by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
A 9-year-old boy with Type 1 diabetes died 18 days after he was medically kidnapped from his father and put into the Arizona Foster Care system, and into a group home.
His father had been arrested for possession of illegal drugs, which prompted the State to kidnap his son.
Richard Blodgett admits he was using fentanyl illegally. The single father told the Associated Press he had to in order to control pain enough to support his 9-year-old diabetic son, Jakob.
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“I wasn’t getting high. I wasn’t abusing them. I was using them to be able to work and provide for my son,” Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, they are illegal. I can’t get around that. But they were stronger than my meds, and they were working.”
This is yet another clear case where neither the parent nor the child requested any “help”, but the State moved in anyway to take the child away from the father whom he loved, against the wishes of both the father and the child.
18 days later, he was DEAD in State custody.
The child’s grandmother who lived in another state and would have surely welcomed the stay of her grandson, was apparently never even considered as a placement for the 9-year-old boy.
ABC15 has published an investigation they conducted on the Arizona Foster Care system, and found that other children have died after being removed from their parents and put into Foster Care.
The video is 6 minutes long:
Excerpts:
Jakob Blodgett was an affectionate 9-year-old who loved to play video games and adored his dad.
“They let him die. They killed him,” said Jakob’s grandmother, Cheryl Doenges.
Doenges’ diabetic grandson died just 18 days after he was placed in Arizona’s foster care system.
“He had done absolutely nothing wrong. Just a little boy living his life. And they took it away from him; they took him away from all of us,” Doenges said.
Medical records obtained by the ABC15 Investigators show the state struggled to manage Jakob’s diabetes from the beginning, and the group home where Arizona’s Department of Child Safety placed Jakob allowed him to refuse the insulin, which he needed to stay alive.
Jakob died due to complications of diabetes a day after Christmas in 2022, according to the autopsy.
“They need to accept responsibility because the Arizona Department of Child Safety killed Jacob Blodgett,” said Attorney Robert Pastor who is representing Jakob’s father.
Pastor recently filed a notice of claim, the precursor to a lawsuit, against DCS and the Phoenix group home where Jakob was placed.
“This is a systemic failure,” said Pastor. (Full article.)
I am glad that Attorney Robert Pastor is stepping in here to provide legal counsel to Jakob’s father, but we are never going to get rid of the murderers and kidnappers if we keep saying that stories like this are “a systemic failure.”
This is a clear example of “systemic ABUSE“, because this kind of abuse happens regularly throughout the entire system.
To call it a “failure” is to claim that the system is failing to do what it is designed to do, and it pre-supposes that the system is designed to “protect” children.
But that is NOT the function of the system, even though it claims to be. We need to move past what the system is claiming to be, and look at its actions and call them out for what they are DOING, and not what they are SAYING.
We know that the system does NOT protect children, and we have known that for decades now based on wide-scale research on children in foster care.
And that research states that children are better protected when they remain in their home with their family, even if that family is “troubled” and has issues, such as the parents being drug users, than when that child is ripped apart from the only people they have ever known who love them, and put into homes of strangers, or as in this case, into “group homes” who are for-profit businesses that make a very lucrative income from collecting funds from the State to “take care” of foster children. See:
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