BROKEN LIVES: MOM'S ADDICTION SHUTS OUT KIDS

Maya's body was young and strong. And so were the babies who grew in her
womb, despite daily doses of cocaine that Maya breathed into her lungs as
desperately as she breathed air.

She loved drugs more than she loved her body, which she sold on street
corners or in crack houses to buy her next hit. Certainly she loved drugs
more than she loved her men -- most of them had deserted Maya long before
seeing their children emerge fat and beautiful from her body.

But drugs and babies do not mix. Not in Sacramento County, which has one of
the state's strictest child-welfare policies about drug abuse. Maya's five
babies -- now ages 2 to 14 -- were swept into California's already crowded
foster system, where officials estimate 60 to 80 percent of child welfare
cases are drug related.

So, one November day in 1998, Maya sat in dependency court wearing orange
jail coveralls as a referee and seven attorneys debated whether to keep
trying to get her off the drugs so she could get her children back. They
decided there was no point. It didn't seem to matter much to Maya.

Two days earlier, she had given birth at UC Davis Medical Center to her
fifth child, a cocaine-exposed little girl named Allison who had
immediately been whisked away to a foster home. The baby's most likely
daddy, interviewed in jail by a social worker, said he told Maya to stay
away from cocaine, but she ignored him.

Days later in the same courtroom, social workers and attorneys decided not
to give Maya -- whose name, like others in this series-has been changed --
a chance to get her new baby back. Maya, by then freed from jail, didn't
even come to court. Her attorney made a prediction. "She'll have another
one," he said.

He was dead wrong.

In the summer of 1967, Maya became the seventh of eight children born in
poverty to a single mother who had fled rural Arkansas for a better life in
California. The odds were against Maya and her siblings from the start, but
several brothers and sisters became successful adults -- one manages a
restaurant; another works for a state agency.

Maya didn't succeed. She quit high school in the 11th grade and began
dabbling in drugs, although she did attend church with her younger sister,
Veronica.

Maya's brother Oscar remembers the day Veronica prayed for a handsome man
to come into her life through the church. He did. But he fell in love with
Maya. Veronica's prayer brought the family no blessing, Oscar says now.

Oscar believes that while Maya was being wooed by James, the man who would
become her only husband, she met the love of her life: rock cocaine.

At age 19, Maya gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Courtney.
Nine months later, she married James, who was then on probation for battery
and later would be arrested on suspicion of spousal abuse. They split
before the year's end.

Courtney's godmother had met Maya at church, too, and was herself the
product of California's foster care system. But unlike Maya, the baby's
godmother worked long hours as a nursing aide and had fallen in love with
the tiny girl.

By the time Courtney was 6 weeks old, she was spending more time with her
godmother than with Maya. By the time she was 5 years old, she was living
there full time.

As Courtney entered kindergarten, Maya began having more babies. First came
a daughter in May 1992, and then, 15 months later, a son. Neither child has
ever met his or her father. Neither knows much of Maya. Both soon were
living with Maya's mother while Maya intensified her affair with the rock.

By then, Maya had begun prostituting herself for drug money. Along the way,
she'd found a new boyfriend, Eddie -- a small-time felon who thought Maya
was gorgeous.

"I met a star," Eddie told his sister, Susannah, when he called to announce
that he and Maya would visit her Central Valley farming town for a few
weeks to avoid some trouble in Sacramento.

When they arrived, Susannah realized both were addicted to drugs.

"They were in their own little world," said Susannah, who fed the couple
during the nine months they stayed there and tried without success to get
Maya to return to church.

Before long, Maya was pregnant. The baby would be her fourth, but it was
Eddie's first, and he was excited. As Maya's belly began to grow, Eddie
supported Maya by acting as her pimp as she turned tricks in a motel.

"He needed a little guidance, and she was more dominant. She knew the
streets a lot better," Susannah said. "It made him happy. He felt like he
was a playboy or a pimp."

Every day Maya and Eddie got up around noon and began hustling. When she
could, Maya stole from her clients, too. Susannah fed them because they
never had enough money to eat.

"They would make a lot of money, buy a lot of drugs and (smoke) until it
ran out," said Susannah's husband, who had fought his own battle with
drugs. "When you're an addict, there is nothing more important than the drugs."

The love affair ended when Eddie was sent to prison for stealing a purse,
his third strike, and Maya returned home to Sacramento to work the streets.
Her baby boy was born at home five months later.

"I don't even think she named him," said Susannah, who'd begged Maya early
in the pregnancy to let her raise the baby. "Her mind just wasn't there.
She was all drugged out."

It was the birth of that baby that finally caught the attention of Child
Protective Services. Because her other children had not been living with
her, Maya's arrests and intermittent homelessness had never prompted calls
to CPS.

When Maya arrived at a Kaiser Hospital in September 1997 with her
hours-old, drug-exposed newborn, a hospital social worker called CPS, as
she is required by law to do.

The agency had no file on Maya so she was offered the option of voluntary
counseling in lieu of dependency court. Maya agreed, and her sister
Veronica took temporary custody of the newborn, Matthew.

To keep her children, Maya had only to participate in a drug-rehabilitation
program. But she didn't do it. And Matthew's high-pitched, drug-withdrawal
screams soon proved too much for his aunt. By Thanksgiving, all four of
Maya's children were in foster care.

By then, 10-year-old Courtney had seen enough.

It was a "bad environment, I know that," Courtney volunteered to a social
worker. "People in and out."

Social workers eventually sent the two middle children back to their
grandmother's home, returned Courtney to her godmother and placed Matthew
with his Aunt Susannah, who has since adopted him. Such "kin" placements
are especially common in African American families like theirs, studies
have shown.

Maya wasn't worried, Susannah said. She knew her children were loved.

"Relative placements are clearly the best thing for the children," said
Jessica Katz, who represented all of Maya's children as an attorney for the
nonprofit Sacramento Child Advocates. "But they're not necessarily the best
thing for getting the parents off drugs because they have no incentive."

Maya was dodging her social worker, Angel Jenkins. The social worker mailed
pleading letters to Maya's various addresses warning that if she didn't
sign a plan acknowledging her problem, agreeing to quit smoking cocaine and
take parenting classes, she risked losing her children forever.

In February 1998, Jenkins made a surprise visit to Maya's tiny apartment
and discovered it had burned down. The Red Cross had provided Maya
temporary shelter but had no idea where she'd gone. Law enforcement
computers and other state data systems proved no help.

Maya had vanished. Jenkins gave up looking. The system was no longer trying
to reunite Maya with her children.

"I don't think we, as a group, had any relationship with this mom," Katz
said. "But I also don't think anybody could have forced her to clean up.
She was too far gone."

By then Maya had another baby growing in her body. She delivered Allison
that fall at UC Davis Medical Center after going into labor in jail, where
she was doing time for stealing a bicycle. Social workers had

found Maya at last.

Allison's daddy was a registered sex offender who had been repeatedly
imprisoned for violent crimes. He told a social worker that he'd watched
Maya smoke cocaine at least once a day throughout the first two months of
pregnancy and knew she'd also used methamphetamine and alcohol. After that,
he didn't know what she did because he was in prison.

"Maybe she doesn't want to try," he told the social worker.

Although the hospital lost Allison's drug test, Maya had been full of
cocaine when she was sent to jail two days before delivery. It was enough
for social workers to ask juvenile court Referee Dean Petersen to forgo
Maya's right to get Allison back.

"You have to have a parent who is willing," said Petersen, the lead
dependency officer in Sacramento County. "And if they're not willing, you
have to make a quick decision and say, 'This child is adoptable. She can
have a reasonable life.' "

It is an unusual step, one taken only in egregious abuse cases or when
parents have failed efforts to reunite them with older children. But
Allison qualified. Her case was sent directly to the adoptions bureau, and
soon social workers were delivering the infant to the open arms of Maya's
brother Oscar.

In Oscar's home, Allison learned to crawl, laugh and annoy her 8-year-old
brother. Despite a regular supply of cocaine while in her mother's womb,
Allison has blossomed into an articulate and happy 2-year-old who today
calls Oscar "Daddy," and Oscar's wife "Mommy."

Some day, Oscar figures he'll have to tell Allison the story of Maya. But
he doesn't want to tell her how the story ends.

One night in May 2000, Maya drew her last sweet, deep breaths of cocaine.
Her body was discovered in a Sacramento alley an hour after daybreak, clad
only in a pearl necklace and a single white tennis shoe.

She was nine months pregnant. Her sixth baby died with her.

"It must have been a terrible, frightening way to be," said Joe Cushing,
the city parks officer who was flagged down by a passer-by who found Maya's
body. "Your last minutes alone, naked, on the street."

On that spring morning, as a breeze rustled the leaves of a nearby oak tree
and the dogs paced nervously in neighboring yards, homicide Detective Troy
Woodward remembers bending over Maya. He noted her swollen abdomen.

"It was mysterious," he said. Maya had no marks on her body, and while
investigators later would discover she had a substantial amount of cocaine
in her system -- as did the baby -- it was not a fatal overdose.

A friend told Woodward that he'd seen Maya the day before she died. He said
he'd smoked crack with her twice and driven her to Broadway so she could
turn a trick to repay him $5 she'd borrowed for drugs.

At midnight, when he pounded on the door of her rented room, Maya was
lighting another pipe, he said.

"Come back in an hour," she told him. But she wasn't there.

Woodward theorized that Maya may have been turning a trick or smoking a
crack pipe when she started having trouble, and that her companion may have
dumped her out of fear.

Coroner's officials said that if drugs caused Maya's heartbeat to speed up
to a fatal pace there would have been no sign in death, unlike a heart
attack which leaves scarring visible at autopsy. Her official cause of
death is undetermined.

On Mother's Day, Woodward -- a new father himself -- stood in an
observation room at the coroner's office. He watched a forensic pathologist
deliver Maya's baby -- 5* pounds and 18* inches long with a tuft of wavy
black hair and tiny fingernails.

"I thought he was a beautiful baby," Woodward said somberly. "He never had
a chance."

Later that week, as Maya's oldest daughter turned 13, Maya was buried with
her last baby. He was nestled in her arms below the view of anyone who
peered in her open casket. Together, they were laid in an unmarked grave
beneath the spreading limbs of a pine tree.

The social workers and attorneys, counselors and judges had done all they
could to save Maya's children. But sometimes the system can't do enough.

Maya kept this baby.