Sucker Punched

Bizarrely, it was a staffer who was downstairs and outside of the building who heard her screams and finally burst into the bathroom and ended the beating. Leah was aghast when she looked in the mirror: "My teeth were broken. There was blood everywhere. I started crying."

The police were called, and Leah recalls being asked whether she wanted to press charges. She said yes but heard no more about it. When police asked her whether she wanted them to call an ambulance, she said yes. The staff, however, wouldn't let her leave with the ambulance when it arrived.

A day later, staffers took her in for some slapdash dental work that didn't include Novocain. "They took me to the dentist and made him glue everything together," she says. "They had found one piece of tooth. For the rest, he used this white stuff that looks like tooth." The entire blob of ersatz enamel was attached with a dollop of glue that swept back onto her palate and formed a rigid block. "I couldn't talk because it was so thick," she says. "I couldn't eat."

Her mother describes the results with two words: "Horrible. Disgusting."

Two days after the attack, Leah wasn't able to get out of bed. "I couldn't move my neck, my hands, my legs. That's when they rushed me to the hospital in a van. They told them that I had a concussion and a neck sprain. They put me on 900 milligrams of ibuprofen for my pain."

The Brown Schools informed neither Leah's caseworker, Rosenberg, nor her mother of the incident. Leah borrowed a student's cell phone at school to call her mother, who then contacted Rosenberg. He began working to get her moved to a different shelter.

As for Ashley, she stayed in the shelter, living side-by-side with Leah for another week and a half. No one came back to follow up on the attack. On the day Leah was transferring to another facility, Ashley barricaded herself in the kitchen. "She was ruining the kitchen," Leah recalls. "She was taking all the pots and pans and knives and forks, throwing everything. The food was all over. They had to put all the kids in lockdown. She'd gone crazy."

Rosenberg says Ashley had previous assault and battery charges and should have been in a more secure facility in the first place.

Leah's makeshift teeth soon began crumbling. At one point, she was chewing an ice cube from a drink and soon realized that it was part of the tooth that had dropped off. She tried using Superglue to put it together. Her gums had become infected and inflamed. She avoided friends and activities at school.

Leah rejoined her mother at the end of the school year, about four months after being removed. Rosenberg had persuaded them to agree to counseling services, and Shanti agreed to go to substance abuse treatment as well as anger management and parenting classes, which she completed.

What remained unremedied, however, were Leah's dental problems. Rosenberg and Shanti couldn't get ChildNet to fix the teeth — even though that agency was directly responsible for what went on in its shelter system. ChildNet's executive director, Peter Balitsaris, knew that the shelter was a mess. He told the Miami Herald in May 2005 that the Brown Schools shelter was being shut down for failing to meet licensing standards. No one from ChildNet responded to New Times' questions about Leah's case.

ChildNet gave Leah's mother an insurance card at one point, but no dentist would accept it. "I must have called three dozen dentists, and there was no one who would take it," recalls Rosenberg, who no longer works for ChildNet but has continued to help Leah. Shanti shelled out a hard-earned $2,000 to get Leah double root canals, steel pegs anchored to her jaw, and a temporary bridge, which is now decaying. But it was too little, too late.

"She has no self-esteem anymore," Shanti says. "She was so confident in herself before."

Pressure has built over the past year: Leah got pregnant. Her sister's boyfriend deserted her and their child. Shanti, drinking again, was charged in April with assaulting Leah. ChildNet has not intervened.

Leah doesn't have much to smile about.