500 FOSTER KIDS MISSING ABOUT HALF KIDNAPPED BY KIN, HALF RAN AWAY.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

Nearly 500 foster children have disappeared from Los Angeles County's troubled child-welfare system, most of them believed to have been abducted by relatives or guardians, officials disclosed Tuesday.

An unprecedented internal study by the Department of Children and Family Services found the nation's largest foster care system - with some 50,000 youngsters - was unable to locate 488 of them as of Aug. 30.

Officials believe that 252 of them were abducted by parents, relatives or guardians. The rest are presumed to have run away. Officials said they were unaware of any abductions of the children by strangers.

Police reports are filed on missing and abducted foster youths, but only 64 had been recovered or returned voluntarily as of Aug. 30. At least eight children were slain or died in accidents after running away or being abducted in the past few years.

``This is yet another shocking revelation of a beleaguered child-welfare system that puts children at more risk in the system than if they had remained with their families,'' said Linda Wallace Pate, a Century City attorney who represents the family of a child who went AWOL from foster care and was slain.

``These children are running away from a failed system that merely warehouses approximately 50,000 kids with a hefty annual budget of $1.4 billion. This requires an immediate investigation by an independent body that should be open to the public.''

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich had asked for the report last month in light of a state audit that found that computer problems precluded the DCFS from locating foster children 8 percent of the time.

``It's shocking,'' he said. ``But it's not surprising and that's why we brought in a new interim director to run the department. We are working together to ensure that every child is accounted for. These eight deaths are examples of how dysfunctional the system is.''

In the report, DCFS Interim Director Marjorie Kelly wrote that the department has a set of policies it follows when a child runs away, including advising the caregiver to file a missing-person report, investigating the disappearance and notifying law enforcement agencies in other states.

In abductions, additional steps are taken. Law enforcement and the Juvenile Court's Child Abduction Unit are contacted, social workers search for the parents, and the nonprofit Find the Children organization distributes fliers in areas where the child may have been taken.

Kelly, who replaced former director Anita Bock after the Board of Supervisors voted to ask for her resignation earlier this year, said she is very concerned about the number of missing children and wants to step up efforts to find them.

``I think what we need to improve on is a sustained effort to find these children,'' Kelly said. ``There is a fairly aggressive search initially. But after a child is missing for a couple of weeks, I think we need to improve on our efforts to find them.''

Antonovich said he expects to introduce a motion at the next supervisors' meeting seeking to post the names and photographs of the missing children on an Internet site to encourage anyone with information about their whereabouts to contact authorities.

He also plans to ask Kelly to provide a list of the children's names, their last-known whereabouts and what efforts are being made to find them.

Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash said posting the children's names and pictures on the Internet would require a court order to waive confidentiality rules involving foster children.

``Personally, I don't think it's a bad idea, but I haven't really given it that much thought,'' Nash said.

The 488 foster children missing in Los Angeles County are almost as many as the more than 500 children missing from the entire Florida child-welfare system. The Florida foster care system has been the target of intense criticism and scrutiny since April, when the agency admitted it had lost 5-year-old Rilya Wilson of Miami, who is still missing. No caseworker had checked on her for 15 months.

Karen Strickland, executive director of the nonprofit Find the Children organization in Santa Monica, said some foster children in the county have been missing for years.

``There are children who have been gone for 20 years and nobody knows what happened to them,'' said Strickland, whose organization is dedicated to finding missing children. ``Families can take children to Mexico and we'll never see them again. The same is true if they hide in this country. Unless they engage in criminal activity, they can stay pretty well hidden.''

In the past several years, Strickland said, five foster children who were abducted by parents, relatives or guardians were slain by their abductors or died in accidents.

This is in addition to two children who ran away from MacLaren Children's Center in El Monte earlier this year and died.

In one case, 14-year-old Desiree Andrea Collins, who repeatedly ran away from MacLaren and various foster homes, was shot to death Feb. 10 in North Hills by a 19-year-old man.

In another case, a 17-year-old girl known only as ``Misty S.'' died of a diabetic seizure in February after she went AWOL from MacLaren during a medical appointment. Former MacLaren food service worker Greg Lyons alleged in a class-action lawsuit filed last year that ``Misty S.'' had been sexually abused by a staff member before she went AWOL.

In the final case, a teenage boy who ran away from a foster placement earlier this year was killed when he crashed a stolen car during a high- speed chase with police.

After years of pleading with the DCFS, Nash said he recently ordered the department to make sure the children's court files include their pictures so in case they run away or are abducted, authorities can use the photos to help find them.

``It's something we see in court every day,'' Nash said. ``Kids run away and they come back. Sometimes they don't come back. In my almost 13 years here, I've seen cases where kids run away and terrible things happen to them. I've seen cases where kids run away and they are later found dead.''

Amy Pellman, legal director of The Alliance for Children's Rights, said the large number of children missing from the DCFS indicates that the department is not picking up on the red flags in family dynamics.

``Children are supposed to be safe in foster homes and shielded from abuse they have already suffered,'' Pellman said. ``I think these foster children are telling us that foster care is a horrible place to grow up.''

Tom O'Connor, a spokesman for Service Employees International Union Local 535, which represents social workers, said the real problem behind the large number of missing children is the huge caseloads social workers carry.

``It's the 800-pound elephant in the middle of the room nobody wants to talk about,'' O'Connor said. ``There are reams of documents talking about the totally unrealistic caseloads these social workers are carrying, not just in Los Angeles County, but across the state and nation.

``I think the front-line social workers would say, If I wasn't carrying 50 to 80 cases, the situation would be greatly improved. How does a social worker, other than living 24 hours a day, side by side with a child, prevent a parent, guardian or family member from abducting a child? It's a monumental task.''