The high cost of one illegal alien
May 6, 2012
OFIR members and supporters:
One illegal alien, Cesar Cruz-Reyes, is costing the state of Oregon $5.85 million.
Illegal alien Cesar Cruz-Reyes, who died in state prison, had been accused of possession and dealing cocaine, a hit and run, lying to the Police and was serving a 2 ½ year prison sentence for the beating his foster daughter and causing her life-long disabilities. Doctors believe she could remain childlike for life.
Oregon has agreed to pay his foster child $3.75 million because they allowed Cesar Cruz-Reyes to become her foster parent and incredible, amazing $2.1 million to Reyes family because he died in prison. A total of $5.85 million must be paid from public funds as a result of this person’s illegal entry, which could have been prevented by adequate enforcement of the immigration laws.
As hard as all of that is to believe, the Oregon Department of Human Services could still continue to allow an illegal alien with a criminal background to become a foster parent!
Illegal aliens likeCesar Cruz-Reyes will be allowed to drive on our roads without a driver license underGovernor Kitzhaber’s order to police to accept the Mexican Matricula Consular as ID. How many people will be killed or maimed or suffercar wrecks because of Governor John Kitzhaber’s irresponsible decree?
FAIR estimated two years ago that illegal aliens cost Oregon State taxpayers $705 million a year. Better add another $5.85 million to the total.
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State makes record $3.75 million settlement in Gresham child abuse case of Stephanie Kuntupis
The Oregonian, Saturday, May 5, 2012
By Aimee Green
Nearly five years after a Gresham man violently shook his 2-year-old foster daughter — blinding her in one eye and causing irreversible brain damage — the state has agreed to pay her $3.75 million, the largest child welfare payout in Oregon history.
Now 7, Stephanie Kuntupis will likely never be able to hold down a job or live independently, and experts say she could remain childlike for life.
In an unusual twist in the case, the state also has agreed to pay $2.1 million to the family of Cesar Cruz-Reyes, the man who battered the girl. Cruz-Reyes died from medication side effects while serving a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for abusing Stephanie. The settlement also set a record as the largest in state prison history.
But it turns out that none of the money going to Cruz-Reyes’ family will help cover the bigger settlement for his former foster daughter.
That’s true even though Cruz-Reyes’ wife, Michele Cruz-Reyes, concealed information from child welfare workers that probably would have prevented the couple from becoming foster parents, according to officials at the Oregon Department of Human Services.
Stephanie also suffered unexplained bruises in the weeks before she was rushed unconscious to the hospital on June 22, 2007. It’s unclear what Michele Cruz-Reyes knew about the abuse the toddler suffered at her husband’s hands. Prosecutors didn’t charge her in the case.
The twin settlements bring the case to a costly close, and once again shine a light on vulnerabilities in the state’s child welfare system.
Director Erinn Kelley-Siel said the Department of Human Services has learned from its mistakes.
“This is a 5-year-old case that’s back in the newspaper, and it’s going to sound like it’s today’s child welfare system, and it’s not today’s child welfare system,” said Kelley-Siel, who didn’t work for the agency when Stephanie was abused. “… The screening for foster parents is remarkably different than the (system) we had five years ago.”
The reported number of children who are neglected or abused in foster care has dropped from 142 in 2007 to 64 in 2010. That means the number of children who are known to have been hurt in foster homes has declined from about one in 100 to one in 200, according to the latest figures available.
“That’s a really tough message to communicate to the public because even one bad outcome isn’t acceptable,” Kelley-Siel said.
Experts say Stephanie could die a premature death from early-onset dementia because her brain was so severely jarred by the abuse.
The large settlement will help care for her throughout her life, said Erin Olson, one of her attorneys. “But this little girl has lots of needs, so it’s appropriately big.”
Stephanie walks with a limp. She eats to the point of vomiting because of her brain injury, and her new foster mother must hide food so the girl won’t consume everything in sight.
Even so, she’s made remarkable strides thanks to intensive therapy and a nurturing home, said Neil Jackson, another of her attorneys. Although the first-grader lags far behind her classmates, she can now write the numbers one through 10 and15 of 26 letters of the alphabet.
She doesn’t remember what happened to make her this way.
“She’s a beautiful child,” Jackson said. “She loves to smile. She’s an angel. Just an angel.”
DHS gaps
Michele Cruz-Reyes claimed on the couple’s foster parent application that she and her husband had never been arrested or charged with a crime, according to Stephanie’s lawsuit. State records, however, show more than half a dozen arrests between the two of them.
Cesar Cruz-Reyes had been arrested, but not convicted, on accusations of possessing and dealing cocaine in 1992. He also had been accused of hit-and-run driving and lying to police twice in 1992. Michele Cruz-Reyes had been charged with theft in 1992 and conspiracy to commit identity theft in 2006, the year before Stephanie moved in.
Although she wasn’t convicted of a crime, Michele Cruz-Reyes signed an agreement in 1999 with the state acknowledging that she’d fraudulently received more than $2,300 in welfare because she lied about her household income and that she would repay the remaining $1,500 that she still owed.
Foster home certifiers either didn’t know about all of the Cruz-Reyes’ brushes with the law or discounted the information, DHS officials acknowledged.
Certifiers also didn’t realize that Cesar Cruz-Reyes had a history of using false names. They didn’t know he’d been using his son’s Social Security number to get hired as a construction laborer, as well as in two bankruptcies and on his application to be a foster parent. A long-standing DHS rule states that foster parents can’t make a living off of the income they receive from being foster parents — in the Cruz-Reyeses’ case, at least $1,200 a month.
Kelley-Siel and DHS spokesman Gene Evans highlighted several ways the child welfare system has improved.
Attorneys for Stephanie said Cesar Cruz-Reyes immigrated to the U.S. illegally. A 2010 department policy addresses that issue: It bars applicants who are illegal immigrants from becoming foster parents. An exception can be made for illegal immigrants who are taking in a relative’s child.
Also beginning in 2010, all DHS certifiers began asking foster parent applicants “a more comprehensive series of questions” — such as whether they were sexually abused or beaten as children, Evans said. The questions are designed to gain a deeper understanding of their backgrounds.
Employees who screen calls to the child-abuse hotline also have been better trained to identify reports that can’t be ignored, Evans said. In Stephanie’s case, the same employee didn’t investigate a hotline report about Michele Cruz-Reyes repeatedly failing to take ailing foster children to the doctor and a report of another 2-year-old foster child in the couple’s care with bloody, swollen eyes and patches of missing hair.
[Since those lapses, Evans said, DHS now requires a supervisor to sign off on any decision not to investigate an abuse report.
But DHS policy today still would allow a supervisor the discretion to approve Cesar Cruz-Reyes as a foster parent even with his most serious arrest for allegedly dealing cocaine. The department’s foster-care manual doesn’t specifically direct certifiers to consider any of the other types of crimes Cesar and Michele Cruz-Reyes had been arrested for, including lying to police and theft.
Prison settlement
Still lingering are questions about why the state paid out so much in Cesar Cruz-Reyes’ death. The $2.1 million is more than five times the nearest settlement amount for an inmate.
According to his wife’s lawsuit, medical staff began giving him the drug Isoniazid as a preventative tuberculosis treatment shortly after he arrived in prison in 2009. But they failed to properly monitor him, ignored his pleas for help when he was so sick he could barely walk and waited days before sending him to Salem Hospital, where he died from side effects of the drug.
Staff at the Oregon Department of Corrections said Director Colette Peters wasn’t available for an interview, but emailed her response: “We take the safety and health of the inmates in our custody very seriously. This is a tragic situation.”
Attorneys for the Oregon Department of Justice declined to talk about why they settled for the record amount.
Benjamin Haile, one of the attorneys for the estate, said Cruz-Reyes had lots of earning power left because his employer was willing to hire him back upon release even though he was a convicted felon.
The settlement compensates Cruz-Reyes’ wife and teen-age children for their tremendous loss, he said. “This is an extremely compelling case of medical neglect, of denying a person basic essential medical care and missing opportunities over and over to save his life,” he said.
Haile declined a request to speak to Michele Cruz-Reyes, who has since changed her last name to Schmer.
In court papers, Steven Goldberg, another estate attorney, noted that the case would have been worth “very little” had a jury been allowed to know why Cruz-Reyes was in prison.
But, Goldberg wrote, “We believed that we would have been able to keep out the facts underlying decedent’s conviction.”
What’s more, Goldberg wrote that “Mr. Cruz-Reyes was in many ways an extraordinary person” given his 11-year marriage and his children “who were terrific students who had a strong relationship with their father.”
— Aimee Green