Ma’Khia Bryant’s death at the hands of an Ohio officer has left a lasting impression and has sparked necessary conversations about the foster care system in the United States– especially how it affects children.
Ma’Khia’s sister Ja’Niah Bryant has spoken out.
A little more than three weeks before Ma’Khia was shot and killed by Nicholas Reardon, an officer who has not yet been held accountable, Ja’Niah Bryant made a frantic call to 911 and desperately pleaded for someone to help deal with the constant fighting at the home where she resided, reported The New York Times.
Officers arrived, and the final disposition of the call was them telling Ja’Niah that nothing could be done about the situation, to which the teen responded that if she could not leave the foster, she would kill someone. Twenty-three days later, Ja’Niah placed a similar phone and reported that two young women who lived in the home had returned and were threatening her and her sister, Ma’Khia.
The nation now knows what happened next. A day that began hard enough for the Bryant sisters ended with a dead 16-year-old girl and a mountain of speculation about how things could have ended differently if she weren’t in foster care.
Ohio, the state where Bryant lived, places children in foster care at a ten percent rate higher than the national average. The state is also more likely to place children with guardians who are not related to them. This goes against well-aggregated research that a relative is the best guardianship option for children who must be taken from their parents.
“Everybody knows, and the research has proven over and over and over again that the best placement for children is with their kin,” said Ronald R. Browder, the president and chief executive of the Ohio Federation for Health Equity and Social Justice. That’s exactly what Ja’Niah and Ma’Khia wanted. But, the state of Ohio chose foster care for the Bryant children shortly after a judge ruled their birth mother Paula Bryant was guilty of neglect.
The sisters stayed with their grandmother for 16 months before she was evicted for having the girls there and lost custody of them despite her pleas to caseworkers to explore other options like hotels.
The siblings were also temporarily split up.
In total, Ma’Khia would be bounced around to about six different foster homes in a short period of time. Some of the homes were so abusive that she wasn’t allowed to leave. Some were unsanitary. Some of the foster parents were verbally abusive.
Research suggests that every time a foster child is moved, they experience a new level of trauma. In the end, the sisters ended up in a home where previous foster children who were barely out of their teens would supervise them.
Ja’Niah and Ma’Khia Bryant were clear that they wanted to be reunited with their biological family. “We can go to Mommy or Grandma. It doesn’t matter, as long as we can get off the system,” Ja’Niah said Ma’Khia once told her and their other siblings who were also in foster care.
Unfortunately, that never happened. When Angela Moore, the foster mother at the time of Ma’Khia’s death, would not come home as her former foster daughters threatened the Bryant sisters, their biological grandmother came and tried to protect them.
The attempt was futile.
The trauma that the children experienced is not an uncommon event in the foster care system, yet officials seem loath to offer solutions for change. Franklin County Children’s Services has declined to comment, citing privacy.
