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Drug's youngest victims see families torn apart
The ice epidemic has touched tens of thousands of lives in Hawai'i. It has an impact on our families, our children, our schools, our crime rate, our prisons, our businesses. Our community has never faced a problem quite like this, and we are still searching for the right responses.
Gov. Linda Lingle's administration will host the Hawai'i Drug Control Strategy Summit, with about about 350 people gathering in Waikiki tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday to draft plans to cope with the drug problem.
During the next year, The Advertiser will probe different aspects of the problem, and our responses to it. This week, our focus is on our children growing up with crystal methamphetamine in the neighborhood, in the house and in the family.
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
KA'U, Hawai'i — Sanisha Llanes' little brothers stare at her when she talks, listening intently. They glance at her before they answer questions. The skinny, dark-haired Sanisha, 9, fed them and protected them. They depend on her still.
Kevin Dayton • The Honolulu Advertiser
While their mother and father wandered rural Ka'u searching for methamphetamine or the money to buy it, Sanisha stayed home from school to care for her two brothers and sister, ages 6, 3 and 8 months.
Sanisha, 9, watches over her younger sister, Meiling, 2, while in the custody of their grandmother, Colleen Gundaker. The children's parents are attempting to overcome methamphetamine addiction.
When her parents returned, strung out and raging, Sanisha would charge into combat with her thin arms raised like a referee, shielding her mother from a beating. Her father would shout at her to get out of the way, shoving her aside.
Sometimes Sanisha would run to get a stick, and hit him with it, she said. Once, in the kitchen, she saw her father bash her mother in the face with a ketchup bottle. Another time, Sanisha used her body to shield her mother as he came at her with a baseball bat.
He pounded the kitchen table with the bat instead.
Sanisha's younger brother, Delfredo, would run to neighbors' houses, calling out for help. Fredo, now 7, seems slightly embarrassed at this, as if he secretly worries he didn't do enough to help. He reminds Sanisha that he, too, thrust himself between those warring giants, his parents.
Sanisha, sitting at her grandmother's wood dining table in Wai'ohinu, nods in agreement: He did, that's true. Fredo, a handsome boy with dark, serious eyes, noticeably perks up at this recognition of his courage.
Damaged children
When state Child Protective Services removes children from a home because of drug use, it becomes a powerful tool to pressure the parents into treatment. TUESDAY Requiring doctors to report their ice-addicted patients presents a dilemma — pregnant drug users may avoid prenatal care to keep from losing custody of their children.
While the state increasingly focuses on the thefts, burglaries and violent crime associated with methamphetamine addiction, experts say the harm to children of addicts is often overlooked, hidden from public view by the confidential proceedings of Family Court and Child Protective Services.
TOMORROW
Drug and alcohol abuse has always fractured families, but methamphetamine addiction is so powerful and consumes parents' lives so quickly that experts say it is in a class of its own.
Parents who are alcoholics or addicted to other types of drugs may keep their lives glued together for decades, but ice addicts rarely can, said Dr. Kevin Kunz, a Kona physician who specializes in treating addicts.
Some people become deeply addicted to ice within two weeks, and the drug is associated with extreme levels of domestic violence, said Peggy Hilton, section administrator for East Hawai'i Child Welfare Services. After a binge, ice users "crash" and can sleep for days, leaving the children in the house to fend for themselves.
CPS now removes an average of more than one child a day from homes in the eastern half of the Big Island, the vast majority of them ice-related cases, Hilton said.
Fred Holschuh, who worked as a Hilo Medical Center emergency room physician for many years, recalled two cases that illustrate the violence within some families where ice is being used.
In one case, Holschuh recalls a terrified woman who was covered in blood, cowering in a corner of the emergency room. She had been repeatedly slashed with a knife by her ice-using boyfriend. Holschuh believes the attack was an attempt to control the woman, not kill her.
Holschuh cited another case where a woman on ice was brought to the emergency room after allegedly attempting to kill her own child. The woman was so violently aggressive that doctors said it took four police officers to restrain her, he said.
In a bit of black humor that reflects the problem's severity, state Child Protective Services workers on the Big Island have wished aloud for the "good old days" when the addicts they dealt with were more likely to be using heroin than crystal methamphetamine.
At least most heroin addicts would make a reasonable attempt to get their kids back from the foster homes where they had been placed, the case workers say. Hilton said there is a kernel of truth in that dark joke.
"With crystal meth cases, a lot of times they never call for their children once the children are placed in foster care," Hilton said. "They don't show up at court hearings." CPS must publish newspaper advertisements to inform parents that the state is terminating their parental rights so their children can be adopted by another family.
Kunz said many parents seek treatment because they are worried about losing their children or going to jail, but others deeply addicted to the drug simply abandon their families.
"It is not unusual at all to see a mother leave her children," Kunz said. "We've seen cases where the (child) protective agency will come in and take the children, and the mother will have an expression very much like a cat that's lost a few kittens from the litter, because this drug owns her, and her mothering is left so far behind.
"It's a very frightening thing to see. That woman's brain has lost interest in anything except more of that drug."
Many recovering addicts seem comfortable talking about the lying, stealing, dealing and spouse abuse in their past, but these same people often struggle for words when asked to describe what this mayhem has done to their children.
'I had to go in the middle'
Kevin Dayton • The Honolulu Advertiser
Sanisha knows something about palm reading, and if you ask her she will show you a particular line on your hand that carries special significance. She traces it out on her own palm, explaining that if the line is long and crooked — as hers is — that means you have been through lots of trouble.
The four Llanes children, Calvin, 4, Sanisha, 9, Meiling, 2, and Delfredo, 7, were placed in the custody of their grandmother, Colleen Gundaker.
Sanisha and other children from similar backgrounds are sometimes reluctant to talk about the specifics of what happened in their old homes before they were removed. But Sanisha offers bits and pieces.
"They drink beer, and when they're pau drink beer they walk down the steps and they fall. And sometimes they would get crazy. They would hit us," she said.
"You can tell that they're drunk," Fredo explains.
When their parents used drugs and drank, Fredo and his little brother Calvin, now 4, would find ways to avoid them. "Them two stayed away, but I stayed close, because I had to protect my mom," Sanisha said.
Fredo adds quickly, "I wanted to protect my daddy."
The worst day, Sanisha recalls, was the day a centipede bit her, and she had to stay home from school. Her father had made other plans, and he was furious, and yet another battled erupted between the adults.
On one level, Sanisha seems to blame herself and her brothers and sister for the violence. She believes her parents fought because the children were always underfoot or didn't listen.
"And that's why every time that they fight, I had to go in the middle," she said.
On another level, Sanisha knew very well that her parents' violent outbursts were tied to drug use, and she didn't want methamphetamine around. Once, when she returned home from playing with a neighborhood friend, she confronted a room full of adults smoking ice in the kitchen.
"I told them all to get out of the house," she said, calmly. "They looked at me and they didn't listen. They told me to go to my friend's house and stay there."
Sanisha learned to cook for her brothers and claims she could make "whatever they wanted." saimin, egg-salad sandwiches and Cream of Wheat provided by the federal Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutritional program were particular favorites, she said.
When the school would call the house to inquire about the children, Sanisha's parents would order her to hang up the phone, she said. Sanisha told no one what was happening. "I was shame," she said.
Children taken from homes
Family court and child protective services officials say Sanisha's story is typical. CPS reports that on average it is now removing about 40 children a month from homes in the eastern region of the Big Island.
GADDIS
CPS does not tally methamphetamine-related cases separately from other drug cases, so statistical data is difficult to come by. But Hilton said she is confident more than 85 percent of the cases assigned for CPS investigation on the Hilo side of the island are ice-related.
On the Big Island alone, more than 1,000 children are being supervised by CPS, including about 300 in foster care, Hilton said. She warned that those numbers tend to understate the problem because children are constantly leaving the system as they graduate from CPS supervision, and new children are entering the system daily.
When police raid the so-called "ice houses," they typically find junked cars in an overgrown yard, auto parts strewn around a house with holes in the walls and light fixtures that don't work. Recovering addicts often recall living in homes long after the electricity was cut off, using candles and bathing in cold water.
"Rotting food on the stove is nothing unusual, the places smell like garbage, disarray, messy places," said a police detective who has participated in many raids in the Hilo area. He asked that he not be identified because he works undercover at times.
"We've had places with last year's turkey rotting in the refrigerator just like soup, you can just see the bones," he said. "The smell is bad, and you turn on the TV like a kid could turn on the TV, there's normally porno in the VCR. That's not unusual."
The children may suffer beatings and sometimes sexual abuse, and watch as virtually everything the family owns is sold or traded off. They look on as people they love are hurt, and they are usually powerless to stop it. Sometimes, these children die, victims of neglect or abuse at the hands of addicts.
"From the point of view of the kids, they end up dealing with irrational people that are impulsive, they have no judgment, and are sometimes paranoid or delusional," said Hilo Family Court Judge Ben Gaddis. "So, you can imagine what effect that has on kids."
Gaddis said these youngsters come to the attention of the authorities in a variety of ways. Often the schools report that two, three or four siblings have been missing from their classes, and authorities discover the reason is the parents' addiction to ice.
"I see these people on the school nonattendance calendar, I see them on the juvenile calendar, I see them on the restraining order calendar for TROs (temporary retraining orders)," Gaddis said. "They come to me in Child Protective Services cases, we get them on the Family Court criminal calendar, people seek divorces because their significant other is addicted. It comes to me just about every way you can think of."
Hilton said she and her staff worry about the lessons these children are learning, and how they will turn out as adults.
"We're already seeing a huge increase in the numbers of children needing residential care, therapeutic foster care, and children that we're flying over to O'ahu to psychiatric care facilities because they're a danger to themselves and others," she said. "They're getting younger and younger."
CPS workers are also encountering another type of child that in some ways is even more chilling: Some no longer seem to care what lies ahead for them.
"When we take children away from their parents, and they've been going from one drug user to the next, or from one ice house to the next, when the case workers go in, (the children) have no separation anxiety. They never ask about the parents," Hilton said. "They just go with the flow because that's their life. Their boundaries are almost nonexistent."
Maggot-covered floor
In early 2002, Sanisha's grandmother Colleen Gundaker heard from a worried Na'alehu acquaintance that something was wrong. Sanisha and her siblings had appeared at a neighbor's home, unattended and hungry, and the neighbor fed them.
Gundaker drove to her daughter's Na'alehu home to check on the family, and, when she opened the door to the living room, she found herself standing amid crawling maggots.
She called out, but the only reply was an infant, Sanisha's baby sister Meiling, burbling from the bedroom, she said. The parents were in a deep sleep, with open cans of corned beef strewn around the floor of the room.
None of the children were in school, and they had no clean clothes. They had been wearing shirts and pants taken from a heap of dirty laundry in the bathroom.
Gundaker had bought furniture for the Na'alehu house before turning it over to her daughter, but discovered when she returned that the furnishings had been sold.
Sanisha recently recalled that she has seen her old family dining table at the house of an acquaintance. It was obvious from her outraged tone that Sanisha wanted that table back.
On the day Gundaker stepped in maggots, she loaded Sanisha and Fredo in her car and took them with her when she left the house. Sanisha was ready to leave, but insisted to her grandmother that they had to go back to get Calvin and Meiling, her younger brother and sister.
Gundaker drove away that day without the smaller children because she did not believe she had the legal right to take them. But she called CPS to report their predicament, and was relieved to learn that someone else had already called to report the family.
Gundaker later asked for and was awarded custody of all four children as a foster parent, and will obtain legal guardianship this month.
For a woman who had thought her child-raising days were finished, the first months with her grandchildren were brutal. All of her grandchildren love their parents, she said, and her grandsons reacted angrily to the new environment.
"They would fight back with me, they wouldn't listen. They were so in control of their own lives, there was no discipline, no nothing, so who am I?" Gundaker said.
"They destroyed everything I have," she said. "They would rip the furniture, they would get angry, they would yell at me. It took a lot of patience, a lot of understanding."
Particularly alarming was little Calvin's habit of using lighters or matches to try to burn things. "You have to watch him very closely," Gundaker said.
Sanisha is struggling in school, but at home she still attempts to rule the household. She watches over her siblings as if she believes it is still up to her to raise them, and this worries her grandmother.
"She thinks she's in charge of everything, but she shouldn't be," Gundaker said. "She should be a little girl of 9 years old."
For all of their problems, the family is unmistakably recovering. Late last year Sanisha and her grandmother drove Sanisha's mother to a drug-treatment program and wished her good luck.
"I said 'I love you, and from this point on it's up to you,' " Gundaker said. "She's been clean since then. I got my daughter back."
Sanisha's mother, Saydi Cajigal, said she finally sought treatment because she could not stand the loss of her children, and Cajigal later convinced her husband to do the same. She said her decision to enter a treatment program called Bridge House was the best decision of her life.
Both parents are doing well in recovery, and visit the children frequently. Gundaker said she has watched the deep, loving connection between the parents and the children, and said it is as if a wound has been drained and is now healing over.
When asked about the violence in her home, Cajigal, 29, said she had a violent relationship with her common-law husband before they began using meth, and the drug made their problems worse.
In some cases, Cajigal said she would demand that her husband provide drugs, and would physically attack him if he didn't.
Her husband, Delfredo Llanes Sr., is now working steadily and staying clean. He said simply, "My children have been through a lot."
Cajigal started a chapter of crystal meth anonymous in Ka'u to provide support and understanding for recovering addicts like herself, with some meetings attended by up to a dozen people. But she believes the local drug problem is getting worse.
When Cajigal first returned home after treatment, she said she had so many old drug-using friends visiting her that she finally planted a big sign in the dirt in the front yard for everyone to see.
"No Ice Here," it read.
Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.
