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Tarri Peterson Tells the Terrors
of DSS
By Ed
Oliver
March 22, 2001
In
dramatic testimony, Tarri Peterson told the committee that she
was taken by DSS from a loving, caring home along with her siblings.
She said her parents are the best parents she ever knew. The agency
asked her repeatedly if her parents abused the children, touched
them sexually or if her dad hit her mom. “I know in my heart that
none of that ever happened in my home. But over the five years
I was with DSS, they kept trying to tell me that I was lying and
that it did happen. How are you going to tell a ten year-old girl
what she experienced? You can’t.”
Tarri
told the committee that she ran from her foster home because they
bad-mouthed her parents, she was also raped while in DSS protective
care. She was put in a “key shelter.” Because of her previous
rape, Tarri was angry and swore at the manhandling by the staff
and resisted. She said they sat on her and put her in the “24
hour chair,” which meant she had to sit in her seat from the point
she woke up until she went to bed. She could only get up to go
to the bathroom. She was confined to the chair for 26 days straight
until she ran away and Erik Bleicken took her in. After two-and-a-half
months she was recaptured by DSS.
“The
first time I was ever restrained, I was tripped, my face went
dragging across the floor. I had the biggest rug burn. My clothes
were up to my neck. They were holding me, telling me to stay still,
how could I stay still? Marsha, I don’t know how much she weighed,
was sitting on my ribs. I had a rib problem from falling down
a flight of stairs in DSS custody and I had asthma. I ended up
being unconscious because she wouldn’t get off me, I could not
breathe. I was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, but I don’t even remember
the trip there.
“Being
brought back into DSS custody with people knowing I was abused,
people acted like they were blind-folded,” she said.
Tarri
said she is her brother Troy’s only contact with the outside world.
Troy did not fare well either in DSS custody and has been locked
away in Westboro State Hospital. She said just last night she
called the hospital and found out that Troy was caught trying
to call his grandparents, something he’s forbidden to do.
“I
asked, ‘Is there any reason why he would have called. Did you
touch my brother?’ The staff member I talked to said, ‘Absolutely
not.’ But you know something? I know what is going on behind those
doors because I was there. I don’t trust those people for a moment.”
Erik
Bleicken, who ran for Congress from the Cape in 1998 and 2000,
testified that he sheltered Tarri in 1998. He said she was covered
with bruises and had been taken to Cape Cod Hospital in an ambulance
three times within the year with life-threatening situations from
the DSS facility where she was being held.
Bleicken
described the futility of his efforts to get somebody to investigate
DSS. He said, “Nobody is in charge, there is no oversight.” He
said shortly after DSS recaptured Tarri, she was taken to the
hospital again by ambulance.
Tarri,
who is sixteen and a sophomore, is now free from DSS after Massachusetts
News publicized her story. She lives with her aunt and uncle.
Tarri is one of six children seized from her parents by DSS in
1995. (See January 2000 issue of Massachusetts News.)
Main
article:
Beacon
Hill Hears from Girl Raped by DSS
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