Caring for Addicts’ Children

Moving quietly past piles of rotting garbage and empty soda cans, Sue Webber-Brown and eight other members of a special narcotics unit wince at the stench outside the dingy duplex apartment.

It will top 100 degrees today in this dusty little town on the Feather River, and the heat already is cooking an enormous trash heap left by the mother inside, a methamphetamine addict.

Gun in hand, tall and hefty in her police battle garb, Webber-Brown can look formidable. But it’s another side--one of her colleagues calls her “mother to the world”--that has brought her here today.

She has a way of putting people at ease and a passion for helping children, colleagues say. For Webber-Brown, this is more a rescue mission than a drug bust. There are two children inside the apartment--a 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. She and her colleagues on the Butte County Interagency Narcotics Task Force are here to take them away.

A revolution in drug enforcement philosophy started in Butte County 11 years ago, and Webber-Brown has become its national leader. The idea was simple: The children found during drug raids are more important than the drugs.

Following the lead of this tiny county north of Sacramento, programs for children endangered by drugs now exist in dozens of law enforcement and child welfare agencies around the state and nation. In most, a social worker works with police, often going along on raids to provide immediate attention and care for children traumatized by seeing their parents being taken away in handcuffs.

Before this, children in drug cases were often an afterthought. Police and prosecutors focused primarily on seizing drugs and cash.

“The last thing police wanted to deal with, traditionally, was the kids,” Webber-Brown says. “They’d turn them over to grandparents or friends, and they’d be back with their drug-addict parents in days.”

But that won’t be the case on this day. Webber-Brown is focusing on the apartment’s drab green front door and what she is likely to find on the other side. She is an investigator for the Butte County district attorney’s office. With her are police from state and local agencies, a child services worker, a probation officer and a prosecutor. If they find what they believe is there, the children will be in foster care before the sun is down.

“This is a mother who has been a methamphetamine addict for years,” she says. “Lately she has been selling her daughter’s dolls and their TV and Nintendo games for drugs.”

It’s not difficult to know how Webber-Brown’s empathy for these children was born. She came up the hard way in Oroville, raised by a “dysfunctional family” living in a trailer. During high school, she worked three jobs. Afterward, she spent years trying to figure out what to do.

By 1991, however, it had begun to come together. She had her second husband, her third child and the job she had been seeking for years--as an investigator for Dist. Atty. Michael Ramsey on Butte County’s drug task force.

In the early 1990s, Butte County had one of the biggest methamphetamine problems in the nation for a rural county. And it still does. Outlaw biker gangs had set up major meth labs here, then mom-and-pop operations run by addicts had taken over.

“This is what I had worked for, the task force,” Webber-Brown recalls. “On the raids, we’d be seeing these babies lying in their own feces, in their own urine. Being a hormonal new mother, it became my whole life.

“Nobody in law enforcement was focusing on the children,” she says.

Husband Signs On

Her first convert was her husband, Mitch Brown, now Oroville’s police chief. Working on a master’s degree, he wrote his thesis on the toxic dangers of meth labs. The report helped increase both state use of child endangerment laws and awareness of long-term environmental threats of methamphetamine.

Webber-Brown also had a friend who shared her feelings. Lisa Fey Williams was a Butte County social worker then. The two women worked to bridge the large gulf of distrust between police and social agencies.

The idea of social workers and police joining hands began to spread, “at first, very slowly for years. Then it started picking up some steam,” says Webber-Brown.

Now she has led training sessions for 12,000 social workers and law enforcement officials across the country.

Seven California counties have received state funding intermittently in recent years, and two dozen others are trying to launch their own programs for drug-endangered children programs. Fifteen states already have received training, and half dozen have programs running.

But Webber-Brown is frustrated that the movement hasn’t spread even more quickly.

“This type of program should be everywhere by now,” she says. “If you walk into a house and hit a bad guy with every charge you can, why not add child endangerment? Most people still don’t get it.”

The 15-year-old boy is terrified as the officers burst into the living room, and he somehow manages to slip out the front door, running and crying to a neighbor across the street. An officer retrieves him after he has calmed down.

His 12-year-old sister takes it all much more tranquilly. She finishes a bath as if it’s just the Avon lady calling.

“I think she has probably numbed herself to everything, because of all that has happened in her life,” says Heather Cowin , a child services representative.

Webber-Brown is in the living room, keeping one eye on the mother while Cmdr. Keith Krampitz, with the state Department of Justice, supervises a quick search. Almost immediately, as official reports will later note, the officers spot a small packet of what turns out to be high-grade methamphetamine on a living-room shelf, within easy reach of the children.

The mother reaches for a cigarette as the search progresses. Webber-Brown tells her she can have a cigarette outside if she would like.

Outside, the two women talk. Webber-Brown is holding a tape recorder, and her real purpose is to gather admissions about both drug use and child endangerment. Within a few minutes she has what she needs. The mother also agrees to speak to a reporter.

“My children mean the world to me,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to give it up for a while.... I have no problems with stopping. I’ve stopped before.”

In fact, Webber-Brown says, the 12-year-old girl has been molested by her grandfather, and the boy has been physically abused by a boyfriend of his mother.

The mother will be arrested on charges of possession of illegal drugs and child endangerment, Webber-Brown tells her. They will be taking her away now and placing her children in foster care.

Then she pauses.

“Would you like to say goodbye to your children now?” she asks.

“Could I have another cigarette first?” the mother replies.

Though Butte County started its Drug Endangered Children program in 1991, it wasn’t formalized until two years later. And it wasn’t until 1999 that similar programs were receiving state money in six other counties: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino and Shasta.

Despite sporadic funding, two dozen California counties have joined the seven receiving state money in trying to establish similar programs. The initial focus was on meth labs, where explosions, fires and constant exposure to large batches of toxic chemicals were among the dangers. But some counties have broadened their focus beyond manufacturers to chronic meth users.

857 Children Taken

Since the Butte County task force formally set up operations, 857 children have been taken from 401 homes and meth labs. Webber-Brown estimates that fewer than 20% are reunited with their parents, compared with more than 50% of children who return to families statewide in child welfare cases.

Experts say high rates of family dissolution in meth cases are found in other counties and are justified by widespread sexual and physical abuse in meth homes.

Today there is even a statewide group, the California DEC Alliance, to lobby and provide information to improve law enforcement’s work with drug-affected children.

San Diego prosecutor Tom Manning, chairman of the group, says another important component of the work can be quick medical treatment. Children can ingest meth because the drugs can infuse everything in a home from cereal and meat to water and the air.

Despite all the progress, Webber-Brown still runs into law enforcement officials who view her efforts as too soft.

“I’m always emotional at the end of my presentations, because I show slides of the children we have saved,” she says. “And they are real people to me, people who have been horribly abused.

“So I am showing this picture of Janet, who has had her hair torn out, and an officer in Solano County stands up and says, ‘I think you have done this job too long. You should not get so involved that you know these children by name.’

“I gathered myself together and I said: ‘That’s why I’m up here teaching people like you. ... Maybe you have been doing your job too long, and maybe you should retire.’

“The whole room stood and applauded.”

Progress in Small Steps

Year after year, it all boils down to a series of tiny tragedies and small triumphs for Webber-Brown.

She is talking now about some of the sad times, the times that left her in tears or silent screams of rage.

Among the most potent memories is of an 11-year-old girl in Chico who had taken on a maternal role: feeding her little brothers and the dog, cleaning up, with little help from any adult.

“I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to her.... asked her if she ever had baby sitters and she said the 19-year-old boy next door was coming over,” Webber-Brown recalled. “Then she just looked at me and said, ‘I have a secret. My neighbor has been molesting me, and I think he is starting to molest my little brother.’

“I just lost it,” Webber-Brown says. “This little girl was afraid to tell anybody what was happening because she was afraid she would be taken away and there would be nobody to watch over her brothers.”

Over the years, she has learned to rejoice in small victories.

With the last of the day’s raids over, she watches the two children being taken away from their duplex in Oroville, past the fence with the Nazi swastika and the White Power emblem and a swatch of sun-baked dirt where a front yard should have been.

But when she talks about why she keeps doing this, she focuses on simple things.

“I feel good right now,” she says. “Tonight those kids will have something to eat, and they will get a bath. And tomorrow they will have breakfast. All the things the rest of us take for granted.”