13 months later, cause of boy's death still unknown

07/17/2003

BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer

NORTH SMITHFIELD -- In the back of Union Cemetery, beneath a row of modest flat stones, Reggie Robinson lies. He was 8 years old and in state foster care when he died 13 months ago.

No one knows why or how.

A small square of plywood marked his plot until June 30, the anniversary of his death, when a charitable parishioner from Wendy Leupold's church provided her son a proper gravestone.

Now an engraved image of Reggie smiles up from a corner of black polished granite, his soft dimples, high forehead and glasses cut from rock as hard as was his life.

Journal photo / Mary Murphy A MOTHER MOURNS: Wendy Leupold, the mother of the late Reggie Robinson, frequently visits the grave of her son at Union Cemetery, North Smithfield. At left is her daughter, Ashley, 11, and at right is a friend, Mike Gladu.

"I come here all the time," Leupold said the other day after placing fresh roses on his grave.

"Sometimes at 1 or 2 in the morning," said her 11-year-old daughter, Ashley.

True, Leupold confessed. "I carry around a lot of guilt."

Leupold was a cocaine addict when she delivered Reggie in March 1994. The boy was named after his father, Reginald C. Robinson Sr., then a chronic thief who was charged with robbery days after his son's birth and jailed.

Reggie suffered emotionally and physically. His parents say he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. He could be impulsive, defiant, moody and difficult. His numerous medications included: Risperdal, an antipsychotic; Concerta, to control his hyperactivity; and Fluoxetine, an antidepressant.

For years he bounced between foster and group homes and Bradley Hospital as Leupold struggled to piece her life back together and his father served time in prison.

In September 1999, the Department of Children Youth and Families placed Reggie with his father's wife, Crystal Robinson. She lived in a crowded house on Gray Street in Providence with five of her own children. Reggie slept on a roll-out cot.

Around 3 a.m. on June 30, 2002, Crystal Robinson called 911 and reported Reggie unconscious. An ambulance whisked him to Hasbro Children's Hospital, where emergency workers found him in respiratory and cardiac arrest.

His body temperature that Sunday morning registered 108 degrees.

They could not revive him.

DCYF officials, Providence police and the Office of the Child Advocate prepared to open investigations into Reggie's death.

Thomas Dwyer, the DCYF's associate director for child welfare services, said last summer his department's inquiry would focus not only on the child's death but the last 72 hours of his life.

Dwyer said Reggie attended classes days earlier at Mount Pleasant Academy -- a Providence school for the learning disabled -- "without any discernible problems."

Child Advocate Laureen D'Ambra's office geared up as well, expecting to probe into whether the DCYF's handling of the case had placed Reggie in danger.

A Providence police detective began working the case.

But all three inquiries stalled as officials waited for the state medical examiner Elizabeth A. Laposata to issue a cause of death.

That report has not come.

A school photo of Reggie Robinson, 8, who was in state foster care when he died.

Thirteen months later, Laposata is still investigating Reggie's death, says Robert J. Marshall Jr., a spokesman for the Department of Health.

Laposata has not returned telephone messages left by The Journal. However, Marshall said he spoke to Laposata at a reporter's request last week about Reggie's death.

The case has required "extensive medical records review and forensic testing," Marshall said, "and that's not completed. I asked her for a target date [of completion] and she wasn't able to give me one at this point."

Marshall said it isn't unheard of for a cause of death to take a year to determine.

THE WAITING has frustrated many who have followed this case closely.

"It's been a whole year now since he died," said D'Ambra, the state's child advocate, "and we still don't have any medical examiner's report and we're not in any position to do anything until we do.

"I actually met with her [Laposata] sometime in August last year and we were told we were getting an autopsy within a month, which would have been September, and we still haven't had it."

D'Ambra said she mentioned Reggie's death to Atty. Gen. Patrick C. Lynch last month in their first meeting, in hopes Lynch might persuade Laposata to move quicker.

Last fall, Reggie's death even became part of an election campaign, as William Gilbert, of North Kingstown, running for state Senate, called for a state investigation.

Gilbert, who works at Toray Plastics, also runs a community group home for recovering substance abusers. He knows social workers who are familiar with Reggie's case.

Gilbert charged that the "cloak of secrecy" surrounding Reggie's death and the DCYF's "inclination to hide behind confidentiality" were preventing the truth from surfacing.

Gilbert remains sharply critical of the DCYF's supervision of the boy.

"No one seems to care about little Reggie Robinson," he said last week. "He's just a little kid from Providence who nobody wants to do anything about."

WENDY LEUPOLD and Reginald Robinson, his mother and father, concede neither was a proper parent for Reggie when he needed them most. But both say they want the mystery surrounding his death solved.

"I want to know what happened to my son so I can let go," said Leupold, of Millville, Mass., who last month called the governor's office to demand answers. "I gave birth to that child and I want to know what happened. I just feel they are trying to hide something."

Robinson says the DCYF focused more on him and his criminal history -- reacting to what he said were false abuse allegations -- than supervising his child and monitoring his medications.

Reggie often alleged he was being abused, said his father.

"He made allegations against Crystal, against her children," as well as allegations of abuse at school, Robinson said. "He made allegations against me and the only one they [the DCYF] believed was the one against me."

The incident Robinson refers to occurred Jan. 7, 2002. A clinician at Mount Pleasant Academy called the state's child-abuse hot line after Reggie, then 7, arrived at school with marks on his arms and legs and a bump on his head.

DCYF investigator Joseph P. Silvia looked into the matter.

Silvia's report, filed in District Court, Providence, is included in the department's request for a restraining order against Robinson.

According to Silvia's report, when school officials asked Reggie how he was injured, he first said his stepmother had struck him on the head with a Coca-Cola bottle and his father had whipped him with a belt.

Silvia reported that the school clinician, Ginny Miller, told him that "in the past, Reginald has had a history of making false accusations."

When Crystal Robinson arrived at the school, she told officials and later Silvia that she was unaware of Reggie's injuries.

Miller told Silvia "that she has been working with the family and feels that Crystal Robinson was truthful with her." She noted, however, that Reggie's father "was on parole for various acts of assault . . ."

Reggie later recanted his allegation against his stepmother, explaining "he did not know what to say when he was asked about the bump on his head . . ."

Reggie maintained, however, that his father struck him with a belt. Based on his testimony and the marks on his body, Silvia concluded in his report that the boy "had been subjected to physical punishment by his father . . ."

Providence police charged Robinson with second-degree child abuse. He was immediately held in prison as a parole violator. (In July 1997, Woonsocket police arrested Robinson and charged him with rape. He later pleaded no contest to an amended charge of simple assault.)

But prosecutors eventually dropped the child-abuse charge, citing a lack of evidence, the attorney general's office said. Robinson was paroled to home confinement in Woonsocket on June 5, 2002.

ROBINSON acknowledges his violent past but says it never involved child abuse.

He has hired a lawyer, he said, to clear his DCYF record, expose how the child-welfare system violated his due-process rights as Reggie's father, and to push for an official cause of death for his son.

"I think there was an oversight," said Robinson. "I think they [the DCYF] were more concerned about me instead of my son and I think that's where it became a major problem."

The DCYF should have more closely monitored Reggie's medications, Robinson said, than focus on him as an alleged abuser.

"The poor kid was on a lot of medications but they weren't giving him any blood tests to see if he was having a reaction," said Robinson. "I didn't think he needed medications. What he needed was just somebody to love him and hug him, show him that they cared because his mother and father weren't there. This boy was really hurt because we weren't there for him."

His lawyer, Melissa Weber, puts it bluntly: "This kid was a walking medicine cabinet."

She lists some of the medicines Reggie was taking at the time of his death: Risperdal, Concerta, Fluoxetine, the antihistamine Diphenhydramine and Guanfacine, most commonly used to treat high blood pressure but also used for drug withdrawal.

"That's a hell of a lot of drugs," said Weber, "and dad was jumping up and down saying 'I don't want my kid on that many drugs' and they were saying, 'You were a bad daddy. You may have been a criminal. You don't know what you're talking about.' "

The DCYF, Weber said, "used the father's history as a distracter from the abuse this child received from the professionals."

THE DCYF's Dwyer denies his department's focus on Reginald Robinson played any role in Reggie Robinson's death.

"We certainly have focused on the father in this case because of the history but certainly not to the exclusion of looking at any other possibilities," Dwyer said.

"I don't believe that there is any basis to the assertion that we have been less than diligent in following up every possible lead in this case."

Further, Dwyer said, any conclusion drawn between the medications Reggie was taking and his cause of death "is sheer speculation at this juncture. Again, we need to await the findings of the medical examiner."

However, Dwyer said, "we may never know."

There have been other cases of children in state care whose deaths remained unexplained.

For now, Wendy Leupold, whose parental rights to Reggie were terminated by the DCYF, continues her cemetery vigil.

Sometimes she brings a chair and passes sunny afternoons beside the silk flowers she has arranged over the grave.

The mystery of Reggie's death still tugs at her at night, too.

She has learned the gates are still open at dawn and the police are most understanding.

"What are they going to tell me? I'm visiting my son."