Audio By Carbonatix
part 1 of 2
Casey Collier’s quicksilver moods–kind and gentle one moment, unruly and obstinate the next–puzzled the people around him from the time he was a preschooler. He landed in therapy before he was ten, in a mental hospital at age twelve. The explanations for his actions seemed to change with every psychologist and psychiatrist who had a crack at him.
His adoptive parents, Mike and Rose Collier, tried futilely to find help for him. Their frustration was exacerbated upon learning that Casey’s birth mother had had mental problems of her own–something the Denver Department of Social Services didn’t mention at the time of adoption.
Casey grew up. But he never got better. He spent much of his adolescence in a rotating series of group homes and institutions. By the time he was a teenager, he stood six-foot-five and had become known as a problem patient, often angry, sometimes violent.
Last year, at age seventeen, Casey made his last stop on the treatment merry-go-round: the Cleo Wallace Center, a Westminster facility for adolescents and children with behavioral problems. The staff at Cleo Wallace was supposed to help Casey, enforcing a series of ironclad rules designed to force him into
more positive behavior patterns. Instead, they killed him.
On the afternoon of December 21, Cleo Wallace employees became convinced that Casey had lost control. Two staffers grabbed him, intending to escort him to an isolation room. When he began struggling, four other employees joined in. Using a controversial method of restraint that Cleo Wallace staffers refer to as “the Illinois system,” six men pressed Casey face down on the floor. One man held his head, another his arms, another his legs. Three staffers laid across his back, a procedure that, according to the autopsy report, literally prevented the asthmatic Casey from drawing air into his lungs.
When Casey quit struggling, the staff members released him. By then he was dead, facedown in a pool of his own vomit. An accident, said Cleo Wallace directors–their staff had used the restraint for years with only minor injuries to staff or patients. An accident, said the Jefferson County Coroner’s office.
Last month, after a seven-week investigation, the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office ruled that insufficient evidence existed to bring charges of criminally negligent homicide against the Cleo Wallace employees. That finding officially concluded the criminal probe into Casey Collier’s death. But it hasn’t ended the questions.
For in addition to raising doubts about the care he received at Cleo Wallace, Casey’s death has laid bare a glaring omission in state regulations regarding the use of physical restraint at residential child-and-adolescent-care facilities such as Cleo Wallace.
No requirements mandate that staff at such facilities receive training in the use of physical restraint techniques. State regulations say that “holding shall be the only means of restraining a child,” and that discipline may include “gentle physical restraint such as holding.” The rules say too that “children shall not be subjected to physical harm or humiliation,” and prohibit “cruel and unusual punishments” (including “roughly handling a child”). But those regulations don’t explain what “holding” means–and state inspectors apparently have decided that the technique that led to Casey Collier’s death didn’t qualify as “rough handling.”
Rose and Mike Collier say they’re incensed about the state’s apparent inability to help them. “If they killed Casey like this, they could kill someone else,” says Mike Collier, in a voice that keeps pace with his rising anger. “It never leaves my mind. For the past two or three weeks, all I can picture is him laying on the ground, struggling and knowing he’s going to die.”
“Casey wasn’t just thrown away to that place,” adds Rose. “Casey had someone to fight for him, and he’s dead. What about the children who have no one to fight for them? Casey didn’t just die for nothing. He died for a reason. Somebody’s going to have to tell us something, sometime.”
The Colliers say they want to know why Cleo Wallace staffers found it necessary to manhandle their son. Didn’t employees realize they shouldn’t lie across the back of an asthmatic? Why didn’t they notice that, as they held Casey down, he was choking on his own vomit? And why didn’t staffers realize, in time to save his life, that the young man they continued to press against the floor had stopped breathing?
Casey’s tragic death capped for his parents a series of tragedies that began the day they adopted him. For if the Colliers had known the sad truth about Casey and his biological mother–facts that would not come to light until almost ten years after he’d come to live with them–they might never have brought him home in the first place.
When Mike and Rose Collier got married in 1974, each already had been through the trials of parenting. Rose, a Denver Public Schools tutor, has two grown sons. Mike, a taxi driver, has two grown daughters. But in January 1978, Rose saw a local television program in which a Denver social worker mentioned that there was a great need for minority couples willing to adopt. She contacted the Denver Department of Social Services (DDSS) and began the process of trying to adopt a baby.
The Colliers say they didn’t insist on taking a perfect child. They say they told a social worker they would take a child who was hearing-impaired or could not walk, but felt they couldn’t properly tend to a child who required constant custodial care.
Court documents show that a social worker told the Colliers about an eighteen-month-old boy who was “in good health.” The agency agreed to investigate the child’s physical and mental condition, check his family background and determine the reason his parents relinquished him. It also promised to determine the “suitability of the adoption.”
The Colliers didn’t know that the boy they brought home and named Casey had been born to a mother with serious mental and emotional problems. They didn’t know that Casey had a history of abuse as a foster child—or that the abuse he suffered had contributed to a host of psychological problems. Before he died, the boy who allegedly was in good mental health was diagnosed with everything from depression and “oppositional-defiant disorder” to autism and paranoia.
“Chances are, if they had told us first, we wouldn’t have adopted him,” Rose admits. “But if we had met him before they told us, we probably would have taken him anyway. Because when we met him, there was no question about it. He took to my husband right away. And that was it.”
The Reverend Earl Holiman, the Colliers’ pastor at Denver’s Bethsaida Temple, presided over the rites that conveyed Casey into and out of their lives. Holiman christened the boy. Fifteen years later he gave his eulogy. “He was born into abuse and he died in abuse,” Holiman told mourners at Casey’s memorial service.
“To me, he was a normal baby, a beautiful young man,” Holiman says of Casey as a child. “It wasn’t until later, not too long after they’d adopted him, that they discovered his asthma and the abuse he had experienced. As I remember, his mother mentioned to me once that she saw his feet were scarred on top. She immediately went to have him examined so no one would be accusing her. That’s when she discovered that he’d been stood in scalding water.”
Rose says that when she questioned a social worker about the scars and about Casey’s fear of water, the woman said she had “reason to believe” someone in Casey’s foster family had placed him in scalding water when he misbehaved. In addition, he may have been made to stand in a toilet while it was being flushed.
Preschool was when “all our troubles started,” says Rose. The very first week Casey began attending class, his teacher sent him home with a note complaining that he was unable to sit still and that he acted aggressively toward other children. More notes followed. He wouldn’t stay in his seat. He was stubborn. He distracted the rest of the class.
In the beginning, Mike considered Casey’s behavior normal, if mischievous. He would tell Rose, “He’s just being a boy.” But Rose couldn’t remember having had the same problems with her sons at that age. Someone always seemed to be knocking on the door complaining about Casey. He was throwing rocks, they’d say, or he pushed someone off a bike.
By the spring of 1986 Rose and Mike had separated. The emotional toll from dealing with her rocky marriage and coping with her needy son weighed heavily on Rose. When she also began suffering debilitating headaches, she says, it was all too much for her to bear.
“He was getting in trouble in school and in the neighborhood, and I didn’t have two minutes to lay down,” she says. “Nobody would babysit him. There was no place to get any relief.”
She sought help from a mental health center near their Park Hill home. Casey started weekly counseling sessions. But his problems continued unabated.
Unable to get along with other children and a frustration to teachers who felt they couldn’t help him, Casey bounced between at least four different elementary schools.
In June 1988, Rose agreed to place Casey in the Denver Children’s Home for three months, where professionals could evaluate the twelve-year-old’s mental and physical state. Though pinpointing the cause of Casey’s problems proved difficult, one staff member was succinct in her assessment of the boy. “I was told that he was crazy,” Rose remembers. “That was the terminology she used.” The official finding was that Casey had a psychotic disorder.
Randy Craven, who worked as a counselor at the Children’s Home while Casey lived there, is more gentle in his description of the boy. Casey was childish and stubborn, says Craven, but also “really endearing and easy to like.” One of Casey’s biggest problems, he says, was that the boy never seemed to know when he’d reached the limit of someone’s patience.
“He might pull somebody’s hair or fidget to the point that someone would tell him to stop, and he would continue to do it until we had to intervene,” says Craven. Intervention meant physical restraint–two people would sit on the floor beside the prone child and hold down his arms. Counselors needed to do this with Casey as often as three times per week.
Casey didn’t like living in a group home, Craven remembers, but “I don’t know what else you could do with him. He couldn’t get along in a normal setting.”
Children’s Home staffers apparently agreed. They recommended that Casey be sent to a psychiatric facility to live. But Rose, who had intended Casey’s absence to be temporary, insisted on bringing him back to live with her. She brought him home and continued his therapy sessions at the Park Hill center. “I tried every avenue to keep him home,” she says.
Casey, however, was far too disturbed to remain with Rose. In November 1988, two months after she’d brought him home, Rose agreed with his Park Hill therapist’s recommendation that the boy check into the Fort Logan Mental Health Center for a 72-hour evaluation. He ended up staying seven months.
By that time the cost of Casey’s care had become too much for the Colliers to bear alone. They began looking for financial assistance. Rose got him on Medicaid and Social Security disability and asked the Denver Department of Social Services for help.
To enable the DDSS to assist them, the Colliers needed to sign a dependency-and-neglect petition assigning temporary wardship of Casey to the agency, says Rose. During this process, the Colliers began to learn about Casey’s biological mother. She had grown up in a school for the retarded and had spent time in the state psychiatric hospital in Pueblo.
According to a report filed after Casey’s death by Triena Harper, the chief deputy coroner for Jefferson County, the woman also had problems with drugs and alcohol and went into labor in a detox ward. Court documents indicate that social workers took Casey from his mother shortly after his birth and placed him in a foster home, because they deemed the woman unable to care for an infant. He was the second of her boys to be put up for adoption.
Rose says she became livid upon learning about the boy’s background. When she and Mike had adopted the boy, she says, they were told there weren’t any records on his family. “As it turned out,” she says, “they lied to us. There were tons of records.”
Rose asked the American Civil Liberties Union for assistance. Denver attorney Paul Radosevich volunteered to assist the ACLU and represent Rose in a suit against the DDSS (Mike was not a party to the suit, as the two were separated at the time).
Rose’s suit, filed on April 28, 1989, claimed that the Department of Social Services had “intentionally or with deliberate indifference” failed to disclose or discover important background information about the boy and his parents. The complaint also alleged that the agency had misrepresented Casey’s mental and physical condition.
U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Sparr heard oral arguments in the case in August 1990. In May 1991 Sparr ruled in favor of the Department of Social Services. The judge, says Radosevich, decided that as a county agency, the DDSS was immune from liability. In addition, Sparr could find no statutory basis–in state or federal law–providing for the rights of adoptive parents.
“The adoption process is designed to protect the best interests of the child in placing it in a suitable home,” Sparr wrote in his decision. “As a secondary matter, the rights of the biological parents will be considered. No provision for protecting the `rights’ of the adoptive parents in obtaining a suitable child are mentioned in the statutory scheme, and no such right can be inferred from other sources.”
While Rose waged her battles in court, Casey continued his seesaw existence. He’d made new friends and grew to like it at Fort Logan, says Rose. But his progress came erratically. According to the coroner’s investigation, therapists again recommended that Rose send Casey to live at a residential treatment facility.
Rose, however, tried keeping him at home one last time. In the fall of 1989, Casey began spending mornings in class at Smiley Middle School. He spent afternoons at home with tutor Bill Holden, who worked in the Denver Public Schools’ Homebound program for special-education students.
Casey was a nice kid, Holden says. He was friendly, smiled a lot and, from what Holden saw, wasn’t violent or aggressive. “I was hoping that with his supportive home unit and the schools that he would be able to head in the right direction,” Holden says.
But by late June 1991 Casey was back in a mental ward. It started with an argument, says Rose. Casey was going out to play basketball, and his young niece wanted to tag along. “He said no,” Rose remembers, “and she came crying to me. When I confronted him, it was more than he could take. He fell apart. His conversation was bizarre. He said he thought everybody was after him. It was just awful.” According to the coroner’s investigation, Casey ripped the telephone from the wall, yelled at his mother and “physically abused” his niece.
The realization that she would have to send Casey back to the hospital was heartrending, says Rose. “I believe he would have been better off at home if I only could have handled it,” she says, beginning to cry. “I just believe I’m probably the reason he’s dead.”
Rose took Casey to Denver General Hospital that night. From there he was sent back to Fort Logan. After two months therapists decided that Casey needed a highly structured environment. They sent him to live at the Griffith Center, a residential center for disturbed youths, in rural Larkspur.
“It seemed like a real nice setting,” says Rose. “They had horses, cabins, rolling hills. But Casey was afraid. He said he was being mistreated.” That was all Rose needed to hear. Less than a month after he’d arrived, she says, she decided to pull him out.
Other sources put a far different spin on Casey’s short tenure at Griffith. The report filed by Triena Harper at the coroner’s office says that staff members had twice caught Casey squirting ammonia into other children’s eyes. When Westminster detective Mike Lynch began investigating Casey’s death, a Cleo Wallace employee told him that Casey also had assaulted a female staff member at Griffith. Griffith’s director declined to confirm or deny to Lynch or to Westword whether the incident occurred.
Rose bristles at the suggestion that Casey ever harmed anyone, and refers to the assault allegations as “hogwash.” But her depiction of Casey as a gentle giant does not jibe with information from staffers at some of the treatment centers where he lived.
After leaving Larkspur, Casey was shipped back to Fort Logan, and then to a group home in Grand Junction. That didn’t last long, either. “He said a staffworker was gay and that he wanted [Casey] to live with him,” says Rose. “Next thing I knew, Casey was on the phone with his [Social Services] caseworker, and he was on a Greyhound bus back to Denver.” Casey’s “story-telling,” as his mother describes it, apparently was designed to sabotage his placements so he could go home. Rose says she fell for it on more than one occasion.
Casey lasted only two weeks at his next stop, a vocational rehabilitation program in Utah. Program directors sent him home, the coroner’s report says, “due to his outbursts of anger and self-destructive behavior.”
end of part 1
