on it.

The purpose of the plan was to provide “for the safety, attachment and welfare needs needing to be met,” according to the document.

The child’s name was smudged out on the paperwork. But at the time, Ina Rose was the only child in the Berven household old enough to attend school. District records indicated Ina Rose was a student at Bunker Hill.

The adults attending the meeting signed the plan. The two-page document said Ina Rose needed help with being picked on at school, she needed to go to school regularly, she needed contact with her real mother and to have an understanding of family relationships.

The plan also said Ina Rose “is having issues with food that may need to be addressed — hording, finding food, storing.”

It was that one-sentence entry that Haskinson’s attorney, Jesse Coggins, brought up in court, when he was asking the judge for leniency in sentencing his client. In an interview after Haskinson’s sentencing, Coggins said since the agency was aware of Ina Rose’s problems in March 2004, he wanted to know why they didn’t do anything then.

“It is my belief that there’s a lot of agency activity that’s not documented,” Coggins said of the agency.

Paperwork trail

In mid-September, following public records requests from The World that were sent to the Coos Bay Department of Human Services office and ultimately to the Oregon Attorney General’s Office, the agency released about 250 pages of documents. The Family Decision Meeting plan wasn’t included.

The information was erased on many documents other than dates, names and memo headings. The state indicated that was due to the medical records privacy law and state statutes.

All of the records were dated from March 4, 2005, forward.

The agency offered scant comment on why there were no records prior to the day a Coos County Sheriff’s deputy found Ina Rose in a car during a traffic stop. A letter from Child Welfare’s Nancylee Stewart for Coos and Curry counties did say the criminal cases against Berven and Haskinson were filed in March 2005, therefore any prior records were considered outside the scope of the public record request.

While it’s unclear what records the agency might have on the case, clearly, school officials expected caseworker involvement.

The plan the agency helped develop in 2004 specified each party’s responsibilities.

In part, it said the Berven family needed to enroll the child in counseling and take Ina Rose to a doctor within 30 days. The school needed to pursue an educational evaluation of the student. And Berven needed to provide address information, a birth certificate and somehow establish records showing who had parental custody of Ina Rose. He was not her biological father, but he apparently had legal custody since at least February 2002.

The plan did not list any responsibilities for Child Welfare, but the agency is supposed to monitor such plans.

According to Stewart’s letter, family or team decision meetings are for collaboration to protect children and support families in crisis. A team looks at a family’s needs and strengths and links them with resources. The team also explores placement options for the child and develops the plan, with immediate safety and follow-up measures.

On May 18, 2004, Principal David Laird wrote the following update note on the Berven-Haskinson family: “Children Services not doing anything more — marginal involvement at best. They did family ... plan but had no plans to monitor or involve themselves. Juliana will refer to Safety Net.”

It appears that never happened.

According to Stewart’s letter, “We have no information regarding whether the parents were referred to Safety Net.” The program, which was discontinued this fall, was designed to link families with at-risk children to services to help them before there was irreversible damage.

On May 19, Laird sent out a memo to Ina Rose’s two teachers and other school officials, saying he had spoken with Haskinson. The family was planning to go to the doctor in June. It mentioned that Haskinson said Ina Rose was complaining about her treatment by school officials. He asked them to be careful about protecting the child’s feelings. And, he wrote that Child Welfare was not monitoring the case, “which was a surprise to me.”

The School District provided one other document.

It was a letter from Principal Laird, dated June 13, 2004. He wrote that the school was undecided about moving the child up a grade, because of attendance issues. Her other teacher, Penny Morgan, recommended the child be held back and that the parents had not been involved in all of the discussions. He suggested that when the child registered for school in the fall of 2004, a team meet with the parents to discuss the decision.

Ina Rose never showed up for school that September, according to School District records. In October 2004, paperwork was filed to enroll Ina Rose in homeschooling with the South Coast Education Service District, according to that agency’s records.

Intuition

Knowing when a child is being abused can be difficult. Knowing when to call Child Welfare officials is even tougher.

But talk to teachers and school nurses and almost unanimously they will say their intuition tells them when something is wrong.

“A lot of times ... you need a child to disclose what happened,” said Robin Loper, who’s been a nurse for 25 years, 15 of those with the St. Helens School District near Portland.

Loper, who helps train people in identifying and reporting child abuse, said she encourages teachers and other mandatory child-abuse reporters to make those calls. They can’t let nagging fears stop them — that no one will act or things will get worse.

“To take matters into our own hands and not report, it’s not only ridiculous, it’s illegal,” Loper said.

The challenge, she said, is acting on a report quickly and eliminating bureaucracy.

Many people often won’t take a professional’s report seriously. They want to hear the story from the child. Loper said that’s dangerous. In a school setting, that can mean a child might have to tell a story several times before it gets to a Child Welfare caseworker. By then, a story may have changed dramatically, and a child may feel intimated and in trouble.

“If the child trusts you enough to tell you they were abused, that child should not have to tell someone again,” Loper said.

Licensed Clinical Social Worker Karen Phifer, of Cares Northwest in Portland, agrees that people have to trust the child welfare system and make those calls. In training sessions, she encourages medical workers and others to seek out partners.

“The ones that are really good at what they do, you’re going to have to glom onto them to trust in the system,” she said.

While Loper had no connection to Ina Rose’s case, she said such cases are perplexing. As with any child abuse case, there often are many people who know but never tell child protective workers.

“Everybody wants to point fingers, but how many other people saw this emaciated child?” she asked.

It’s not a perfect system, she added. But it’s the only system communities have.

Living in the system

Once children are taken into protective custody, they are placed in foster homes. At that point, the state is to decide whether to work with families to return children or, in some cases, find families to adopt them.

In juvenile court, both federal and state statutes mandate preference be given to return or reunite children with their legal parents, according to attorney Julie McFarlane, with Juvenile Rights Project Inc. The organization represents children statewide on advocacy and court issues.

Even if a parent signs over child custody rights to another person, those rights are revokable at any time, McFarlane said. The legal precedent is based on the Washington case, Troxel vs. Granville, in which the U.S. Supreme Court essentially ruled parents are best for their children. A parent’s rights can be terminated if a parent kills a child’s sibling or severely abuses a child.

Beyond that, for parents with problems, a state’s first responsibility is to try to provide services to help the parent. The law basically says a state has a year to do that, she said.

Listening to Ina Rose

On Oct. 31, Ina Rose’s biological mother, Ilene, and her family, caseworkers and attorneys returned to the courtroom. The state was recommending Ina Rose not be returned to her mother.

The week prior, she had been moved to a new foster home in the Eugene area. The child’s court-appointed attorney, Sharon Mitchell, told the court that Ilene was having trouble with her younger child, a son.

He apparently was falling asleep during school. As a result of that and other issues, the state indicated Ina Rose should not be returned to her mother in a report apparently provided to the judge.

Ilene’s attorney argued about the assessment. He said the family had been told Ina Rose would be returned by December. He told Child Welfare to take into account Ilene’s mother, Pam Baker. She would be a resource in helping raise the child.

Judge Richard Barron wasn’t convinced.

Ilene visited Ina Rose several times weekly throughout the summer. Incomplete Child Welfare case notes found fault with Ilene’s behavior. Notes mentioned that in May, a caseworker visited Ilene’s home and talked with her “about the lack of room for (Ina Rose) and about getting things cleaned up.”

On June 9, a caseworker wrote that she asked Ilene not to bring candy to the visits, but that she just shrugged her shoulders.

On July 13, a caseworker wrote that Ilene had an inappropriate conversation with Ina Rose.

On July 14, a caseworker wrote that Ilene repeatedly had been warned not to bring a CD player to visits with Ina Rose, but that she continued to do so. Child Welfare officials believed the choice of music to be inappropriate.

An agreement with Ilene in August suggested there were specific expectations for Ilene to meet to regain custody of Ina Rose. It went on to say “(Ina Rose) has been in foster care due to circumstances which indicated that Ilene was not able to provide adequate care and protection.”

On Oct. 31, Judge Barron told Ilene he’s not sure she can help Ina Rose grow and have a life.

When Ilene went before him, she brought with her a packet of school pictures of a smiling, blonde-haired girl. The heavy-set, red-haired woman told the judge she’s been working with everyone involved in the case to get Ina Rose back. She attended parenting classes, got her own house and worked with mental health officials.

“For a year, I lost my daughter. I could not find her for a year,” she said crying.

“I know she has a lot of medical problems and I’m willing to do what I can,” she went on.

Barron said Ina Rose’s own comments concerned him most — when the child asked Ilene if she was going to give her away again and who Ilene would give her to.

“I wouldn’t ever give her away” Ilene protested.

The judge went on, saying he didn’t want the child to have any more abuse by the system.

“She needs the best opportunity that we can give her. She didn’t get it and we owe her something,” Barron said.

She needs love constantly and the court needs to make sure she’s protected, Barron added.

“Nobody can read that report and expect this child to grow in her care,” Barron said looking out across the courtroom.

When contacted last week, Ina Rose’s biological grandmother, Pam Baker, said Ilene is traveling to Eugene to visit Ina Rose. But she said their attorney advised them not to discuss the case. She did say the family is not sure what will happen with Ina Rose’s custody, but Baker is encouraging caseworkers to listen to her granddaughter.

“Ask (Ina Rose) what she wants. Nobody’s listening to (Ina Rose),” Baker contended.

— City Editor Elise Hamner can be reached by calling 269-1222 ext. 239 or by e-mailing ehamner@theworldlink.com.