School shootings and fentanyl overdoses: the uncounted costs of neglecting maltreated children

A fourteen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl are charged as adults, one for a mass shooting and the other for selling a fentanyl tablet that killed an older teenager. These two young people had something in common–a long history of neglect (and sometimes abuse) by their parents and a failure to intervene by child welfare services despite multiple reports that children were in danger. Ignoring chronically maltreated children when they could have been saved and then locking them up for life is both inhumane and costly. We must intervene to help maltreated children before they are irrevocably damaged by years of abuse and neglect.

On September 4, 2024, fourteen-year-old Colt Gray shot and killed two teachers and two students at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia with an AR-15 style rifle given to him by his father. He has been charged as an adult and is awaiting trial. It did not take long for the media to uncover that Colt had grown up in a chronically abusive and neglectful home. As the Washington Post put it in a devastating article, “Colt’s parents, each addicted to drugs and alcohol, were perpetually inattentive, often cruel and sometimes entirely absent, according to family members, neighbors, investigators, police reports and court records.” In November 2022, Colt’s mother, Marcee Gray, left his father, Colin Gray, and moved to southern Georgia with her two younger children. It appears that DCFS had opened a case at some point because In October of 2023, a spot drug-test revealed Marcee’s renewed drug use. Colin Gray was ordered to retrieve the other children, or they would be placed in foster care. Shortly thereafter, it appears that the case was closed.

There is no information from media reports about whether DCFS evaluated Colin Gray for his fitness to take care of his three children or to monitor their well-being in his care before closing the child welfare case. Yet, relatives reported to the New York Post that Colin Gray relentlessly bullied his son, calling him names like “sissy” and “bitch.” The Washington Post reported that Colt first came to the attention of authorities at the age of 11, when his school flagged him for searching the internet for ideas on how to kill his father. In Colin Gray’s custody, Colt never attended eighth grade and was not even registered for school until February 2 of that year. That Christmas, Colin Gray gave Colt his own AR-15 style rifle, in an attempt to “toughen him up,” as relatives told the New York Post. By his fourteenth birthday in January, Colt’s grandmother reported that he was searching the internet for what was wrong with him; she offered to pay for therapy and take him there but his father never signed him up. In July of 2023, Marcee returned from rehab and Colin allowed her to move back in. Colt’s mental health deteriorated even further after his mother’s return, and he talked of hurting himself or others. He registered for high school two weeks late and rarely attended. “Colt was like the thrown-away child,” said his grandmother, who tried in vain to get his father and the school to help him. Five days after his father failed to take him to a crisis mental health center despite his grandmother’s plea, Colt brought his rifle to school and took four lives.

Also charged as an adult was 15-year-old Maylia Sotelo of Green Bay, Wisconsin, the subject of a devastating article by Lizzie Presser of Pro Publica.  Maylia’s home had been a “hangout for users and dealers.” Her three older sisters had all been kicked out or left due to their mother’s violence. Maylia’s had been referred to child protective services 20 times before she was finally removed from her home at the age of 14. In a pattern typical of chronic maltreatment, the reports concerned multiple types of neglect, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. Before Maylia turned one, CPS documents show that her mother overdosed on cocaine and Adderall with seven children in her home. When she was five years old, a caller reported that her mother was “high as a kite” and her boyfriend was violent. The next year, another report indicated that there was no food in the home and that the mother was using heroin in front of her children.

When Malia was seven, CPS substantiated a report that a man “opened his pants, pulled out his penis and masturbated” in front of one of Maylia’s sisters. That same year, a woman overdosed on crack in the house and Maylia’s mother “would not call rescue or the police because [she] did not want her children removed,” according to a social worker’s notes. And a school employee reported that Maylia missed half the school year. When Maylia was 14 and her mother became psychotic, Maylia and her sister were finally removed from the home and placed with relatives. But they were given no counseling or assistance with school, according to Pro Publica. Maylia had been smoking weed since fifth grade, then began selling it. By the beginning of tenth grade, she was selling “blues,” pills that were billed as percocet but actually contained filler and fentanyl. She sold a pill to an 18-year-old named Jack McDonough. When he died of an overdose, Maylia was arrested for first-degree reckless homicide.

It is obvious that both Colt Gray and Maylia Sotelo were chronically maltreated children who suffered from multiple types of maltreatment over a period of years. It is also obvious that the systems designed to protect them failed both of these young people. Both families clearly required intervention that did not come when it was needed, though we do not have enough details to make an informed critique of the system’s response. When the child welfare system finally intervened in Malia’s case, it may have been hard to change her trajectory, and it appears that she was left with relatives and received monitoring or services to address her traumatic history. In Colt’s case, the intervention may have also come too late to prevent serious psychological damage. And once they became involved, caseworkers appeared to be focused on his mother and ended the case with the placement of all three children with their father, a parent who had been equally neglectful and failed to take action to protect the children from his wife’s abuse.

Perhaps more intensive in-home services provided earlier could have helped Colt’s and Maylia’s parents address the issues that led them to abuse or neglect their children. If not, perhaps Maylia’s earlier removal from her toxic home, and Colin’s removal to a better environment than either of his parents could provide might have saved these children from the sad fate that awaited them. The approach that is currently in fashion – exemplified by the much touted Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) of 2018 – prescribes the avoidance of foster care at almost any cost. It does, however, promise that parents receive support in parenting their children, whether it is mental health, drug treatment, or parenting training. Child welfare systems have long been providing such support to families in the form of in-home services, and FFPSA was supposed to provide the resources to improve these services. Unfortunately, FFPSA did not acknowledge or support the crucial role of frequent home visits to ensure the children are safe and that they can be removed into foster care if the parents do not cooperate with their plans for addressing their issues and improving their parenting.

Sadly, there is no evidence that increases in family support or child safety monitoring are forthcoming. States are proudly citing drops in their foster care caseloads, with no reporting on what is happening to the children left at home. States are not required to release data on the number of cases opened for in-home services, so we have no idea whether the abused and neglected children who are not being removed are getting any supervision or their parents receiving services. But as I have written, data from the states with the largest and third largest foster care caseloads indicates that the number of children receiving in-home services has not increased to make up for the drop in children removed to foster care; instead it has decreased along with foster care placements, resulting in a decline in the number of children being served overall.

Studies have documented the connection between child maltreatment and crime.¹ Failing to intervene with at-risk children before they resort to crime and subsequently incarcerating them results in unnecessary human suffering, not to mention greater financial costs, than intervening early. If we do not want to remove more children, we must provide intensive services to parents and close monitoring of their children’s safety–and be ready to remove the children as soon as it becomes clear that parents are not going to change before the children are irreparably harmed. Such monitoring is key, because we really do not know what, if anything, works in preventing future maltreatment among parents who have maltreated their children.

This is not the first time that the failure of CPS has been noted in the wake of a heinous crime. I previously wrote about Lisa Montgomery, who was executed on January 12, 2021. She murdered a pregnant woman, cut out the baby, and took it home. It turned out that Lisa Montgomery had a long and horrific history of physical and sexual abuse throughout her childhood, including beatings and bizarre punishments by her mother, rape by her stepfather, and prostitution by both. Sadly, it seems that we have not made much progress since Lisa’s childhood, and current ideological trends run the risk of leaving even more children unprotected in the future.

Notes

1. See Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin, Does Child Abuse Cause Crime? NBER Working Paper 12171, https://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/does-child-abuse-cause-crime and Todd I. Herrenkohl et al., Effects of Child Maltreatment, Cumulative Victimization Experiences, and Proximal Life Stress on Adult Crime and Antisocial Behavior, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/250506.pdf.