Looking Out for the Children

Butte County’s affair with methamphetamine started the day the Hells Angels rumbled into town, looking for isolated real estate to use for lab sites.

It was the early 1980s and Proposition 13, the anti-tax initiative, had knocked the sheriff’s budget as flat as the county’s picturesque tablelands. Only a part-time narcotics investigator remained for a 1,600-square-mile area.

By the early 1990s, Butte County, which is north of Sacramento, had one of the state’s worst methamphetamine epidemics for a community its size.

Although many of the bikers were gone by then, the illicit trade had been picked up by low-income and unemployed residents, hungry for an easy source of cash. Many of the labs became the equivalent of family-owned businesses.

Alarmed by the trend and its obvious risks to youngsters, county officials created the only program in the state to ensure that the welfare of children would not be forgotten in law enforcement efforts to tackle the meth crisis.

The innovative effort, called Drug Endangered Children, requires police to immediately notify social workers whenever they find a child at a clandestine laboratory. The referrals trigger a review to determine whether a youngster should be placed in foster care.

During the review, each child is screened for drugs and chemical contamination. Social workers help investigators decide whether to pursue criminal charges of abuse and endangerment.

“We want these people to know that they will lose their kids until they learn to be parents,” said Sue Webber-Brown, a district attorney’s investigator who helped found the program.

At the end of March, Webber-Brown and her colleagues received their latest referral--an 8-year-old girl whose mother had burned to death in a trailer fire. The blaze started when her father spilled alcohol into a sparking heater while cleaning a batch of freshly made meth, or “crank.” The girl escaped unhurt. The father is in jail.

In some of their earlier cases, social workers say they have seen unprotected toddlers crawling on contaminated floors while their parents wore masks to protect themselves from chemicals. The program’s small charges often complain about headaches, burning eyes and breathing problems.

In counseling, they draw crank pipes, syringes and lab equipment such as beakers. Others talk about smoke, fires and explosions in their homes.

“I have even had 4- and 5-year-olds tell me how to smoke methamphetamine,” said Heather Cowin, a social worker who evaluates homes where labs are found.

The interagency effort began in early 1992, the year Butte County ranked third in the state for lab seizures. Webber-Brown and Lisa Fey, a social worker, were looking into a couple of the more egregious cases and became concerned about what they found.

At the time, police were supposed to follow the state welfare and institutions code, which required that social workers be contacted whenever child abuse or neglect was suspected. But few officers made referrals, and when they did, social workers were often slow to respond.

Usually, narcotics officers just handed the children to relatives, friends or neighbors so they could devote full attention to their investigations. No one ever checked the backgrounds of the people who agreed to take the youngsters. Nor did anyone assess the children’s health and safety, although they often lived in squalid homes filled with toxic chemicals, drugs and loaded guns.

“We’d lose track of where the kids were,” Fey said. “Then the parents would be released from jail on bail, and the first thing they would do is go find their children. Pretty soon the kids were right back in the same miserable situation.”

From 1993 to 1995, the program dealt with 63 children removed from 26 methamphetamine labs. Seventeen child-endangerment cases were filed against parents. In 1995, the year drug testing began, five of 15 children removed from labs tested positive for methamphetamine, including a 3-year-old.

Butte County Dist. Atty. Michael L. Ramsey said that since the effort began, his office has filed more child-endangerment cases, prosecutors are better prepared for court, and parents who operate labs are getting longer sentences.

“Judges and juries now see there are real victims,” he said.

The program is considered a model for other counties. Riverside Dist. Atty. Grover Trask said the Inland Empire may need a similar review process. An effort is underway to improve communication between police and social workers.

The Office of Criminal Justice Planning, which helps formulate law enforcement policy for the governor, has held discussions with Butte County authorities about its policies. There is talk of forming a statewide task force.

“We don’t know what happens to most of these kids,” said Cheryl Mouras-Ashby, chief of the office’s branch that handles violence against children. “This issue needs some attention.”

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‘It’s Really Icky and My Head Hurts’

In January, Tammi Lyn Geiger-Cash, 32, and Brent Lyle Cash, 31, were arrested in Butte County on charges of manufacturing methamphetamine and child endangerment. Their 7-year-old daughter was interviewed by a district attorney’s investigator. The girl, who earlier in the day talked to a social worker, recounted breathing fumes, handling a container of half-finished speed and watching her parents manufacture the drug. Some excerpts:

Investigator: What time of the day or the night do you smell it?

Child: Sometimes in bed at night when I’m awake and sometimes in the middle of the day when I get home from school.

Investigator: Tell me what it smells like to you.

Child: I can’t really remember, but it’s really icky and my head hurts.

Investigator: Where does the smell come from?

Child: The kitchen and the garage. They mostly do it in the kitchen.

Investigator: What was mommy doing when you were watching?

Child: It’s really hard to explain. . . . Ummmmmmm. She has this jar, and a funnel, and she mixes stuff in it, and it kind of falls through. And it’s really, really stinky.

Investigator: Did you seen what color it was?

Child: It was kind of bright orange-red.

Investigator: Besides your headache, did you ever hurt anywhere? Was it hard for you to breathe?

Child: It was not hard for me to breathe, but my throat hurt.

Investigator: Did it hurt every time, like once a week?

Child: Yeah, it hurt.

Investigator: Did you tell the social worker that there was a jar of reddish stuff?

Child: Yeah, this morning. It was by the fireplace. It was really bright, bright orange.

Investigator: What happened to it?

Child: I handed it to my dad.