By Jane Coaston, title image by Alex Merto, The New York Times, December 18, 2021
In 2006, 3-year-old Marcus Fiesel was murdered by his foster parents near Cincinnati. They left him in a second-floor closet in August wrapped in tape and a blanket in a playpen with no food or water while they went out of town to a family reunion, dog in tow. When they returned home, they took his body to an abandoned chimney, doused it in gasoline and burned it, throwing most of the remains into the Ohio River. Days later, his foster mother called the police, claiming that Marcus had gone missing after a visit to a local park.
I was back home in Cincinnati that summer when Marcus disappeared. Every news station and every newspaper was locked on the case, with hundreds of people searching the park where his foster mother told the police she had last seen him. Everyone wanted to find Marcus, a little boy whose neighbor said loved flowers. He had been placed into the foster care system because his mother, already enduring domestic abuse at the hands of a boyfriend, wasn’t able to care for him.
The same year Marcus was murdered, my mother was named Volunteer of the Year at ProKids in Cincinnati, where she served as a volunteer court-appointed special advocate, known by the acronym Casa. Developed by a Seattle judge in 1976, the program is based on Casa volunteers who are designated by a judge to represent in court the interests and needs of a child who has experienced abuse or neglect. They interview families, write reports, work with foster parents and group homes, and stand in court, making sure that the child at the center of every child-welfare legal proceeding is heard throughout the case.
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