Tale of two tragedies and the response that could have been

Tale of two tragedies
and the response
that could have been

Five sad — and perhaps avoidable —deaths have raised questions about whether institutions and their employees have the power, ability and responsibility to intervene in private lives.

In one case, the four daughters of Banita Jacks, 33, of Washington D.C., are dead. The girls, ages 5, 6, 11 and 16, died sometime after their mother stopped sending them to school last spring and Jan. 11, when their bodies were found in a row house during the eviction of their mother for nonpayment of rent. It appears that Brittany and Tatianna Jacks and N’Kiah and Aja Fogle died within the last month, that they were malnourished and that their deaths were ultimately the result of stabbing, suffocation or beating.

In the other case, Daniel Kim, 21, of Reston, Va., a math major at Virginia Tech, is dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His body was found in his car in a Target parking lot in Christianburg, Va., in mid-December. Both stories have been extensively reported by the Washington Post.

Who knew what

In the case of the girls, a social worker at the high school where Brittany Jacks was a student became concerned when she stopped coming to school. She visited the home in May, but the mother denied her entrance. She reported what she saw to police, that the girls appeared to be dirty and unfed and that the mother appeared to have mental problems. The school that the three younger children attended never followed up on their absences because a relative told school officials that the mother had decided to home-school her children.

The school social worker also tried to get Washington’s Child and Family Services Agency to act. A CFS social worker made two visits to the home; no one answered the door to the rowhouse either time. The case was closed a few weeks later based on an unconfirmed — and erroneous —report that the family had moved to Maryland.

Washington Mayor Andrian M. Fenty has expressed outrage that four children could fall through the cracks and to their deaths, apparently at the hands of their mother. He acted quickly, firing two social workers, two managers and two phone operators at CFS for not taking complaints about the family seriously or not following up adequately on the information available.

Here, of all places

Meanwhile at Virginia Tech, warnings about Daniel Kim were also given short shrift. This is the same university where a disgruntled and obviously unstable student, Seung Hui Cho, went on a rampage last April, killing 32 students and faculty members and himself. It is, one would suspect, the last campus in the United States where a complaint that a student had bought a gun and was suicidal would be ignored. And yet ...

Weeks before Kim killed himself, Shaun Pribush, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., sent an e-mail to Virginia Tech’s health center saying that he and another student who knew Kim from playing interactive online games and exchanging e-mail were concerned. He told them that he had bought a gun and that he had attempted at least once to commit suicide, but vomited the pills he took. Another student told much the same thing to a telephone operator at Virginia Tech, but either hung up or the connection was lost while the call was transferred to the student health center.

The university’s response was to report what it had been told to the local police department, because Kim lived off campus. A police officer called on Kim, asked him about a message that Virginia Tech received from a student at “RPI” and left after being told that Kim felt fine and didn’t know anyone at RPI.

No one from the health center attempted to contact Kim while he was on campus, which would have been for naught because he had stopped attending class (which in itself is a warning sign of student depression). Kim was not referred to the threat assessment team that was organized after last spring’s shootings to deal with students who could pose a threat to themselves or others.

Differing reactions

Washington, Mayor Fenty is being criticized by some as being too hard on the six people he fired. His critics say the breakdown is systemic, and that individual workers should not be held to account.

There is no such debate at Virginia Tech, because there hasn’t been even a hint of holding any individual at the university to account for Daniel Kim’s death.

One of the differences, of course, was that four innocent children died in Washington. The only one who died in Virginia was a troubled 21-year-old student who took his own life.

But both cases point up how difficult it is for institutions to inject themselves into the private lives of people, even when the lives of family, friends or passers-by may be at stake.

And they point up how easy it is for tragic things to happen when social workers, police and counselors are either too overworked or too disinterested to fully react to a potential threat.

And, until something similar happens again, these stories point up how easy it is to forget.