To Hug a Porcupine

"I think I need help," he stated weakly.

Hector Rosa had already been jailed for that incident when Debbie called DCF to report that her boys may have been sexually abused. She says she was told not to worry; Rosa was locked away. He would later be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

"Couldn't anyone have told me?" Debbie asked, incredulous. "Would a phone call have been so difficult?" After her boys were interviewed by authorities, three additional charges of lewd assault were filed against Hector. He pleaded no contest to one charge and had ten years tacked on to his life sentence. Weeks later, however, he withdrew his plea, and he is still fighting his cases from prison.

Because the boys lived in fear that Hector would come back and kill them for telling — James had night terrors about it — Debbie brought them to his sentencing hearing so they could see him in shackles. In the courtroom, Brian lowered his head and let out a satisfied "Yesss!" Matthew stared Hector in the eyes. When they got home, Debbie says, little James asked who would watch the bad man when the guards slept at night. Debbie reassured him: "You are safe."

The family moved to a new home with separate bedrooms for each of the boys, but their frustrating behavior continued. The boys destroyed furniture, tortured pets, smeared feces on the computer, and, when separated, would tear out electrical sockets to tunnel into one another's rooms. Debbie was horrified to walk in on the children all naked together.

Regardless of age, an orgasm "is ten times more potent than cocaine," one of the boys' therapists later said in a deposition. It would not be surprising if, after being exposed to sexual stimulation, they felt compelled to continue it. Debbie and Jorge installed a security system so they'd know if the kids were trying to get out of bed.

Realizing they might be in over their heads, Debbie quit her job to stay home and care for the boys. Although Jorge had become a full-time youth minister who opened missions abroad, he stopped traveling for work. The couple says they asked the state to provide additional, post-adoption psychiatric services but were met with the attitude: Too bad; they're your kids now.

One serendipitous day, Debbie was browsing in a bookstore and noticed a volume out of place on a shelf. She moved to slide it out of the way and was struck by its title: High Risk: Children Without a Conscience by Dr. Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey. The book described a psychiatric diagnosis that had been around for decades but remained relatively unknown: reactive attachment disorder.

Kids who do not receive adequate parenting in the early stages of life, the book explained, had no foundation for healthy emotional development. Such children — kids who were abused, neglected, kept in hospitals, or rejected by mothers with depression — would show little in the way of bonding as they aged. They would often turn aggressive and violent. They would release their anger on caretakers. Debbie remembers thinking: "My God. These are our kids!'"

Even now, reactive attachment disorder remains underresearched. ATTACh.org (the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children), the preeminent organization focusing on the disorder, has only 380 members — 60 percent clinicians, 40 percent parents — according to its executive director, Lynn Wetterberg. She estimates that there are fewer than ten residential centers in the country equipped to handle patients diagnosed with the condition.

Debbie and Jorge became convinced that their children needed such treatment after they were diagnosed with RAD. They say they begged DCF for additional services only to be denied because the kids' Medicare wouldn't cover the bill. It was only after they wrote to then-Gov. Jeb Bush, using Hector Rosa as leverage, that then-district administrator of DCF Paul Brown invited the couple in for a meeting.

Brown authorized money for the whole family and two therapists to attend a two-week session at a treatment center in Colorado that specialized in RAD. It costs around $10,000 per session.

"I just want to feel like I did one decent thing," Debbie remembered Brown telling them. She was surprised when he added a suggestion: They ought to sue DCF. The next day, she says, Brown resigned. "He said the system was too broken to fix."

To prepare for the family's visit around Christmas 2000, therapists in Colorado requested the boys' records directly from DCF. Adoption worker Zuclich sent them: not just a quarter-inch stack but boxes and boxes, with a DCF provision that the files not be shared with the parents.

Nestled in a conference room surrounded by the Rocky Mountains and evergreen trees, therapists sorted through documents. They looked sympathetically at Debbie and Jorge. The information they were reading stunned them. Goodness, would they like to share, but professional regulations prevented them from breaking DCF's orders.

Debbie and Jorge watched helplessly. Their furor grew. They wanted to know what those papers said.

"That was the moment of truth for me," Debbie says. "Up until then, I'd just thought we'd been dealing with incredibly incompetent people. Then I realized they had actually been hiding things. It had all been a setup."