In the 1980s, I was a Children’s Protective Services worker based in Benton Harbor. My referral one hot summer day was to investigate possible neglect by the parents of a grade-school girl who had been hospitalized with a head injury after a fall. The girl was home now, so I drove up to the eight-unit apartment building where she, her mother, and her siblings lived.
Their apartment was on the second floor, off a main hall shared with three other apartments. On this muggy day, an open exit door at the far end of the hallway lit the barren walls with hazy sunshine and brought some fresh air into the otherwise windowless space. I knocked on the apartment door and met the mother, who was holding a baby in a tidy but sparse kitchen.
“Oh yes, come in.” She sighed and pursed her lips. “I know what you’re here about. My daughter is here and you can talk to her if you want.” She motioned toward a kitchen chair.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. I sat down and took out my spiral-bound steno pad.
“She fell off that balcony back there,” she said, nodding through the wall toward the exit door I had seen. “That cheap-ass landlord won’t fix it. I can’t watch all the kids every minute. I had told her to stay off of there.”
“Why did she fall?” I asked.
“Go take a look at it!” the mother exclaimed. “Take my daughter with you. She can tell you about it.” She called her daughter in from the next room. “Show this Social Services lady where you fell.”
I walked down the hall with her daughter, an eight-year-old whose brown forehead was covered with gauze and white tape. She didn’t speak until we got to the exit door. “I was playing with my friends out here,” she said.
We stepped onto a wooden deck with peeled paint and grey weathered boards. From this second story, I could see a gravelly and pock-marked concrete parking lot directly below. “Don’t get near the edge,” I told her. The splintered railing was missing almost every upright piece and leaned out from the deck at a crazy angle. To the right, what was left of a stairway stretched to the ground level with little evidence of what was holding it up. I had already decided not to walk on the stairs before I realized that three of the steps were completely missing. “Let’s go back inside,” I said to the girl.
In the apartment, I asked the mother to fill in a few details for my report and told her that I would not be opening a case. I could have left then, but something was bothering me. “What did the doctor say about your daughter’s head injury?” I asked.
“It’s too soon to tell for sure,” the mother answered. “She hasn’t been back to school yet.”
“That landlord should fix those stairs right away. You could sue him,” I told her. I felt energized by the obvious righteousness of my cause. She looked at me with her dark eyes flashing and intense. “And then where would we live?” she asked.
Back at the office, I still couldn’t let it go. I dialed the Health Department. “Building Inspector, please,” I said to the operator. The phone rang for a bit before a man answered. I told him who I was and how dangerous and unusable the fire escape was in
this building. “Okay,” he said, with no enthusiasm, “I’ll see if somebody can go take a look.” I pressed him about the urgency of the situation. “It’s hard for us to get any action on this kind of thing,” he said. “All we really can do is condemn the building. Is that what you want us to do?” As I hung up, I was suddenly very weary.
Maybe I can follow up again, I thought to myself, but I knew that tomorrow would bring another referral to investigate. I slid a blue recording belt into my Dictaphone and started my report. “Neglect was unsubstantiated,” I said.