What a Mess: From ‘Angel’ to ‘Unsuitable’ Foster Mother

The last time Christine Coleman was in the news was 10 years ago today, when People magazine called her “an angel of mercy . . . [who] has turned her pleasant ranch house in Woodland Hills, Calif., into a haven for AIDS babies.”

She and her then-husband--already parents of five adopted children--had taken in six foster children infected with HIV at a time when the AIDS epidemic was feared, its victims shunned.

She was the toast of Los Angeles County’s Children and Family Services agency, appearing on radio programs, recruiting other foster families and writing a manual on caring for babies with AIDS.

Plaques and awards, reminders of that era, still line the walls of her suburban house . . . but the home is no longer called “a haven” by county social workers.

In fact, Coleman’s six foster children were taken from her last month. Social workers said they found her house so unkempt and poorly maintained, “there is a substantial danger to the physical health” of children in her care.

And Coleman, in their eyes, is an unsuitable mother . . . no longer the angel of mercy who created a family for children no one else wanted, children no one even expected to live.

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Chris Coleman, 45, is the first to admit she’s not the world’s best housekeeper.

“My house was a mess. . . . There were repairs that needed to be made. I don’t deny that,” she says.

But “is that a reason to remove children who have lived with me all their lives, who have bonded with this family and are known as exemplary kids in the community?” she asks.

Single now--she and her husband separated in 1992--Coleman is mother to her five adopted children and legal guardian of six foster children, who range in age from 9 to 13. Only three of the foster children are from the original group of AIDS babies--and only two still show signs of HIV.

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Coleman was warned by social workers last summer that the condition of her rented home was unacceptable. The 5,800-square-foot house is large but hardly luxurious, with cracked pink stucco and an overgrown yard. But it also has a swimming pool, stained-glass windows and rooms large enough to accommodate the three adopted children who still live with Coleman as well as the six foster kids.

She made repairs and, in January, department officials pronounced it acceptable. Then two months later, on March 7, a social worker paid an unannounced visit. She left with a list of deficiencies . . . and with Coleman’s oldest foster child, 13-year-old Kimberly.

The complaints ranged from the dangerous to the ridiculous . . . from true safety hazards, like a broken window and a hole in the backyard big enough for a child to fall into, to the kind of thing you might find in any house on a busy day--dirty dishes, piles of laundry, a dog rummaging through a kitchen trash can.

The house was clearly not a model of good housekeeping.

“In the hallway across from the laundry room was clothes piled in the hallway,” the report said. “The bathroom toilet was stopped up and filled with stool, the floor was bare, exposing the sub-flooring, missing were the bathtub faucet handles.”

In a bedroom shared by two of Coleman’s foster sons, the complaints included “dresser drawers missing, with clothing hanging out.” In another, “there was no floor covering . . . and clothing [was] stacked several piles high in the corner on a chair.” And in the giant bedroom, where five girls slept, there was torn carpeting, a missing closet door, a broken mirror and window.

“Spoiled, green, rotten pork chops” were sitting on the kitchen counter and there were “three dogs roaming freely about the house.”

Over the next four days, several social workers--each representing one of the five remaining foster children--would tour the home. And one by one, all five children--Ray-Ray and Jessica on Wednesday, Mikey on Thursday, Sophia and Robert on Friday--were taken to new foster homes.

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The news unsettled the family, the neighborhood and the doctors caring for Robert and Sophia, both of whom require a demanding regime of medication to keep their HIV symptoms at bay.

Neighbors and the children’s classmates pitched in on a weekend cleanup campaign, cutting the lawn, painting walls, repairing drawers and closet doors. A neighbor got Coleman a discount on carpeting for the living room and two bedrooms. Her boss gave her a set of sofas to replace the tattered one in the family room. And Coleman spent more than $3,000--which had been earmarked for this month’s $3,300 rent--on building materials and a handyman.

Within a week, Coleman had made enough repairs to begin agitating in phone calls and faxes for the children’s return. The doctor treating Sophia and Robert in the county’s pediatric AIDS program warned officials that the trauma of separation threatened the children’s fragile health.

In the meantime, Sophia, 10, already was suffering. Unhappy at her new foster home, she’d begun threatening suicide. Paramedics took her to a psychiatric hospital, where Coleman says she was restrained and given an antipsychotic medication that sent her into convulsions. That landed her at Long Beach Memorial Hospital.

Even when she was well enough to leave, Sophia’s social worker told her doctor that he intended to send her to another foster home.

“I cannot comprehend,” Sophia’s doctor, Dr. Margaret Khoury, wrote officials in response, “why [Sophia] cannot return to her home and her family. The home is fixed and . . . this child has a family which is willing, invested and able to provide loving care.

“It should be a priority to act in the best interest of the child and reunite her with her family.”

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It is a slippery concept, this “best interest of the child.” How to weigh the risk of physical harm in a home with broken windows and rickety steps against the certainty of emotional trauma caused by wrenching a family apart.

Even Coleman’s two 16-year-olds “have been emotionally traumatized by the removal of their siblings” and now need counseling, their social worker’s report says.

County officials say confidentiality rules prohibit them from discussing details of the case. “I can only say that social workers determined that this place is a danger to these kids,” said department spokesman Neil Rincover.

The nation’s largest child welfare agency, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, has been criticized for years for failing to adequately protect the children in its care. Turnover is high among overworked and disillusioned social workers and a scathing county review last year described the agency as in “chaos.’

Rincover said the department has tried to work with Coleman through the years to address her problems. “This was not the case of a happy family one day, pulled apart by mean social workers the next. This environment was not safe for these kids. You wouldn’t put your kids in this setting, and neither would I.”

But Coleman says social workers put too much emphasis on a home’s physical condition and too little on its emotional environment.

“These are people who would walk into JonBenet [Ramsey’s] room and say, ‘This child is so well cared for.’ Well, my kids don’t have Ethan Allen canopy beds. But they do have a family that loves them,” Coleman said.

“If they can take my kids for this, they can take anybody’s kids. They could take your kids.”

I thought for a moment about that broken pane of glass in my patio door, the piles of laundry on the bedroom floor, the stack of unread newspapers, my two trash-can-rummaging dogs.

And I felt my heart clench as I wondered what assortment of housekeeping errors should be used to judge a mother, should be allowed to come between a woman and her kids?

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Sophia came home Tuesday to a house that smelled of new carpet and fresh paint, to a bedroom where her two sisters’ beds still are empty, to the only mother she has ever known.

There is a hearing next week on Coleman’s request to regain custody of the other five children. She senses she faces an uphill battle, expects the department to impose a whole host of conditions.

She may have to quit her job as a sales representative or at least cut back to part time. She may have to hire a housekeeper.

She may have to consider moving to a smaller house, in a cheaper neck of the woods. “I know I don’t make enough to support a family this size in this area,” says Coleman. But she grew up in Watts, with a drug-addicted mother who flitted in and out of her life. She wants something better for the kids in her care.

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“Here, the schools are good and my kids have friends. I just wanted to stay here two more years, so my big girls could graduate from El Camino [High School]. Then Kimberly would be ready to go to high school and the others graduating from elementary . . . and we could start fresh somewhere else, without so much disruption to their lives.”

She is thinking like a mother, not a social worker.

I look around her big, messy house and wonder why the social workers saw only dirty laundry and not the awards for perfect attendance, good citizenship and student of the month on the kids’ bedroom walls.

Just the clothes hanging out of broken drawers and not the plastic bins neatly labeled with a child’s name and a day of the week, where every kid can find, clean and already assembled, an outfit for every school day.

Only the dirty dishes and not the pictures of happy children that cover every table, every shelf, every wall?

“I know I’m not the perfect mother,” Coleman says.

And I wonder who is.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.