CPS HELPLESS TO KEEP INFANT FROM ADDICTS

Child Protective Services knew Demitres Robertson was a crack addict who
had used cocaine the morning she gave birth last year.

It knew the baby, Anndreah, was born with cocaine in her system and had to
stay in the hospital three days until the drugs cleared her system. And it
already was investigating allegations that Robertson and her mother smoked
crack cocaine every day in front of her other two children, both boys.

Despite all this, CPS said it had no legal authority to keep Anndreah from
going home with her mother and grandmother.

Anndreah died a week later after she was exposed to a steady stream of
secondhand crack cocaine smoke, police said. She was 10 days old.

On Wednesday, after a nine-month investigation, Robertson was charged with
one count of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse. Butler was
charged with two counts of child abuse.

"We cannot take children away based on parents using crack cocaine or any
drug," said Dolores Reid, deputy assistant director for the state Division
of Children, Youth and Families, the agency that oversees CPS. "We have to
have evidence that the parent is not feeding the child, not keeping the
child clean or not supervising the child."

CPS had been referred to the family's cramped apartment on Oct. 4, 2001,
less than a month before Anndreah was born, after Phoenix police saw
conditions at the apartment, according to court records.

CPS learned that Demitres Robertson, 23, and her mother, Lillian Ann
Butler, 44, were smoking crack cocaine almost daily.

On Oct. 19, 2001, Solomon Butler, Lillian Ann Butler's husband, told a CPS
investigator that he believed "the boys were inhaling the smoke because
their behavior changed after the women started smoking," court records state.

Anndreah was born Oct. 30, 2001, and three days later was handed over to
Butler and taken to their central Phoenix apartment. She died Nov. 8, 2001,
her intestines destroyed by the secondhand crack cocaine smoke. Her death
was ruled a homicide.