Boy’s Death Shows Obstacles to Aiding Homeless Children

These are the children who are rootless, helpless--and homeless. The fortunate ones bounce from school to school, taking handouts, eating meals at soup kitchens and spending nights in homeless shelters. The wretched ones never make it to school. They live in parks or under shrubs, and sometimes they have to shoplift their meals.

Steven Giguere Jr., only 4 months old, could be considered among the wretched. Steven, his 3-year-old sister and their parents lived in a car in front of an Anaheim camping store.

Early one morning last week, his parents found Steven was dead. The family’s pet rat had gnawed at the sleeping infant, inflicting more than 110 bites, authorities said.

The county’s children’s services department had received five complaints about the Giguere family situation in three years--including one less than 48 hours before Steven’s death. For a variety of reasons, the two Giguere children were never taken from their parents.

The death has prompted an internal review into how the department responds to reports of child abuse and neglect, particularly those involving homeless children. Officials will look at how the department tracks initial complaints and matches them with any data on file to ensure the quickest response.

The Giguere case points to the difficulty authorities have in keeping track of homeless children. Officials estimate that of the 10,000 to 12,000 homeless people in Orange County, nearly half are under the age of 18. And of those, the majority are under the age of 5, officials say.

For these children, living in the shadows of affluent Orange County is a perilous existence. Officials say some of the homeless children must scrounge daily for food and shelter, often sleeping in drug-infested motels and neighborhood parks.

“There is no question that the (Giguere) case has led to soul-searching,” said Gene Howard, director of the children’s services department. “Everybody is touched by this tragedy. We have to keep asking ourselves if there is a better way to reach these families so that we can prevent outcomes like this.”

Dianne Giguere, Steven Jr.’s grandmother, said she called children’s services early last week to report that her son, Steven, and his wife, Kathyleen, were placing the infant and his sister, Karissa, in a dangerous situation by living in a car.

Howard and other children’s services officials dispute this account.

Howard said his department’s records indicate that the complaint about the Gigueres was made by an anonymous caller who did not know the homeless family’s whereabouts.

Social workers would have responded immediately if they knew where the family was, Howard said. In fact, children’s services workers responded on four previous occasions to complaints about the Gigueres, when the family lived in an apartment and a motel. But during each visit, social workers could not find enough evidence to remove the children from their parents’ care.

Each year, county social workers remove about 1,200 children from their homes, said Nathan Y. Nishimoto, program manager at the children’s services department. About 50% of these children have been physically abused; some 25% have suffered sexual abuse, and about 5% have been neglected by their parents. The remainder are abandoned children or those who have been removed from incapacitated parents, he said.

In an interview at the Children Emergency Response Unit in Orange this week, Nishimoto, Howard and a team of social workers said the Giguere case illustrates the difficulties in protecting homeless and transient children and the limitations of social workers in removing children from people who might appear to be delinquent parents.

Nishimoto said social workers did not remove the Giguere children because their parents were providing “the minimally acceptable level of care.” State law also specifically prohibits social workers from removing children if the parents’ only “failure” is being homeless, he said.

In some cases, social workers simply intercede on the children’s behalf to improve their living conditions.

Gary Taylor, a senior social worker, said he recently responded to a report about a woman who was sleeping with her two young children at the bottom of a drained swimming pool at a Santa Ana park. The woman was taking good care of the children, providing proper nourishment and even sending them to classes at a neighborhood school.

Taylor interceded with the relatives of the woman to allow the children to stay at their house.

“A lot of people think we can just walk into someone’s life or someone’s home and snatch their children if it appears that the parents are neglecting them,” Nishimoto said. “But if the parents are providing basic care and their living circumstances are not an immediate threat to the children’s welfare and safety, we try to provide service to raise their care level so that the children can remain safely in their own homes.”

In Orange County, 32 county social workers, known as “family maintenance workers,” are sent to about 3,000 troubled homes--such as the Gigueres’--each year to demonstrate basic elements of parenting: cleaning, shopping, feeding, even smiling and having eye contact with babies. The social workers may also tell parents about places where they can get help, such as food banks or county welfare offices. Parents are also taught more sophisticated behavior, such as anger control, goal setting and decision making.

Officials say such “family preservation” programs represent a different approach nationwide to a crisis in child welfare: It moves away from judging and punishing “bad parents” toward understanding and helping them improve their behavior.

Advocates for the homeless in Orange County say they support any philosophy that allows homeless people to keep their children.

Jan Mickelson, director of the Central Orange County YWCA, which along with the county’s Department of Education runs a school for homeless children, said some parents want to provide a better life for their children, but many do not have the economic means.

Tim Shaw, executive director of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, a coalition of service providers, government officials, business and lay people seeking solutions to the local homeless problems, said that “just because somebody is rendered incapable of maintaining a residence does not make them less of a parent.”

“I know cases of conscientious, good parents who are forced to live in a car,” Shaw said. “Some homeless people are just people; they’re not criminals. They love their kids and kids love their parents. A lot are good parents in bad situations.”

Sara March, 25, said she and her husband are among those parents who were caught in a bad situation.

Shortly before Christmas last year, March and her husband, Tony, 26, were laid off from their jobs at a local aerospace company. After their savings were exhausted, the couple were evicted, and they found themselves bouncing from motel to motel with their five children, ages 7 months to 7 years.

When the Marches could no longer afford even a $200-a-week motel room, they were forced to sleep a few nights at a Garden Grove park where homeless people congregate after dark.

Sara March recalled the children having to sleep sitting straight up in the family’s red, two-door 1973 Buick Skylark.

“The kids would say: ‘Mom, when are we getting an apartment again,’ ” March recalled. “I would tell them that as soon as we get some money, that I was doing the best I can.”

March and her family are now staying at the Anaheim Interfaith Shelter, a homeless shelter that she describes as “heaven compared to the motels.”

Tony March spends a few hours each day looking for jobs, but so far he has had no luck.

“We’ve thought about leaving the state to find a job,” Sara March said, as she coddled her 7-month-old daughter, Windy. “But we don’t know if that is wise. We don’t want to be homeless in Arizona or Oklahoma.”

County social workers and homeless advocates said Steven Giguere’s death should serve as a lesson for all county residents.

“There are hundreds of families in Orange County who live like this,” Howard said. “But homelessness is a community problem. Everyone has to get involved, because we can’t do it alone.”