Miami Herald
Child's death was anything but a suicide
By FRED GRIMM
April 27, 2009

Calling the death of Gabriel Myers a ''suicide'' lets his killers off
the hook.

The 7-year-old was propelled by a vast conspiracy of abuse and neglect
and malpractice. The boy only finished the job on April 15, when he
locked himself in the bathroom of his Margate foster home and coiled a
shower hose around his neck.

We know that his mother, currently in jail in Ohio, her parental rights
severed by the courts, seemed to be preoccupied with other matters,
including drugs.

AN ALARMING PATHOLOGY

And we know that something awful in his short, sad life had triggered an
alarming pathology of aggressive sexual behaviors. This stuff doesn't
occur spontaneously. Someone, reportedly an older child, inflicted this
kind of learned behavior on a small child. Gabriel was abused.

''Kids act out like this because someone hurt them,'' said Andrea Moore,
the longtime child advocate in Broward County and director of Florida's
Children First. ``And they are trying to tell us they're hurt.''

Gabriel was a child of obvious and urgent needs. He needed help,
attention and therapy. What he got was Lexapro, Zyprexa and Symbyax (a
combination of Zyprexa and Prozac). None of the three powerful
psychotropic drugs doled out to Gabriel while he was a foster child was
approved for children. All three drugs were known to raise the risk of
''suicidal tendencies'' in children.

And Moore points out that none of these anti-psychotic and
anti-depressant drugs had a damn thing to do with repairing Gabriel's
underlying problems. ``Give me a break. There is no drug that cures the
pain of childhood sexual abuse.''

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS

The drugs, which come with a long and sobering list of possible side
effects in children, have been doled out to troublesome kids to make
them more manageable. Eli Lilly was fined $1.4 billion -- that's billion
with a B -- in March for nefariously marketing the unauthorized use of
Zyprexa for children, despite the known risks. A big chunk of those
kids, like Gabriel, were foster kids, whose lives by definition were
inflicted with the kind of trauma apt to cause unruly behavior.

State officials across the country seemed happy to pay $25 a pill to
keep their unruly wards quiet. Eli Lilly also targeted elderly Medicaid
patients. The federal lawsuit cited a ``thinly veiled marketing of
Zyprexa as an effective chemical restraint for demanding, vulnerable and
needy patients.''

Foster kids were essentially guinea pigs in a vast, public-financed drug
experiment.

Of course, safeguards supposedly protected foster kids. Florida requires
so-called ''informed consent'' before some doctor pumps a kid up with
psychotropics. Parents are asked first -- though most foster children
would hardly be foster children if it wasn't for lousy decisions by
irresponsible parents.\

Absent a parent, a judge must give the OK for psychotropics. But the
courts and case workers from the Department of Children & Families are
all too overwhelmed by caseloads and beset by budget cuts to spend time
contesting a doctor's judgment.

''No one was looking out for Gabriel,'' Moore said.

What Gabriel got, instead of real help, were powerful adult drugs laden
with dangerous side effects. His cause of death was listed as suicide.
It was just another misdiagnosis.

  _____  

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