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| Report: Teen Suicide Was System's Failure |
| By Hartford Courant |
| Published: 12/26/2001 |
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The other prisoners in the Naugatuck jail that weekend couldn't actually see Falan Fox - she'd been segregated because she was the only female - but they could hear her well enough. For almost three hours, they listened to the girl calling for help. About 5:30 p.m., she gave up. Then she made a noose out of a pair of white socks, tied it around a bar on her cell door and hung herself in full view of the monitoring camera. From the time she was 8 years old - when a therapist's recommendation for medication to control her moods was ignored, to July 22, 2000, when she yelled for help for three hours - Fox's serious mental health needs went largely unmet, according to a report released recently. State Child Advocate Jeanne Milstein, whose office investigated Fox's death with the child fatality review panel, said the 16 year-old's case demonstrates why Connecticut can no longer afford to treat depressed and desperate young people like criminals instead of patients. 'Falan was left to chance,' Milstein said. 'She got lost in a maze we created.' Every system that was supposed to protect Fox - the schools, the state Department of Children and Families, the judicial system and the local police - ultimately failed, the report found, because they didn't adequately address the root causes of her problems: mental illness and physical abuse. Instead, Fox was shuttled between foster homes, group homes, shelters and detention centers as the adults in her life attempted to control and punish her out-of-control behavior. At each stop, she acted out - usually by trying to harm herself, running away or violating curfews and other rules. Milstein, who issued a series of recommendations recently to address the system's failure to protect Fox, also called attention to the rising number of teen suicides in Connecticut last year. 'Ten percent of high school kids have actually tried to kill themselves, and the typical school has no idea who these kids are,' said Susan K. Patrick, president of the Governor's Prevention Partnership. Milstein said her office intends to investigate the 15 teen suicides that occurred between Oct. 1, 2000, and Sept. 30, 2001. There were eight the previous year. Milstein also recommended several steps she believes would have prevented Fox's suicide, such as legislation that would allow children's mental health records to be shared with the state Department of Correction and local police departments and establishing a single person or agency to guide a child's care through the juvenile justice and mental health systems. But before either of these things is done, she said, Connecticut has to stop putting status offenders like Fox - whose primary 'crimes' were truancy and disobeying her parents until shortly before her death - in jails and detention centers. |
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