A Fateful Ruling, a Fatal Fall

The wiry 7-year-old and her timid little sister did everything they could to protect themselves from danger. They watched over one another. They demanded to be together every waking moment, to sleep in the same bed. They developed a language of their own.

It was a bond only a mother could break.

Five days before Christmas last year, their mother, LaShanda Crozier, and her husband, Davon Lewis, lost a court battle over back rent, virtually assuring the family’s eviction.

The couple took their girls home on a bus. Then, in the dimming afternoon, Crozier brought them back to the Los Angeles County Courthouse.

She marched them to the observation deck, nine stories above the Civic Center. She perched the youngsters on a granite rail. And then she pushed them.

Crozier, tears flowing, slid to the rail’s edge, her feet dangling. She was about to let go when a deputy burst through the double doors leading to the deck.

“Don’t come a step closer!” she warned Sgt. Gary Melton, chief of the courthouse bailiffs. He froze. She said she was sick and tired and fed up.

“God will judge me,” she told Melton. “I’ve got to go.”

Chasing her fading scream, Melton ran to the building’s edge, leaned over and looked down. Dead on the concrete walkway below was not only Crozier, 27, but the crumpled bodies of her two girls, Breanna, 7, and Joan, 5.

“It was like somebody hit me in the chest with a two-by-four,” Melton recalls. “The only thing I keep thinking is: Why? You know, why?”

In the months following, there has been no shortage of people asking the same painful question: grieving family members, LAPD detectives, judges, lawyers, politicians and top officials from the nation’s largest children’s welfare agency.

When they died, the girls’ legal guardian was the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. A watchdog agency whose task is to protect kids from abusive parents, Children and Family Services oversees roughly 54,000 children under age 17. It removes about 12,000 children from their families annually, or about five out of every 1,000 children in the county, just above the national average.

But Children and Family Services also operates amid the increasing influence of the family preservation movement. State law strongly encourages juvenile courts to return children to their biological families as soon as possible.

The result is often a tangle. Courtrooms overflow. Responsibility fades. Blame shifts. And tragedy stands ready.

All agree that before they died, Breanna and Joan could have, even should have, been plucked from desperation.

“This is a terrible case,” says Anita Bock, director of Children and Family Services. “The red flags, the danger signs that something bad could happen, were everywhere. . . . There wasn’t enough attention put into what was happening to these children.”

First Child’s Birth Began Family’s Isolation

Breanna came first, in the summer of 1993. She was premature, a 5-pound newborn who came into the world with a struggle.

Her parents--bouncing between a series of menial jobs and welfare--lived in single-room apartments in the heart of South Los Angeles. In some of their apartments, furniture was stacked in front of the windows, to shield Breanna from stray bullets.

Almost as soon as Breanna was born, her parents began isolating themselves from those who had been close to them. Between the young parents and their families came threats and bitter accusations. Crozier and Lewis developed a motto: “It’s us against the world.” Their families responded in kind.

In 1995, Joan was born. A few months later, relatives started calling the police and the Children and Family Services department. They alleged that the parents were seriously neglecting the girls, not feeding or clothing them properly. The father, they said, was abusive. Both parents, according to the allegations received by the department, were said to be on drugs.

A social worker from Children and Family Services followed up. She appeared unannounced and asked Crozier and Lewis if they were using drugs. Both denied any problems. Believing them, the social worker closed the case.

It didn’t take long, though, for their troubles to emerge openly.

In the summer of 1997, Lewis and his family got into a fight about money at his mother’s apartment. Police came, and an officer tried to handcuff Lewis. He got away and ended up fighting with officers in the middle of the street, according to police reports. Loudly cursing at her husband, Crozier ran out of the house. Little Joan was in one arm, Breanna racing a few steps behind, tugging at her mother.

The cops grabbed Crozier and found a loaded .38 in her jacket. They found another loaded gun on the front seat of the car.

Both parents went to jail, but police failed to alert social workers of what they found. Breanna and Joan stayed for a few days with their cousins. When their mother and father got out, the family gathered together and went on its way.

Sisters Instinctively Leaned on One Another

For the next two years the girls did their best to endure the only life they knew, family members say. Occasionally they stayed with their parents in shelters, sometimes with relatives. Mostly though, Breanna and Joan lived in a primer gray 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

Their bathroom, the relatives say, was often a sidewalk; showers sometimes came from a garden hose. They ate from a single plastic bowl.

When Joan’s flowing hair became too hard to comb, her father simply shaved her head. There are no records of either girl being immunized or visiting a dentist. Joan’s teeth became green-and-black nubs, thoroughly rotten.

The girls learned to lean on one another. They developed their own language of broken English and made-up words, spoken rapid-fire--a product of Breanna’s severe but untreated speech problem. At night the two slept together, always touching, curled up like kittens.

In early 1999, Lewis was again arrested for fighting with police, this time in Culver City. The next day, social worker Bill McCoy discovered Lewis’ family living in the Cutlass. McCoy, like all of the social workers involved in the case, has been advised by Children and Family Services not to comment. But McCoy’s typed and handwritten records, and those of his colleagues, were obtained by The Times after a request made to the presiding judge of children’s court.

McCoy noted that when he questioned both parents about their treatment of the girls, they offered bizarre answers.

Joan’s teeth were bad, Lewis explained, because “she was probably given too much milk.” He said he shaved off Joan’s hair “because I felt like it.” Asked why both girls were underweight and had signs of malnutrition, he said, “I didn’t starve my daughter, she’s just skinny.”

For her part, Crozier said Joan’s teeth were bad because she “fell down.” She denied living in the car but was unable to say where she lived. Asked about drugs, she wouldn’t respond.

The parents’ evasions triggered a more formal investigation by Children and Family Services.

They discovered a long rap sheet on Lewis, dating back to an arrest as a juvenile for selling crack cocaine. As an adult he had another serious drug offense and, just a year before Breanna was born, he’d been convicted of raping and battering a 15-year-old girl.

Crozier had been arrested on robbery charges and convicted of burglary. Of more concern to McCoy and Janice Spicer, a third social worker then involved in the case, was that Crozier, downcast and angry, was showing signs of depression. When Spicer interviewed the struggling mother’s family she found that Crozier had once purposefully overdosed on drugs, and that she had severed ties with almost everyone from her past.

The social workers felt that she was in an unhealthy relationship and that she would be better off on her own. Crozier “needs to establish herself as an autonomous person capable of taking responsibility for her own life before she can be entrusted with the lives of little children,” Spicer wrote in a report to children’s court.

Great-Aunt Gave Girls Their First Real Home

With their father in jail and their mother found unfit, Breanna and Joan were placed by Children and Family Services in the home of John and Marlene Lemons, a retired couple who occasionally cared for foster children in South-Central. The girls arrived in February 1999 with no possessions, only their tattered clothes, two sizes too small.

“They were frightened and unsure,” says Marlene Lemons. “But they hadn’t given up.”

Crozier was allowed to occasionally see her daughters at the Lemons house. On her first visit, Breanna and Joan largely ignored her, playing in the backyard.

As Crozier was about to leave, the Lemonses say, she grabbed the girls and tried to run. Unable to open the front door, she flopped down, balled up and threw a tantrum. Then she accused the Lemonses of stealing her children.

The Lemonses say Crozier also phoned. “I’ll kill you,” she reportedly said. “I’ll see you in the street and I’ll kill you.”

“We loved those little girls,” said John Lemons tearfully. “But we just couldn’t stand the threats.”

After less than two months in their home, the Lemonses reluctantly asked Children and Family Services to find a new home for Breanna and Joan. The girls’ maternal great-aunt, Marietta Snowden, agreed to take them in.

It was with Snowden, then a census worker living in a little home in Panorama City, that the girls tasted, for the first time, prolonged stability and care.

Their great-aunt was not a rich woman, but she provided the girls with books and bikes, as much food and clothing as they needed. Each had a bed, even though they still insisted on sleeping together.

“Both children are thriving,” Spicer wrote to the children’s court.

She said the great-aunt had “enrolled both in school, attended to their health and dental needs, and sees to it that they are clean and well groomed. Breanna . . . is now fairly intelligible.”

Breanna, according to social worker notes, court records and interviews, also began opening up. She told her kindergarten teacher about living with her parents in a car. She told yet another social worker at one point: “Daddy whips me.” Records indicate she made at least three such statements on separate occasions, allegations her father denied, then and today. “There was no abuse,” Lewis insists, “and no neglect.”

During the first six months that Breanna and Joan were in their new home, their mother rarely visited. Meanwhile, Joan was coming out of her shell, regularly encountering children her own age for the first time. She begged her great-aunt to buy her purple dresses. She loved to have her hair--now growing out--put in ponytails.

Breanna could run faster than any of the boys in her class--and pound them in tetherball. In the living room, she lined up in neat rows the shoes her great-aunt bought her. There was one pair she is said to have particularly loved: her purple jelly sandals.

Father Planned Family Reunion From Jail

While the girls grew more and more comfortable, Lewis, still in jail, began making clear he wanted his family put back together.

“I’m not saying I’m a perfect parent,” Lewis wrote to children’s court. “I’ve made mistakes but I love my children to [sic] much to explain and I know how to take care of them lovingly. . . . None of this was ever intended on happening.”

After Lewis was released in late 1999, he and his wife rented a room in a Compton boarding house. They began attending parenting classes at a storefront center in Inglewood. In group sessions, according to her counselor there, Crozier told everyone that all she wanted was to be “with her little angels.”

But the couple’s relationship continued on a raucous course. They got kicked out of the boarding house because of their loud arguments. They ended up in a ramshackle studio apartment just west of USC. On the floor were two old mattresses: one for Lewis and Crozier, the other for the daughters they hoped would soon return.

Still, they raged at one another. The manager said the confrontations were sometimes violent. Once, on a lawn in front of the building, Crozier kicked Lewis in the groin.

As they battled, their two girls moved with their great-aunt into a two-story home on a cul-de-sac in the Kern County town of Rosamond.

The girls had been away from their parents just over a year. During that time, the children’s court conducted mandatory reviews of their case nearly every month. Each time, the court ruled Breanna and Joan should not live with their parents.

In children’s court on June 1, 2000, Crozier and Lewis decided to fight back. Overseeing the proceeding was referee Stephen Marpet, new to the family’s case.

In court that day, the parents’ troubled history was not explored. Marpet felt the family’s main problem was that they were mired in poverty. In addition, those who knew the couple and their children best--family members and foster parents--were not called by county lawyers representing Children and Family Services.

Also working in the parents’ favor was California’s strong bias toward keeping troubled families intact. In most cases when children are taken out of the home, state law insists every effort must be made to reunify them with their parents.

County officials estimate that, each year, an average of 1,500 children are returned to their families, sparing them foster care, group homes or adoption. Although most reunifications have been successful, hundreds of children have been abused after being returned. During the past decade in Los Angeles County 16 have been killed, although the rate has slowed in recent years.

During the June hearing, Marpet focused mainly on whether Breanna and Joan’s parents were attending mandated counseling. Lewis had been going regularly. He was also working. But Crozier had been to just a few sessions all year. Could the court trust that the kids would be safe if they were living with Crozier?

The last social worker to handle the case, Coleta Lewis (no relation to Davon Lewis), was asked if it was still her opinion that the girls should remain with Snowden.

“Yes it is,” she replied, “ . . . mainly because the mother and father reside together. And at this time, the mother has not complied [by going to therapy].”

But after a short deliberation, Marpet ordered the girls returned to the parents, with Lewis assuming primary responsibility. He allowed Crozier to continue living in the apartment with her daughters so long as the couple complied with a few simple requirements: Crozier would have to attend therapy regularly, the children were to be put in day care and both parents were to fully cooperate with their social worker.

He also ordered that Crozier was not to be alone with Breanna and Joan.

It would not be a decision that would stick in his mind. “I was just filling in that day,” Marpet said later.

Finding out the news when a social worker left a message on her answering machine, Marietta Snowden, the great-aunt, nearly burst into tears.

“It felt like the girls were just tore out of my hands,” she recalls, sifting through mementos the girls left behind: the stuffed brown teddy bears, the dolls, a tiny white plaster handprint made by Joan.

Almost from the day Breanna and Joan were back with their parents, the court orders were ignored. The girls weren’t placed in day care. The couple would not call back when the social worker paged. And records show that while Lewis was working at a nearby grocery, Crozier was at home, alone with the girls for hours.

Crozier went to only a couple of therapy sessions, where she behaved in ways that raised concerns.

Crozier, a counselor wrote to the social worker, “does not understand what is happening . . . why she was referred to therapy, nor why the children were removed initially.”

Worried about the children, social worker Coleta Lewis began making unannounced visits. She was met with angry outbursts from Crozier: “Why are you here? Why are you hounding me like I’m going to hurt my children?”

By late July, Crozier had stopped going to counseling, and the family was back in children’s court before Commissioner Stanley Genser for a previously scheduled monitoring hearing.

Coleta Lewis argued in a written report that the children should be taken back by the county if Crozier didn’t start cooperating. “If she doesn’t understand what happened and the reason we became involved, . . . the children are at risk.”

Genser acknowledged that Crozier had been alone with the children, contrary to the court’s order. He wasn’t pleased. But nothing bad had happened, so he loosened the leash, allowing Crozier to be alone with her children whenever she wanted. Get back in therapy and start following the earlier orders, he told them.

Genser believes the court did its best to protect the children. He argues that nobody could have predicted the “reprehensible” murders. Based on what he heard in court, “there was never any hint of risk,” Genser said.

Indeed, records indicate that during the hearings the Children and Family Services lawyers did not aggressively present such crucial information as allegations of abuse and neglect made by family members. In other instances, they seemed ill-prepared. They failed, for example, to include potentially important details on the parents’ criminal records during oral arguments--an important issue because Lewis’ conviction for rape and battery, under state law, should have made it extremely difficult for him to regain custody.

The lawyers did stress repeatedly that the girls were exposed to highly dangerous conditions at home--a characterization Genser greeted skeptically.

By late last summer, away from the court’s view, Crozier was cracking.

Not only did she fail to resume counseling, her mood was growing darker and more complicated than ever. Breanna’s and Joan’s teachers say Crozier showed up at school almost every day, patiently waiting on a cement bench to pick them up, showing concern for their well-being. But during these months she also suffered a miscarriage. Davon Lewis says that Crozier pictured her unborn child in heaven, and she wanted to be there too.

Crozier would sometimes visit her father, Leonard Crozier, a 57-year-old window washer who lives in a South-Central trailer home. Last fall, they strolled through a place picked by Crozier: the Inglewood Park Cemetery. Crozier told her father she was thinking of killing herself, and killing Breanna and Joan too. Her father says he was so confused by his own problems that he was of little help.

Pressures were mounting. The family could hardly pay rent. Crozier, increasingly out of touch with reality, her relatives say, was soon due to have a probation hearing for charges stemming from the time she was caught with a loaded gun.

On a mid-December evening, Coleta Lewis made a routine visit to the family’s apartment. Davon Lewis was working and the girls were home with their mother, who was typically angry and confrontational. The social worker let it slide, staying only a short time, suggesting the apartment be cleaned, giving Breanna and Joan a pair of children’s books.

The last sentence the social worker wrote in her report about the visit was was short, to the point and, in the hindsight of what was to come, tragic: “No problems reported.”

Five days later, on the roof of the courthouse in the dimming night air, all that remained of the mother and her two girls was Crozier’s purse--and a purple jelly sandal.

Relatives and Officials Haunted by Decision

Members of Lewis’ and Crozier’s families have spent months questioning why the girls were ever given back to the parents.

Lewis, now 30, says he is haunted by visions of his daughters tumbling in the air. He has been a vagabond, living with friends, sometimes with his sister. He acknowledges that his children lived a hardscrabble life and that their mother was crumbling, obsessed with the prospect of her children being taken from her again.

“Even on a good day my wife, she would say, ‘I hate this world, I don’t want to be in this place,’ ” Lewis says. “I tried to talk to her, to help. She told me she wasn’t going to do it. I guess words don’t mean nothing when a person is that low.”

Anita Bock, the head of Children and Family Services, says that Crozier’s problems were clearly evident and that neither the mother nor the father should have been granted custody.

“We could have been much more aggressive in court in this case,” she says, acknowledging the reunification was not opposed strongly enough. “This has caused us all to reflect on how we do things. We have changed.”

Among other things, Bock says, social workers are being better trained to identify psychological problems and to be more assertive in court.

At Menlo Elementary School, classmates of Breanna and Joan are still grappling with the meaning of death. The school had been an oasis for the girls during their final months. They were popular. They were making progress. Every day during recess, Breanna made a dash to the kindergarten playground, where she would watch her sister play, making sure she was safe. Perhaps to return the favor, Joan would stuff little surprises in Breanna’s backpack: purple clips with hearts on them.

“They seemed happy,” says Wendy Davis, Breanna’s second-grade teacher. “Nobody knew what was going on.”

In the days just after the deaths, most of Breanna’s classmates had no idea what had happened.

So the teacher gathered her 6- and 7-year-olds in a circle and asked them what they liked best about Breanna. She was really fast, they said. She had a huuuge smile! She was getting good at saying words.

Then the teacher asked if they ever did something they wished they could take back.

Yes, the children answered. Over vacation, the teacher told them, “Breanna’s mother did something she couldn’t take back, and Breanna and her little sister, Joan, are dead.”

She shared a few details. The children fell silent. Some fidgeted. Some looked lost. Did Breanna fall and break her leg, like my brother, asked one?

Well, no, replied the teacher. “This means Breanna and Joan are never going to come back. But they’re in a better place. Breanna and Joan, they’re flying with the angels now.”

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