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There are a couple of ways law-abiding citizens can abandon children in Nebraska. Sometimes a desperate parent will tell a child that he or she is going to the hospital for something minor, like a rash - then in the emergency room, the child waits and waits, only to discover that the doctors are there but the parent has walked away for good. Or unruly teenagers might simply be dumped at the ER door. "A parent will pull up and say, 'All right, get out of the car,' " says Lisa Stites of Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. In other...
Five of the children abandoned in Nebraska have been from out of state, but most are local. A majority of the children are older than 13 and have a history of being treated for mental-health issues. Nearly every abandoned child came from a single-parent household. In September, one father walked into a hospital and left nine children, ages 1 to 17. He reportedly told hospital workers that he'd been overwhelmed since his wife died a few days after their youngest was born...
...Nebraska legislature's judiciary committee met in a special session on Monday to begin rewriting the law, which has resulted in an epidemic of abandoned children - with some parents driving from Florida, Arizona and Georgia to drop off their problem kids. Most states allow a parent to leave an infant at a fire station or hospital without fear of prosecution, but because Nebraska's law did not define child, 34 kids have been dropped off at Omaha hospitals since September. None were infants. The rest of America was stunned. But, as the special session proceeded, some legislators defended the intent...
Some lawmakers were angered by what they see as a callous response from Heineman's administration - that state welfare agents appear to be accusing parents of too easily abdicating their responsibilities. "It's been very disturbing, how judgmental you've been," Senator Amanda McGill said to the state's health and human services chief, Todd Landry. "You've had plenty of time to make these judgmental statements to the press" but not to return phone calls from desperate parents, she said. Landry argued that the state offers many lifelines and that services are available. "So all a parent...
Even though Governor Heineman is likely to accept a law that applies to infancy, the broader issue of childhood mental illness did have its hearing. A majority of the kids abandoned had a history of mental illness - 90% of the parents or guardians had sought state services for them before. Many had at least one parent in jail. One big hole in the safety net, said Dr. Jane Theobald, an Omaha psychiatrist and representative for the Nebraska Psychiatric Association, is that there are simply not enough facilities for troubled youngsters. A teenager who attempts suicide might stay at a general...