[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 200 (Friday, December 15, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18686-S18689]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              CHILD ABUSE

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday I spoke here about the Interior 
conference legislation. I talked some about the issue of child abuse, 
particularly with respect to native Americans, and about some of the 
difficulties that I have witnessed and held some hearings about.
  I described Tamara DeMaris, who was placed in a foster home at age 3 
and severely beaten. Her nose was broken, her arm was broken, her hair 
pulled out by the roots. Why? Because one person was handling 150 cases 
and did not have time to check where they were putting this 3-year-old 
kid, so this poor 3-year-old was put in an unsafe foster home where 
drunken brawls ensued and this child was beaten severely.
  We need to do better than this. That was the point I was making 
yesterday. Children cannot deal for themselves. They are not 
responsible for themselves. We are responsible to help children in this 
country who are helpless, to give hope to children who are hopeless. It 
is our responsibility.
  I read a few days ago a piece in Time magazine that I wish to read to 
the Senate, not in its entirety, but I would ask all of you to read the 
article in its entirety, because it, too, relates to the question of 
what are we doing to protect children in this country. I am not talking 
about the children that go to bed safe and secure at night in a good 
home, that is warm, having just had a good meal. I am talking about 
children who come from circumstances of poverty and neglect and abuse, 
and who cannot help themselves.
  On the cover of Time magazine was a picture of a young girl named 
Elisa Izquierdo. Let me read part of the magazine article to you 
because it describes something we all must understand--behind all of 
these discussions about policies and numbers are people, some of whom 
are desperately reaching out for help.
  ``Little Elisa Izquierdo liked to dance, which is almost too 
perfect,'' the article says, this article written by David Van Biema in 
the December 11 Time magazine. It says:

       Fairy tales, especially those featuring princesses, often 
     include dancing, although perhaps not Elisa's favorite 
     merengue. Fairy-tale princesses are born humble. Elisa fit 
     that bill: she was conceived in a homeless shelter in the 
     Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and born addicted to crack. 
     That Elisa nevertheless had a special, enchanted aura is 
     something that the whole city of New York now knows. 
     ``Radiant,'' said one of her preschool teachers, remembering 
     a brilliant smile and flashing black eyes. ``People loved 
     her,'' adds another. ``Everybody loved her.'' And, unlikely 
     as it may seem, there was even a prince in Elisa's life: a 
     real scion of Greece's old royalty named Prince Michael, who 
     was a patron of the little girl's preschool. He made a 
     promise to finance her full private school education up to 
     college, which is about as happily ever after as this age 
     permits.
       Fairy tale princesses, however, are not bludgeoned to death 
     by their mothers. They are not violated with a tooth brush 
     and a hair brush, and the neighbors do not hear them moaning 
     and pleading at night. Last week, two months before her 
     seventh birthday, Elisa Izquierdo lay in her casket, 
     wearing a crown of flowers. The casket was open, which was 
     an anguished protest on someone's part; no exertion of the 
     undertaker's art could conceal all Elisa's wounds. Before 
     she smashed her daughter's head against a cement wall, 
     Awilda Lopez told police, she had made her eat her own 
     feces and used her head to mop the floor. All this over a 
     period of weeks, or maybe months. The fairy tale was 
     ended.


[[Page S18687]]

  This is a story of desperation and a story of one murder. Twenty-
three thousand people are murdered in this country every year. This 
little 6-year-old girl is one, murdered by her mother. But let me read 
some of the description of what the girl went through. The reason I am 
describing this is that we failed, the system failed, the child welfare 
agency failed, and the programs failed to help this girl.

       ``Drugs, drugs, drugs--that's all she was interested in,'' 
     says neighbor Doris Sepulveda, who watched the Lopezes trying 
     to sell a child's tricycle outside their building. Another 
     neighbor, Eric Latorre, recalls seeing the whole family out 
     at 2 a.m. as Awilda [the mother] sought crack. . . . [Her 
     mother] reportedly had come to believe that little Elisa, 
     whom she called a mongoloid and a filthy little whore, had 
     been put under a spell by her father--a spell that had to be 
     beaten out of the child. Neighbors, some of whom say they 
     called the authorities, later told the press of muffled 
     moaning and Elisa's voice pleading, ``Mommy, mommy, please 
     stop! No more! No more! I'm sorry!'' Law-enforcement 
     authorities have provided a reason for those cries: they say 
     Elisa was repeatedly sexually assaulted with a toothbrush and 
     a hairbrush. When her screams became too loud, [her mother] 
     simply turned up the radio.
       Elisa stopped attending school, and neighbors say they saw 
     less and less of her. On November 15, Carlos Lopez was jailed 
     again for violating his parole agreement. On November 22, the 
     day before Thanksgiving, all that was twisted in Awilda 
     apparently snapped. One of her sisters, quoted in the New 
     York Times, reported a chilling phone conversation with her 
     that night: ``She told me that Elisa was like retarded on the 
     bed, not eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. I said, 
     'Take her to the hospital, and I'll take care of your other 
     kids.' She said she would think about it after she finished 
     the dishes.''
       The next morning Awilda called Francisco Santana, a 
     downstairs neighbor. ``She was crying, `I can't believe it, 
     tell me it's not true,' '' he says. When he arrived at her 
     apartment, she showed him Elisa's motionless body. He put his 
     hand to the child's cold forehead, pronounced her dead and 
     spent the next two hours pleading with Awilda to call the 
     police. When he finally called himself, he says, she ran to 
     the apartment roof and had to be restrained from jumping. 
     When the police arrived, she confessed to killing Elisa by 
     throwing her against the concrete wall. She confessed that 
     she had made Elisa eat her own feces and that she had mopped 
     the floor with her head. The police told reporters that there 
     was no part of the six-year-old's body that was not cut or 
     bruised. Thirty circular marks that at first appeared to be 
     cigarette burns turned out to be impressions left by the 
     stone in someone's ring. ``In my 22 years,'' says Lieutenant 
     Luis Gonzalez, [the police lieutenant], ``this is the worst 
     case of child abuse I have ever seen.''
       . . . an aspect of the tragedy's aftermath [according to 
     this magazine article] . . . has also dumbfounded the [people 
     of New York who shared in this tragedy]. The people of New 
     York could do nothing about Awilda's drug-induced delusions 
     or her timid neighbors. But they wanted an accounting from 
     the CWA [Child Welfare Agency].

  This story describes report after report after report that was made 
to the Child Welfare Agency.

       Instead, Executive Deputy Commissioner [of the Child 
     Welfare Agency] Kathryn Croft has steadfastly maintained that 
     the state confidentiality laws designed to protect 
     complainants prevent her from revealing any details of the 
     case. Thus the public may never know how many cries for help 
     the agency actually recorded or what it did about them. It 
     may never know whether the CWA really made an extended effort 
     to observe Awilda before [returning that child to this 
     mother].

  Mr. President, I have not read all of this article, but it is 
sufficient to describe what happens to some children in this country. I 
described several of them yesterday. This is another, a little 6-year-
old girl from New York who was failed by our system.
  I am investigating at the moment to find out why a child welfare 
agency would not be willing to disclose what exists in these files. Who 
contacted them? When did they contact them? Who failed this child? Who 
did not follow up? Why did they not take this child away from a mother 
who was torturing her? Why is this child dead?
  Confidentiality laws apply to protect people from disclosure of 
sensitive information about a family that is dealt with by the child 
welfare agency. It is not a confidentiality statute designed to protect 
the agency from an investigation. I am trying to find out what kind of 
Federal circumstances exist that can pry open the child welfare 
agency's records to find out, how did this happen?
  At the end of this story, it describes again a common problem. It 
describes city, State, and Federal Government budgets that have cut 
one-sixth from the child welfare agency's budget. The head of the child 
welfare agency estimates that her caseworkers' caseload is going up. 
They simply cannot do enough investigations.
  It is what I described yesterday. The caseload on the reservation in 
North Dakota was so high that the social worker who was in charge of 
those cases put Tamara DeMaris, a young and innocent 3-year-old girl, 
in a home where she was beaten severely, in a foster home that was not 
safe. Here, we have a caseload apparently that does not permit a 
welfare agency to deal with issues of life or death for 6-year-old 
girls in New York City.
  There is something fundamentally wrong. The reason I bring this to 
the floor is because we are talking about all of these spending areas, 
all of these areas of Federal spending, and we get phone calls and my 
colleagues get phone calls saying we have got to cut Federal spending. 
I do not disagree with that. We have to balance the budget. I do not 
disagree with that.
  Does anybody in this Chamber under any circumstances, or any anybody 
in any State legislature or in any city council, believe that a 6-year-
old does not deserve the protection that society must give her when she 
is being sexually abused and beaten, and, yes, threatened with murder? 
Does anybody believe that is not our responsibility?
  This country fails these children when we do not decide to debate 
these kinds of issues in the context of what we must do to protect 
these kids? It is not a question of anybody that thinks it does not 
matter or whether you have enough social workers to protect these 
children. In my judgment, we are not doing any service to public 
service in this country. We must, it seems to me, ask the question: How 
do we do this job? Not whether, but how do we do this job? What does it 
take to make sure we protect these children?
  I hope everyone reads this article. There are dozens and dozens and 
dozens of cases like this all over the country. My only point is, we 
can do much better and must do much better. When systems fail, we must 
find out why. When children, innocent victims, find themselves in 
circumstances like this, someone ought to be willing to stand up and 
assume responsibility, to say we are going to help.
  I told the Senate yesterday about a stack of folders on a floor, 
where I saw reports of sexual and physical abuse against children on an 
Indian reservation that had not even been investigated because they did 
not have the investigators to go out and investigate. I was appalled, 
just appalled to understand that in that stack is a young child living 
in a circumstance where they have been sexually molested. There is an 
allegation of sexual misconduct or allegation of physical misconduct by 
a guardian, and it has not even been investigated. We must do better 
than that.
  I hope that as we discuss and think our way through this notion of 
how do we balance the budget, we ask, what are our priorities? Is it B-
2 bombers, is it the school lunch program, is it a dozen or 100 
different things? I hope none of us will ever decide that it is 
discretionary on our part whether we protect children like Elisa.
  Elisa did not have to die. We failed. We all failed Elisa, and I hope 
as we develop our priorities for the years ahead, we will decide, at 
the very least, that those who cannot help themselves, those children 
in harm's way, those children whose lives are threatened deserve and 
require our help. I hope there is no disagreement on any side of the 
political aisle on that question.
  I recognize the Senator from Minnesota has been waiting. I appreciate 
very much his indulgence.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the article to which I referred in my remarks.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                       [From Time, Dec. 11, 1995]

                         Abandoned to Her Fate

                          (By David Van Biema)

       Elisa Izquierdo liked to dance, which is almost too 
     perfect. Fairy tales, especially those featuring princesses, 
     often include dancing, although perhaps not Elisa's favorite 
     merengue. Fairy-tale princesses are born humble. Elisa fit 
     that bill: she was conceived in a homeless shelter in the 
     Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and born addicted to crack. 

[[Page S18688]]
     That Elisa nevertheless had a special, enchanted aura is something the 
     whole city of New York now knows. ``Radiant,'' says one of 
     her preschool teachers, remembering a brilliant smile and 
     flashing black eyes. ``People loved her,'' adds another. 
     ``Everybody loved her.'' And, unlikely as it may seem, there 
     was even a prince in Elisa's life: a real scion of Greece's 
     old royalty named Prince Michael, who was a patron of the 
     little girl's preschool. He made a promise to finance her 
     full private-school education up to college, which is about 
     as happily ever after as this age permits.
       Fairy-tale princesses, however, are not bludgeoned to death 
     by their mothers. They are not violated with a toothbrush and 
     a hairbrush, and the neighbors do not hear them moaning and 
     pleading at night. Last week, two months before her seventh 
     birthday, Elisa Izquierdo lay in her casket, wearing a crown 
     of flowers. The casket was open, which was an anguished 
     protest on someone's part; no exertion of the undertaker's 
     art could conceal all Elisa's wounds. Before she smashed her 
     daughter's head against a cement wall, Awilda Lopez told 
     police, she had made her eat her own feces and used her head 
     to mop the floor. All this over a period of weeks, or maybe 
     months. The fairy tale was ended.
       America dotes on fairy tales and likes to think it takes 
     action on nightmares. When the story of Elisa's death hit the 
     news last week, New Yorkers and people across the 
     country remembered the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964, and 
     took to task all the neighbors who had known too much and 
     said nothing. But, it turned out, many others had not been 
     silent: Elisa's slow, tortured demise had been reported 
     repeatedly. Over the six years of her life, city 
     authorities had been notified at least eight times. And so 
     outrage focused on the child-welfare system. How did it 
     happen, the public wondered angrily, that Elisa's case was 
     known to the system, and yet the system so shamefully 
     failed her?
       The Child Welfare Administration, which handles cases of 
     abuse in New York City, first heard of Elisa on Feb. 11, 
     1989, the day of her birth. Her mother was a crack addict 
     whose addition was indirectly responsible for her pregnancy: 
     she had lost her apartment, and in Brooklyn's Auburn Place 
     homeless shelter she began a romance with Gustavo Izquierdo, 
     who worked at the shelter as a cook. As her pregnancy 
     progressed, Awilda was so lost in the pipe that relatives 
     managed to wrest custody of her first two children, Rubencito 
     and Kasey, from her. The social workers at Woodhull Hospital 
     took one look at Elisa's tiny, crack-addicted body and 
     immediately assigned custody to the father. Following 
     standard procedure, they also alerted the CWA.
       Perhaps to his own surprise, Izquierdo--who had emigrated 
     from Cuba hoping to teach dance--turned out to be a wonderful 
     father. At first there were panicky calls to female 
     acquaintances about diapers and formula, but eventually he 
     mastered the basics. Every morning he would iron a dress for 
     Elisa and put her beautiful hair into braids or pigtails. 
     When she was four, he rented a Queens banquet hall for a 
     party marking her baptism. Says a friend, Mary Crespo: ``She 
     was his life. He would always say Elisa was his princess.''
       It was through her father's efforts that the princess found 
     her prince. Izquierdo took parenting classes at the local 
     YWCA, and he enrolled one-year-old Elisa in the Y's 
     Montessori preschool. She was a favorite pupil. Says the 
     school's then director, Phyllis Bryce: ``She was beautiful, 
     radiant. She had an inner strength and a lot of potential for 
     growth.'' So fond of both father and daughter were the 
     Montessori staff members that when Izquierdo fell behind on 
     tuition, they recommended his daughter to Prince Michael of 
     Greece.
       Michael will probably never ascend his country's throne, 
     since the monarchy was abolished in 1974. But he still 
     dispenses royal charity. After an aide established a 
     connection with the Montessori school, the faculty introduced 
     Michael to Elisa. On the day he arrived in Brooklyn, he would 
     later remember, ``[Elisa] jumped into my arms. She was a 
     lively, charming, beautiful girl. She was so full of love.'' 
     The prince visited several times, bringing stuffed animals or 
     clothes; the little princess responded with thank-you notes 
     and pictures. Michael's most handsome offer arrived in late 
     1993: he would pay Elisa's full tuition, through 12th grade, 
     at the Brooklyn Friends School.
       In 1991 Awilda petitioned for, and was granted, 
     unsupervised visitation rights with her daughter. The mother 
     had already regained custody of her two older children; she 
     seemed to have effected a miraculous recovery. In December 
     1990 social workers signed an affidavit stating that she had 
     given up drugs, married a man named Carlos Lopez and settled 
     at a permanent address. ``Both [Lopezes] are willing to go 
     for random drug tests,'' the affidavit read. ``They never 
     miss appointments with the agency, and they are always on 
     time. Mr. Lopez is supportive . . . He appears to be gentle 
     and understanding.''
       That last was a grave misjudgment. Carlos Lopez, who did 
     maintenance work, was solicitous only in public. At night 
     neighbors heard dishes, pots and pans crashing against walls. 
     In January 1992, a month after Awilda gave birth to his 
     second child, Carlos stabbed her 17 times with a pocketknife, 
     putting her in the hospital for three days. According to a 
     neighbor, the attack occurred in front of Elisa, during a 
     weekend visit. Carlos served two months in jail and then, 
     neighbors say, resumed beating his wife--and his visiting 
     stepdaughter.
       Elisa's life became an excruciating alternation of 
     happiness and horror. The four-year-old took the Friends 
     School's screening examination and passed. But according to 
     Montessori teacher Barbara Simmons, she also began telling 
     people that her mother had locked her in a closet. On one 
     occasion she volunteered, ``Awilda hits me. I don't want to 
     go to Awilda.'' Montessori principal Bryce says she reported 
     suspected abuse to both the Brooklyn Bureau of Community 
     Services and a child-abuse hot line--the CWA's second 
     warning about Elisa. In response, Bryce has said, child-
     welfare workers made several visits to the Lopez home, 
     ``and then stopped, as they usually do.''
       Izquierdo apparently knew about the mistreatment. A 
     neighbor told the New York Times that Elisa would wake up 
     screaming in the night, that although toilet trained, she had 
     begun to urinate and defecate uncontrollably and that there 
     were cuts and bruises on her vagina. In 1992 Izquierdo 
     petitioned the family court to deny Awilda custodial rights, 
     but fate intervened before the court could act on his 
     request. By late 1993, already ill with cancer, he was 
     planning to take Elisa to Cuba, and perhaps hoping to leave 
     here there permanently. Tickets were bought, but he became 
     too ill to travel and on May 26 Izquierdo died.
       Awilda immediately filed for permanent custody. A cousin of 
     Izquierdo's, Elsa Canizares, challenged the petition, 
     alleging that Lopez was insane and abused the child. Bryce 
     wrote in a letter to family court judge Phoebe Greenbaum that 
     ``Elisa was emotionally and physically abused during the 
     weekend visitations with her mom. Teachers' observation notes 
     are available.'' Bryce also enlisted the help of Prince 
     Michael, who added his own letter.
       Canizares arrived for the June 1994 custody hearing alone. 
     Awilda, by contrast, brought a small army. Her lawyer that 
     day was from the Legal Aid Society, which maintained that its 
     caseworkers had visited the Lopezes and found that ``Elisa 
     expressed a strong desire to live with her mother'' and her 
     siblings. Also backing Awilda was the CWA, which Judge 
     Greenbaum has indicated had been monitoring the family for 
     more than a year--the agency's third contact with Elisa. 
     Finally there was Project Chance, a federally funded 
     parenting program for the poor run by a man named Bart 
     O'Connor.
       When O'Connor met her in 1992, Awilda had seemed ``an 
     easily excitable woman,'' but one who was ``very lively, very 
     vibrant and loved her children beyond belief.'' She dutifully 
     attended parenting classes and sought extra advice. There 
     were setbacks, during which she returned to drugs and 
     abandoned the children. But she recovered--``The kids seemed 
     happy, and the house was immaculate.'' When Awilda asked 
     O'Connor to help her get Elis back, he had his doubts: ``She 
     was just learning to handle five kids. I thought another kid 
     might be too much.'' But, after all, he had just given her a 
     progress award, so he vouched for her to the court. In 
     September Judge Greenbaum awarded full custody to Awilda, 
     directing the CWA to observe the family for a year. Last 
     week, hounded by the press, Greenbaum released a statement 
     that read in part, ``It is any judge's worst nightmare to be 
     involved in a case in which a child dies.''
       Especially, it can be assumed, when a child dies slowly, by 
     torture. In September, Awilda removed Elisa from the 
     Montessori school and enrolled her in Manhattan's Public 
     School 26. The Daily News reports that on arrival, she 
     seemed a fairly happy girl, one who shared make-believe 
     bus trips with other children during lunch hour. But she 
     soon folded up into herself. The school's principal and 
     social worker, noting that she was often bruised and had 
     trouble walking, reported the matter directly to a deputy 
     director of CWA's Manhattan field division, in what would 
     be CWA's fourth notification. School district spokesman 
     Andrew Lachman says the official allegedly replied that 
     the case was ``not reportable'' owing to insufficient 
     evidence. School staff then visited the Lopez apartment. 
     To their surprise, Awilda ``was very happy to see them,'' 
     says Lachman, and there were no signs of abuse.
       O'Connor, however, was regretting his recommendation to the 
     judge. He received a series of hysterical phone calls from 
     Awilda complaining that Elisa was soiling herself and 
     drinking from the toilet and had cut off her hair. Finally 
     she asked O'Connor to take Elisa away. Convinced the girl's 
     symptoms had existed prior to her contact with Awilda but 
     were now driving her mother over the edge, he rushed to the 
     apartment. ``You could smell urine and see she had defecated 
     everywhere,'' he says. ``Her toys were thrown around. There 
     were feces smeared on the refrigerator.''
       O'Connor claims he called Elisa's CWA caseworker, who told 
     him he was ``too busy'' to come by. Moreover, O'Connor says 
     the caseworker never responded to this fifth appeal to CWA, 
     despite repeated subsequent calls. O'Connor took the Lopezs 
     to a city hospital for psychiatric counseling, and Awilda 
     seemed to calm down somewhat. To O'Connor's dismay however, 
     she repeatedly avoided signing a release that would allow him 
     to send his observations to the city agency. By last July she 
     had dropped out of touch entirely.
       There was a reason for that. ``Drugs, drugs, drugs--that's 
     all she was interested in,'' says neighbor Doris Sepulveda, 
     who watched the Lopezes trying to sell a child's tricycle 
     outside their building. Another neighbor, Eric 

[[Page S18689]]
     Latorre, recalls seeing the whole family out at 2 a.m. as Awilda sought 
     crack. Awilda had reportedly come to believe that Elisa, whom 
     she called a mongoloid and filthy little whore, had been put 
     under a spell by her father--a spell that had to be beaten 
     out of the child. Neighbors, some of whom say they called the 
     authorities, later told the press of muffled moaning and 
     Elisa's voice pleading, ``Mommy, Mommy, please stop! No more! 
     No more! I'm sorry!'' Law-enforcement authorities have 
     provided a reason for those cries: they say Elisa was 
     repeatedly sexually assaulted with a toothbrush and a 
     hairbrush. When her screams became too loud, Awilda turned up 
     the radio.
       Elisa stopped attending school, and neighbors say they saw 
     less and less of her. On Nov. 15, Carlos Lopez was jailed 
     again for violating his parole agreement. And on Nov. 22, the 
     day before Thanksgiving, all that was twisted in Awilda 
     apparently snapped. One of her sisters, quoted in the New 
     York Times, reported a chilling phone conversation with her 
     that night: ``She told me that Elisa was like retarded on the 
     bed, not eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. I said, 
     `Take her to the hospital, and I'll take care of your other 
     kids.' She said she would think about it after she finished 
     the dishes.''
       The next morning Awilda called Francisco Santana, a 
     downstairs neighbor. ``She was crying, `I can't believe it, 
     tell me it's not true,'' ' he says. When he arrived at her 
     apartment, she showed him Elisa's motionless body. He put his 
     hand to the child's cold forehead, pronounced her dead and 
     spent the next two hours pleading with Awilda to call the 
     police. When he finally called himself, he says, she ran to 
     the apartment roof and had to be restrained from jumping. 
     When the police arrived, she confessed to killing Elisa by 
     throwing her against a concrete wall. She confessed that she 
     had made Elisa eat her own feces and that she had mopped the 
     floor with her head. The police told reporters that there was 
     no part of the six-year-old's body that was not cut or 
     bruised. Thirty circular marks that at first appeared to be 
     cigarette burns turned out to be impressions left by the 
     stone in someone's ring. ``In my 22 years,'' said Lieut. Luis 
     Gonzalez, ``this is the worst case of child abuse I have ever 
     seen.''
       O'Connor sits in his Brooklyn office and fields calls from 
     the media. ``We made a mistake,'' he says grimly. ``We will 
     try to make sure this never happens again.'' Looking back, he 
     says, ``I should have thrown bombs in the CWA's doorway.'' 
     The initials themselves infuriate him. At least, he says, 
     ``we will say our mea culpa. We're not going to run behind 
     confidentiality laws and not admit we've made a mistake.''
       He is referring to an aspect of the tragedy's aftermath 
     that has dumbfounded the city. The people of New York could 
     do nothing about Awilda's drug-induced delusions or her timid 
     neighbors. But they wanted an accounting from the CWA. 
     Instead, Executive Deputy Commissioner Kathryn Croft has 
     steadfastly maintained that state confidentiality laws 
     designed to protect complainants prevent her from revealing 
     any details of a case. Thus the public may never know how 
     many cries for help the agency actually recorded or what it 
     did about them. It may never know whether the CWA really made 
     an extended effort to observe Awilda before making a 
     recommendation to Judge Greenbaum--or whether a caseworker 
     was really ``too busy'' to return a call.
       What the public could surmise, however, was that something 
     was amiss. Last week someone leaked an Oct. 10 letter from 
     CWA Commissioner Croft to Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, complaining 
     that city staff cuts make it impossible for her to train 
     child-abuse caseworkers or even measure their competence. And 
     that is the least of it. The city, state and Federal 
     Government have cut one-sixth from CWA's $1.2 billion budget. 
     While Croft estimates her average staff member's case load at 
     16.9, some workers at the agency's Queens branch put theirs 
     at 25, a number that almost precludes meaningful long-term 
     investigations. ``There are no bodies available to do the 
     work,'' says Bonnie Buford, a supervisor in a Queens child-
     protective-services unit. Claims Gail Nayowith, executive 
     director of the Citizens' Committee for Children: ``Case 
     loads are rising. Investigations take longer, and some very 
     important programs don't exist . . . This child and her 
     family should have got services. With appropriate 
     interventions, services and follow-up, [Elisa] would be 
     alive.''
       But she is not alive. At her funeral, the Rev. Gianni 
     Agostinelli told mourners that ``Elisa was not killed only by 
     the hand of a sick individual, but by the impotence of 
     silence of many, by the neglect of child-welfare institutions 
     and the moral mediocrity that has intoxicated our 
     neighborhoods.'' Later, Elisa was laid to rest in the Cypress 
     Hills Cemetery in Queens. There had been discussion about her 
     body: the Izquierdo side of her family wanted to determine 
     its fate, but so did the Lopez side. And it seems that 
     mortuaries, like city bureaucracies, have rules for such 
     situations. Regardless of the circumstances, the custody of 
     the body goes to the mother.

  Mr. GRAMS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.

                          ____________________