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Excerpt from muddyrivernews.com
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
It was on L.J.’s 11th birthday, in December 2022, that child welfare workers finally took him away. They arrived at his central Illinois home to investigate an abuse allegation and decided on the spot to remove the boy along with his baby brother and sister — the “Irish twins,” as their parents called them.
His mother begged to keep the children while her boyfriend told child welfare workers and the police called to the scene that they could take L.J.: “You wanna take someone? Take that little motherfucker down there or wherever the fuck he is at. I’ve been trying to get him out of here for a long time.”
By that time, L.J. told authorities he hadn’t been in a classroom for years, according to police records. First came COVID-19. Then, in August 2021 when he was going to have to repeat the third grade, his mother and her boyfriend decided that L.J. would be homeschooled and that they would be his teachers. In an instant, his world shrank to the confines of a one-bedroom apartment in the small Illinois college town of Charleston — no teachers, counselors or classmates.
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