Lessons from Hawaii’s “Lord of the Flies” foster home

It went on for decades. Rampant sexual abuse in the Hawaii foster home of John Teixeira. Caseworkers failed to check on the children. Not only did the state family police agency ignore complaints, they praised Teixeira to the skies – because, after all, there’s always a “shortage” of foster homes, and Teixeira would take children no one else would.  And it wasn’t just the family police agency. Teixeira also was subject to one of those treacly “model foster parent” stories that so many reporters seem to love. 

The horrors finally were exposed thanks to a civil lawsuit by one brave former foster youth, and dogged reporting from Honolulu Civil Beat. 

How bad was it? From one of the stories: 

“Life for a young boy in the Teixeira foster home was a struggle for survival akin to ‘Lord of the Flies,’” the judge in JR’s lawsuit wrote in 2024, referring to the classic novel about castaway children creating a savage society. “The older boys were abusive and Defendant Teixeira, an abuser himself, failed to protect younger boys from them.” 

One of those who tried to warn the family police agency 

… said she tried to tell the social worker that she didn’t think the boys were being treated right in Teixeira’s home. 

She testified that she vividly recalls the social worker’s response. 

“When you’re looking for a foster home for teenage boys, you take what you can get.” 

But that, of course, is because systems tear apart so many families needlessly in the first place. 

And reporter John Hill doesn’t let the family police agency get away with the usual excuse: Oh, that was long ago, we do much better now.  Hill writes: 

The story is a microcosm of what was happening to foster children across Hawaiʻi in the 1990s and 2000s — and, evidence suggests, to this day. [Emphasis added.] 

You can read all about what happened to children placed with Teixeira in the series itself; I won’t recap it here, just be sure you’re ready for it. 

Instead, I want to focus on something mentioned at the very beginning of the series. How JR wound up in foster care in the first place: 

The 8-year-old boy who would later be known as John Roe 121 arrived at his new foster home in Waimānalo in the midst of a crisis. 

JR and his siblings had been taken from their biological parents three years earlier after his mother accidentally hit his brother on the head with a hammer in the midst of being attacked by the children’s drug-addled father. 

OK, let’s stop there. What might have happened had Hawaii authorities removed the drug-addled father instead of the children? No, just doing that and closing the door wouldn’t have been enough. But what if they’d then helped JR’s mother cope with all that had been done to her – both the psychological help agencies love to dispense and the concrete help she almost certainly needed?  What if they’d at least tried that first? 

And before you say: Wait, you wanted the state to try keeping the children in a home like that? Read the stories to see what happened to JR when they didn’t. 

But that was only the first mistake. When children genuinely can’t stay with their own parents, the best choice almost always is another relative. But Hawaii authorities quickly gave up on that: 

[The children] stayed for a short time with an aunt. When state child welfare workers showed up, the aunt told 5-year-old JR and two younger siblings to hide in a closet. But they made too much noise. 

The social workers opened the closet door and took them away. 

Then came another placement that was not as bad as a total stranger. But, as one might expect, given what he’d been through, JR’s behavior was getting difficult. The state could have provided wraparound services to save that placement. But instead… 

JR’s next stop was with a neighbor of his mother. Separated from his siblings, he spent three years with her. Now she was telling the state she could no longer handle him. 

So JR was moved from home to home to home – eventually winding up in the “Lord of the Flies” home.  

And then the state family policing agency blew it again: 

… when a relative expressed interest in adopting JR, state officials declined. Teixeira, they said, was JR’s “best advocate,” according to the later expert witness report. 

So, JR had a home. Teixeira had solved a problem for the state, as he had many times before — where to put foster boys no one else wanted. 

Another story is even more tragic. It’s the story of Rahiem Morris. 

Rahiem’s dad had a drug problem. He separated from the boy’s mother. Then the mother, Sharon Fernandez-Thomas, was arrested for contacting her husband’s new girlfriend, violating a court order. 

She pleaded no contest and was sentenced to community service. And CWS took Rahiem, who was 4, severing her parental rights. 

Then Rahiem’s mother remarried, moved to the mainland and lost track of him. 

There is nothing to indicate Rahiem’s mother abused or neglected him; so there’s no indication there was anything wrong that couldn’t have been fixed without taking Rahiem at all, let alone terminating his right to live with his mother for his entire childhood. 

After Raheim aged out, mother and son found either other again. Children who age out often go back to the parents the state tried to keep from them forever.  But by then, too much damage had been done to Raheim in foster care, particularly at the “Lord of the Flies” home. 

There is only one piece of encouraging news here: It looks like in 2023 and 2024, Hawaii finally got serious about taking away fewer children (though, as always, we don’t know how much of the decline is real and how much is just a shift to hidden foster care.) If it’s real, then, in 2024, for the first time in more than 20 years, the rate at which Hawaii took away children was no worse than the national average – though that average is itself too high. 

That means for the first time, if the family police agency builds on this progress, maybe Hawaii foster children won’t have to “take what [they] can get.”