Winner Update: Rose Again Foundation
There are so many children and so many stories that I can share with you, but I’m going to tell you tonight about a very recent story. This started four weeks ago. At 10:40 at night I got a text from a local foster mom. She said, “Rhonda, I have just accepted three children, age six, two, and seven months. They’re at the police station. Their sister is deceased and the parents have been arrested for murder.” I didn’t sleep the rest of that night.
She said, “I need a crib by the time they show up with the kids in the morning or they will separate the kids and take the seven-month-old elsewhere.” That’s one thing we don’t want, so the next morning we had a crib. One of our board members and her husband put the crib together. Another board member was out shopping, getting everything we needed for that crib, getting clothes, and shoes, and toiletries, a little tub to bathe the baby in, food, and so on.
The children, we were told, were going to come very hungry and very dirty, and they did. They also came very bruised and very beaten, very, very thin. The oldest, who will be seven in July, size four pants fell off of him. We had to find pants that had belts to keep clothes up onto his skinny little body. He was white, very pale, very, very pale. He told us he was there when his sister died. He was talking to her and she stopped talking. He said, “I was freaking out.”
Imagine being six years old and this happening and then strangers come in the home. Next thing you know you’re at a police station. All those bright lights. All the different people. Now you arrive at a new home with strangers. This little boy had belt marks on his face, on his back and bruises everywhere. He was so hungry, so scared. The two-year-old has yet to speak. The two-year-old has a deformed head from being strapped in, like a car seat they assume, for long periods of time when his head was still soft. He has a deformity on both sides from laying like this, and then laying like this. And that’s what that child did.
The autopsy was being done on their sister and they needed a lot of the evidence from these children to prosecute those parents because they didn’t want them to ever come out. And they won’t. But now you have these children. The boy who will be seven has never been to school. So what happens when school starts and you put that child in class? So that’s not going to happen to him because of you guys. Because of you, we had the car seats we needed. We had the crib we needed. We had the food, and clothes, and the diapers that we needed. We had the double-stroller that we needed.
