Columnist Jon Ralston: Adacelli’s death exposes problem

Friday, Aug. 26, 2005 | 4:55 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

Many of us in the pundit game write about politics from a safe distance. Ensconced in our ivory towers, we preach about governments behaving badly, about politicians pandering pusillanimously, about lobbyists influencing insidiously. We lambaste, we sear and we pierce -- but we rarely holster our rhetorical swords to see the consequences of the actions we write or talk about.

And then a case comes along that reduces all the pontifications to a tower of Babel, making real what had been far removed. That's what happened last week as I delved into (through two "Face to Face" programs) the tragic story of Adacelli Snyder, a child who lived (or more aptly, barely existed) through just over two years of hell before dying. Her mother, Charlene Snyder, and Snyder's boyfriend, Jack Richardson, stand accused of second-degree murder, and evidence indicates the child afflicted with cerebral palsy was treated more like a dog than a human being.

But little Adacelli's death also exposes a shameful neglect by government to protect society's most vulnerable citizens, illuminating a criminally porous safety net that the little girl fell through and then suffered a horrible death by starvation.

The facts of this case are at once singularly awful but, alas, probably emblematic of what lurks beneath the veneer of prosperity and complacency in the valley. As politicians genuflect, or even prostrate themselves, before the lowest-common-denominator, we-hate-government set and the Sun City, pull-up-the-drawbridge crowd, beyond the gated communities of Southern Nevada (and probably inside them, too) something frightening is happening.

When you ponder, far from this reality, whether government needs more resources to do its job properly or whether it must have its spending restrained by government growth initiatives or property tax rollbacks, consider the story of Adacelli Snyder.

If you have not followed the story, Adacelli, weighing only 11 pounds, was found dead less than two months ago in a squalid trailer where she and her three siblings were being "raised" by Snyder and Richardson. The couple was arrested a couple of weeks ago and charged with murder by child neglect.

That last word rankles me after reading the police report of the conditions at the home. Just one sampling: "Garbage, rotting food, dirt and other forms of debris were evident on the floors of every room in the trailer, making it difficult to walk from one room to another in parts of the residence. Animal and apparent human feces were on some areas of the floors and smeared on some walls." The trailer was teeming with vermin, including flies, lice and roaches.

Adacelli's face was covered with bites and insect eggs. Her eye was discolored, her abdomen was bruised, open sores dotted her buttocks and thighs and dried fecal matter and urine covered her lower body, the arrest warrant says. A family friend, the document states, once found the child in "this little pallet of blankets on the floor -- it almost looked like a dog bed to me, and it really disturbed me." Neglect, I think you'll agree, is a wholly inadequate word.

How does this happen? That's the obvious question. But perhaps the more important question is how could those charged with protecting children let this happen, and how many others are suffering now as Adacelli and her siblings did?

The facts here are quite disturbing. The county's Child Protective Services division looked at the family for a year but closed the case in July 2004, when the then-1-year-old child did not weigh much more than 12 pounds. Charlene Snyder subsequently failed to show up for pediatric appointments for months -- Adacelli had not been seen by a doctor since April 2004 and the other children, who also have signs of neglect, had not been seen since last year, either. And even after Snyder filed a domestic violence report on April 4, the police either did not see fit to contact CPS, or they did and the county did nothing.

It's hard to tell, considering the shoddy recordkeeping at the county. In fact, a county-commissioned study, released six days before Adacelli's death, revealed that documentation was almost nonexistent.

"Evidence used to make findings was routinely not documented," the Child Welfare Institute report asserts. "Progress toward case goals, or lack thereof, was often not documented. There was little documentation of contact with service providers to determine progress or current status." So how can we trust that CPS knew what it was doing when it closed the case on the family more than a year ago and never checked in again?

County Manager Thom Reilly acknowledges the problems found in the study are serious but he defends the division as overworked and overwhelmed, yet making the best of an impossible situation. He also is protective of family services boss Susan Klein-Rothschild, whom he just named the county's manager of the year.

But this is not merely about poor management or one horrific case. It is about a system where it is sometimes easier to fall through the cracks than be caught in the social safety net. The integration of the state and county child welfare systems is barely a year old and must be given a chance to succeed, but it needs to go a long way before it solves problems of training and coordination.

My heart does not bleed to the point where I would suggest all neglectful or abusive parents could be transformed, with proper attention, into nurturing ones. But if you want a real-world story of why government here cannot be fettered with artificial and arbitrary limitations, such as a taxpayer bill of rights or a Prop 13, this is it. This isn't ivory tower bloviation. With more money begetting more training, more case workers and better systems, maybe, just maybe, little Adacelli Snyder might still be alive and hundreds, maybe thousands, of kids might not be suffering now.