House of Secrets (13 page)
“You wouldn’t believe the things they’re accusing her dad of up When Sue tried to find out more, Joey became evasive. Later Teresa coaxed a fragment of information out of him. Pixie’s sister Machelle, he said, had made accusations against their father. She’d accused him of punishing his kids too hard. “They’re all lies,” Joey said. “It’s just tearing the family apart.” When family members pushed for details, Pixie offered explanations. Machelle had always been a troublemaker, Pixie said. She’d run away before. The only reason she’d made the accusation was that she was still in high school and needed an excuse to move out of the house. The whole family began to notice the change. Before Pixie had been the silent partner. Now Joey seemed to be the one with no words. Pixie would sit on the couch, chatting about the kids or their latest plans. Joey’s mind was somewhere else. “It got so that Stella was saying everything,” his aunt Velva would recall. “It was as if Joey wasn’t allowed to answer.
And if you asked him a question directly, he’d just look at her.” And then there were the kids. The whole family had theories, Teresa, Sam, Velva, their parents. Now nearly 4, Dawn still was sucking on a bottle and not talking. Dawn couldn’t identify colors. Dawn couldn’t count.
Both girls lacked any sort of natural animation, as if they were cartoon figures who only moved their mouths. “It’s as if they’re not real people or something,” grandmother Gladys Barrick said one day.
“It’s like they’re afraid,” her husband said. One day, Sam Barrick came right out with it. He’d seen family photographs of the Sextons.
“I don’t want to say this,” he said. “But you like her father’s kids.”
l know, those look Estella May Sexton took another sip of coffee and began to recall the years she came to fear the man his relatives called Eddie Lee. “We were together about two or three years, and then everything started changing. It started with me talking to another man. I guess he got jealous … but really I didn’t have any commitments from him, and he shouldn’t have gotten jealous. This other guy asked me if I wanted to go out. I told him Eddie’s coming over.
He said, what if he doesn’t? I said all right. Then they both came over at the same time. “After the guy left, we were standing on the porch and he smacked me and called me a couple of names. He called me a slut. I swung back at him. But he ducked and it went through my brother-in-law’s window. I still have the scar on my wrist here. It was bleeding real bad. I said, I’m not going out with you anymore.”
The next day he apologized. He was calling me baby.” He acted like he really cared, and he just didn’t want me to go out with anyone else.
“Well, I lived with him before I got married. Because he was married, but I didn’t know it. I wanted to get married and he finally told me.
His wife lived in Delbarton, West Virginia. He hadn’t been with her for years. He had to get this divorce, and it was going to take him a while to get it. But he kept putting it o I had Eddie Jr. before we got married. I quit working at Grant’s and I couldn’t go to beauty school. He said, if we’re going to stay together, the man does the work, supports the family. The woman doesn’t do it. He was working at Canton Drop Forge. He kept everything in the house we needed. We’d go out on the weekends and he treated the kids, the two boys, real well.
If I needed anything, he’d get it. We got along real well. “Then we had this argument on a Wednesday. He’d started drinking on the job and smoking pot and coming home real drunk. I told him he was a grown man.
I wasn’t brought up like that and I didn’t like it around the kids.
During the argument, he smacked me around pretty bad. The same night he apologized. We got into an argument on a Wednesday, then got married on that Saturday. Otis performed the ceremony in Eddie’s mom’s living room. I had a black eye when I got married … I thought I was in love. “He began to say, I’m supposed to spend my time with him.
If I wanted to see anybody, it had to be with him. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself, and he didn’t like my dad. See, my dad sensed something about him. And Dad’s the one who finally told me that he found out Eddie had been in prison. And when I confronted Eddie about it, he really hit the ceiling. “And that’s the first real bad beating, and I wanted to get away from him. He put soap in a sock, saying they did that all the time in Moundsville Prison. That’s where he told me he was from. He really beat me with that sock. And I was out of it for a while. And I got a few back at him, too. I threw a vaporizer at him and knocked him down. Then I took off. Well, I got as far as the porch … I think he knocked me out. “After he went to work, I called my sister, Irene. I went to her house. For a week, maybe. I don’t think it was that long, because he found out where I was. He told me if I didn’t come back, he was going to kill her and her children. And he’d always add, Your mom and dad, too.” Cause he knew how close we were. I didn’t want anybody hurt because of me, so I went back.
“After I confronted him about prison, he changed, as different as night and day. He started going somewhere shooting craps. He would lose all his pay. We ended up going on welfare when they went on strike. Then he put on this act like he got hurt at work… but there’s nothing wrong with him. “Every time I said something, it was wrong, or I said it at the wrong time. I was afraid to say anything. He wouldn’t let me have a phone put in. He wouldn’t let me get my driver’s license.
He also said, You don’t see your family no more. “We stayed away from them for ten years.” As a new season came to central Ohio with budding oaks and the scent of lilac, Ed and May Sexton did a little spring cleaning for the Department of Human Services. Not long after the pick-up order, social workers told Pixie and Sherri Sexton that it would be advisable for them to move out of the house on Caroline, otherwise the agency would have no choice but to remove their children from the home. Joel and Pixie moved to Bolivar. Sherri Sexton and her 1-year-old son Christopher’s departure was more abrupt. One spring day a car showed up on Caroline. It was driven by a nephew, the son of Sexton’s older brother Dave. Dave Sexton lived 1,000 miles south, north of Tampa. Sexton stuffed a couple of bags with clothes and escorted her to the car. She needed to “start a new life,” Eddie Sexton had told his brother. Sherri would recall a different reason, “He didn’t want a blood test taken of me and my son.” The Sexton case was now being assigned to what the DHS called its Ongoing Unit. A social worker would oversee the family, eventually arranging supervised visits between children and parents at a supervised center called Harmony House. The worker would arrange counseling and therapy if they were called for. Like other cases, the goal was to work out the family’s problems. Work toward reumfication. “The DHS does not want to be in the business of breaking families apart,” Judee Genetin would say. Assigned was a worker named Bonita Hilson, a DHS veteran with a respected work record. From the beginning, Ed Sexton, the father who once beat a daughter for simply speaking to an African-American teen, would not be happy. Bonita Hilson was black. On the legal front, the DHS and the Sextons became emeshed in a series of motions, show cause hearings, and judicial orders in Family Court. While the Sexton’s attorney had succeeded in getting a no-contact order against Otis Sexton, the DHS also had one in place for the Sexton parents, except for authorized visits at Harmony House. The paper chase started on May 21, when Estella May Sexton filed an affidavit and a motion in Family Court. She wanted all child welfare and custody matters regarding her children be transferred from county and state courts to the Allegheny Nation Tribal Council She was an American Indian, she claimed. By federal law, she was entitled to have all child welfare matters concerning her family handled by Indian child welfare officials. The court scheduled a hearing on the matter for late June, then took it under advisement and rescheduled the matter for July. In some ways, the tribal motion was the least of the DHS’s problems. Kimberly, Lana, Christopher, Matthe Charles, and James all were in foster homes. But soon the DHS suspected the Sexton parents of making unauthorized contact with some of the kids. A teacher, a custodian, and a cook saw them outside Faircrest Middle School in Canton, where Christopher was enrolled. Christopher’s foster parents also believed that the Sextons had followed them home one day. DHS attorneys filed a complaint to the court. The Sextons filed their own motion. They wanted interim visitation with their children The court scheduled another hearing for July. One night in late June, Otis Sexton received a call from James at his foster home in Andover, Ohio, a small town near the Pennsylvania border, 90 miles from Canton. James, Matt and Charles were staying in the same foster home. “Uncle Otie, my father is coming to get us at midnight,” James said. “He’s coming to pick all of us up.” Otis called the DHS. Authorities sped to the home. They removed the boys and interviewed James. Dad visited frequently, James said. The boys planned walks so they could meet him. He said his father promised to buy them cars if they recanted their stories of abuse. Skipper had revealed the location, workers learned. They removed Charles Sexton from the foster home and placed him in the Canton Children’s Residential Center, a juvenile detention facility. DHS attorneys filed a second no-contact order complaint against Ed Sexton, the same day the Indian matter came up for hearing. When asked for proof of her heritage by the court, Estella May Sexton produced a tribal card she’d acquired a couple weeks after the children were removed. It was from the Allegheny Nation Indian Community Center, located in a deteriorating Victorian in east Canton. One study had shown the Allegheny group to be a mix of white, black, and Native American blood with unclear origins. The Canton tribe had never been recognized by either the State of Ohio or the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. On that basis, Family Court Judge Julie Edwards reected the motion on July 6. But informally she turned over the investigation of the Sexton’s heritage to the North American Indian Cultural Center, an organization licensed by the state to handle Indian welfare cases. The federal law required the court make every effort to determine whether a family fell under the act. Two days later, DHS staffers, the Sextons, and attorneys appeared again before the court on the original no-contact complaint. The court decided the parents had shown up in the school parking lot, but DHS had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was intentional and in contempt of the court. DHS attorneys were running out of time. The original complaint filed three months ago was expiring. But that same month, Lana, Dad’s 12-year-old Angel, began disclosing for the first time to her foster family that her father frequently beat her. DHS attorneys put together a new complaint covering four of the children’s charges. But two children, Christopher and Kimberly, had yet to disclose any abuse. They were maintaining that everything in the house on Caroline Street was fine. The court set new hearing dates. DHS attorney Judee Genetin hnew it was easy enough to get the children removed from the home, but obtaining long-term custody of the children by DHS was a far more demanding standard By statute, Family Court also made every effort to preserve families.
Their tools included counseling, home monitoring, and self-help groups.
DHS staff would have to prove a pervasive pattern of sexual and physical abuse with the minor children. So far, only Machelle had claimed sexual abuse. Genetin later recalled, “When we finally moved by removing the children in April, we were very concerned. We felt very strongly at that point that the abuse was happening. But we weren’t able to stop them from showing up at the schools. We had a hearing on the contempt and were told we didn’t prove it, even though we had witnesses who saw them at the school, on the grounds. We felt that these people were dangerous, that the dad was dangerous, but we were also watching the case slowly slip away.” The Sexton children also were watching. “Unfortunately,” Genetin said, “it would soon become obvious to these kids that we could not do what we said we could do.” Many months later, Charles Sexton would explain what happened during his first summer away from home. Little did DHS officials know that Skipper had made contact with his parents only days after he was removed from the house on Caroline. In April, he said, after he was placed in a temporary placement home, he and Matt went skating at the Playland Skatery north of Canton. The day he was removed from the home, he said, he’d promised to let his mother know his whereabouts.
“I don’t know. If my mom wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have said anything.
I just love her with all my heart. I just needed to let her know wherever I am. “So, we called from the Skatery and told them where we was. My parents picked us up and took us back to the house. It was weird. I never seen my dad act that way. It would have been nice if he was like that when we were growing up. He asked me if I wanted a cigarette. Before I wasn’t allowed to smoke. I took it in a second.
We ate pizza. Pat and Eddie Jr. was there. My father said, where I go, let him know where I am. So, the jackass I was, I did it.” Skipper called his parents from Andover. He recalled, “We were living with a single guy. He’d let us go out, meet chicks. Do about everything. Go camping. Hunting. Real good time. I had a girlfriend. A good job.
My mom and dad used to come up to Andover and give us money and cigarettes. My mom always gave me money. But my dad, that was the first time.” Two weeks after DHS transferred him to juvenile detention for disclosing the foster home’s location, he ran away. On July 13, DHS notified police he was missing. He was last seen wearing blue jeans, a tank top, black high-top tennis shoes, and a Marlboro baseball cap, worn backwards. The escape, Skipper said, was arranged at a supervised visitahon with his father. “The case worker, she walked away, and me and my old man set it up real fast. I told him where I was. He was like, well, are you across from the school? He said go back there in the woods and I’ll be back there by the church. So I went back there and no one was back there. I thought, I’m going to get locked down for this. And I went to this guy’s phone. Made up a bullshit story like my brother had left me out there. Used his phone.
