Mariah and the Toy Box
Authorities returned a 3-year-old girl to her foster family after she had ingested meth. Then she got a second dose — and died.
Spiders crawled up her tiny limbs, as monkeys danced and bunnies hopped about. ¶ Her fingers curled up in jagged spasms, her belly shook violently, and her pupils grew nearly as wide as her big brown eyes. Her heart pumped as fast as it could to cope with the methamphetamine coursing through her 33-pound body. ¶ Little Mariah, a 3-year-old born in Berkeley, was “tweaking again,” her foster brother would tell investigators — detailing the extended hallucinations and body convulsions in the hours before she died on Oct. 16, 2015.
Again. Thirteen days earlier, just days after her new foster parents took Mariah and her older brother Jeremyah into their Stockton home, the agitated girl was rushed to the emergency room where doctors found traces of meth in her system.
At the time, medical staff decided Mariah had ingested the drug while living with her biological mother in Oakland, San Joaquin County prosecutors say. The girl was treated then returned to the foster home. It was a death sentence.
Hundreds of pages of reports and records from San Joaquin Child Protective Services, the hospital, police and the coroner obtained by this news organization show a series of failures by the people tasked with protecting Mariah, from the social workers who chose not to remove her from the foster home after the first incident, to the doctors who appear to have accepted the foster mother’s suggestions that the drug poisoning occurred before the girl was in her care.
But a leading toxicology expert briefed on the case said
no doctor or social worker should have believed that excuse. Mariah had been away from her biological mother for at least three days when she arrived at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Stockton, and such severe symptoms would surface immediately after drug ingestion, the expert said.
“I think CPS made a mistake. CPS should not have placed that child back with the foster family,” said Bruce Goldberger, University of Florida College of Medicine professor and director of toxicology.
Bill Grimm, senior attorney for Oakland’s National Center for Youth Law, said after being briefed on the case that the Child Protective Services’ decision has profound implications.
“The decision to return this child to the foster family raises serious questions about the quality of investigations conducted by the agency and is evidence of its failure to make the child’s health and safety the paramount concern,” he said. “It suggests that many other children entrusted to this agency are at risk and calls for an independent assessment of how abuse and neglect investigations are conducted.”
The toddler took her final breaths alone, during a nap on her pink bed with a baby blanket. Her foster mother’s boyfriend, Ernest Stevens III, found Mariah’s lifeless body not far from where he later claimed to have discovered a bag of white crystals on Mariah’s toy box.
Four months later, Stevens hanged himself as investigators probed the girl’s death. Although authorities do not identify the suspect in Mariah’s death by name, a statement from the San Joaquin district attorney says the suspect committed suicide, and no other suspects were identified. The DA’s office would not address whether they believe the poisoning was accidental or intentional.
Neither Mariah’s mother nor her foster mom would speak for this article. But the outcome continues to gnaw at Mariah’s anguished grandmother, Veronica Thomas, who is calling for someone to be held accountable.
“They not only put one kid in danger they put two kids in danger,” Thomas said. “The methamphetamine was around the house, if my other kid took that meth, he would have been dead as well. It was by the grace of God he didn’t eat that stuff.”
Early life, new home
Mariah Sultana Mustafa was born Oct. 2, 2012 at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley to a 19-yearold mother, Sumayyah Sultana Mustafa. The name on her birth certificate was misspelled — “Mariha.” No father was listed. She had a brother, Jeremyah, two years older, and they spent their early years with their grandmother in Oakland.
Little could be learned about those days. Alameda County refused to release child protective services documents requested by this news agency despite state law that makes clear such records become public after a child’s death from neglect or abuse. But San Joaquin County CPS records, which cover the short time Mariah spent in Stockton, indicate Mariah’s biological mother was a drug user and the little girl was “physically/sexually abused.”
On Sept. 30, 2015, Alameda County authorities removed the siblings from their Oakland home and with the help of placement agency Triad Family Services, found foster parent Maria Moore. Moore collected the brother and sister in Hayward the next day and drove them to her Stockton home. Like other foster parents, Moore, who had been taking in children for 17 years, was paid for providing foster care.
But CPS records show Moore had a spotty record. Since 2012, six incidents at the 44-year-old’s home were referred to CPS. Two times, allegations of “general neglect” were sustained against Moore, records show.
They involved Moore admitting she shared medications among the minors under her care and a finding that Moore and Stevens had a history of “coaching” their kids to lie in previous investigations. In October 2014, Moore signed a safety plan that said she would “make sure they are not exposed to drugs, harmful substances or threats of physical harm.”
Mariah and Jeremyah moved in with Moore on Oct. 1, 2015. They shared the home with their foster mother’s two biological children and two older foster kids. Stevens, the boyfriend, split his time between Moore’s home and his parents’ house next door. Stevens had received approval from San Joaquin County in January 2015 allowing him to be alone with Moore’s foster children, according to records.
It’s not easy placing siblings into the same foster home because the pool of willing recipients is smaller. Moore herself was reluctant to take both Mariah and Jeremyah, she would later tell investigators. She had wanted only one child, and she wanted that child to have special needs because “there is more compensation,” records show. It was Stevens who said they should take both siblings, though they were much younger than Moore’s other foster children, according to the CPS records. Moore soon regretted doing so.
“I was even going to call Joanne (Willis of Triad) to give Mariah back because it was causing too many problems with Ernest (Stevens),” Moore would tell an investigator.
Hallucinations
The first signs of trouble came on Oct. 3, 2015, days before Mariah’s third birthday. The shy girl who liked to wear her hair in buns and pink nail polish became hyper, talkative and spoke to herself.
Her demeanor grew stranger during an afternoon visit to a neighborhood park. Mariah spoke about seeing monkeys and bunnies. She began to shake and sweat and her heart raced. According to records, Moore waited until about 9 p.m. to take the girl to St. Joseph’s Medical Center, a few miles from the family home.
Around 11 p.m., a hospital urine sample revealed traces of methamphetamine in Mariah’s system. In their records doctors noted an “altered level of consciousness” and “amphetamine abuse.”
San Joaquin County records don’t fully address what doctors and investigators concluded about the origin of the methamphetamine. But some things are clear: A nurse referred the case to San Joaquin CPS. Stockton police officer Douglas Sheldon responded to the hospital on Oct. 4 shortly before 4 a.m. and spoke to nurse Jeremy Massey, who suggested that the drug poisoning had occurred before Mariah came to Stockton. But it appears that his suggestion was based only on the words of foster mother Moore.
“Jeremy advised that Maria has only had custody of Mariah since 10/1/15 and that it would be possible for tests to find residual traces of narcotics from prior to 10/1/15,” Sheldon wrote in his report.
Officer Sheldon then spoke to Moore: “Maria did not know where the children lived prior to being taken by CPS but advised that she was told by their social worker that their parents had a history of substance abuse,” Sheldon wrote. She also told the officer that Mariah had seemed strange from the start — disoriented and not talking the first night in her foster home, acting “weird” the second night and then becoming “really hyper” and talking a lot the day of the park visit.
Hospital triage records also note that Moore told medical staff that Mariah’s biological mother was a drug user: “Per report: Exposure to crack cocaine in utero or inside the home.”
The records don’t say definitively that the hospital employees believed Moore’s story. But last month, more than two years after Mariah died, the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office released a statement explaining why no charges had been filed and said this about why Mariah was returned to her foster home: “Medical personnel determined the child was suffering from exposure to methamphetamine from the housing prior to Ms. Moore.”
In a statement, hospital spokeswoman Michelle Willow expressed sympathy to Mariah’s family but said confidentiality laws prevented hospital employees from speaking about the specifics of the girl’s care.
Darren Kessler, an attorney representing Mariah’s brother, said there is no indication Mariah had ever been exposed to drugs by her biological family. After his sister died, Jeremyah told investigators that he never saw Mariah hallucinate or act strangely when they lived in their Oakland home.
Moore had no criminal record. Stevens had no arrest record in Stockton, according to Stockton police spokesman Officer Joseph Silva. Police conducted a welfare check when Moore brought Mariah home from the hospital and found the home clean and the other children sleeping. The officer marked the case open and noted the need to identify and contact Mariah’s biological parents, according to a police report. On Tuesday, Silva said Officer Sheldon forwarded the case to Stockton detectives but could not say if they contacted the child’s family at the time.
‘Poor thing’
What happened next is now the subject of a lawsuit, filed by Kessler on behalf of Mariah’s brother against Alameda County, social workers Diane Davis Maas and Sue May, placement agency Triad, and Moore.
Kessler said the toddler should have been removed immediately from the foster home the first time she was found with drugs in her system. Instead, the attorney argues a lack of urgency — brought on by neglect and a failure to train social workers properly — left Mariah with Moore.
“Both Triad and Alameda County, when alerted to the first exposure to methamphetamine of Mariah, did nothing to follow up, to look into, to investigate what happened,” Kessler said. “The very people who were entrusted by law to protect these children when taken from their biological
home … those very people dropped the ball when something as alarming as meth ingestion of a twoyear-old.”
Triad CEO Nancy Reagh and Rebecca Widen, an attorney for Alameda County, each said they could not discuss the case. Representatives who oversee San Joaquin County CPS did not return phone calls or emails.
But child welfare records from San Joaquin County show Triad was alerted to Mariah’s positive meth test on Oct. 4, 2015. The next day, Joanne Willis, of Triad, phoned Alameda County social worker Davis Maas. The pair eventually spoke by phone on Oct. 6., according to notes from a San Joaquin social worker, and Davis Maas’ response was to say: “Poor thing.”
Willis also visited Moore’s home on Oct. 4, Oct. 7 and Oct. 14 and had “no concerns at any of the visits,” CPS records indicate.
Toy Box
Two days after Willis’ final visit, Mariah began exhibiting the same symptoms as before. In interviews with San Joaquin social workers, Moore said Mariah was up all night and into the morning of Oct. 16. Instead of taking her to the hospital, Moore said she hugged the girl and tried to calm her.
Later that morning, the foster mother took another child to St. Joseph’s Medical Center for a routine appointment, but despite Mariah’s increasing agitation, she left the toddler at home with Stevens. As her condition deteriorated, Stevens brought Mariah next door to his parent’s home, and his mother said he should take the girl to the hospital. But Stevens said Moore had told them to expect the girl would have more withdrawal symptoms.
His mother later told police: “Mariah was shaky, her hands were cramping up, and she was not making any sense verbally.” Mariah’s 5-year-old brother told police that “her tummy was shaking really hard” and she was “talking about spiders that weren’t there and she wouldn’t quit talking.”
Stevens returned home and put Mariah down for a nap. When he next checked on her she was cold and unresponsive. Moore, who had returned home, called 911 and performed CPR before an ambulance rushed the girl to St. Joseph’s. As paramedics prepared to leave the home, Stevens handed an EMT a bag with a small white rock — which later tested positive for meth — and said he found it on Mariah’s toy box, the paramedic would tell investigators.
Stevens later told a CPS investigator that when he found the white rock he tested it on his tongue and knew it wasn’t cocaine or crack. Asked how he knew that, Stevens told the social worker “he used to use these drugs about 20 years ago” but he insisted he did not use drugs any more.
Asked why he didn’t call 911 earlier, Stevens said “I’m not the foster parent.”
Death
As Moore, Stevens and their teenage foster son followed the ambulance to the hospital, Stevens began acting strangely, Moore said, according to the records. He insisted on stopping at a gas station and went inside for five to eight minutes to talk with the teenager, who had been with him when he supposedly found the meth baggie.
Dr. Melissa Clark, who treated Mariah, said in her notes the girl was likely dead on arrival, but medical staff continued to care for her. She pronounced Mariah dead at 11:28 a.m.
“Staff and team emotionally upset and sad. Took a moment to PAUSE in memory of the young child,” Clark wrote.
After Mariah died, Moore told Clark a new story about the first hospitalization, saying she thought the girl had found meth in the park. But Stevens lost control after hearing the news.
“(He was yelling) ‘Were there drugs there?’ ‘I know where the drugs came from’,” Clark wrote in her notes, adding that she felt unsafe and opened the door to the small private room. “The foster father at that point said he felt he had failed her because she was a baby and she died.”
The final CPS report agreed with Stevens.
“Even though the cause of death is unknown, it was apparent by everyone’s description of Mariah in the home on the morning of Oct. 16, 2015, that Mariah should have been taken for medical treatment prior to being put down for a nap based off of her behaviors,” the report concluded.
In the hours after her death, Stevens began to look more like a suspect. Moore told investigators he frequently withdrew money from her bank accounts and that when they first started dating eight years prior, he borrowed money from her to buy cocaine, and she once saw him use it. She described how the children’s medications had started to disappear from a locked medicine cabinet, to which Stevens had a key.
An autopsy found 13 mg/l of meth in Mariah’s blood.
“The concentration of methamphetamine is VERY high and consistent with accidental ingestion,” toxicology expert Goldberger wrote in an email. “There is no possible way she could survive.”
Any shot at criminal justice for Mariah ended Feb. 15, 2016, the day Stevens killed himself. His father found him in a spare bedroom hanging from a shoestring. A San Joaquin Coroner’s Office narrative report said the family told investigators Stevens “was very distraught about a Child Protective Services case that had recently reopened.” He had a blood-alcohol level of 0.18 percent, the report noted.
“This child’s death is a tragedy,” San Joaquin District Attorney Tori VerberSalazar said in a statement last month. “While emotional frustration and disappointment come with the lack of criminal charges, we must abide by the guiding principles of law. After careful review of the reports covering this time frame, it was determined there were no charges against Ms. Moore.”
None of the agencies involved would say whether they opened internal investigations into the handling of Mariah’s case.
‘You should go’
On a recent Friday, reporters visited Mariah’s former foster home in a tract development on the northern outskirts of Stockton. As a wind chime with ceramic butterflies gently swayed, a dog barked and a neighbor played loud music as he worked on his car. But no one answered repeated knocks on the door of the two-story yellow home. Moore also did not return multiple calls for comment nor did she respond to a note left under her welcome mat.
In a brief phone interview a few months earlier, Moore said after she was cleared of wrongdoing, her other foster children were returned to her home.
Stevens’ parents could not be reached. A woman who twice answered their door finally told a reporter: “My parents got your note and don’t want you to come here any more. You should go.”
Back in Oakland, Mariah’s biological grandmother said her granddaughter’s death has ripped the family apart.
“The system failed me,” said Thomas, adding that the childrens’ mother has been going through a tough time, but didn’t elaborate. “(Maria Moore) is still walking around. My grandkid is dead.”
Similar to her misspelled birth certificate, Mariah’s last name is spelled wrong — “Mustasa” — in her autopsy report. Her remains are buried in a section of Hayward’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery for babies and toddlers, under a marker calling her “Our Precious Little Baby.” Pink artificial flowers, a plastic angel clutching a heart and a worn-out toy car keep her company.