In 1987, nine days before Christmas, Thomas Waters-Rimmer, a first-year college student, filed a $5 million lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Cleveland against Lorain County, its commissioners, and its child welfare agency. He accused the three of negligence, holding them responsible for the harm he suffered after the child welfare agency, the Lorain County Children Services Board, removed him from the custody of his abusive father when he was four and placed him in a home where he was sexually abused for twelve years. The focus of the complaint was Children Services but legal protocol required that the county and its commissioners also be named as defendants.
The suit—with its all too familiar allegation of a child protection agency failing to protect a child—sparked major news coverage. A CBS-TV affiliate in Vermont, where Tom lived, first reported the story. The broadcast was carried by a sister station in Cleveland, where the city’s major newspaper, the Plain Dealer, printed follow-up stories. And the Chronicle-Telegram in Elyria where the administrative office of Children Services was located, about thirty miles southwest of Cleveland, also published stories. Tom and one of his lawyers also were featured on a talk show of Cleveland radio station WWWE.
I learned about the lawsuit four months later in April 1988 when a literary agent phoned me in New York City, where I lived, provided some details about the lawsuit, and asked if I would be interested in working with Tom on a book. He called me because of a book I had written about kids who murdered their parents. Several chapters were based on interviews with sons and daughters who, because of the psychological, physical, and sexual violence they had suffered in their homes, killed their mothers and fathers. I believed the slayings were the only means for many of the kids to protect themselves and that the sentences for those imprisoned were exceedingly harsh in light of the sadistic treatment they suffered in their homes.
Those opinions had prompted the agent to contact me. If I could sympathize with murderous kids, he reasoned, then I should certainly be able to sympathize with his client, who had not killed anyone even though he had been cruelly mistreated by his natural father and then savagely abused by his foster father. Tom was seeing a psychologist regularly and attending college full time in Vermont, the agent said. He had not succumbed to the harmful effects of a brutal childhood like the kids I had interviewed. He was leading a normal life. He wanted justice, not revenge. That was his reason for filing the suit. He hoped it would make a difference in the lives of other kids.
Tom, the agent intimated, was on a crusade.
I told the agent I was too busy to take on another project. I was teaching full time in the journalism department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, working part time at the New York Post and developing a proposal for a book about kids on death row. But besides having no spare time, I also was skeptical about working with Tom. I had learned from my earlier research that it was very difficult for kids to talk about what they had suffered in their homes even though many of the ones I had interviewed had told me more than they had told their lawyers and their
