Dontel Jeffers

The Boston Herald

Somebody loved him enough to dress him up and scrub his face and put braids in his hair and sit him on a chair and take his picture. And someone loved him enough to give him his smile. Dontel Jeffers' smile is real. No artifice. No faking it for the camera.

So he was happy once. The proof is in the picture, which accompanies the headlines about this 4-year-old's death.

A dog is electrocuted on a city street, and there is hell to pay. NStar failed to do its job and to make certain this doesn't happen again - it has happened before - the family of the year-old boxer, Cassius, killed last week, is suing NStar for $740,000, the annual salary of NStar's CEO.

It's a bold move that may finally force change.

But why is it that nothing ever changes for the children - even when one dies tragically?

A few years ago I visited a flat where there were 10 children - the youngest ones in filthy diapers; the older ones in filthy clothes - all of them on a filthy floor, mice droppings and food wrappings everywhere. A visiting nurse was treating one child for asthma and another for some other ailment. The mother was pregnant again.

In a cleaner place on the other side of town, a 4-year-old watched her father shoot up and then pass out, his heart barely beating until EMTs arrived.

Too many children don't stand a chance.

Dontel Jeffers seems to have been one of them. Born to a mother who loves drugs more than she loved him, he played second fiddle from the start. She had a choice. And she didn't chose him. Same thing with his father who was deported because of a drug conviction.

But here is this boy, smiling anyway, maybe because he had aunts and uncles and a grandmother who loved him.

Last May, when his father was deported, the boy's grandmother, Agatha Jeffers, went to court to get custody of Dontel. But the court sent the boy home to his troubled mother instead.

In November, DSS removed Dontel and his younger half-sister from her care. But it wasn't the grandmother's home they took the boy to. Dontel was brought to a residential facility in Dorchester run by St. Mary's Church, where his relatives visited and took him home on weekends.

When they arrived on Sunday, Feb. 27, though, they were told Dontel had been moved. And though they demanded to know where he was, no one could or would tell them.

Ten days later Dontel, who was in a foster home, died with bruises all over his body.

His grandmother was scheduled to appear in court next Tuesday with proof that her place was deleaded and now safe for her grandson. For lack of a nail, a kingdom was lost. For lack of a mother, a father, a system that was supposed to protect him, and for lack of public outrage - there are hundreds of Dontels - this boy was lost.

An electric grid is fixable. You can pinpoint the live wires. But how do you fix a huge, complex, overburdened childcare system that is trying to do what parents will not.