Running from the system
Investigators chase after CPS runaways, hoping to avert tragedy
She sat hunched like a shivering puppy, by a sign with arrows pointed in opposite directions and the warning: “My way. The highway.” Oversized glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose, stopped by a small stud piercing. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose bun, her expression rueful.
The round-faced 17-year-old waited alone in a corner, steeling herself for a scolding from an adult.
Angel had recently run away from an emergency shelter at a Child Protective Services office in Houston, where she had been placed because the state had nowhere else to put her.
She didn’t want to be there, bunking in a room with old board games and mismatched blankets, a security guard in the lobby, and slogans like “Believe” and “Dream” stenciled on the walls — exhortations that seem like taunts.
So she took off, like dozens of foster kids who would rather risk the dangers of the street than stay in state custody.
As the teenager nibbled on a Pop-Tart, Shitonda Johnson hustled down the hallway on the second floor of the CPS building. She hovered over Angel, her voice suddenly softening from the crisp just-business-ma’am diction honed by her years in law enforcement.
“How are you? Is that your lunch?” Johnson
asked in a maternal tone. “Come on, sweetie.”
She led Angel to a conference room.
Johnson’s assignment: Find out why Angel had taken off, what happened while she was missing, and, if she could, persuade her not to run again.
As a special investigator with the Department of Family and Protective Services, she had seen what happens to runaway foster kids. Pimps eager to lure them into prostitution. Men who offer help but deliver sexual assault. A swift descent into homelessness and hunger.
Johnson braced herself for Angel’s story.
They run because they are angry, because they miss their families, because they chafe at rules, because they are in bad foster homes. Because years of trauma can carve indelible scars.
Last year, 972 children ran away from CPS care in Texas. Of those, 112 ran multiple times. One-third of the runaways were never found.
In CPS’ Region 6, an area that includes Harris and 11 surrounding counties, 81 children in state custody were reported as runaways in April alone.
One was Angel. Another was 15-year-old Daphne Jackson.
Daphne and another girl ran away from a CPS office in north Harris County. Less than 12 hours later, Daphne was dead and the other girl injured, struck by a van as they walked along a busy thoroughfare.
Like many repeat runaways, both girls had ended up as “children without placement” — youth who stay in CPS offices under the supervision of caseworkers because a foster home cannot immediately be found.
The practice has been sharply criticized by child welfare advocates. Gov. Greg Abbott has called it “unacceptable.” In May, the state agency was ordered to spend $3.5 million to ease the problem.
Yet, at any give time, dozens of children in CPS custody are in such last-resort placements — housed in state office buildings, in makeshift dorms with linoleum tile floors, fluorescent lights and bare walls.
It creates a troubling cycle. Kids in these emergency shelters are most likely to run away, and foster homes and residential treatment facilities often refuse to accept habitual runaways.
About 10 percent of foster care runaways who were recovered say they were victimized — forced into prostitution, sexually abused or physically assaulted. Other repeat runaways return to recruit foster kids as sex workers.
The number of runaways and the connection to human trafficking have alarmed state officials, leading to the creation of the state’s first Missing Children/ Human Trafficking Task Force, which started operating in early April. The new unit, which has 10 special investigators with law enforcement experience and training, tracks down missing foster care children, interviews runaways, and looks for patterns and leads on human traffickers across Southeast Texas.
In May, 50 runaways were reported in Region 6; the task force recovered 35.
Until now, the work of finding runaways fell to any available CPS caseworker, who already faced grueling caseloads and resistance from kids resentful of the foster care system.
The task force is not part of CPS, which can give the special investigators like Shitonda Johnson an advantage in building a rapport with runaways.
“They are so against CPS,” said task force director Catherine Giannaris. “They end up hating their caseworker because they put them in placement. When we find them, we have to build trust. We want to find out what’s wrong. We want them to be safe.”
Inside the conference room, at a long table that swallowed most of the space, Johnson pulled a chair next to Angel. Close, but not crowding.
“Any time you guys run away, someone’s going to have to come out and interview you, OK?” Johnson said, easing into the conversation.
Johnson, a former sheriff’s deputy, Houston Independent School District gang officer and jail guard, wanted the girl to know that she was not there to chastise or judge. Just to listen.
Angel, who has been in state custody for a year, nodded.
These interviews are delicate dances. The investigator has to run through a list of questions asking for intimate, sometimes humiliating, information from teenagers who pride themselves on being tough and street-smart but still blush when talking about sex.
They have to dig for details about the men who prey on young kids, excavate clues about hangouts and social media profiles, fill in a timeline of jumbled days and nights.
At the same time, they have to establish a connection — one that might be strong enough to dissuade the teens from taking flight again. Or at the very least, forge a lifeline if they do.
Angel is the classic profile for a foster runaway. She falls in the right age range — 81 percent of CPS runaways last year were ages 15 to 17. The right gender — 60 percent were girls, who were most likely to run away again.
And the right circumstances — six months from aging out of foster care, unhappy with her placement, searching for somewhere to belong.
She had already gone missing several times before, including the previous week — a pattern that landed her in the shelter at the CPS office on Chimney Rock. There, kids sleep on roll-away beds and share a communal shower where a handwritten sign implores: “Don’t leave clothes on the ground. No socks, shirts, pants, shoes. Nothing.”
At Chimney Rock, she met another girl — a 17-year-old who “convinced her of stuff.”
“She convinced you?” asked Johnson. “What did she tell you?”
“Money. Alcohol. Weed. Party.”
Johnson prodded. What exactly did the other girl mean?
“How to make money,” Angel said.
So how were you going to make money? “She prostitutes or whatever.” The other girl prostitutes herself? “Yeah.” Did she prostitute herself while you two were together? “Yeah.” This other teen had targeted Angel and two other girls, including one who is just 13. She “acted all friendly,” brought them pizza, bragged about the money she made.
The crew took off Saturday evening but was picked up by police and returned to the shelter. A short time later, they left again — bouncing back and forth over the next three days between the Chimney Rock office and the streets.
Their first stop was a park adjacent to the office, where men were waiting, along with another CPS runaway — a boy Angel has a crush on.
“I guess they were recruiting girls or whatever,” Angel said with a shrug.
Johnson’s voice etched up a notch. “Where did you go?”
The boy, who was driving a car without a license, ferried the girls to a street in Sunnyside.
“It’s, like, where the prostitutes are,” Angel explained.
Johnson’s eyebrows arched slightly. Over her notebook, her pen paused in midair. “So what happened?”
Johnson begins each case by scouring the missing child’s CPS file. She collects names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, recent photos. Any nugget of information that could narrow down where the runaway might hide, in which direction he or she might head.
Once in a while, she turns up a family member’s current location and that, in turn, leads to the runaway. In most cases, there are disconnected numbers and obsolete addresses.
There is also the jagged history of a childhood in foster care. Parental abuse and neglect. Disrupted adoptions. Mental health evaluations. Police reports. Temporary placements, group homes, residential treatment facilities, emergency shelters.
“It breaks my heart,” says Johnson, 44, who had worked as a CPS investigator for six years before joining the task force. “They’ve been put through enough in life.”
After combing through the computer record, Johnson queries caseworkers about the child’s favorite stomping grounds. She checks with law enforcement for updates.
Then Johnson hits the road in her Toyota Prius, covering 200 to 300 miles a day and armed with an orange file folder for each runaway. Inside the folder: printouts of pages from the case file and a sheaf of flyers topped by the message: “MISSING. Help bring me home.”
She visits spots where the child was last seen, where relatives might live, where CPS runaways congregate, where prostitutes are known to cluster. Fast-food joints. Former foster homes. Seedy motels. Convenience stores.
One week in May, as Johnson chased a 17-year-old girl missing since February, her route zigzagged from an apartment in Pasadena to a neighborhood on the northside, from a Burger King off Tidwell to the runaway’s last foster home, a brick two-story in a manicured suburb. The house, gleaming on the outside, was piled with trash and debris inside.
At each stop, she left behind flyers. One taped to the front door of her grandfather’s house, a crooked clapboard with peeling paint and a weathered doghouse in the shape of a hamburger in the front yard. A few posted at a battered Pasadena apartment complex with murky water in the kidney-shaped swimming pool and a yellow sign boasting “Bueno. Bonito. Barato” (Good. Attractive. Cheap).
Another dropped off at the last known address for the teen’s parents, a bedraggled trailer park littered with empty beer cans and worn children’s toys. The road was rutted and bumpy. The units
— “probably old FEMA trailers,” guessed Johnson — were dented and sagging.
So sad, Johnson murmured as she walked away. It is her refrain throughout the day, as she retraces the children’s steps and absorbs their story.
She repeated it after catching up with a whipsmart 16-year-old with a sly smile who keeps turning up on runaway reports. The girl, placed with her grandmother in northeast Houston, was later sent to a psychiatric facility after an altercation at the house.
She muttered the words after she interviewed a wide-eyed 13-year-old with a history of mental illness and violent episodes. The boy, who ran away from a group home in Baytown, boasted that he could protect himself on the streets with a makeshift “fireball” — an aerosol can and a lighter.
So sad, Johnson said about the girl who had been raped after running back to the mother suspected of prostituting her, about the 14-year-old boy who had been sexually abused and asked, “Why would a person do this to me?”
About all the faces on the flyers, missing children wearing tight grins for the camera.
Her fiancé thinks she invests too much of herself in the kids. But Johnson, who has no children of her own, can’t give up.
As Angel continued her story, she fidgeted in the swivel chair and avoided Johnson’s eyes.
The boy she liked, the runaway with a car, had tried to persuade her to prostitute herself. He instructed her in what to do, what streets to walk.
“He was a pimp, I guess,” she said, “whatever you want to call it.”
Angel needed the money, but she was scared.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she admitted.
Instead, Angel stayed with one of the other girls, while the first teen — the runaway who recruited her — went with a man in a red car.
That’s when she was prostituting herself, Johnson asked. “Yeah.” The rest of the details emerged in a tangle, as Angel raced randomly through the events of the weekend.
After the first girl returned, they napped in a gold Chevy Impala in an apartment parking lot off Bissonnet. They hooked up with some “college guys” at a party where they “jugged” Hennessy cognac and Ciroc vodka. They smoked “reggie” and “gas” — street slang for marijuana. The 13-year-old began to hallucinate so they dumped her at the door of the CPS Chimney Rock office. They stopped at Taco Bell to eat. Angel had sex with one of the older boys, whose name she did not know. She didn’t use protection.
Johnson interrupted with a sharp “Excuse me? You trying to get pregnant?”
“Nope,” Angel replied sheepishly.
Are you trying to get an STD? “Nope.” Johnson tried to chip through the teenage veneer of invincibility. “I know you’re a smart girl,” Johnson said. “So you make better decisions, all right? So what happened after that?”
That’s when the CPS teen with the car came back. He took Angel to a friend’s apartment, where they smoked weed and chilled.
“So what does chill mean?” Johnson questioned, anticipating the response.
Angel’s answer came in an embarrassed whisper. “Sex.” No condoms again. But this time, Angel’s reasons were different.
The two had talked for hours about relationships, her first time doing that with a boy, she told Johnson. He wanted to have a baby with her. He wanted to introduce her to his family.
Or, at least that was what he had claimed. She found out later that it was just a line. After the sex, after his cousin made a pass at her, after the boy got mad and grabbed her arm, leaving a dark bruise, after he deposited her back at the Chimney Rock office and drove away.
“So are you going to stop believing what these boys tell you?” Johnson asked gingerly.
She understood why Angel fell for the lies, why she was an easy mark for predators.
Angel’s mother had booted her out of the house, furious that the teen had blabbed about the older woman’s crack habit. “My mom doesn’t want me,” Angel said matter-of-factly.
She just wanted someone to care about her.
Johnson knows what that feels like. She, too, had grown up without her mother, who left their Louisiana hometown to find a job in Texas. Raised by her grandmother, she struck out on her own at age 16, moving to Houston to live with a distant relative. She got a job at Church’s Fried Chicken, finished high school, went on to college and graduate school.
Johnson remembers straining against the odds, being envious of kids who had parents, craving a relationship with her mother.
Maybe that’s why she cares so much about the kids.
“This is your truth, your story,” she reassured Angel. “I’m not here to judge you.”
As the interview ended, Johnson handed over her business card. The number, she emphasized, is on 24/7. Call me. Text me. Leave a message. Check in. OK, Angel promised. Johnson looked skeptical. “So what’s my name?” “Ummm …” “I thought you were going to remember it by heart,” she teased.
Angel’s caseworker would take over from here. The girl wanted CPS to let her stay with a family friend. If that happened, she swore, “I’ll act good because that’s somewhere I want to be at.”
Johnson just hoped the teenager could stick it out a few more months, until she ages out of the foster system.
Please don’t run away again, Johnson begged before saying goodbye. Please don’t prostitute yourself.
Angel stood up, then hesitated, unsure of which door to take. She turned to Johnson and asked: “Where do I go?”