10 years later, what became of the girl in the window?

November 30, 2017 8:51 AM

"In 2007, a feral child was found starving, covered in her own filth, unable to walk or talk. A new family took in the girl, called her Dani, and tried to make up for years of neglect." Ten years later, an update from the Tampa Bay Times.

The original story.

Three year update, previously on Metafilter.

posted by mosessis (48 comments total)

Her adoptive parents are incredibly strong -- awesome, in the true sense of the word.
posted by holborne at 9:21 AM on November 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Feel kind of horrible for the ex-wife. Still, good update, thanks for the post.
posted by Melismata at 9:23 AM on November 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Warning, that last picture of Dani and her dad made it very dusty in here.

Thanks for the update. I'd entirely forgotten about Dani but the first section of the original story brought it all flooding back. It sounds like she is doing remarkably well given those early years of complete deprivation - that she connects with other people at all and can learn new skills and enjoy small things are encouraging.
posted by Flannery Culp at 9:25 AM on November 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

That was a hard read.
posted by notyou at 9:34 AM on November 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

Oh, man, that had me in tears. I remember the horrifying original story. That the mother never received any real consequences for this is frightening. The power of human interaction on babies and toddlers, that there are no do-overs, that human beings can be so cruel and so selfless...
posted by rikschell at 9:49 AM on November 30, 2017 [14 favorites]

so , so dusty
posted by French Fry at 9:52 AM on November 30, 2017

90% of parents with a special needs child will lose their marriage: a statistic I don't think I have ever heard.
posted by Miko at 9:53 AM on November 30, 2017 [47 favorites]

What an incredibly human and real story. It shows the limits of even the truly good people, but reminds us that they do exist. Terribly sad and yet uplifting at the same time.

Seconding Flannery Culp on that last photo - but don't just skip to it. Story is tough but worth your time and energy.
posted by martin q blank at 9:54 AM on November 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

Reporter Lane DeGregory previously
posted by not_the_water at 9:55 AM on November 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

90% of parents with a special needs child will lose their marriage: a statistic I don't think I have ever heard.

Does anyone have a cite for this? It sounds plausible, but I'm wondering about the research.
posted by epanalepsis at 9:59 AM on November 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

A citation I've seen

2005 blackwell publishing, family court review, october 2005, 43 fam. ct. rev. 607

I looked it up and the abstract seems to fit as well.
posted by French Fry at 10:07 AM on November 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

Wow. I am floored. Not in a good or a bad way, just floored.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 10:08 AM on November 30, 2017

Time to weep the weepy weep way.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 10:25 AM on November 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

I wonder how they define "special needs child," though.

It's amazing to me that, as resilient as kids can be, you really can mess a child up permanently by neglecting his or her emotional and psychological needs in infancy and very early childhood. People can bounce back from almost anything, but not from not being held enough as babies. It's both fascinating and tragic.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:27 AM on November 30, 2017 [12 favorites]

What a sad story. Thanks for posting it.

They kinda' slipped that 90% bombshell in there - as a parent of a kid with pretty extreme special needs, that's maybe not what I needed to read today. :(
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:37 AM on November 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

That was hard to read.
posted by greenhornet at 10:41 AM on November 30, 2017

The other thing that struck me was how gender dynamics added an extra layer of difficulty onto the issue of physically managing a special needs child once they're larger and stronger than the parents - one of the reasons Bernie resigns himself to the group home is that he isn't able to redirect or restrain Dani in public anymore because to outside observers it looks like a grown man assaulting a teenage girl rather than a dad trying to help his daughter.
posted by Flannery Culp at 10:47 AM on November 30, 2017 [40 favorites]

> Does anyone have a cite for this? It sounds plausible, but I'm wondering about the research

I can tell you that parents of kids with special needs hate having it thrown around. It sounds like a curse. You are DOOMED, DOOOOOOMED.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:11 AM on November 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

I'm going to hug my son extra close tonight. I'm sure he won't know why I'll be a bit weepy when I do it, but that's ok.
posted by Zonker at 11:12 AM on November 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Both of the stories in the post briefly mention Genie Wiley, who was found in similar conditions (perhaps even worse, since she was strapped into a potty chair for years) in 1970 at the age of 13. As this 2106 Guardian story reports, no one is entirely sure where she is now except "somewhere in state care in California" at the age of 60. These are such heartbreaking stories. It is almost (but sadly not entirely) unimaginable that this can happen to anyone.
posted by briank at 11:32 AM on November 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Man, that whole story is a kick in the teeth. Honestly infuriating that her birth mother didn't receive any real punishment.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:48 AM on November 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Not to mention the statistics about how many friends that parents with special needs children lose, because they don't have the energy to do the emotional labour to maintain them because they're using so much of it up at home.

Hey, if you have an old friend who's a parent of a special needs child who you've kinda drifted out of contact with, maybe give them a call.
posted by clawsoon at 12:12 PM on November 30, 2017 [20 favorites]

Wow. Very powerful and moving. I had only vaguely remembered the original story, but what an amazing piece of journalism to begin with as well as a unique opportunity to follow up on.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:24 PM on November 30, 2017

2005 blackwell publishing, family court review, october 2005, 43 fam. ct. rev. 607

Eh, I have the full text and it just points to a couple of other studies - all older, so I'm doubtful of applicability since things have changed quite a bit since ADA was implemented. I'll keep looking though.
posted by epanalepsis at 12:37 PM on November 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Bio mom’s IQ is listed as 77 (see the original story). FYI, ID (intellectual disability, formerly known as mental retardation) is generally diagnosed at 70. This lady was, quite simply, not up to the task of parenting 3 kids as a single mom. I’m not sure she deserves all the blame people tend to heap on her.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 1:28 PM on November 30, 2017 [17 favorites]

We could address a lot of society’s problems if we listened to this organization more.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 1:30 PM on November 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

The words I want to type involve immediate and overwhelming physical violence for perpetrators of this type of abuse on beings that are defenseless and innocent. So I better just not. But perhaps that's not the right course either. Let's just say that I don't know that I could have shown the restraint that was shown by the police officer who found/rescued Dani.

.... and I'm not certain that I'm willing to admit that as a flaw in myself.
posted by RolandOfEld at 1:36 PM on November 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

90% of parents with a special needs child will lose their marriage

Yeah but also

He and his wife, Diane, had five boys between them

(it does appear from the story that only one was at home when Dani was there)

and also

Bernie and Diane also took in foster kids — 15 teenagers in five years.

This is a lot more complicated than just "90% of parents with a special needs child will lose their marriage." They had literally over a dozen kids coming and going through their house! PLUS Dani. That would be too much for a lot of people. Me, for sure.

I think "savior disorder" broke up this marriage, not one special-needs child.
posted by 41swans at 2:34 PM on November 30, 2017 [24 favorites]

Bio mom’s IQ is listed as 77 (see the original story). FYI, ID (intellectual disability, formerly known as mental retardation) is generally diagnosed at 70. This lady was, quite simply, not up to the task of parenting 3 kids as a single mom. I’m not sure she deserves all the blame people tend to heap on her.

From the first story, linked above - "What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?"

You don't need a large IQ to have empathy for your very own baby. This mother apparently had none.
posted by 41swans at 2:40 PM on November 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

41swans: I think "savior disorder" broke up this marriage, not one special-needs child.

They were partly taking in so many kids in order to get enough foster care money to get by. Things might've been different for the family if foster care payments were more generous.
posted by clawsoon at 2:49 PM on November 30, 2017 [8 favorites]

They kinda' slipped that 90% bombshell in there - as a parent of a kid with pretty extreme special needs, that's maybe not what I needed to read today. :(

80% of all divorces claim financial troubles are a big part. How many parents of special needs children aren't facing financial problems?

You don't need a large IQ to have empathy for your very own baby.

You don't need a high IQ to have empathy, but you need training to know how to express it, and how to apply it to small children. Most adults don't even know that babies literally, physically need to be touched.

"What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?"

One who didn't have the intelligence or the education to understand (1) what was wrong with that, (2) that it was horrifically unhealthy in many ways, and (3) what needed to change to make it better. She may have known what she was doing was "bad," but not have had any idea what that meant for her child, nor any idea what she should be doing differently. (Cue: "It takes a village" speech.)

And aside from that, there's not a whole lot of point in sending her to prison. It's not like she's going to do it again, nor is she going to "learn a lesson" from being locked up. Child neglect is a weird legal situation and the normal criminal punishments don't make a lot of sense.

So damn sad, though.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:14 PM on November 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

I used to work on a research study that looked at the long-term developmental effects of parenting in early childhood. What they found is that yes, parenting style, especially how you talk to your child, during the first three years is hugely important to long-term development. The study especially looked at high-risk very low birthweight kids and found that parenting had a much greater impact on those already-disadvantaged kids than your average child.

It was amazing and incredibly depressing for me to see mothers totally neglect the social needs of their children. There was one time when I was in a home for three hours and I swear the mom never communicated with her child in anything other than grunts. And that was when me the researcher was sitting there with a clipboard explicitly observing her parenting.

The depressing thing was how little chance so many kids have because it can be nearly impossible to make up for early neglect just on a cognitive level. And as a society we don't provide any alternative sources of enrichment for kids until they're much older and the damage has been done.

After I left that job I went to work in mental health crisis intervention and suicide prevention and it was MUCH less depressing.
posted by threeturtles at 3:17 PM on November 30, 2017 [12 favorites]

And yes, even though I saw some chilling things, I still have some sympathy for the mothers in these situations, because often they themselves are products of terrible home environments, abuse, low IQ, low education, drug abuse or mental illness. I mean, I really felt for the mom of a child with CP who went to prison on drug charges for much of her child's early life, and really seemed to mean well, but had no idea how to care for his special needs when she herself was damaged from drug abuse. (Luckily he had a pretty decent grandparent, but still.)

Or the obviously low-IQ woman who had 12 children but struggled just to communicate clearly on an adult level. When we heap all the blame onto the parents we are abdicating a great deal of responsibility we should have as a society.
posted by threeturtles at 3:24 PM on November 30, 2017 [18 favorites]

Bio mom’s IQ is listed as 77 (see the original story). FYI, ID (intellectual disability, formerly known as mental retardation) is generally diagnosed at 70.

My research has all been into feral children and language development, but from what I understand it can be hard to tease out the strands of neglect, lack of language input, and simple inherited traits like low IQ to explain why children like Dani and Genie never develop language. I know the birth mother's account should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but from the original story:

“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”...

Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”...

“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her – but she just tore them off.”

This could all be normal kid stuff, but is it possible that Dani may have started out with some deficits? The neglect and abuse has made it impossible for us to ever know what Dani would have been like.

Although I do hate that language from these stories, that Dani is "lost inside herself" somewhere. No, you are looking at Dani, this is who she is. This is how her brain and body work. There's not some neurotypical kid locked up in her body screaming to get out. It really, really irritates me.
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:31 PM on November 30, 2017 [45 favorites]

Things might've been different for the family if foster care payments were more generous.

Things might have been different for Dani herself if healthcare and children's and parents' and families' well-being was any sort of priority in this country. It's just failures all the way down.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:58 PM on November 30, 2017 [19 favorites]

Most adults don't even know that babies literally, physically need to be touched.

That feels like an outrageous claim.
posted by 41swans at 5:02 PM on November 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

Most adults don't even know that babies literally, physically need to be touched.

That feels like an outrageous claim.

If people knew that, we wouldn't have doctors and psychologists telling people, over and over, about the importance of skin contact and picking up and holding babies.

We don't need to tell people, "you have to feed the baby or it'll die, and if you don't feed it enough or the right things, it won't be healthy." We sometimes have to tell them, "that is not enough" or "that is not healthy," but there's no question about the basic claim, "baby needs healthy foods." However, we get plenty of parents who think that picking up a crying two-month-old baby is "spoiling" it.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:43 PM on November 30, 2017 [14 favorites]

This sad, bittersweet story reminded me of “The Girl in the Closet,” a series in the Dallas Morning News some years ago). Lauren Atkinson survived grotesque conditions including sexual abuse so severe she needed reconstructive surgery. It has haunted me ever since. She became a competent adult eventually, despite constant heartbreak.
posted by mmiddle at 7:14 PM on November 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

Side thought, adjacent to all the questions and accusations about the mother: Where's this girl's father? Why isn't he being held accountable for her health?

This is what male privilege looks like: nowhere in those three articles about her is he even mentioned. This girl was abandoned by two parents, but only one of them faced criminal charges for it.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:06 AM on December 1, 2017 [9 favorites]

ErisLordFreedom - I wondered that too. But then I saw this, just now from the "three year update" link - Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

“His name was Ron,” she says. She shakes her head. “No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob.”
posted by 41swans at 4:59 AM on December 1, 2017

So many problems in our society could be made better if the government simply hired more social workers and gave them the resources to make a difference.
posted by Beholder at 6:46 AM on December 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

It sounds like the authorities decided, shrug, he's untraceable, not, oh hey, there was a guy in Vegas seven years ago who owes this woman thousands of dollars in child support payments and also is responsible for criminal neglect of his daughter.

Tracking him down very likely wouldn't be easy, but it doesn't sound like anyone tried. (Blood tests, maybe? We can't tell from the article how much effort was put into getting a description from mom.) It really doesn't sound like anyone involved is claiming his daughter should be his responsibility; none of the articles mention the concept of "man has a Vegas fling; ignores disabled daughter for her entire life." He's allowed to be invisible, not part of the story at all.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:37 AM on December 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

This sad, bittersweet story reminded me of “The Girl in the Closet,” a series in the Dallas Morning News some years ago). Lauren Atkinson survived grotesque conditions including sexual abuse so severe she needed reconstructive surgery. It has haunted me ever since. She became a competent adult eventually, despite constant heartbreak.

Ok, see, now after reading that, I am even more convinced that Dani began life already with an intellectual disability. Lauren went through just as much for just as long, and yet she can talk and recognize people and attend community college. Why? Why the difference?
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:20 PM on December 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

There are tremendous variations in outcomes in these cases but a lot has to do with timing: the earlier and more severe the neglect, the worse it is. I co-wrote a book with Dr. Bruce Perry (who was on Oprah to discuss this case and did some follow up consulting with the family) called The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, which is a series of his cases. That one, the child turned out OK even though he spent several early years literally in a kennel, at least in part because he had appropriate, nurturing care for the first nine months of life or something around that *before* that.

If you don't have *any* early appropriate care and/or if you have genetics that makes you need extra support or if you have intellectual disability to begin with, it is much harder to recover. I was not surprised to learn how sadly this turned out, given the severity and timing of the neglect and the history of the mom.

Regarding the need for babies to be touched: there are a surprising number of new parents who are even now not aware of this, many of whom were neglected early in life themselves. If you don't get early nurture that is appropriate, you don't learn how to give it automatically.

When you've got an intellectually disabled, overwhelmed, single mom who probably was severely neglected and abused during her own childhood, it's basically severely high risk for more abuse and neglect. In the case of the boy raised as a dog, for example, he was kept in a kennel by an intellectually disabled man who had been the boy's caregiver's partner and he apparently didn't know any better. When she died, the kid was just left with him. Somehow, he knew enough to take him to the hospital when he got sick, which is how the problem was discovered.
posted by Maias at 3:35 PM on December 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

none of the articles mention the concept of "man has a Vegas fling; ignores disabled daughter for her entire life." He's allowed to be invisible, not part of the story at all.

I agree that he should not be left off the hook if he knew that this child existed. What if he didn't / doesn't know, though?
posted by dhens at 11:58 PM on December 2, 2017

he should not be left off the hook if he knew that this child existed. What if he didn't / doesn't know, though?

He probably doesn't - because we have a social system, strongly supported by law, that says "men can walk away without noticing whether they've started a child."

Is there a John Doe warrant out for his arrest for child neglect, and for repayment of health expenses that were covered by social services?

Rhetorical. Of course not. Even thinking about it is weird. Because we do not hold men responsible as parents. Changing that wouldn't be a quick or simple thing; it's embedded deep in our culture. But it can start with looking at any case of "single mom fails at parenting" and saying, where's the rest of the headline, the part that should say, "deadbeat dad fails to notice his child being mistreated?"
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 7:24 PM on December 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

Following up on the issue of IQ: 6.3% of the population has an IQ of 77 or below. It seems a little unfair--and unrealistic--to state that so many of us would be unfit to be parents, purely on the basis of IQ. Also take into consideration the roughly 3 point increase in the average IQ every 10 years; if a woman like Dani's mother scored 77 today, she would have scored 83 when her child was born 20 years ago, putting her in the 12.9th percentile. By that standard, many of our own ancestors might be judged unfit to be parents.
posted by MrBobinski at 5:59 PM on December 5, 2017

Is there a John Doe warrant out for his arrest for child neglect, and for repayment of health expenses that were covered by social services?

I agree that he should have to pay back child support and other costs, and that he should be held responsible. I do not see how you could possibly give him a criminal charge for neglect if he didn't know about this child from a one-night stand, as I don't see how he would have the mens rea for it.
posted by dhens at 9:43 PM on December 6, 2017