The woman who calls 911 says there's a diabetic teen boy in distress, but when police and paramedics arrive at the house in Mesa, Arizona she comes outside to say he's just "pretending that he's dead on the floor" because he wants attention. When those first responders go inside, they find something tragically different. Fifteen-year-old Christian Williams isn't breathing.
His lips are blue and his heart has stopped. The small ranch house — lit up from inside in the dark, desert night — is a residential treatment facility for seven young men in foster care. The facility provided specialized mental health care for Christian, who, in the one month since he'd come to the group home, was in and out of the hospital for complications from his Type 1 diabetes.
"I've never even dealt with a diabetic. I don't know anything about that," the woman who called the police, a staffer at the foster care home, tells an officer, recorded on the officer's body camera. Paramedics begin CPR, steadily pushing on Christian's chest, in an attempt to revive him.
An NPR investigation — including an analysis of federal data on hundreds of thousands of children — shows that kids with disabilities are the largest group that go into foster care. More significantly, they suffer the worst outcomes in foster care — getting trapped in the system longer than children without disabilities and dealing with lifelong harm. One reason, NPR found, is the extreme complexity of the system.
"Caring for children with disabilities in foster care involves much more than meeting their medical needs," explained Bobbi Andrew-Green, an Alaska foster parent to children with complex medical needs. She navigates child welfare, mental health, Medicaid, special education, home nursing and other service systems. "It is beyond complex to the point where some days, I'm dizzy," she said.
Disability encompasses a wide range of conditions. In our reporting, we came across children who used wheelchairs, were blind or deaf, had intellectual disabilities or used ventilators and sometimes were sent to foster homes that weren't accessible for them. But the largest group of children in foster care are those with a behavioral health disability.
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