Foster Child Said Forced to Serve Corpse

Foster Child Said Forced to Serve Corpse
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By STEVE STRUNSKY Associated Press Writer Originally published
February 3, 2004, 11:10 PM EST
CLARK, N.J. -- A couple has been charged with forcing their
13-year-old foster daughter to take meals to an elderly relative's
room for several weeks even though they knew the man had died,
prosecutors said.
Police were called to the house in August and an autopsy determined
that the 82-year-old man had been dead for several weeks in the room
where the girl was sent every day with food.
Kenneth and Donna Keaveney were charged Tuesday with child cruelty and
elder neglect following a five-month investigation, Union County
Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow said.
"They both knew the grandfather had passed away and was rotting to the
point where the house reeked of death," Romankow said.
The decaying remains of Donna Keaveney's father, Nicola Lombardi, were
found Aug. 28.
The 13-year-old and two other foster children, ages 11 and 4, were
immediately removed from the house by the state Division of Youth and
Family Services.
The Keaveneys had been foster parents for almost five years, agency
spokesman Andy Williams said. It was not known how long the three
foster children were living at the home before the body was found.
The Keaveneys were scheduled to make their first court appearance next
week. Assistant Prosecutor Robert O'Leary said the couple did not yet
have a lawyer.
No one answered the door at the home Tuesday evening.
Bill Megee, a 60-year-old retired electrician who lives next door in
the middle-class neighborhood, said the couple moved in to the blue,
split-level home about 10 years ago with elderly man and his wife. But
the wife was killed in an auto accident several years ago, Megee said,
and the family underwent drastic changes afterward.
Megee said he sometimes heard Kenneth Keaveney ridiculing the older
man. "You could hear his yelling and screaming, 'Your father stinks --
can't you give him a shower?'"
The troubling case is the latest involving children under DYFS care. A
Collingswood couple was charged in October with starving their four
adopted children.
That case caused outrage after DYFS officials said a caseworker was
supposed to have been visiting the home regularly yet made no report
that anything was wrong with the children.
Troubles at the agency led officials to order a safety assessment of
every one of the thousands of children under foster care in the state
last year. Williams said it was not known if the Keaveney home had
been visited as part of those assessments.
James Davy, the newly appointed human services commissioner, called
the assessments into question last month and ordered that about half
of them be repeated with DYFS caseworkers under the supervision of
independent supervisors.
Kevin Ryan, the state's new Child Advocate, said the latest case
"again raises very profound questions about the safety assessments and
whether children in foster care are safe."
http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationwo...,5350264.story
Defend your civil liberties! Get information at http://www.aclu.org, become a member at http://www.aclu.org/join and get active at http://www.aclu.org/action.