Australia - Deborah Melville, 12, dies of extreme neglect, Palmerston, 12 July 2007

anneinchicago

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This is distressing. And nauseating. And... Well, just plain horrific...

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24090555-421,00.html

A 12-YEAR-old girl was left without food or water to die in the backyard of her foster home, delirious with pain and unable to move, a court has heard.
and

Crown Prosecutor Richard Coates said doctors at Royal Darwin Hospital (RDH) uncovered a "massive 1.5 litres of pus" in the child's leg, caused by a fracture to her left thigh.

Sisters Toni Melville, 43, and Denise Reynolds, 42, have been charged with the manslaughter of the girl, who first started to limp following a school sports day.


Three weeks later, on July 12 last year, she died from a blood and bone infection.
and

Mr Coates said Ms Reynolds was a "stubborn" woman who insisted the child had sustained a sports injury which would improve with exercise. When the girl refused, Ms Reynolds would "smack her leg with a stick".
and

"When assistance was not forthcoming to help her to the toilet she would urinate and defecate in her clothes where she lay."
 
Horrifying!

If she was in foster care, she was removed from her regular home, right? For some reason, I'm guessing her original home wasn't as bad as this :(
 
Omg the hell that poor girl went through!!
The article says a caseworker was at the home the day before she died, 17 people lived there in a 3 bedroom house, wth is wrong here?

VB
 
Dear Lord......why didn't the caseworker do something? That poor child.
 
I'm speechless.

Hell is too good for these women.

And some hell for the caseworker who visited the home the day before--if the girl was that ill, it was the caseworker's duty to notice.
 
And they call this a civilized society, yet this stuff keeps happening right in front of our eyes.

Horrifying.

:(
fran
 
If the case worker had seen the condition the girl was in, and she didn't report it, she should be charged as well. Who were all of the 17 people living in there? Were they all foster children? These women should go to prison and have all their kids taken away; disgusting..

"Mr Coates said social workers who visited the three-bedroom Palmerston home - which housed 17 people - the day before the death found the child lying on the kitchen floor crying."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24090555-421,00.html

So there was case workers? As in more than one.
 
I don't understand. The caseworker observed this little girl in that condition, laying on the floor, hardly able to walk and didn't do anything to help her? How can someone be so apathetic? I thought people got into social work because they want to help people. I just don't understand how she could observe this and then turn around and leave.
 
The caseworker should be fired if it comes out that its true she observed this child in pain and never got her any help. Its just a disgusting story and makes me so mad.
 
Social workers were there the day before she died and saw her lying on the kitchen floor crying. Did they do anything about it?
 
I'm dumbfounded. How could they have been found not guilty. Even IF they thought it was a sports injury that would get better with exercise, when it didn't, why didn't they seek care for her. She was soiling herself for goodness' sake!
 
I can't even comment. Two more monsters walk free.
 
Sorry for bringing up an old thread, but many of the reports linked are not online anymore, so I couldn't find out if this had been posted -- a report from 2009:

IN the weeks leading up to her foster daughter's death, Denise Reynolds spent most nights at the casino in Darwin.

Earning more than $6000 a month in various government benefits to care for her five foster children, as well as her own seven children, Ms Reynolds spent so little time at home she thought the 12-year-old girl's leg was "getting better".

Ms Reynolds, while giving evidence during a coronial inquest, said she was not a problem gambler and denied spending Centrelink and foster carer benefits at the casino.

However, it was revealed during the inquest that Ms Reynolds had withdrawn $13,000 from ATMs at the Sky City Casino the month Deborah Melville died.

___


The family lived in the lounge room of a three bedroom home with Ms Reynolds' sister and her family, as well as a man on sex charges who had been bailed to live at the address.

Ms Reynolds said her sister, Toni Melville, was under strict instructions not to leave any of the children alone with the man.

Ms Reynolds claims she was forced to move into her sister's house when she and her husband separated.
She said she continued to care for the Melville children because she did not want them to be separated from each other.

"I lost my relationship because I chose them (the five Melville children) over him," she said.

"Unfortunately I chose the wrong way, didn't I?"


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arc...se-was-a-gambler/story-e6frg6po-1225808141120

Let's please NOT let this terrible case and the terrible INJUSTICE of these scumbags walking free sink out of sight.

How on earth did Melville and Reynolds get a walk on this case of obvious and abject criminal neglect? Ithink this an important question. Because 'not guilty' means they were able to continue neglecting the other 11 kids in their "care", for a start.

I had a similar infection to that which killed poor little Deborah, a few years ago now. It left me permanently disabled. But almost worse? The trauma of that pain... I cannot begin to describe what AGONY that child must have gone through. In my case, I wanted to die, and I am not joking.. after a month in hospital, and on the legal limit of morphine the hospital could give me - I was STILL in the most horrific pain.

I am telling you, leaving her like that was *torture* of the most unimaginable kind, if Deborah's pain was only half what I experienced.... and her infection was worse than mine, by far....

Please, let's keep discussions going on HOW these awful people were declared 'not guilty'.
 
From 2008 (details given here are enough to make you cry....):

Deborah's death triggered a damning audit of FACS, details of which were never made public by the NT Government.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arc...ilures-laid-bare/story-e6frgd9f-1111117209593

2010 Four Corners report, scroll down for more horrifying details..

NATALIE HUNTER, FMR DIR. KARU ABORIGINAL FAMILY SUPPORT AGENCY: I was actually horrified. I was just appalled to think that the Department can place children in this type of environment. The environment was, to me it was like a cubby house. It was of tin, galvanised tin. There was pots of tins where the rain came in, that was gathering the rain and just a whole heap of bunk beds.

____

This document obtained by Four Corners graphically illustrates what the concerns were about.

In December 2000, when Deborah was six years old, FACS was warned she 'was exhibiting inappropriate sexualised behaviours'.

Six years later, concerns were voiced that Deborah's home was like a 'concentration camp', and that 'Denise is getting a lot of money but nothing to show for it'.

The truth is that for Deborah's carer, her priorities lay elsewhere.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Night after night, Deborah's great-aunt left the children at home, and came here to Darwin's Casino, to gamble. Deborah's case-workers were told that she had a gambling problem, but they never investigated the rumours. Each month she received more than $10,000 in benefits. Most of that went straight into Sky City's pokie machines. Only later did the police establish just how much she had gambled in a little over four and a half years. It was $1.6 million dollars.

Coroner's comments:

A CORONER has revealed serious deficiencies and systemic failures in the Northern Territory's child protection system, and warns that the dysfunction could get even worse.

Greg Cavanagh yesterday detailed a litany of failures contributing to the deaths of two children who were supposed to have been closely monitored by the NT Department of Family and Community Services.

Two-and-a-half years after the Little Children Are Sacred report revealed indigenous children were being sexually abused in almost all of the NT's remote communities, Mr Cavanagh described the death of 12-year-old Aboriginal girl Deborah Melville in Palmerston, near Darwin, as ''appalling'' and ''needless''.

Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/national/...-die-in-dirt-20100120-mjxt.html#ixzz36fPgYesn


OMG Inquest transcript.. I'm in tears, reading this.

http://www.nt.gov.au/justice/ntmc/judgements/2010 NTMC 007.pdf
 
Melville's great-aunt and aunt both lived at the home at the time of Deborah's death. Both women were charged with manslaughter in the case but were eventually acquitted in 2008 on the grounds that they couldn't have known just how sick she was. Not everyone, however, was let off the hook: In an inquiry completed on Jan. 19, the national Department of Families and Child Services, the authority that was supposed to be protecting Deborah, was found largely responsible for her death, having ignored the many red flags raised throughout her six years in foster care.
(See a brief history of baby lifts.)

One of the crucial conclusions of Bath's report is that the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP), a guideline instated in 1983 to avoid another Stolen Generation scenario, is problematic. Responding to the painful legacy of old laws by which children were forcibly removed from their families and placed thousands of miles away in homes of white Australians, the ACPP stipulates that Aboriginal children removed by the state from their parents should be placed with family members or other indigenous Australians whenever possible. But it's a system, the study shows, that is failing the children it was designed to protect. "The present data suggests, as do some of the decisions in the case studies, that in some cases this principle appears to be given primacy over basic child-protection considerations," Bath told the Australian.

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1963608,00.html

I want to know who the hell was on the jury that decided these two neglectful monsters "couldn't have known" how sick Deborah was. I want to know if they were TOLD Deborah's carers were long-term child abusers, whooping it up at the casino while their kids suffered at home -- which MIGHT count toward them "not knowing" she was so ill.

But I do NOT believe they did not know. No way, no how.

The good news is, they're still able to be prosecuted under a bunch of other charges. Bet they're not... but maybe one day.
 
From the Inquest report, linked above:

On 5 February 2003, Virginia Child Care Centre sent a letter to Adrienne
Boucher about inappropriate and disturbing behaviour by ___ and
____ including sexualised behaviour. ____ was trying to touch other
children inappropriately, she was hurting them and also calling them
“n*ggers”, a word she said they used at home. Both children used phrases
such as “lick your willy” and “let’s go sex”. _____ did not wear
underwear and her clothes, which were too big and fell down.


-- Which is NOT surprising, as the two foster-monsters allowed not one but TWO child molesters to share their home, which had 13 children in it.

Please, someone tell me they don't have ANY kids in their care any more...
 
I don't think that I can bring myself to read that. Deborah <3 I hope you're at peace beautiful girl xo
 

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