In search of shadows

David Kihara

Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006 | 7:54 a.m.

"L.M." was 14 when he ran away from Child Haven, the county's emergency foster care facility he had been placed in after being removed from his family's home because of suspected abuse or neglect.

Like many children placed in a temporary foster shelter or home, L.M. was not happy about being there. County records show that on the day L.M. ran away, he told social workers that his grandmother had died, and he was crying and distraught.

"You all can't keep me here if I don't want to be here," he told a social worker. He then walked away from the facility, climbed over a fence and fled.

Each year many children like L.M. run away from foster homes and shelters.

Clark County Family Services estimates that on any given day more than 75 children are missing from their foster homes. Some run away for a few hours or days and then return, while others are never heard from again.

That issue has the Clark County Family Services Department and the juvenile justice system scrambling to find a solution.

"These kids -- we don't want them to be forgotten," said Frank Sullivan, a hearing master in Family Court. Hearing masters, who act as judges but are appointed rather than elected, often preside over the initial aspects of a family court case such as where a child will be placed temporarily.

Beginning next month, Sullivan will begin holding "AWOL Court," a newly formed program to help track foster home runaways. The court session, which may meet once a month, will bring in social workers or others with information on a child. Each case will be reviewed to determine where the child is and what steps are being made to find him or her.

Tracking foster runaways is complicated by the lack of any comprehensive information on the number of missing children, how long they have been missing or what efforts are being made to find them, he said.

Currently, the courts are usually informed that a child is missing during the mandatory six-month review of a foster child's case, he said.

"We're responsible for these kids," he said. "We take wardship of them and are responsible for finding them. We're their parent."

Some recent incidents underline the problem.

Several teens ran away from Child Haven on Jan. 9. The youths were known as "habitual runaways," and evidence showed they were sleeping on rooftops and in storage sheds on the Child Haven grounds, according to a Metro Police report.

Before the teens fled from the foster care facility, however, they broke into the Andre Agassi Center for Education, the six-room school inside the Child Haven facility. The youths ransacked the school, causing more than $23,000 worth of damage to the facility.

In another instance, a 14-year-old, "D.M.," ran away from Child Haven three times in less than a week. A report shows that D.M. ran away from the facility twice in one day simply by slipping out of a window or walking away when the staff was occupied with other matters.

Susan Klein-Rothschild, the county's director of family services, said one of the problems is that children are not detained at Child Haven. While the facility has 24-hour security, it is not a prison. Because the children have done nothing wrong, the county does not use force to keep them there.

"We don't want them on the street or in other situations that aren't safe," Klein-Rothschild said. "But unlike a juvenile justice facility, where they have a legal right to detain them, we are here to meet the needs of the kids. We don't take any physical action to keep them there."

The county's AWOL Court program is modeled in part on a similar program in Michigan, which also faced a problem with children running away from foster care. In 2002, the Michigan Human Services Department began working with law enforcement to access databases to help track the kids.

The Michigan Supreme Court also ordered all state trial courts to work to find children who run away from foster care facilities. Among other things, the courts hold hearings in which judges question social workers and others about the missing children.

Of 787 foster children missing in Michigan in 2004, the state's Supreme Court reported that Family Court judges assisted in finding 618.

Sullivan said some fine tuning is needed before the AWOL Court is up and running in Clark County. The court is still assessing whether additional staff or funding is needed. He said he also hopes to coordinate with the authorities in other states such as California and Utah because "many times the kids aren't going to stay in Las Vegas."

"It's kind of corny, but if we find one kid that we didn't find before, this program is a success," Sullivan said.

David Kihara can be reached at 259-2330 or at davidk@lasvegassun.com.