He was one of the only ones
It was the dimples and the too-big clothes hanging off his slight body that wrecked her. Stephen was 10 the first time she saw him. Each time Elizabeth Pate looked at the Adoption Exchange website — and she looked at it obsessively for seven years — she looked for Stephen.
He was usually there, smiling next to a write-up about how much he wanted a “forever family,” that he liked animals and “keeping his room clean.” When he wasn’t there, Elizabeth assumed he had been adopted and thought, “Good for him,” then swallowed her own disappointment.
Inevitably, however, Stephen’s online profile would reappear among Colorado’s other hard-to-place children and teens running out of time, the ones whose lists of foster placements grew longer each year. The ones with behavioral problems or disabilities or who simply were no longer angelic, adaptable babies. Every time, Elizabeth
stopped at Stephen’s face, looked at his bright-blue eyes and sandyblond hair.
She happened to catch him once on “Wednesday’s Child,” a local CBS segment that featured children awaiting adoption. In-line skating at a rink in a black T-shirt, Stephen was introduced as a “clean-cut, nice young man” with a gentle spirit. His dimples flashed when he smiled. “I was hoping a banker. Or get a humane society and run it myself,” he said when the news reporter asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He loved animals, the reporter said.
Elizabeth had wished for this as long as she could remember, since she was a young girl and felt special, almost superior, because she was adopted. She had “been chosen,” her parents told her. Divorced and her twin boys grown, she hoped that after her move to Colorado in 2006, she would start the adoption process. Except life got in her way. Elizabeth vowed to call the adoption agency when her parttime job at the Denver Public Library turned into a full-time job, believing she would need more income to raise another child. But soon after she started working full-time, her mother, in poor health after years of alcoholism, moved in with her and stayed until she died three years later. And then there was a serious relationship with a boyfriend that spiraled into something toxic, again delaying her adoption plans.
It would take seven years for Elizabeth to make the call.
For any foster kid still in care at age 15 in Colorado, the odds of getting adopted are near zero.
Colorado adoption rates by age form a steadily unwavering line: The likelihood of being adopted plummets each year a child has another birthday.
About 55 percent of the babies and toddlers under age 3 who last year left foster-care placements were adopted, 524 children in all. Almost all of the rest went to relatives or back to their parents.
Just six teens 15 and older were adopted from foster care placements last year, less than 1 percent of the 948 children whose cases were closed in 2017. By contrast, about 200 aged out of the system without ever finding permanent homes, 83 went to juvenile detention and 68 ran away.
“You try and act good”
Stephen Morgan had no idea Elizabeth Pate was watching him grow up online. His childhood is a blur, and he has almost no memory of his life before age 12 — at least not many memories that he wants to talk about.
Stephen was 1 when he, along with his two sisters and a brother, was taken away from his biological parents in Texas. Stephen’s half-sister, as an infant, died before he was born, and Stephen was taken to the hospital at 2 months old because he hadn’t gained weight since birth. The four kids went into foster care and were adopted by a family that later moved to Colorado Springs.
Stephen can’t remember those parents, can’t picture what his siblings looked like and has to dig deep in his memory to recall their names.
He doesn’t remember whether they said goodbye when, after six years, his adoptive parents gave him back to the state of Colorado.
They kept his sisters and brother, but Stephen’s adoption was terminated when he was 7. “I only remember waking up somewhere else,” he said over a plate of sesame chicken at a Chinese restaurant in Arvada. In his file, it says Stephen’s behavioral problems were so severe, the family “feared for their lives” when they gave him away.
For the next 10 years, Stephen lived in residential treatment centers, group homes and, rarely, a regular home with foster parents. He remembers a short stint with a foster mother in Montrose who sent him away after he says he “got bored, went for a walk and got lost.” On his last car ride with her, Stephen remembers Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” was on the radio. A few days earlier, she had given him a Terrell Davis football jersey, which became one of his most-prized possessions.
Another foster mother once brought home a box with a puppy inside, one of the few happy memories of his time in the system. That gift, too, came a few days before he moved again.
At 12, Stephen went to youth lockup for the first time for throwing a book at a staff member at a residential treatment center and breaking her finger. At another center, an employee told Stephen and a boy to fight, and when Stephen — in a flash of rage — leveled the kid, he was punished.
Stephen still thinks about an older couple looking to adopt who invited him to their mini-ranch, where he rode one of their horses. They never asked to see him again. He hasn’t stopped wondering why, and he guesses it was because he was too wild, ran the horse too fast and recklessly. “I scared the hell out of them,” he said.
He recalls feeling as if he were “up for auction” when the Adoption Exchange took his photo for its website, although he hoped it would work.
Eventually, Stephen was taking 10 pills each day for his various behavioral problems, including a diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder. “They had me so drugged up, I didn’t know what to do,” he said. His homes included Gilliam Youth Services Center, a corrections facility in Denver, and the Tennyson Center, which is for kids who’ve been traumatized.
His number of placements reached the 20s.
At some point, he stopped caring.
“For a little while, you try and act good,” he said. “You try and do what they say. But after a while, it’s too much.”
“Stephen deserved a home”
It was 2013 when Elizabeth finally found herself alone in her three-bedroom home in Broomfield, ready to help the boy she had seen only in pictures.
“I was naive enough to think I could call up the county and ask for that kid,” Elizabeth said. Stephen was still in foster care, an El Paso County agency told her, and Elizabeth would have to become a certified foster parent — a process that would end up taking 10 months — before she could meet him.
The list of Colorado foster kids predicted to have the toughest time getting adopted has 81 names.
Among them is an 18-year-old boy with a mental health diagnosis who has lived in the system for nearly his entire life, through 15 placements. His parents’ rights were terminated when he was 2. Another 18-year-old boy has blown through 46 placements in the past 11 years.
One youth on the list — now 18 years old — ran away from her last of 24 placements in December 2016 and has not been found. The youngest child is 7 and has been in the system for more than five years.
It was a “match party” at a bowling alley put on by nonprofit adoption agency Lutheran Family Services where Elizabeth and Stephen first met, on Dec. 6, 2013.
It was one month before his 18th birthday.
Stephen, living at a Colorado Springs group home with a few other foster teens, had been looking for an apartment and a job, counting the days until he would turn 18 and emancipate from the child welfare system. He had a semester left in high school and wasn’t sure whether he would finish.
Still, he was open to meeting Elizabeth. After they bowled — Elizabeth won — they met a few more times over the next couple of weeks. They both liked to talk and chatted easily. “He must have told me he was going to be 18 about 100 times in that first conversation,” Elizabeth said, with an eye roll and a laugh.
The first time Stephen walked into Elizabeth’s house, he was bombarded by her king-sized German shepherd, Apollo. It was love at first sight, for both of them. And hanging out with Elizabeth felt different than any other potential matchup, too. It was more relaxed, Stephen said. “She was the only one who felt like that.”
Stephen knew that was due, in part, to having mellowed out and having learned to control his anger — if not his depression — in his later teens.
For her part, Elizabeth, at least in a small way, felt she knew Stephen already. When she read his file and met with his child welfare workers, it didn’t scare her. It made her determined.
“Stephen deserved a home,” Elizabeth said. “More than anyone.”
Adopted at age 19
Stephen moved into Elizabeth’s house within a month of their meeting, fast-tracked by the county so he could start Legacy High School in time for spring semester.
Their first real fight came after Stephen filled a backpack with alcohol — that Elizabeth intended to use for Christmas — and gave it to a friend at school. Another time, Stephen crawled through a window screen because he lost his house key, setting off a financial setback for Elizabeth after a neighbor called police to report a burglary. Elizabeth ended up with $2,000 in vet bills after her dogs tusseled with a police canine.
For a while, Stephen slept on a dog bed with Apollo, and he wore his clothes to bed, always ready to leave in a hurry, Elizabeth figured. He barricaded his door at night, with Apollo on the inside.
Stephen graduated that spring, squeaking through with a D- in a required computer course. Elizabeth gave him two choices: Get a job or enroll in college. Stephen eventually chose an 11-month residential Job Corps program and earned a certificate in culinary arts. Although he loves to cook at home, the idea of whipping out plates in a restaurant stresses him out. When he first moved in with Elizabeth, he cooked and ate only two things: boxed macaroni and cheese, and ramen noodles.
When Stephen arrived, his first instinct was to lie, about anything. He no longer does, Elizabeth said.
About a year and a half after they met, long enough to learn to trust each other, Elizabeth adopted Stephen. He was 19.
“Sometimes he’ll say, ‘I knew you were going to keep me. You weren’t going to give up on me,’ ” Elizabeth said. “But at the same time, he was terrified it wasn’t going to work.”
Now he calls her mom. Stephen, 22, the fringe of his brown hair hanging over his light eyes, has been working the graveyard shift at a Walmart in Arvada, where he had moved in with a high school girlfriend. They recently broke up, and Stephen is back home with Elizabeth, hoping to transfer to a Walmart in Broomfield. He’s learning how to drive.
Although it took seven years for Elizabeth to meet him, Stephen says she came at just the right
time. If she had tried to adopt him sooner, he said, it wouldn’t have lasted — he would have shattered that placement like the rest.
And if Elizabeth hadn’t come when she did? “I would be homeless,” he said. “I really appreciate her so much that I don’t know how to show it.”
Stephen says that when he’s older, he will adopt foster teens. He also hopes to someday find his siblings, which is why he kept their last name of Morgan instead of taking Elizabeth’s. They are Angela, Carrie and Brandon, according to his foster care documents.
He said he deals with depression “24/7,” but after seeing 19 therapists while in foster care, he’s “pretty much over” seeing another one.
Breach of trust
About two years after adopting Stephen, Elizabeth thought she had it in her to adopt another teenager.
The boy moved in just before his 14th birthday after about seven years in the system, removed from his biological parents because of abuse. He lasted at Elizabeth’s eight months, blowing up their relationship in spectacular fashion.
The teen stole Elizabeth’s car and her credit card in the night, went joy-riding with two other boys — ages 12 and 14 — and crashed in Boulder, totaling the Nissan Versa Note. Elizabeth found out the next morning when Broomfield police knocked on her door to ask whether she knew where her car was. “In my driveway?” she asked.
The boy was charged with three felonies for the theft and crash, but he eventually was convicted of a misdemeanor. He was sent to Denver Children’s Home, where he repeatedly called Elizabeth and cried. “He called me mom and said he wanted to be adopted,” she said.
It broke her heart, Elizabeth said, but the car theft was the last thing she could handle — emotionally and financially — after he had stolen her credit card multiple times and set fires in her house.
“I still believe adopting teens is very important,” she said. “How many of us can imagine if the day we turned 18, we lost everyone in our family and it was just us from here on out? We can’t.”
She agonizes over that, about how much more she has left to give. “I tend to be very trusting of people until they give me reason not to be,” she said. The breach of trust made her feel like she lost part of herself.
Her foster care license was due for renewal last fall.
Elizabeth let it expire.