L.A. Mom who Beheaded Son Showed Red Flags

(AP)  A Los Angeles woman who decapitated her 4-year-old with a kitchen knife showed signs of mental illness nine months before the attack, yet Los Angeles County child welfare officials decided she wasn't a serious threat to the boy.

Lars Sanchez was found dead on July 18 in a bedroom he shared with his mother. She was on the floor, her left wrist slashed to the bone.

Nine months earlier, Yolanda Tijerina was investigated after she began screaming and shouting, "I think you killed my son!" - apparently to no one in particular - outside the boy's Highland Park preschool, the Los Angeles Times said.

The principal at Meridian Children's Center reported her to the county's child abuse hotline.

Social workers, who investigated for several days, learned that Tijerina often spoke nonsensically, and the boy's adult sister told officials that she believed her brother was in danger.

The investigation concluded that the mother's "emotional stability, developmental status or cognitive deficiency impairs her current ability to supervise, protect or care for the child."

However, officials concluded that the boy could remain at the home if there were three months of informal monitoring by family members, neighbors and a neighborhood resource center, the Times said, citing documents released by the county Department of Children and Family Services.

Emotional abuse allegations involving the boy could not be substantiated, the department concluded.

The employees involved in the case have been assigned to desk duty pending a review.

Last month, county supervisors voted to review the deaths of about a dozen children who had been the subject of abuse complaints to the county. The vote followed the July beating death of 6-year-old Dae'von Bailey in South Los Angeles. His stepfather is suspected of killing him.

The boy reportedly had been the subject of about a dozen calls to child welfare authorities about possible abuse.

Last year, social workers removed 4,468 children from Los Angeles County homes, and parental mental illness was the main reason in nearly a fifth of those cases.

However, mental illness alone doesn't disqualify a parent from caring for a child. Social workers must also determine if the child is being abused or neglected, the parent is getting treatment, and whether there are other adults at home to care for the child.

The decision can be difficult.

"Social workers are not necessarily trained to assess a parent's mental health," said Charles Sophy, medical director with the Department of Children and Family Services.

"Mental illness is easy to hide sometimes," Sophy said. "You can put on a smiling face when I knock on your door, and I will never know that you tried to kill yourself last week."

[Resin-Smoker]

How about sterilizing the mentaly ill ?

After a few decades of this there would be fewer and fewer individuals with mental diseases and less of this crap where social services would have to be the care takers of the underprivileged childeren with whacked out parents.

[ianlou]

They say you can measure the compassion of a society by examining it's prisons. In America we use our prisons as our primary mental illness facilities since we closed most of our State Mental Hospitals.

This means the mentally ill are either on the street or being victimize in prison.

I wonder if places like Turky have a better track record.

Lets hear it for America's superior health system.

[mariannpepit]

He ex-husband knew she had a mental problem that's probably why he divorced her. Why didn't he go to court to have the children taken away from her and the Welfare system knew about her condition. What was wrong with their judgment? That's why so many children are being murdered by one of their parents because of the carelessness of the welfare system and social workers. They knew forehand she was dangerous and this killing proved it. They all need to be fired ane replaced by competent people. When the social worker told them she had a mental problem and the little girl told them they should have done something at that time.

[aChangeOfIdeas]

why the dad didn't go to court...probably a combination of money and futility. My husband tried to get primary custody of his child - away from the mother who used to leave the child alone (at 5, 6 years old) in hotel lobbies while she was otherwise occupied, shall we say. The child never bathed, wet her bed and slept in it for weeks...mom drank. school teachers/counselors all saw this and my husband's attorney wanted 5 grand up front and still said it was a "slim to none" chance he could get the child. And the chance turned out to be none.

[mariannpepit]

A mother with a history of mental illness should not be around any children. The welfare system should be sued by the child's father and she should be locked up in a mental hospital. I believe that many of the social workers don't care about children and what happens to them. Her child should have been taken away from her months back. And her ex- husband should have seen those signs also. He knew she severe mental problems and so did the social worker. Both her children should have been taken away from her.

[doctajim]

How does one spell "Norplant"!
And medical insurance companies either don't provide mental health care, limit it to 3 visits of "brief therapy", or only pay for inpatient care.
Thanks Reagan for dumping the mentally ill onto the streets of America.

[TheMasses2016]

You are a partisan idiot using politics to institute your brainless posts.

[gramto8]

You are a partisan idiot using politics to institute your brainless posts.

by TheMasses2016 August 18, 2009 5:06 PM EDT


Conventional wisdom suggests that the reduction of funding for social welfare policies during the 1980s is the result of a conservative backlash against the welfare state. With such a backlash, it should be expected that changes in the policies toward involuntary commitment of the mentally ill reflect a generally conservative approach to social policy more generally. In this case, however, the complex of social forces that lead to less restrictive guidelines for involuntary commitment are not the result of conservative politics per se, but rather a coalition of fiscal conservatives, law and order Republicans, relatives of mentally ill patients, and the practitioners working with those patients. Combined with a sharp rise in homelessness during the 1980s, Ronald Reagan pursued a policy toward the treatment of mental illness that satisfied special interest groups and the demands of the business community, but failed to address the issue: the treatment of mental illness.

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html

[TheMasses2016]

Jesus!

Sick.