Fla. Foster Children At Risk?

It's an unimaginable crime -- a mother killing her own child. Yet last spring, 21-year-old Yusimil Herrera was arrested for the murder of her 3-year-old daughter, Angel.

And the story doesn't end there. Florida's Department of Children and Families is accused of failing to save Angel despite numerous warnings. That agency is notorious for its failures; it actually has lost track of more than 500 children under its watch.

And, as reports, no one knows that better than Yusimil Herrera, who was raised as a ward of the state. Today, she sits in jail, awaiting her murder trial. It's a far cry from where she was when she first spoke to CBS for a story about foster care four years ago.

In the spring of 2001, Yusimil had just given birth to a baby she optimistically named Angel Hope. Yusimil, 17, who was about to leave foster care, was convinced she'd overcome all her problems, including a diagnosis of mental illness.

Now, four years later, she's in jail facing life for the murder of that same baby, Angel. Yusimil is so heavily medicated to control her mood swings that it affects her speech and motor skills.

"It's a lot of medicine now. I need to be on the right medicine," she tells Mabrey. And when Yusimil is off her medicine, she says, "I'm all off. I don't know what be goin' on. Sometimes, I overreact."

The story of how Yusimil ended up this way began long before she had Angel. Born to a drug-addicted mother, Yusimil and her sister, Tasha Ruiz, were abandoned on a street corner in Miami in 1986. Yusimil was 2; Tasha, 4. Police found them wandering in a park two days later and placed them in foster care.

Because Yusimil is so heavily medicated, 60 Minutes Wednesday asked Tasha to tell their story. Tasha says she was moved 65 times among almost 40 different foster homes and institutions.

By law, foster care is supposed to be a temporary refuge, but for Yusimil and Tasha, it was the beginning of a 16-year nightmare. They were separated early on, and sent to different homes. And both suffered abuses so horrifying they'd be hard to believe if they weren't documented.

60 Minutes Wednesday examined more than 15,000 pages of their medical and department records. One home already had a complaint of "bizarre" physical abuse, but Tasha was sent there anyway. She remembers how the family's son used to abuse her.

"Every day we'll have to get in a corner, in the kitchen, on your knees, with your hands behind your back on the hard floor for hours and hours," recalls Tasha, who says she was about 6 or 7 at the time this happened.

"And if you would move or turn your head or something, they'll come in, snap your head against the wall or hit you. Or they'll tie you in a chair with a rope and put ice-cold water from the freezer and pour it on you. And all you have is your panties on."

"Did you tell them this is what was happening to you," asks Mabrey.

"I told the mother, the lady of the house. And she didn't believe me," says Tasha, who adds that somebody finally started to believe her when she went to the rape treatment center.

At the rape treatment center, doctors found evidence that 9-year-old Tasha had been raped and sodomized. She told them that she had not only been raped by the son who was torturing her, but also molested by the mother's boyfriend.

What's more, Tasha said she had been molested in her previous foster home as well. But neither home was shut down until more girls complained of sexual abuse.

Within a year, Tasha was diagnosed with syphilis. She wrote a letter saying, "I want to kill myself," and attempted suicide.

"I thought it was the way it was supposed to be for a long time, because it happened so much," says Tasha.

And it happened to Yusimil as well. When you go through her files, you see hospital records where a doctor notes "sexual molestation… in the first foster home" at the age of 3. Another record documents the scars on her back, which she confided to a nurse were cigarette burns. And in yet another, a teacher said that Yusimil was found at school, hungry, rifling through the garbage, looking for food.

Yusimil says she grew up thinking that no adult loved her. She had no memory of her sister, or her father, who'd been in prison since she was an infant.

She was 13 when she first met her father. "My dad was the world to me. I was happy to see him. But then he just went back to jail," says Yusimil. "He promised me he was gonna take me out, but he didn't. And that's like – I guess that makes me upset a little bit. But I love my dad."

She says, however, that she doesn't feel the same about her mother, "because she left me in the park."

By the age of 9, Yusimil was suicidal and sometimes violent. She and Tasha were both locked in psychiatric facilities. According to DCF's own investigator, Yusimil, who may have needed some medication, was often overmedicated to the point of near incoherence.

Florida Sen. Skip Campbell looked into the case after a study showed that statewide some foster kids were being medicated inappropriately with psychotropic drugs and weren't properly monitored.

"Psychiatrists don't necessarily know what dosage to give children. They don't know necessarily what the side effect will be," says Campbell. "And one of the things that concerns me the most is that when we have kids in the process and they age out at 18 years old, not in foster care. What happens to them? Who's gonna take care of them?"

Before Yusimil and Tasha aged out of foster care, child advocates filed suit on their behalf against the state of Florida for negligence for the years of physical and sexual abuse, as well as "excessive amounts of medication." The department argued that the damage had been done by the girls' parents, and says it did the best it could to protect two kids who came into foster care already troubled.

But the jury disagreed. The sisters were awarded $4.4 million dollars and became a symbol of a foster-care system out of control. But before Yusimil and Tasha ever received a dime, the state appealed and the verdict was overturned. The sisters eventually settled, and each ended up with just $90,000. Mark Eiglarsh, Yusimil's attorney on her criminal case, says the money did not improve Yusimil's life.

What should the state have done for her when she turned 18?

"They failed her by not giving her the ability to read, to write. But, I mean, to open up a bank account. To be able to write a check. To be able to go into a store and purchase something," says Eiglarsh. "The state set her up for failure."

The Department of Children and Families would not agree to an interview. From the records, we know the department was concerned about Yusimil's history of anger problems and instability, and tried to keep her on her medication. Yusimil was 17 when she gave birth to Angel Hope, who was the second baby she had while she was in foster care.

Despite documented reports that Yusimil was an unfit mother – so many that DCF had taken away her first child and put her up for adoption -- Yusimil was allowed to retain legal custody of Angel.

But even Yusimil recognized she couldn't care for Angel and gave her daughter to her friend, Ann Mitchell, and Ann's son Ronald to raise. "[She was] bright all the time," says Ronald Mitchell. "Happy. Wasn't shy at all. She was really smart for someone her age."

"Grandma, that's what she knew me as," adds Ann Mitchell, who says Angel didn't know her mother well, because Yusimil didn't visit that often.

Two years later, Yusimil got married and decided to take Angel back. Ann Mitchell and the department fought it in court. But when the judge ruled in Yusimil's favor, DCF failed to follow up with home visits to make sure Angel was safe. Yusimil soon got pregnant again and was off her medication. A few months later, calls began to come into the child abuse hotline.

Tasha says she called DCF and told them that Yusimil was hurting Angel: "I was concerned, because I have, you know, that's a flashback when you see somebody doing this type of stuff. And it hurts, you know, it bothers you."

She says she was afraid for what would happen to Angel "because she [Yusimil] wasn't stable on her medication. I wasn't trying to hurt my sister. I was just trying to help, because I knew she needed help."

Ann Mitchell says she saw Angel bruised and called the abuse hotline, which led to another court hearing in March 2004. But DCF presented little evidence and no witnesses to show that Angel was being abused. Ann Mitchell waited to testify by phone, but no one called.

The department told 60 Minutes Wednesday in a statement that "responding to signs that Angel had been abused, (we) tried to shelter the child … but a Florida court denied our request."

But even their own internal review suggests they didn't try hard enough, finding "there was a significant lack" of evidence presented. The judge returned Angel to her mother.

Ann Mitchell says she can't forget handing Angel over for the last time: "She cried for 30 minutes. 'Grandma, please, I don't wanna go. Please.' My daughter had to pick her up and put her in the car, and I can hear that screaming leaving the driveway. She don't wanna go in the car."

Seven weeks later, police were called to Yusimil's apartment. Angel lay in the hallway unresponsive, her arm broken, her skull fractured, her body covered with bruises. Yusimil told police Angel had fallen in the bath, but according to police reports, she soon admitted she'd hit Angel, knocking her against the wall. Her lawyer wouldn't let her talk about the details of that day.

What kind of mother was Yusimil to Angel? "I was a good mom. I was the best mom to her," says Yusimil. "But she didn't understand me. … Because she was at Ann's house all the time, she wanted to be at Ann's house. I couldn't talk to her. She wouldn't talk to me."

Yusimil is pleading not guilty, and her case is expected to go to trial later this year. But the question remains: With so many warning signs, why didn't DCF take Angel away?

Sen. Campbell says although Yusimil is the only one facing charges, there's plenty of blame to go around.

"Yusimil's case became a symbol of everything that was wrong within the system," says Mabrey. "Is her daughter's death a sign that things have not changed?"

"It's the textbook example of how a system fails," says Campbell.