WHAT HAPPENED TO JOHNNIE JORDAN?

From journalist Toth (Atlantic Monthly, Business Week, etc.), a disturbing story of a 14-year-old boy who axed to death his foster mother.

In the same vein as the author’s Orphans of the Living (1997), this blistering work focuses on the foster-care system and the ways in which it has failed our children. Toth’s introductory chapter describes the murder in graphic detail. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, short-term foster parents to Jordan, had repeatedly called Children Services begging caseworkers to remove the hostile teenager from their home. The elderly couple feared his anger and were unable to control him. Social workers replied that they had nowhere else to place Jordan, who had moved through 19 foster homes in 7 years. On a cold January morning, Mr. Johnson went out to replace a space heater that had broken the previous night. While he was gone, Jordan fell into a rage, brutally murdered Mrs. Johnson, set her corpse on fire, and ran away. (Caught and convicted, he won’t be eligible for parole until he’s 70.) The narrative becomes even grimmer as Toth uncovers Jordan’s background. His parents were crack addicts and pedophiles. They prostituted their seven offspring in exchange for drugs, as well as sexually and physically abusing the children themselves. Taken from his parents at the age of eight, Jordan fared little better in a string of foster homes. When he was not being abused, he was molesting younger foster children in the same household. Toth presents a well-researched, compassionate portrait of Jordan while never excusing the severity of his crimes. She supports the proposal of a separate foster-care agency designed specifically for disturbed children, who would receive extensive therapy, yet be safely removed from the general population. “There is never justification for murder,” the author notes. “But there are reasons why children kill and why, if we do not heed their cries of pain and intervene decisively to help them, we will see countless more children who murder.”

A chilling account.