A family defined by love

FROM her first glance, Dayna Bennett knew that Casey was not the kind of kid featured in adoption brochures. Fifteen and a spindly 6 feet 2, he was so unkempt and forlorn, he “looked like a ragamuffin” when they met in the visiting room of a state mental hospital three years ago.

Bennett knew his history: Casey had been removed from abusive parents at age 6 and spent eight years in foster care, shuttled among relatives, strangers and group homes. Four years ago, when he was bounced from a group home for stealing, his arrest added another label to those he’d picked up along the way: mentally ill, emotionally damaged, developmentally delayed and, now, juvenile delinquent.

The labels didn’t trouble Bennett, the single mother of two daughters adopted from foster care, one of them Casey’s younger sister, Samantha. She wasn’t looking to add a son; she was just there to meet her daughter’s brother.

But last summer, just weeks before he turned 18, Bennett, then 29, officially became Casey’s mother.

The adoption was heralded by county officials and children’s advocates as groundbreaking, the first anyone could recall of a foster child from the juvenile delinquency system.

Shadowing the celebration, however, was an unspoken challenge: How much damage can love undo?

AS a child growing up in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, Dayna Bennett felt an affinity for disabled kids. “I’d sit behind the deaf kids in church,” she recalled. “I was fascinated by communication boards, wheelchairs: the ways you can make life better for handicapped people.”

As a teenager, she baby-sat an autistic boy, taught a blind child in Sunday school and volunteered as an aide in a special education class. “Just instinctively, I loved it,” she said.

She attended college in Oregon and worked in an after-school program in a poor section of Salem, where a shortage of foster homes meant that some students remained with abusive parents. She found herself drawn to those unsmiling children who bore bruises and kept secrets.

When she returned to Los Angeles, she went to work in special education and applied to become a foster parent. She was clear on what kind of child she wanted. “Under 10, severely handicapped ... a kid in diapers, the kind nobody else wanted.”

Instead, foster care officials sent her Brianna, an 11-year-old girl who had spent years tending her drug-addicted mother.

“I didn’t plan to adopt her,” Bennett said. But when attempts to reunite her with her mother failed, “she asked me, ‘If I can’t go home with my mom, would you adopt me?’ ”

That adoption was in the works when foster care officials called again. They had an 11-year-old girl who needed emergency shelter because her foster parents couldn’t handle her behavior problems. Samantha had been abused by her parents, then by relatives, and had passed through eight foster care placements in as many years.

When Bennett heard her story, she politely declined to take the girl in. “I said ‘no way.’ There were so many reasons not to do it.” But after three hours on the phone with the girl’s social worker -- and a night spent in prayer -- she agreed to open her home again.

“I got her on a Tuesday,” Bennett recalled, “and on Sunday she said, ‘Will you adopt me?’ I looked at her and said ‘Why not?’ ”

Bennett’s approach to child-rearing is straightforward and simple: “You love them. You teach them right. You teach them wrong ... insist they behave and give them consequences if they don’t.” She dispenses approval and discipline in equal measure.

In her tidy home in the foothills of the San Gabriels, there are chore lists posted on the walls and rules about everything from how to behave at the dinner table to how to clean the bathtub. Bennett dictates which channels her children can watch on TV and what friends they are allowed to see.

But there are also elaborate birthday celebrations, the affectionate company of a rambunctious black Lab and a row of tiny mailboxes lined up on a counter, where family members leave encouraging notes for one another.

Undaunted by her daughters’ challenges, Bennett home-schooled them until they caught up with their peers. She took them to church, helped them make friends and taught them the importance of making good choices. One has learned to play the flute; the other is taking violin lessons.

Both girls learned that they can rely on a mother who bends but doesn’t break.

“They just needed to be loved,” Bennett says, recalling what Samantha once told her: “Mom, you’re the first adult who wasn’t scared of me.”

But Samantha also had another need, one that would challenge Bennett’s evolving family: She wanted to find her older brother.

BY the time he turned 14, Casey had been taken in, then turned out, by a series of relatives and foster care homes. “When they’d get tired of him or couldn’t deal with him,” they’d call foster care officials to come pick him up, said his former probation officer, Mary Ann Smiley.

Casey, she said, was “a sweet, funny kid with a good attitude” but a bundle of problems.

When he landed on probation in 2002 -- for stealing the keys to a restaurant, then going back after hours and stealing food -- he was taking three kinds of psychotropic medication, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was considered a fire setter, according to an official county synopsis of his records.

Probation officials tried group home placements, but Casey kept getting in trouble. In April 2003, he was ordered into a locked psychiatric ward at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk “where he could get intense therapy,” Smiley said.

Bennett spent weeks tracking down Casey and arranging to take his sister for visits. After a few months of regular trips, she realized that theirs were the only names that ever appeared on Casey’s visitors’ log. “No one was coming to see this kid,” she said. “He was an orphan in the truest sense of the world.”

That broke her heart but not her resolve.

“I kept saying ‘I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t adopt another kid,’ ” she recalled. She started praying that God would send Casey a family. The day she switched from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I wish I could,’ she knew the die was cast. She began taking him home for weekend visits.

One Sunday after church, she sat with Casey in the parking lot, trying to talk him through a difficult spot. “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about your life, what would it be?” she asked.

“I would make you my mom,” he said.

The next day, Bennett called Casey’s probation officer and began the adoption process. There were months of questions, problems, worries and tears. The adoption would take more than two years to complete.

In the meantime, Casey was moved to a less-restrictive psychiatric facility in Long Beach. Bennett and her daughters spent the summer of 2005 making daily 100-mile round-trip treks to visit him. Their makeshift family stretched to include Faith, a teenager befriended by Bennett’s daughters during long days in the visiting room. Her brother was a patient with Casey. By summer’s end, she had moved in with the Bennetts.

That September, with Casey’s adoption on track, he too moved into Bennett’s home.

From the start, he struggled to fit into her well-ordered family. Bennett had to school him on everything from basic hygiene to social graces. She learned to accommodate some of his eccentric behaviors and tried to teach him to moderate others.

In our home, there is no locked, padded room to confine belligerent kids, she told him. “You can’t go into your bedroom and punch your walls. You don’t get to lose your composure.”

The kids mostly got along, but sometimes Casey annoyed his sisters. He left crud on the dishes when it was his turn to wash. He was embarrassingly awkward around their friends. “The fantasy of the perfect brother” died early on, Bennett said.

“I’d love to say ‘And we all lived happily ever after,’ but I’d have to lie. It’s not happily ever after, but it’s good enough. But this is what being a family is.”

Her daughters bemoaned their loss of privacy. Her parents and siblings worried that she had taken on too much, that Casey’s needs would unhinge her family.

But Bennett is no stranger to kids with big needs. She teaches hospitalized, severely handicapped students, some of them bedridden, brain-damaged, relying on respirators to breathe.

At home, Bennett was raising four teens -- ages 18, 16, 15 and 14 -- weathering their temper tantrums, complaints and bouts of self-pity as well as her own exhaustion and misgivings.

Not long after Casey moved in, he stole an iguana from a local pet store. Bennett made him return the lizard, pay the pet store owner and apologize. When they got back home, Casey started packing to leave. “I know I have to go,” he said.

Bennett, worried that the owner might press charges, had told the Los Angeles County Probation Department about the theft. Now, she asked probation officers to let Casey stay. “I love him,” she said. “Please leave him here. The child made a bad choice. He shouldn’t lose his home for misbehaving. No child should have to earn a family.”

She told Casey to unpack. “I’m not kicking you out,” she said. “You’re in big trouble. You’re going to stay in your room for a long, long time. But this is your home. You’re not leaving.’”

BUT leaving was what Casey seemed to do best. Bennett had to put a deadbolt -- locked from inside with a key -- on the outside door near his room to stifle his habit of running off. He’d head up the wash and vanish into the woods near their house, and “I’d have 25 people from church out looking for him,” Bennett said.

Usually, somebody would spot him and let Bennett know or would talk him into going home. Or he’d get cold and hungry and go back on his own.

Bennett never figured out what made him run. A fear of rejection? A sense of wanderlust? Resentment at being under Mom’s thumb? Or the sheer thrill of being a young man on his own after being locked down for so long?

In March, Casey ran off again. This time, days passed, then weeks, then months, and he didn’t come back. Bennett’s church friends found him but couldn’t persuade him to go home.

He wouldn’t tell them why he left, just that he wasn’t ready to return.

Bennett heard accounts from friends who spotted him on the streets, collecting cans and bottles for recycling. She began riding around at night until she spied him safe, if not sound.

Sometimes she drove by him without speaking; just seeing him took a load off her mind. Other times, they’d meet in a park and talk.

One recent Sunday, she took Casey and his sisters to El Pollo Loco for dinner. “He was always my pickiest eater,” she said. “This time he said ‘Mom, I’ll eat anything.’ ”

He hangs out within a few miles of home, Bennett said. He’s not skinny. He’s not filthy. He’s eating and bathing someplace. He’d gotten a haircut the last time she saw him. He shows up at church some Sunday mornings.

She wishes he would stop by the house, if only to get clean clothes and take his meds. “But at least he’s not alone,” she says, comforting herself. “At least now there are people who love him. He has a family to come back to.”

But Casey seems content on the streets, she said. He’s growing up in ways Bennett couldn’t have imagined. He’s learning to navigate the bus system, to budget his money, to fill out job applications. “This from a kid who couldn’t remember to take his lunch to school,” Bennett marvels.

At times, she’s frustrated and disappointed, puzzled by Casey’s recalcitrance, wondering if love alone really is enough to rescue a boy from his wounded youth.

Other times she’s proud of his awkward steps toward independence and his effort to make amends. On Mother’s Day he stopped by the house while the family was out and left a note for the only mother he’s ever known. I’m sorry for hurting you, Mom, he wrote. I just have to do this on my own.

Yet she admits that she’s more than a little scared. She knows Casey is an adult in the eyes of the law. And a mother can’t order a man back home.

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sandy.banks@latimes.com