Rescued from neglect, 5 brothers find hope
The odds were high against the children found living in squalor on Keystone Avenue 10 years ago. But a determined foster mom has helped five boys overcome scars left by a horrific case.
By Dawn Turner Trice
Tribune staff reporter

February 15, 2004

HOPKINS PARK, Ill. -- When the five brothers arrived at Claudine Christian's farm nearly 10 years ago, they weren't accustomed to having meals at a dining room table and they ate with their fingers.

For the first several nights, they slept in a huddle on the bedroom floor despite brand-new bunk beds purchased just for them. Nightmares crowded their dreams.

The brothers were five of 19 children Chicago police found in February 1994, in a squalid two-bedroom apartment at 219 N. Keystone Ave.

At the time, the Keystone Kids, as they would become known, made national news as one of the country's most disturbing cases of child neglect. Six mothers, five of whom were sisters, collected more than $4,500 a month in welfare checks and food stamps while young children slept on stained mattresses on the floor, waded through mounds of filth and depended on the older children to raise them.

Nearly all of the Keystone children--the original 19 eventually rose to 28 because some of the children weren't in the apartment that night--have either been adopted or have "aged out" of the child welfare system.

According to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the five brothers, who now range in age from 12 to 19, are among the last remaining in foster care. Only one other, an 18-year-old, continues to be a ward of the state.

In Christian's home, the brothers have defied what most child-welfare experts say is the lot for children who begin their lives under such horrific neglect. They are junior deacons in their small church. While the older boys once had abysmal school attendance, they now miss very few days of school. With Christian, they have chores and boundaries and distinct expectations. They also have frequent contact with their birth mother.

"When everything happened, we were tired of the cameras flashing and everybody knowing our business," says Johnnie Melton, 18. "We were ashamed. But there wasn't any of that here at Mama's house. She took us in and suddenly we had a real home."

Still, Christian, who has been their most ardent advocate, fears they may not have gotten all they need. Despite many successes, the young men struggle in school with behavioral and academic challenges. The oldest has graduated from high school but can barely read.

From the beginning, social workers knew that the children had experienced such profound deprivation that it was going to be difficult to place them in homes individually, let alone as a group.

When Christian agreed to care for the boys for three months until their mother was released from jail, she wasn't prepared for what was coming: The boys fought incessantly and destroyed items in the home. Her husband decided he couldn't take it anymore and moved out. The foster care placement itself would last more than 10 years.

"Before there was a system, there was a tradition," says Christian, 59, who raised five children of her own before the brothers came. "This was our history: If you knew somebody who couldn't raise their babies, then somebody who could stepped forward. This is just what family and neighbors did for one another."

Christian says she couldn't afford to adopt the brothers, but as they wound their way into her heart, despite the difficulties, neither could she imagine letting them go.