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Death of 5-year-old in DHHS care a bitter loss to mom

BY DAVID HENCHBlethen Maine Newspapers

BY DAVID HENCH

Blethen Maine Newspapers

Virginia Blackmore was to be reunited with her son this month for the first time in more than three years.

Instead she will be presiding over his burial at a family plot in Brooklawn Memorial Park.

Mathew Baker, 5, apparently drowned in Sebago Lake June 25 after going swimming with his foster father, who has a physical handicap and walks with a cane.

Blackmore spoke to her son hours before he died, the first words they had exchanged since he went to live with his father when he was one year old, she said. She talked with her son about his hobbies, how he liked to color and play with blocks, and how he was going to Funtown and Storyland on the weekend and could she come with him.

A Department of Health and Human Services worker notified Blackmore of the boy's death that night.

"I just started crying questions after questions. They said 'We're sorry. We don't have any answers for you,'" Blackmore said.

This week, Blackmore and her mother Lynn Alexander, learned that the boy's remains were to be cremated. They were furious.

They appealed for help and Gov. John Baldacci intervened.

Baldacci sent them a letter Wednesday saying that he would instruct the DHHS commissioner to review her information and offer her some recourse.

The agency arranged a meeting with Blackmore and Alexander and with the boy's biological father, Glenn Baker.

Glenn Baker could not be reached to comment for this story.

The state pays for funeral arrangements when a child in state custody dies, but the agency leaves decisions about arrangements to the last person who had custody of the child, said DHHS spokesman John Martins.

In this case, the state opted to broker an agreement reached at a meeting held Friday in Portland.

Instead of cremating the child or burying him in Gray where his father's family lives, the boy will be interred near his mother's family in Portland. His father's family will arrange the funeral service, Alexander said.

Blackmore also asked for a closed casket, so she can remember her son as a cheerful toddler and as the cute, happy 5-year-old that appears in recent pictures, pictures she saw for the first time Friday.

Having some influence over the funeral proceedings was important, Blackmore said.

"I feel he should be buried with family and not alone where he doesn't fit in," she said. Having missed three years of his young life, she felt compelled to be involved in decisions affecting his burial, she said.

"It's hard seeing my son in pictures, where he's gone and I'm not being able to watch him grow up," she said.

She felt so close to reuniting with him that day after her hour-long telephone call, the day he died.

"I felt like everything was pulled right out from underneath me," she said. "They had no right to keep my son from me to begin with. I'm still that child's parent. Instead of putting him in foster care he should have been with me."

Citing confidentiality laws, a DHHS spokeswoman would not discuss specifics of the case, including whether the boy's biological mother was notified when he was placed in state custody.

The boy had been living with his father, Alexander said. When she and Blackmore tried to get custody of the child to come to live with his two sisters, now 7 and 9, the state said they didn't know where the boy was living, she said.

Only within the past year did they learn that Mathew, whom family members called "Matty," was in state custody and had been placed with a foster family because he had problems with aggressive behavior.

Alexander has vowed to work to change state regulations to give grandparents custodial rights in situations like Mathew's. In the year after Mathew left to live with his father, Blackmore had a breakdown and Alexander cared for the two girls, Alexander said. "I wanted that child in my home," she said. "We got lost in the cracks."

The case of Mathew Baker's death remains under investigation by the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office.

Detectives have interviewed the foster father twice. They haven't determined how the older man lost track of the boy after they had been swimming together off South Beach Street, near where the foster parents lived.

The boy's body was found a significant distance from where the pair had been swimming, said Chief Deputy Kevin Joyce.

The state medical examiner has performed an autopsy on Mathew but says a definitive ruling on the cause of death is pending further study.

The Department of Health and Human Services also investigates death or serious injury to a child in the state's custody.