Boy left in Nebraska coming back to Georgia

The Smyrna boy whose mother took him to Nebraska to find help for behavioral problems should be back in Georgia on Wednesday — the same day a custody hearing may determine whether the boy rejoins his family or becomes a foster child.

The 12-year-old was scheduled to fly Wednesday morning from Lincoln, Neb., to Atlanta, said Joe Kelly, attorney for Lancaster County, Neb. Lincoln is in Lancaster County, and is where Tysheema Brown ended her 1,000-mile drive Saturday to get help for her son.

Georgia Department of Human Resources employees were to accompany him on the flight, said Kelly. Once the airplane left the ground, said Kelly, the boy no longer would be Nebraska’s concern.

Also scheduled on Wednesday: a hearing in Cobb County juvenile courts to determine the child’s custody. He could become a ward of the Cobb County Division of Family and Children Services or return to Brown.

A letter requesting the court hearing says Brown “effectively abandoned all parental responsibilities” when she left him in Nebraska, according to a copy she read over the telephone.

“I don’t have a lawyer,” Brown said. “I’m going to be, like, screwed.”

Georgia officials said little about the case. “I think we can tell you a lot more after the custody hearing,” said Dena Smith, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Human Resources.

Nor have authorities in Nebraska said much about the story of a mom who drove more than 15 hours to find a place for her son.

Friday night, Brown told her son and 7-year-old daughter to get in the family’s 2005 Chevy, she said. The car headed west, crossing mountains and time zones, arriving the next day in Lincoln. There, Brown dropped off the boy at a hospital, taking advantage of Nebraska’s “safe haven” law. Nebraska is the only state that allows parents to drop off children as old as 17. In Georgia, the age cap is 7 days old.

Brown said she hoped Nebraska officials would enroll her son at Boys Town, which has been taking care of troubled children for nearly a century. Brown, 33, acted from experience. A one-time teen runaway herself, she said Boys Town High School helped get her life straight.

If the school got her headed in the right direction, Brown reasoned, surely it could help her son. A sixth-grader, he’d been suspended twice, disrupted classes and was on probation for stealing a camera, she said.

She no longer believed Cobb schools, courts or social services agencies could help her son.

“I didn’t feel like I had any other choice” but to take the boy to Nebraska, said Brown, a single mother. “The system definitely failed him.”

Others say Brown didn’t work the system to her advantage.

“We have some wonderful programs in Georgia, but there are some challenges in finding them,” said Normer Adams, executive director of the Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children. The organization is a referral agency for child welfare programs across the state.

Each county offers programs to help families struggling with unruly children, he said. School systems, Adams said, also have specialists to detect mental-health and behavioral problems in students. Most child-counseling programs cost from $40 to $310 a day, Adams said. Others are free with either private or Medicaid insurance.

He characterized Georgia’s child-welfare system as fractured, meaning a case gets transferred from one agency to another.

“This child will cost the state of Georgia … if it will be with the juvenile court, foster care or behavior care,” he said.

The mother could have taken advantage of free counseling offered through the schools, said Jay Dillon, a spokesman for the Cobb County School District. Administrators twice offered her counseling, and she refused both times, he said

Brown agreed that school officials offered the counseling, but said her son already was getting help from another counseling agency. The schools’ offer, she said, came “too late.”

Now, Brown said, she wants to hear from her son. When she talked to him Monday night, the child sounded upbeat, but a little apprehensive, too.

“He’s doing fine,” Brown said. “He’s not wanting to come back and wind up in a foster home.”

Staff Writer Alexis Stevens contributed to this report.