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RECOGNITION FOR ‘PATRICK’S DISEASE’
Second place, general feature, American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors

This story – originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2003 – started as a simple feature about a troubled family. But when the mother began to hear disturbing reports about her son’s treatment in a local psychiatric hospital, I realized I had a much more complicated story. I worked my sources, pulled oversight reports, consulted mental health experts, sought out workers at the hospital and finally got the medical files that confirmed his mother’s fears.

STORY LINK
Main story: Saving Isaiah

RECOGNITION FOR ‘SAVING ISAIAH’
Winner, single story, Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

The state of Florida locked away Isaiah White 11 months ago.

They confined him in a place they call the “quiet room.”

They held him down and injected him with powerful drugs.

They forced him into full-body restraints as he wriggled on the floor.

He was 6 years old.

While living at Sandy Pines hospital in Tequesta last fall, Isaiah lost his first baby tooth.

He practiced adding small numbers and played CandyLand. He waited for Santa.

When he was bad, staffers confiscated his toys and upped his dose of antipsychotic medications, most of which have not been tested for use in children.

Officials at the state Department of Children and Families, who help run the state’s mental health programs, say psychiatrists are cautious when prescribing drugs. They say they want children to live with families, not in psychiatric wards. They say they do not want to institutionalize any child.

But for nearly a year, Isaiah has lived in facilities for the state’s most disturbed children and teenagers.

In December, three months after the state committed Isaiah to Sandy Pines, a DCF inspector came to look at 11 bruises on his arms and legs.

“Some are from playing outside,” he said, “and some are from being taken down.”

In March, Sandy Pines officials acknowledged they had not helped the boy. DCF transferred him to a psychiatric group home in Broward County, where he remains. He celebrated his seventh birthday last month.

The state has billed Medicaid more than $100,000 for his treatment.

Child advocates are alarmed by Isaiah’s case. Why, they ask, did the state treat a frightened first-grader like a psychotic adult? Is there no better way to discipline a 75-pound child?

“There is something seriously wrong with our mental health system,” said Gerard Glynn, executive director of Florida’s Children First, a coalition that represents children in state custody. “It is appalling. . . . I cannot understand, in a civilized society, locking up a 6-year-old child. Period.”

Confidentiality laws prohibit DCF from talking about Isaiah. But officials say they commit children to locked psychiatric programs only to ensure their safety when all else fails.

“I personally don’t like to see any child in a residential treatment center,” said Sue Ross, chief of children’s mental health for DCF. “But children under the age of 10 are of higher concern to me.”

The Palm Beach Post pieced together Isaiah’s story through police, school, DCF and hospital monitoring reports, DCF records, public court hearings, interviews with his medical doctor, former principal and family members, and hundreds of pages of records from Sandy Pines hospital.

Sandy Pines officials refused several requests for interviews.

17 SURGERIES IN FIRST FOUR YEARS

Isaiah was born in Atlanta, 7 pounds, 11 ounces, with a full head of dark hair.

Nurses hovered in the seconds after his birth, waiting for his first cry. It didn’t come. His lungs couldn’t fill. Nurses whisked him into intensive care.

The infant lay motionless in a plastic bubble, tubes up his nose and machines whirring beside him. He was too fragile to hold, but nurses pulled a chair into the ICU so his mother, Cheryll White, could watch over him.

Weeks later, doctors took Isaiah off life support. But he often wheezed and turned blue. Doctors found that his airway was small and floppy, threatening to collapse and strangle him.

Months later, surgeons sliced into his esophagus and inserted a tube. Later, they cut out a rib and transplanted it into his neck to strengthen his airway.

Nurses often had to stab him again and again with an IV, looking for a vein as he twisted and squirmed. Isaiah panicked when he saw the needles, clenching his whole body against the injections, Cheryll said.

Sometimes, he jerked out his arms and reached for help, like he was falling.

His sister Ashley, then 12, wiped the tears from his face, while his mother held him down.

Doctors often had to pin his arms with heavy wings they called “welcome splints” and “happy sleeves” to keep him from ripping out the small tubes.

When nurses couldn’t get the IV in his arm, they stuck it in his forehead.

One day, doctors left him in a crib with his arms pinned to his body and a needle in his head. When his mother came to check on him, he was rubbing his head against the bars of the crib, trying to pull out the IV.

By the time Isaiah was a toddler, he recognized the green sign marking the exit from Atlanta’s I-285 to the hospital. When he saw it, the 2-year-old lunged against the restraints of his car seat, trying to escape.

Isaiah never learned to speak through the equipment strapped to his neck. When he tried to scream, the only sound was a gurgle and the empty rush of air through the tube.

Cheryll said she tried to soothe her son. She sat by his side. She towed him around the hospital in a red wagon.

And she gave him whatever he wanted.

“If he wanted to eat 10 Popsicles, we gave him 10 Popsicles,” she said.

During his first four years, Isaiah checked into the hospital more than 40 times and underwent 17 surgeries. His mother guesses he spent three-quarters of his days in the hospital.

Despite his single mother’s best efforts, he became increasingly violent, said LeRoy Graham, an Atlanta respiratory specialist who treated Isaiah during those four years. Isaiah punched his nurses. He lunged at Graham.

Though extreme, Isaiah’s behavior was not unusual, Graham said.

Hospitals, no matter how cheery, can be terrifying for the youngest patients. The children try to defend themselves, Graham said.

Isaiah believed the doctors deliberately tortured him, while his mother watched.

His tracheotomy tube was removed when he was 3 1/2, and Isaiah almost never talked about the hospital after that, Cheryll said.

But one day, when he was 5, he turned to her, and hissed: “They slit my throat open from one side to the other. And you let it happen.”

OUTRAGE AT FAMILY, CLASSMATES

When the family moved from Atlanta to Palm Beach County in the summer of 2000, Isaiah’s medical problems were mostly over.

But he was increasingly savage. He charged at relatives with scissors and threw a glass jar on his older sister Kaitlyn’s bare feet. He held his 4-year-old cousin under water until he was blue and gasping. At dinner, he picked up a knife and threatened to cut out his mother’s heart.

In kindergarten at West Riviera Elementary, Isaiah could rarely stay in class for more than two hours, said former Principal Sharon Hench. Discipline slips show he bit other children until their arms were swollen, dived off desks onto his classmates and kicked his teacher.

Seven times, school officials and family members sent him to mental health crisis units under the state’s Baker Act. Once he arrived angry and sweating, after fighting with police.

On an admission in January 2002, crisis unit doctors asked Isaiah to sign an acknowledgement of his treatment plan. He couldn’t read much of it, but at 5, he could write a little.

In shaky, halting print, above the line labeled “client signature,” the kindergartner spelled out his first name.

COMMITTED TO MENTAL WARD AT 6

Psychiatrists diagnosed Isaiah with post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental problem first studied in Vietnam veterans. He had night terrors and trouble sleeping. He flinched when a cashier at a water park asked him to wear a plastic bracelet to show he had paid. It triggered his memory of a hospital ID band.

Cheryll believes her son also has reactive attachment disorder, a problem in which early traumas prevent children from bonding normally with their parents. She wanted to take her son to one of the national centers that train parents to help severely disturbed children.

Nearly every day, Cheryll hounded DCF officials for the money. When she felt administrators were patronizing her, her temper came quick, like a sudden slap.

The state wouldn’t pay for the special treatment, but it did provide a psychiatrist, an after-school program and a therapist who came to the home to work with Isaiah nearly every day. In the summer after his kindergarten year, the state paid his tuition to a summer camp for emotionally disturbed children.

Cheryll couldn’t control her son, so she settled for containment. She took him to the drive-in movies instead of the theater so other families wouldn’t be bothered if he started to howl. She placated him with whatever he demanded: candy, Happy Meals, a singing Barney doll from Toys “R” Us. As the summer of 2002 wore on, Cheryll lost her job as a program director for the homeless. She was hospitalized with pneumonia. She grew increasingly brittle.

Isaiah spent his sixth birthday first at the mental health crisis ward at Columbia Hospital – and in the arcade at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Days later, Isaiah went into a rage and crashed into a window, shattering the glass and splitting open his arm. Doctors had to use heavy sedatives to calm him enough to stitch him up.

They worried the sedative would affect Isaiah’s breathing and asked Cheryll to monitor him closely.

And so, Cheryll said, six years after the tense night of his birth, she again sat by her son, watching his lungs rise and fall. She was furious there was no money to pay for attachment therapy or the inpatient psychiatric program she thought he needed.

Frantic and sobbing, she called the abuse hot line and blamed the state of Florida for neglecting her son. Without more help, she didn’t know what she would do. She said she was afraid she would hurt him.

DCF sent a caseworker the next day. The state took custody of Isaiah and arranged for him to go to a therapeutic foster home. Caseworkers said they took the boy because he no longer could safely stay at home. In their plan, they reported “Special conditions – due to specific medical and behavioral needs, allegations of medical neglect. The mother’s inability to care for specific needs.”

Six weeks later, on Sept. 11, 2002, with the approval of two doctors, the state committed Isaiah to Sandy Pines.

Sandy Pines psychiatrist Neil Merkatz diagnosed the boy with post-traumatic stress disorder “due to multiple hospitalizations.”

If Merkatz had doubts about committing a 6-year-old to Sandy Pines, he didn’t mention them in his admission papers. His recommendation for the boy was three to six months in the hospital.

Soon, the boy who was terrified of needles was held down for injections of psychotropic drugs. The child who associated restraints with painful surgeries was zipped into a full-body “safety coat.”

And the boy with an already weak bond to his mother lived with strangers, waiting for her weekend visits.

NOTED BEHAVIOR EVERY 30 MINUTES

The Sandy Pines staff members measured Isaiah’s behavior in 30-minute increments. They gave him points for small accomplishments, such as brushing his teeth and cleaning his room. When he acted out, staffers took his toys and sent him to his room to eat dinner alone.

He went to a special school inside the hospital and attended individual, group and family therapy sessions. In the beginning, staffers hoped the strict, structured behavior program would help.

“We need to remind ourselves that Isaiah is only 6 yrs. old and in a class with much older children,” his therapist wrote in a Nov. 11 progress report. “Considering the circumstances, he’s showing improvement.”

But they still could not stop his rages. He flew down the hallway screaming. He attacked staff members.

One night in the winter, as older patients screamed and fought in the background, Isaiah talked to his mother on the phone. He practiced adding small numbers and recited her two most important rules:

“Don’t hurt self and don’t hurt others.”

‘WE TOLD HIM THAT IT WOULD HELP’

Sometimes, staff members said they had no other way to control the 4-foot-3 boy besides the safety coats.

Sandy Pines officials would not answer questions about the coats. But the common model is canvas and lined with felt. Staff members pull the children to the ground, then roll them into bags that zip from toe to neck. Straps are tightened around the body, pinning the children’s arms to their torsos.

One day, after Isaiah was in the coat, psychiatrists interviewed him about his feelings.

They asked whether he knew why he had been restrained. He didn’t.

They asked whether the restraint helped him gain control of himself. He said no.

They asked whether he felt safe in the coat. No.

His sister Ashley, now 19, went to see him most weekends and was outraged about his treatment.

“We told him that it would help him, that it was a good place,” she said. “But all of a sudden, he’s in straitjackets, getting injections, abandoned by his family. What’s he supposed to think, at 6 years old? I think it hurt him. A lot.”

Isaiah did not seem to understand what was happening to him. He didn’t know why he couldn’t go home. Most days, he refused to participate in therapy.

Therapists wrote that he didn’t seem “vested” in the goals of the program.

On Dec. 23, staffers recorded in his progress notes that the boy was “overly stimulated” and had trouble focusing on his treatment.

He was too excited about Santa coming, they wrote.

PERMANENT SIDE EFFECTS POSSIBLE

The Sandy Pines psychiatrist tranquilized Isaiah with a variety of drugs, gradually increasing the doses.

The doctor started him on the antipsychotic medication Zyprexa, then switched to Geodon, replaced that with Abilify, and then added Clonidine, a drug used to lower blood pressure.

When he was especially wild, they sedated him with Haldol, a powerful drug originally developed for schizophrenic adults.

The boy’s records don’t always specify whether psychiatrists gave him Haldol by mouth or by syringe. But in some cases, documents show that the drugs were administered “IM” – an abbreviation for intramuscular injection.

Cheryll said she didn’t want her son to get the injections. But when she declined to sign the permission forms, officials threatened to send Isaiah home, she said.

She signed.

At least 13 times in the month of January, Isaiah was sedated with emergency doses of Haldol or the sedative Vistaril, according to his file.

In one case, his file noted that the boy was “lethargic” after an injection and slept through the afternoon.

Doctors’ opinions around the country vary on whether antipsychotic drugs should be given to young children. Some say that, in rare cases, even 6-year-olds can be so dangerous that it would be malpractice not to prescribe the drugs. Other doctors recoil, believing problems with the powerful medications outweigh the benefits.

Though anecdotal evidence shows that the medications can sedate children, the effects and risks on developing brains are largely unknown. Many have not been tested in children and are not yet approved by the government. Their labels carry the blanket caveat: Safety and effectiveness in children have not been established.

But one side effect of Haldol and some other antipsychotic drugs is clear: The longer patients take them, and the higher the dose, the more likely they will develop repetitive tics in their bodies and faces.

Patients may grimace, stick out their tongues, smack their lips and flutter their eyes. Some twitch in their arms, legs and body.

The damage is often irreversible.

FROM ‘DEFIANT’ TO ‘EXTREMELY DEFIANT’

By late fall, Cheryll was unsettled about what was going on inside Sandy Pines and feeling guilt that she initially pushed for her son’s placement there. She called repeatedly to challenge their use of restraints and injections.

“He’s scared of needles,” she told them.

On Jan. 2, when Cheryll went for her weekly family therapy, she noticed an abrasion over Isaiah’s right eye.

Sandy Pines records say he was hurt during a struggle the day before. Staff had held him down to stop him from banging his head on the floor of the quiet room.

Cheryll simmered over the injury during the therapy session and abruptly left when it was over.

Staff members felt that Cheryll’s anger and antagonism were eroding their control and causing her son to confuse discipline with abuse.

A January progress note suggested she impeded the treatment by “attempting to split staff and enable her son’s irresponsible behavior through threatening to call the Department of Children and Families when her son receives a PRN (injection) or sustains a physical injury from requiring restraint.”

Cheryll said part of that is true: She was outraged with Sandy Pines and did ask DCF to investigate.

Through the month of February, Isaiah often exploded, running down the hall screaming one night after he was told he would have to eat dinner alone again and attacking staff who said he couldn’t go on a Fun Friday field trip.

Staff members, unable to keep the boy from kicking them in the face, confiscated his sneakers.

He then padded around in his Batman slippers.

But he warned them he could still fight. He pointed to his fingernails and teeth.

“I still have these,” he said.

In September, when Isaiah was admitted, the Sandy Pines psychiatrist described him as hyper and “defiant.” In March, after six months of restraints and Haldol injections, the boy was described as unstable and “extremely defiant.”

Sandy Pines acknowledged in his discharge papers that it had not been able to help him.

“The behavioral plan was discontinued due to ineffectiveness,” officials wrote.

On March 3, the state transferred Isaiah to a smaller psychiatric program in Broward County run by Alternate Family Care Inc.

EXPERTS: CASH SHOULD GO TOWARD PREVENTION

Child advocates say the high costs of residential treatment centers such as Sandy Pines are better spent on prevention programs.

Like prisons, they say, inpatient psychiatric programs can harden children more than they rehabilitate them, exposing them to much more violent and disturbed peers.

In 2001, a well-known consultant hired by the state was alarmed by the number of young children in Florida programs. He found 7- and 8-year-old girls who lived at the Tampa Bay Academy, a program similar to Sandy Pines, for 18 months.

The child welfare expert, Paul DeMuro, said no child under the age of 11 should be placed in a residential treatment center. Even 11- and 12-year-olds should be in intimate settings with only four to eight beds, he wrote.

DFC said this spring that it had more than 600 children in the state’s inpatient psychiatric programs. Isaiah was one of three 6-year-olds. Four 7-year-olds, eight 8-year-olds and dozens of 9- and 10-year-olds also were committed.

Carolyn Salisbury, who represents many children in South Florida psychiatric hospitals as associate director of the University of Miami’s Children & Youth Law Clinic, said the child patients can become “zombified” from medications. And a few leave more ill than when they arrived. Some who are not schizophrenic begin saying they hear voices, she said.

Many children at Sandy Pines and Alternate Family Care have been sexually abused and are at risk of molesting others, according to police reports.

Isaiah was fluent in curse words by the time he reached kindergarten. But his file says he has never been abused or sexually molested. Compared with many of the disturbed children at Sandy Pines and Alternate Family Care, he is an innocent.

Four years ago at Alternate Family Care, Hollywood police investigated the case of a 14-year-old patient who said he had oral sex with a 6-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl. Detectives could not find out whether his story was true and did not file charges. But inside the teenager’s room, police found a toy doll, naked and hanging from a noose of red ribbon.

Cheryll said she talked to Isaiah about good touch and bad touch and believes he would tell her if anyone had tried to hurt him. But she is angry that, at the same time Isaiah was learning to tie his shoes, he also was learning how to recognize a condom. She jumped when he used the word in front of her one day, pointing to medicine wrapped in a foil package.

After a year in psychiatric programs, Isaiah can quote the patients bill of rights but knows little about being a typical boy.

When he started to lose his baby teeth, Cheryll said she told staffers that he believed in the tooth fairy. If she gave them a crisp bill, she asked, could they slip it under his pillow?

No, she was told.

DESPITE PROGRESS, ‘WILL HE HAVE NORMAL LIFE?’

When Isaiah was released from Sandy Pines, the psychiatrists judged his prognosis “poor-fair.” He was violent, they said. He showed no remorse.

But at Alternate Family Care, Isaiah improved quickly. He told his mother he never got restraints or injections there.

Isaiah is visiting home nearly every weekend now, and Cheryll believes he soon will be home to stay.

He speaks a strange therapeutic language, thanking her for “empowering” him and lecturing his cousins about anger management, Cheryll said. But he seems better. For the first time, he is able to stop himself when he begins to get angry. He is able to talk about the hospital and his fears.

The state also sent Cheryll to therapy. She, too, is calmer now. She said she is better able to discipline her son.

So much, Cheryll says, depends on whether the state can keep Isaiah and other emotionally disturbed children from growing into violent adults. Long-term studies show that half of the children once treated in a residential psychiatric program are arrested by their teenage years.

Cheryll still wants to take parenting courses from an expert who visits homes all over the country. She still wants Isaiah to have specialized attachment therapy. She still doesn’t have the money.

She thinks a lot about his future: “Will he have a normal life? Will he have a wife?” She worries.

After his success at Alternate Family Care, she is more hopeful but knows the future will be hard.

Cheryll is haunted by that day in July 2002 when she lost Isaiah to the state.

It was his last day of therapy for the summer, and she had come to take him home. She told him to get his book bag, so they could get going. Instead of the bag, he came out with a broom, swinging it over his shoulders. His therapist told him to put it down.

Isaiah shouted no. The therapist snatched it away.

Isaiah whipped into a rage. He howled and sprinted across the lobby. Cheryll thought he was headed for the door.

He hit a picture window. Glass shattered. He screamed. A tendon spiraled out of his arm. Blood dripped down and soaked into his clothes.

Everyone was there, Cheryll said, including her, his behavior aide, his therapist, a top official in children’s mental health.

They all watched, stunned.

No one could stop him in time.

Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
August 10, 2003 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 3808 words

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

She called everyone “Mommy.”

Wrapping her arms around women and holding tight, the 2-year-old tried out the name on her foster mother, her preschool teachers and her caseworker at the Department of Children and Families. She seemed to hope that, if she called enough women Mommy, she could get just one to stick.

But since that time, five women who planned to adopt her said they were sorry, but they could not. Over and over, they sent her away to live with strangers.

Now 7, the girl has not really belonged to anybody but the state of Florida for five years – four longer than allowed by federal law.

As time goes by, she gets a little less precious, a little more damaged.

Last year, the girl, whose name is being withheld, threw herself out of her chair during dinner. She banged her head and tore her clothes. She dared her foster parents to punish her, saying they couldn’t do anything to hurt her.

Then, she asked when she would be adopted.

Since she was taken from her biological mother in April 1998, two state DCF administrators, three local child welfare chiefs and at least four of her caseworkers have resigned or been fired. Florida’s child welfare agency heaved in panic over high-profile horrors like the death of Kayla McKean in 1998 and disappearance of Rilya Wilson in 2002, as this girl and thousands of other anonymous children shuffled from home to home.

Her former foster parents say the little girl has been wounded by a system straining so hard to make sure children are alive that it cannot possibly ensure that all of them are well.

They blame past caseworkers who didn’t tell them the extent of her emotional problems, therapy that came too late and ended too soon, and doctors who prescribed drugs, mistaking her sadness and fear for hyperactivity.

Several of her foster families wrote letters to judges, child welfare bosses, the governor and the president of the United States, begging for help. It was slow in coming.

On May 2, 2000, when she was 4, a psychologist agreed with her increasingly strained foster mother that the child needed long-term psychotherapy with a specialist who could address her “emotional issues and behavioral difficulties.”

She was not getting that therapy in November of last year, when she was committed to the mental ward of Columbia Hospital in West Palm Beach.

Confidentiality laws prohibit DCF and the Children’s Home Society, the private contractor that handles the county’s foster care adoptions, from commenting on her case.

In general, said Jan Beerman, a Children’s Home Society program director, “You hope you have done a good job preparing the children and preparing the family, that you have the services in place to help that family. . . . But there are times, despite the best efforts, that it doesn’t work.”

The Children’s Home Society finalized 110 adoptions in Palm Beach County between July and December of last year. That was more than Miami-Dade, and only 12 fewer than Broward, which has about twice the number of foster children.

Even so, more than half of the children in foster care in Palm Beach County have been there longer than allowed by law. About one-fifth have lived in three or more foster homes.

In the 2001-02 school year, the girl attended kindergarten at four different schools, with four different families. She is now living in her seventh foster home.

TAKEN INTO CUSTODY AT 2

The state took the child and her two siblings into custody April 23, 1998, when she was 2. Her mother, Debbie, was homeless and admitted that she and her boyfriend were using crack in front of their three children.

The boyfriend’s mother, Peggy Harris, took in their baby, Mariah, her blood granddaughter. The girl and her older brother, Jay, weren’t family – they had a different father. They had no place to go but foster care.

That day, the caseworker reached Kathy Woltz, a longtime foster mother with a soothing voice and soft brown hair. A deeply religious woman, Woltz believed God made her unable to conceive so she could help abandoned children.

Woltz took the girl, who came to her with raggedy sweatpants, matted blond curls and marker scribbles all over her legs. The child seemed terrified of adult men and didn’t speak for two days, Woltz said. Badly dehydrated, she clutched her sippy cup as she toddled around the house.

But she was loving and sweet, curling up in Woltz’s lap to have her hair brushed. She also could be a tomboy, hurling herself on top of two wrestling brothers more than twice her size.

In preschool, the girl dipped her hand in paint and pressed it to paper. Her teacher printed the words: Here is my hand, so tiny and small/That you may hang upon the wall/So you may watch as years go by/How we have grown, my hand and I.

Woltz planned to keep her. She even posed her in formal family portraits with her adopted son, Tony.

But she was also getting notes from preschool, saying her foster child was attacking other children.

Woltz thought the girl needed intense therapy. But for two years, she said, she never got help.

She rarely got return phone calls from the DCF caseworker, Valerie Coombs. When Coombs did call back, she said she did not believe the little girl needed therapy, according to Woltz. She appealed all the way up to the head of Palm Beach County’s DCF, but said she never got a reply.

In the summer of 2000, Coombs told Woltz that the plan was for the girl and her brother, who was living in another foster home, to be adopted by grandparents in Georgia.

One day in August, Woltz gave up. She picked up the girl from school and took her to DCF. She told her that she was going to live with her grandparents and left. The child was sent to another foster home.

Months later the plan to send her to her grandparents would fall through and Woltz would go into a depression. She was furious with DCF, but asked herself, “Why couldn’t I have done more?”

The woman who once believed it was her divine mission to care for children has never taken another foster child.

When Woltz dropped off the girl that afternoon in August 2000, DCF called Kathy South.

South said caseworkers told her they had a little girl, cute, no problems. South wasn’t sure whether she could take the child, so they put her on the line.

“Hi, new Mommy,” she said.

DCF dropped her off an hour later.

At first, the child was confused, asking why she couldn’t go home. The move away from the mother she had known for half her life required some reprogramming.

“Kathy is not your mother anymore,” South told her. “Tony is not your brother. Now you have a new family.”

South had the same problems as Woltz. On Nov. 13, the girl was sent to the principal’s office, where she hurled her shoes, jumped on furniture and hit the walls.

Her pediatrician diagnosed her with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and started her on the drug Concerta.

South said she repeatedly called the girl’s caseworker, still Valerie Coombs, but could not get her to start therapy. She sent a letter to DCF, saying that, in five months, she never met Coombs in person. Coombs was fired in May 2002 for failing to visit another child.

Coombs said Friday the child did get therapy and the parents chose to give her up because of their own problems.

Three days after the girl started kindergarten in August 2001, DCF found her a new family. South carried her out of her house in her arms to meet her new parents.

The little girl clasped her arms around South’s neck, until they peeled her off.

Then she sat in the back seat of her new family’s car, sobbing, as it pulled away.

HALF-SISTER CHOSEN OVER HER

DCF finally agreed to start counseling that fall. But less than three months later, she was up for adoption again.

The next to take the girl was Peggy Harris, the grandmother of her half-sister, Mariah. In November 2001, Harris started caring for both girls.

“I tried not to show favorites, but I’m sure I did a little bit,” she said.

A single mother getting by on wages from her job as a warehouse clerk, Harris had raised two boys of her own. The half-sisters fought constantly, exhausting her. She decided that she could adopt only one.

Harris chose Mariah and tried to console the other.

“We’ll still see each other, still get together on weekends,” Harris told her.

A caseworker came to take her away one day, while she was at school.

‘This is her sixth placement’

Pam Malone had three sons, and always wanted to adopt a little girl. She and her husband spent the spring of 2002 remodeling a room, adding fresh white paint and a butterfly bedspread.

The little girl came in April.

At first, she seemed to be adjusting. The twice-weekly counseling sessions she had for less than a year were stopped. Soon after, the girl started acting fidgety and upset, picking at her gums, refusing to get ready in the morning.

In November, after months of fighting to restart therapy, Malone took the girl to Children’s Home Society offices and demanded that they treat her immediately.

Caseworkers committed the girl to the children’s crisis unit at Columbia Hospital. She spent nearly a week there saying she missed her brothers, her dog and her bird and asking why she could not go home.

On Nov. 23, Circuit Judge Roger Colton had a hearing on her case.

He ordered Malone not to lose her temper again. He told the caseworkers to restart therapy. He called it “reprehensible” that they had not secured a permanent family long ago.

“This is her sixth placement. Her sixth placement,” he said, punching out his words.

How would you feel, he asked, if you had to lose your mother, your home, your pets – six different times?

As he moved to adjourn, his tone switched to tired, and resigned.

“We can’t fix everything. But we can try. That’s all I’m going to say, folks.”

He sent the girl back home with the Malones.

‘ATTACHMENT DISORDER’ CITED

After diagnosing her with hyperactivity, bipolar disorder and depression, after trying to treat her with the drugs Adderall, Concerta and Zoloft, the girl’s caretakers now realize that her main problem is foster care.

They believe she has attachment disorder, a problem shared by most children who have been abused or neglected, then moved from place to place. They may be charming around strangers but exasperating at home. Often, they behave perfectly for the first few weeks in a new home, then they collapse. They reject a family before the family can reject them.

It makes sense, therapists say, when these children have lost most everyone they ever loved.

For a foster child who has moved many times, the outlook isn’t good, said Elaine Baker, a Palm Beach County attachment therapist.

Therapy for attachment disorder isn’t likely to work unless the child can stay in one place for six months to a year. But the child has a hard time staying in one place that long until she can get intensive therapy, she said.

DCF found homes for her brother and sister long ago – Jay lives with Debbie’s parents in Georgia; Mariah is still with Harris.

Many of the girl’s former foster mothers still call her, look out for her and invite her over for long visits. They hope to find the perfect two-parent home for her, ideally with no other children. They want committed parents who have seen her worst but promise to keep her, anyway.

They like her new caseworker at the Children’s Home Society and believe he is doing his best.

But they know the child’s chances are waning.

When children turn 8, the state classifies them as “special needs,” acknowledging that it is hard to find homes for older children. Two-thirds of the 1,105 children adopted statewide in the first half of this budget year were 7 or younger.

Malone sent the girl for a trial visit with a new prospective family this month. Halfway through the weeklong visit, the new family fell in love with the cute little girl, like everyone always does.

They called Malone and asked her to pack the girl’s things.

Malone said she wasn’t able to say goodbye or explain to the girl why she had to move again.

She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what will happen now.

Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
May 25, 2003 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 2028 words

JUPITER ISLAND – In its century-long history, Gate House is said to have been occupied by Katharine Hepburn, Edsel Ford, several donkeys and an acclaimed playwright who did his best work on the front porch, drinking whiskey and wearing nothing but a towel.

The rambling home off South Beach Road is hidden by a dark, tropical jungle and laced with spiral staircases and secret passageways – the mysterious, fairy-tale kind of a place that inspires tall tales and shameless lies.

But most of its stories, island historians say, are almost certainly true.

Dave Phillips, a genial man with a soft Southern accent, said the house was presented to him more than two years ago as a “tear-down,” a relic that would be razed to make room for a modern palace with marble counters and a private theater.

But the existing house is “enchanting,” he said.

Phillips, who owns a North Carolina realty company and specializes in restoration, bought the property in April 1999 for $1.1 million. He is now working to get it on the National Register of Historic Places as a good example of the Spanish Mission Revival style evidenced in many early South Florida homes.

His application already has been approved by the state. If it passes the scrutiny of National Register officials in Washington, the home will be the first from Jupiter Island on the list.

The property, which islanders call Gate House, is actually a collection of buildings, decked in off-white stucco and barrel tile roofs.

Everywhere in the houses, Phillips said, are places for an average-sized man to bump his head.

Phillips has to lean over to shave because his bathroom ceiling slants down dramatically over the sink, to a height of just over 5 feet. In one building, a 20-foot-long passageway – about 5 feet high and 2 feet wide – connects a bedroom to living room.

As the story goes, a midget once lived in the house. He was often chased by his larger brother, and darted into the tiny tunnels to escape, Phillips said. That legend may be based on reality, some island historians say.

The houses were built by the Yateses, a wealthy railroad family from upstate New York, said Vee Chambers, a 93-year-old resident of Hobe Sound who worked on the island beginning in the 1920s.

According to written histories of the island kept at the Martin County Historical Society, their son, Jack Yates, built most of the surrounding buildings with their small halls and low ceilings, sometime before 1927. The main house was built around the turn of the century.

Jack Yates, lifelong resident Nathaniel Reed says, was a dwarf. Chambers, who knew Yates, said he was “a little deformed – a brilliant person, but short, and he looked like he didn’t have a neck.”

The Yateses owned the home when women still wore petticoats and men’s shirts were always starched, according to a history of the island written by Nathaniel’s father, Joseph Reed, an author and financier who arrived with his family in 1931.

In 1914, he wrote, only 12 families, including the Yateses, lived on Jupiter Island, and residents had to travel by boat to Palm Beach for ice to chill their food. During the years the Yateses owned the home, Reed said, donkeys were stabled all over the island, and hitched to carts for rides. Phillips said one of the cottages on the property is named Donkey House, likely because it was a stable.

In the years the Yates family owned the property, rooms divided and multiplied, according to Joseph Reed’s history:

“(The Yateses) had a big rambling house which, because of Mrs. Yates’ penchant for building, became each year more rambling. In consequence, the original core was finally so surrounded by new rooms, verandas, enclosures, connecting passageways, and more rooms that it became a core indeed – lost in impenetrable gloom.”

Joseph Reed bought the Yateses’ home and many others in the 1930s, as once-wealthy residents grew “desperate and destitute,” Nathaniel Reed said. The Florida real estate boom had ended with the hurricane of 1926 and the stock market crash of 1929.

“My father, very wisely, had been long in bonds, short in stocks,” he said.

According to Joseph Reed’s wife Permelia’s history of the island, filed at the Martin County Historical Society, her husband operated a school in one of the buildings for black women from Banner Lake to teach them the principles of housekeeping.

Chambers said she helped with the school, which was free and attracted some white servants as well.

“He trained cooks and maids for about two years, because none of the locals knew how to serve rich people,” Chambers said.

Shortly after buying the home in 1935, Reed sold it to Edsel Ford, the son of pioneering automaker Henry Ford. According to Joseph Reed’s history of the island, Ford removed wooden Indians from the home for his father’s museums, and built a dock for his large yacht.

Few islanders got to know Ford while he was living in the house. “He was a very shy person, and he didn’t mingle very well. He sort of stayed to himself, though everyone thought he was very nice,” Chambers said.

A few years after he bought it, Ford sold Gate House to acclaimed playwright Philip Barry and his wife. Barry wrote The Philadelphia Story, his most famous play, in pencil on yellow legal pads at Gate House, Chambers said.

She was his secretary, and typed the story after he was finished at the house. The 5-foot-8-inch woman remembers bumping her head frequently on a very low, winding metal staircase.

In 1940, the play was made into a movie starring Katharine Hepburn, a friend of Barry’s, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant.

Reed remembers Barry, a close friend of his father’s, as “brilliant and funny, a marvelous character,” who preferred to write while outdoors, and half-naked.

Barry’s wife, Ellen, survived her husband by many years, and Martin County deeds show she likely kept the house until 1961. The home’s next famous owner, John Walker III, lived there between 1992 until his death in 1995.

The director of the National Gallery in Washington until his retirement in 1969, Walker was “unbelievably educated, one of the great Renaissance men,” Reed said.

Upon his death at age 88, The New York Times eulogized the “patrician art connoisseur,” as the man who “shaped the museum into a world-class institution.”

Walter and Cheryl Forman bought the home in 1997, and sold it to Phillips in April 1999.

Except for renovations to the kitchens and bathrooms, the buildings have hardly changed since the time they were built, said Robert Jones, the state historical specialist handling the National Register application.

He said the house got its name from the words “Gate House” etched in the tile on one of the out buildings, which may have once been the entryway to the property.

Phillips’ favorite story about his house is undocumented, and may be impossible to confirm.

It is rumored on the island that Hepburn and Spencer Tracy rendezvoused at Gate House during their semi-secret 26-year affair.

Hepburn and Tracy first met on the set of Woman of the Year in 1942, and went on to nine movies together, including and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Though they rented a house together in West Hollywood, the couple had to keep their affair secret. Tracy was separated from wife, but as a Catholic, he did not believe in divorce.

It is certainly possible, Phillips said, that the couple met in secret at Gate House. “I’d put up a plaque over the exact spot where they rendezvoused, if I knew where it was,” he said.

Chambers is much more skeptical. The only time she saw Hepburn on the island was in March 1941, when the actress stayed with the Hildebrandts, down the street from Gate House.

But Jupiter Island has always been a place where famous people go to hide. Gate House itself seems to recede into the trees, withholding its secrets from the road.

Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
September 4, 2001
Tuesday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1320 words

As they came of age between 1940 and 1943, Opha Smith’s five sons left their small town in Indiana for places she had never heard of – Gey, Casablanca, Normandy, Salinas, New Guinea.

They volunteered to jump out of planes, crouch in machine gun nests and ride in plywood gliders. They survived diphtheria and gunshot wounds, burrowing into the earth or under trucks at night so they could sleep through the shelling.

Opha Smith had nothing but hope and prayers to bring them home.

And one by one, the five Smith brothers, dozens of war decorations among them, came home – exhausted, but whole.

Ned, 83; Dwight, 81; Russell, 79; Kenneth, 77; and Kyle, 75, are still living, long into retirement, as is a sixth brother, Johnny, who was not old enough to fight in World War II but later served in occupied Germany. Four of the brothers stayed in Indiana, but Ned and Kenneth live in the same Martin County neighborhood, south of Stuart.

For Ned B. Smith, Memorial Day is a time to raise a hand-sewed flag made for him by family. It’s too precious, too beautiful to display on ordinary days, he said.

Ned Smith joined the Army in 1940 for the $28 a month he could send home to help his father, Barbee Smith, who had lost the family’s farm, grocery store and just about everything else during the Depression. He came home with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.

Little sister Ruth was a 12-year-old girl when her oldest brother left and a married woman when he came back. Even during the Depression, her brothers would always let her reach into their pockets for a nickel, or even a dime. And when she ran foot races against her lanky, athletic teenage brothers, the small girl magically came out the winner, again and again.

“People said you must have had a rough time with all those boys, but they were really very protective of me,” Ruth Small said. Though the family missed them terribly, she said, her mother watched stoically as each of her boys walked off her front porch.

It was only the fourth, Kenneth, who made her wince.

During the months after Pearl Harbor, her fourth son was eager to help his big brothers whip the Nazis and Japanese. He planned to enlist in February 1942, on his 17th birthday.

A photo taken around that time shows a skinny kid with a big hat perched atop his big ears and crew cut. Though already as tall as most men, he looks more like a little boy earnestly playing dress-up in Dad’s uniform.

Opha Smith asked him to wait a little longer. Small remembers Kenny himself down on the bed, crying because Mother was trying to stop him from joining the service.

Nobody remembers now whether pride and patriotism changed her mind, or whether she just relented, knowing that she couldn’t stop a world war, couldn’t stop the days that were dragging boys toward their 18th birthdays.

Either way, she signed Kenny’s papers and let him go.

The telegrams came every day around noon.

“We never knew what they would say,” Small said.

The Smiths had heard about the telegram received by the Sullivans in Waterloo, Iowa, who also had five sons in the war. All five died together when their ship, the USS Juneau, was sunk off Guadalcanal in 1942.

Men from the same families and places didn’t fight together after that. Even tragedy, the Army decided, should be rationed like sugar and gasoline, parceled out to families and towns in more manageable bundles.

But both Kenneth and Ned fought at Normandy, one of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century.

Just before D-Day, Opha Smith received a telegram from Kenneth, saying, “Mother, pray for us boys, we need God now.”

It was 30 days before she heard from him again.

Kenneth Smith was training with the 82nd Airborne Division, preparing for an invasion by air. Because the mission had to be a secret, the men didn’t know anything except that they would be landing in the middle of the night, in enemy-occupied territory.

The plan was for airplanes to release hundreds of gliders over Sainte-Mere-Eglise, near Normandy on the French coast. Pilots would steer the canvas-winged gliders into a field, and the six or seven crewmen would jump out to find the others with the help of small clickers that chirped like a cricket.

That wasn’t the way it happened.

“I know now that it was a suicide mission,” Kenneth said.

Before sunset, he took off with his sergeant and five or six other men in a glider towed by a plane.

As they came in sight of land, he saw ships everywhere in the Channel, so close together that it seemed he could walk on them all the way back to England.

The planes started drawing heavy gunfire. Around 11:30 p.m., over the French coast, the airmen cut the ropes on the gliders. The wings of some were shredded and they plunged into the Channel. Other pilots found that the Germans had flooded the fields with 4 feet of water and strung barbed wire between poles.

Later, people came to call the plywood-and-canvas gliders “flying coffins.”

Kenneth’s glider was torn by only a few bullets, but its descent was more plummet than glide. The glider crashed into a tree, ripping through the branches as the nose hit the dirt. Smith was probably knocked out on impact, because he doesn’t remember the next few hours.

When he came to, the members of his crew were gone, and gunfire was everywhere. Then he saw his sergeant, badly wounded and yelling for morphine. Kenneth looked around frantically, trying to find help.

All the other Americans were dead or gone.

“I didn’t know where anyone else was. I was just there by myself, 17 or 18 years old,” he said.

There wasn’t much he could do for the sergeant, so he crouched down in a ditch a few feet from a road and waited for help. When he heard troops approaching, he signaled once with his cricket.

Americans knew to respond with two chirps. The soldiers didn’t signal.

They were German.

Maybe because it was so dark, or probably because they were more terrified than he was, Kenneth said, they passed him by. The next troops down the road were Americans who led him back to the others.

Ned Smith came into Normandy with the 83rd Infantry Division on landing craft. For the men like Ned, who hadn’t seen the battle maps and weren’t invited to the strategy sessions, the invasion seemed like chaos.

“Most of the time, you didn’t know where you were or what you were doing,” he said.

As a medic, Ned used a small bag of supplies, mostly bandages and morphine, to help save lives – but more often to make death a little kinder. He crouched in a trench until he was needed, then rushed out to the front lines to treat the wounded until they were taken away on a litter.

He carried two canteens, one with water for himself and another with whiskey for the dying.

“The ones that were in bad shape, they were so happy to get that drink,” he said.

German snipers seemed to be everywhere, firing from the trees, from behind the hedgerows.

Ned was in those hedge rows when his commander had to leave to find more ammunition. With some trepidation, Ned agreed to take over while he was gone. For 30 minutes, he kept the Americans in place and fighting, and was later awarded a Bronze Star for action beyond the call of duty.

Kenneth’s division quickly took Sainte-Mere-Eglise, the first French town liberated by the Allies, and fought for 36 more days.

“We never gave up an inch,” he said.

Nearly half of his division was lost.

On Christmas Day 1944, Ned was in the blasted-out town of Gey, Germany. The troops dressed up a bedraggled Christmas tree in the rubble, under a tangle of communications wires. Around 11 a.m., cooks were getting started on the holiday meal, and Ned posed for a picture with his buddies.

Then they got the news that the Germans had rallied from retreat and were surging westward. Ned and his division were told to pack up and prepare to join other units fighting them back in the Battle of the Bulge. They drove in Army trucks, all Christmas Day and through the night.

Ned and the others ate Christmas dinner out of a tin rations container that looked like a Fancy Feast cat-food can.

Kenneth’s division also was at the Battle of the Bulge. It was a mean, cold winter, with 3 to 4 feet of snow on the ground. The soldiers put straw in their galoshes to keep their feet warm.

Ned was wounded for the second time a few days later, so he did not run into Kenneth during the battle.

But one day, Kenneth was out hunting eggs for breakfast when a man in the back of a passing truck started waving wildly and yelling, “It’s your brother! It’s your brother!”

Kenneth knew it couldn’t be Ned, who he had learned was recovering in the hospital. Or Dwight, who was in the Pacific Theater. Russell was in Ecuador, helping to guard the Panama Canal.

It wasn’t until Kyle used his nickname from home, “Pig,” that Kenneth recognized him. He went sprinting for the truck and hopped in the back. Kenneth hadn’t known that his younger brother had joined up.

Years later, Kyle said he thinks the chances of that surprise meeting were 1 in a million.

One brother mentioned that Ruth had gotten married to a man named Small, and they agreed that, when they got home, they would size him up and toss him out if he was not up to family standards. (Malcolm Small was allowed to stay. He and Ruth were married for more than 50 years before he died in 1996.)

Hours after the brothers caught up on talk about home, Kyle was injured by gunfire and sent to a hospital.

After a final offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans were exhausted and demoralized.

As the Smith brothers’ various divisions chased retreating Germans, they picked up hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who dutifully dropped their weapons and fell into line for a march to POW camps.

Some had been fighting for almost eight years, but more were old men and boys who seemed very young, even to 19-year-old Kenneth. The elite German SS soldiers fought viciously to the death, Kenneth said, but rank-and-file German troops seemed much more human.

“They were just like us,” he said. “They wanted to go home.”

As his troops advanced into Germany, they came across a concentration camp.

He can’t remember the name of the place. But he can’t seem to forget the awful smell, the thousands of bodies and the faces of the few who were still alive.

Kenneth tried to talk to one man, whose skin hung loosely off his skeleton. But the man went limp just then, and died.

Over the years, Ruth Small’s memories of her brothers’ absence have worn smooth as sea glass, encrusted by time. But one is still sliver sharp.

Small overheard a neighbor gossiping about her mother. Mistaking strength for ruthlessness, the neighbor said that Mrs. Smith didn’t seem to care about her boys at all.

“That hurt me so bad, that she would say that,” Small said.

The neighbor must not have noticed the pride Opha Smith took in a small white flag with five blue stars that hung in her front window, Small said. Maybe she didn’t read the letters Smith wrote about her boys to The Washington Democrat newspaper, signed simply, “A Soldier’s Mother.”

Opha Smith died in 1949, at the age of 61. Technically, the cause of death was a ruptured tumor, Ned said. But Small wonders whether it also might be possible for a mother to die from three years of unyielding fear.

“I think she worried herself to death trying to get those boys home,” she said.

The boys’ homecomings were happy but quiet. Kyle got diphtheria on the ship home, and Ned came back after V-E Day, so they missed the New York City ticker tape parades.

The brothers quickly took jobs, set up lives, moved on. First their children and then their grandchildren sometimes asked for stories, but the brothers stayed mostly silent.

“We never could get the boys to talk about the war,” Small said. “It took them a long, long time.”

Sixty years later, Kenneth and Ned politely offer shards of memory, but they don’t want to dwell on the sadness.

“I don’t go in for this stuff,” Kenneth said. “It’s history.”

Ned is proud of all he was able to do in the war and proud that people want to hear about his experiences all these years later.

But even now, he can’t talk about the dead or wounded.

And he won’t see the 1998 blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan. He doesn’t think much of its fictional premise that the Army would send a squad of men to take Private Ryan out of combat because his three brothers had all been killed.

It’s a nice thought that one life would matter so much, he said, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen in a war.

“You just don’t risk five lives for one,” he said.

Besides, Ned said, he doesn’t watch war movies. The few he saw gave him the sort of nightmares that made him yell out in his sleep.

Now, he just wants to keep the killing safely locked up in the past, where it belongs.

Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
May 27, 2001 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 2156 words

JUPITER ISLAND – Some towns ban broken-down trucks, backyard chicken pens or shabby couches on the front porch.

On Jupiter Island, the battle against tackiness is a bit different. The town’s main eyesore? To many residents, it’s the grand mansions.

Some residents support a size limit on homes, saying they don’t intend to legislate taste – they simply want to stop construction of “in-your-face starter castles” built by speculators and the flashy nouveau riche. Behemoth buildings with imposing entrance gates and opulent foyers are fine in Boca Raton or Palm Beach, but not among the understated homes of Jupiter Island, some residents say. Traditionally, media-shy moguls and famous families like the Roosevelts, Mellons, Doubledays and Bushes have lived and vacationed in smaller homes, obscured from the road by curtains of flowering vines and sprawling banyan trees.

But during the past decade, more and more bricks and mortar have been stacking up behind the leaves.

The town hired consultant Richard Orman last year to study the island’s buildings and draft an ordinance to preserve the character of the island. He has proposed that the town limit the size of its homes, encourage rambling, single-story buildings and prohibit entry gates north of the S curve on South Beach Road.

“I think the security of this entire community is such that you don’t need a moat, fence and a wall around every individual home,” he said at a hearing on Thursday.

Unless the community acts now, a booming real estate market will bring larger and larger homes to the island, Orman said.

Martin County property appraiser records show that, during the past five years, 10 homes with a median of 3,033 total square feet have been demolished to make room for new homes with a median of 10,514 square feet. A total of 27 new homes have been built in that time with a median of 5,255 square feet.

One worrisome example of the bulky building trend is a new two-story, 10,609-square-foot home at 115 South Beach Road, said longtime island resident Andy Resmen. The ad for the oceanfront mansion touts six bedrooms, including two master suites; seven full baths; a two-bedroom staff apartment; a 500-bottle, independently cooled wine room; and a private theater with a 100-inch screen. The price is about $11 million.

ENOUGH ROOM TO LIVE?

The town commission seemed to agree last year that the bulkiest new mansions must somehow be banned. But some residents are now worried that Orman’s proposal, which would not allow residents to add onto homes that exceed the limit for square footage, would cramp their families or limit the diversity of homes on the island.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to know the height of my ceiling inside my house,” resident Tucker Johnson said, “and I find it intrusive that they would want to. I find that scary.”

Johnson expressed concern at an earlier January meeting that an ordinance stingy with square footage could be particularly restrictive for the island’s young families.

As a result of those concerns, Orman revised his proposal to include higher size caps, up to 8,700 square feet for most two-story oceanfront homes and 10,200 square feet for most two-story homes on 2-acre riverfront estates. He also added a provision that residents may build as many one-story accessory buildings – pool houses, staff quarters, orchid sheds, guest homes, etc. – as they want.

But one resident, who asked not to be identified because she did not want to offend her neighbors, said she is skeptical of some families’ insistence that they need more space.

“You can build a house for several children that doesn’t look like Buckingham Palace,” she said.

But one real estate agent, who deals on the island and asked not to be identified, said many buyers consider features like a butler’s pantry, home theater, grand foyer entrance and spacious staff quarters essential in any expensive home.

“People aren’t moving to Jupiter Island to live in the maid’s quarters,” he said. “They want value for their money. I don’t know anybody who would say, ‘These tiny rooms, these little bathrooms, are just terrific. I’ll pay $5 million for that.’ ”

THE NEW AND THE OLD

Behind the proposed size caps, the real agent said, is an “old money” elite raising a disapproving eyebrow at the nouveau riche.

“They want to keep the new money off the island,” he said. “They think that it will keep those people – that element – out.” Though some island residents are “wonderful,” he said, others seem determined to keep the island “exclusive to them and their type.”

Many residents stressed that their concerns are not personal – it is the architecture of the new homes, not the new inhabitants, that is out of place.

Peggy Cole, a former town commissioner and vice mayor, said her sentiment is motivated by a love of the island as it is, not prejudice against those who can afford to build large mansions. Wealthy people have always lived on the island, she said, but in the past tended to build more modest homes.

Now, she said, the character of the island’s homes is fast evolving from “understated elegance” to “overstated opulence.”

But it can be difficult for some residents to disentangle the quality of a neighbor from the quality of his or her home, and by extension, the island’s character and traditions. “It’s the people who have not had money before who are building these huge houses,” said the resident who asked not to be identified. “They want to show off that they have made a lot of money. Elegance is not in their vocabulary. They don’t know what that means.

“The speculators think that people will buy these huge houses and become part of the community. But they are coming in with the wrong foot forward. They would have to be extraordinary people to become an integral part of the community, just because of what they have done.”

IS DIVERSITY NEEDED?

But others have questioned whether a certain style of home is preferable, saying that the island’s character and tradition are defined by diversity of thought and taste.

Nat Reed, son of the founders of the Jupiter Island Club, said at last week’s hearing that a worthwhile cause seemed to have deteriorated into an ordinance that seemed to stress conformity. His parents, Joseph and Permelia Reed, bought much of the island in the 1930s.

“Contrary to what people may think about my mother and father, the Hobe Sound Land Company always sold plots of land in a variety of sizes. . . . That brought an eclectic group of people to Jupiter Island . . . which has long been one of the glories of Jupiter Island. . . . God help us if the dragoons among you decide that we all must now look alike,” he said.

He added: “This whole process has been very divisive, though it was not intended to be. But we are dealing with people’s personal property and therefore strike at the heart of what makes this island unique.”

Jane Doggett expressed similar reservations at the hearing. Within 1,000 feet of her property, she said, are a magnificent brick home, driftwood treehouse lodge, Tudor-style mansion, Spanish mission-style home, shingle-plated Massachusetts beach house and a California desert lodge.

“Hooray, I say, for diversity,” she said, taking her seat amid applause from some of the 100 residents at the meeting.

After several revisions to the proposed ordinance and a three-hour hearing last week, the town is still far from consensus.

Commissioner William Brown, who has worked extensively with Orman and committees of residents to draft an ordinance, urged residents at the meeting to stay focused on the original goal: limiting the bulk of homes.

If the town wants to prevent construction of “the in-your-face starter castles we all know and hate,” Brown said, residents will have to sacrifice some individual freedom. “You can’t have it both ways.”

SPECIAL TOWN, COMMON TREND

Jupiter Island is not alone among affluent communities in its trend toward larger homes. Grander mansions are being built in Nantucket, Mass.; Tuxedo, N.Y.; Palm Beach, and Aspen, Colo., as the strong economy of the past decade has driven a real-estate gold rush. As property values go up, people build larger homes to justify their investment. And in turn, as people build larger homes, the property values rise. Town building official Doug Harvey said many of the island’s full-time residents consider their homes a primary investment and naturally want “the most bang for the buck.”

“If you’re going to pay $4 (million) or $5 million just for the property,” Harvey said, “you’re not going to want to build a $ 25,000 home.”

Former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino pays more than $ 60,000 in taxes each year for a vacant lot valued by the Martin County property appraiser last year at $3.2 million.

Worth magazine has crowned the town “America’s wealthiest” for the past two years, based on its real estate prices. The average home on the island was valued last year at $1.9 million.

The upward spiral in home size and tax bills, fueled in part by speculators according to some residents, has left a few old-timers barely able to pay their taxes.

“The property values have just gone through the roof,” Cole said.

Two years ago, some residents of Delray Beach pressed for a similar ordinance, saying the newer beachfront homes were beginning to erode the community’s small-town feel. But other residents strongly opposed a bulk and height limitation, saying it would prevent them from selling their property at high prices to mansion builders and constrict the town’s potential tax base.

The town commission rejected the zoning changes unanimously, though other towns have been successful.

In 1995, the town of Gulf Stream in Palm Beach County, which like Jupiter Island has about 1,000 affluent residents, reacted to the large, contemporary-style homes being built in the community with a zoning “design manual.”

“We were having a lot of tear-downs, with the result being much bigger houses,” said Town Manager Kristin Garrison.

The resulting manual functions like a cookbook, guiding developers toward homes that conform to the traditional architectural styles of the community, Garrison said.

Gulf Stream’s manual, which addresses architectural details such as style of entrance, roof tile and pitch, and window size and design, is much more comprehensive than Jupiter Island’s proposal. The preference on awnings: operable shutters in classic colors that contrast with the house’s exterior paint. Vinyl and aluminum are discouraged, and florescent, deep and bright shades are prohibited.

The town has encountered initial resistance from some first-time developers, Garrison said. To ensure residents can live within the guidelines, Garrison reviews them with many prospective home buyers. But the majority, she said, have supported the restrictions as a way to preserve the town’s atmosphere.

Jupiter Island’s Brown hopes his community can similarly agree on a way to keep the island as beautiful as it is now.

If the residents cannot reach consensus, he said at the conclusion of last week’s hearing, they may soon be faced with what many consider an ominous prospect:

“Without something like this (ordinance), I predict within 10 years, we’ll have Palm Beach right along South Beach Road.”

Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 29, 2001 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 2164 words