Teen boy caught on camera raping 3-week-old foster sister for 20 minutes, child welfare facility sued
MARION COUNTY, FLORIDA: A 16-year-old boy raped his infant foster sister after the 3-week-old baby was placed in the foster home, alleges a lawsuit filed last week in Marion County, Florida, USA Today reported.
According to the lawsuit, an organization called Kids Central, which managed child welfare in the Ocala region, has been charged with placing the baby in the foster home, knowing that the teenage boy had previously sexually assaulted other children. The Centers, which provides case management services, has also been charged for knowing the teenage boy's history with assault and putting the baby in the home anyway.
This comes after video cameras set up around the house to monitor the boy caught him raping the infant for more than 20 minutes back in March 2019. The boy has since been charged and prosecuted as a juvenile, with his sentence not part of public records. Stacie Schmerling, an attorney with Justice for Kids in Fort Lauderdale, the organization that filed the lawsuit, said in a statement, "This tragedy never should have happened. The family never should have been licensed to care for these vulnerable, non-verbal children.”
The lawsuit reveals that the boy, who was 14 at the time of the crime, had been with 'the Klein' family since he was a baby. The family fostered him and his older sister before adopting both of them in 2011. In 2013, the then 9-year-old boy had molested a 5-year-old, the lawsuit adds. Just three years later, a younger adopted brother that the boy had been sharing a room with, began making comments “about his ‘butt’ and things (the older boy) would do, indicating the possibility that (the boy) was sexually abusing the younger child or minimally being sexually inappropriate,” adds the lawsuit.
Apart from sexual abuse, the boy also allegedly hoarded food, stole and lied. He would stay up all night watching television and frequented pornographic websites while the family would be asleep. The boy had been diagnosed with several disorders and according to the lawsuit, by 2018, he had developed a history of running away from home as well as destroying property.
The lawsuit says that the family he was adopted by felt that the boy “could not be trusted, violated the rules often, had problems with respecting boundaries and could not be left unsupervised in the house,” which led to the installation of the video cameras. Kids Central allegedly did not get the required psychosexual evaluations for the boy, claims the lawsuit, adding that both the now-charged agencies kept sending young children to the Klein's home.
The news comes after an Ohio mom was sentenced to prison for life for raping four children, three of them her own, after one of the victims told her "you'll never touch me again". As previously reported by MEAWW, 26-year-old Amber Brewer was jailed for life back in September in Brown County, Ohio, after she had pleaded guilty to filming herself raping and sexually abusing children. She was allegedly joined by her boyfriend Bill Sheeley, 47, in the heinous crime.