In order for CPS to even bother with these parents, someone would have to report them--a neighbor, a family member, a teacher, etc. The fact that many people on this thread have apparently been recreational pot smokers and raised children w/o being reported to CPS is very telling: what it says to me is that they were not excessive in their use of pot around their kids. This couple may have been excessive and careless, which led someone to report them to CPS. Bottom line is, you don't lose your kids to foster care without really going seriously wrong one way or another.
However, being pot smokers is no reason for these people to lose their child to death. That is a terrible tragedy and a terrible wrong.
One poster here says the family should sue the CPS workers for a whole lot of money. That money doesn't not come out of the pocket of the CPS workers, it comes out of the pocket of the tax payer, so you might as well say take more tax dollars away from the people.
It is pretty common knowledge that CPS workers are over burdened with cases and that CPS is underfunded. They make mistakes, and the mistake here was in allowing the foster parent who killed this child to be a foster parent: obviously not enough background checking was done on her or if she had been doing it for a while, not enough awareness or surveilance of her home and child care methods was done.
The real culprit here is the underfunding of CPS which results in CPS workers having too little time to devote to each case and to monitor each foster family home.
