ONE LIFE CHANGED; WHAT OF THE OTHERS?
by Regina Brett
November 12, 2003 Her lips still burn when she thinks about the cleaning fluid she drank to kill the pain.
The thin girl with the dark, wide eyes and short wild ponytail isn't sure how badly she damaged her esophagus. Or how badly the juvenile detention center staff damaged it by refusing to get her medical help.
Any day now, Cuyahoga County commissioners will sign papers for a settlement and Phylicia Brumfield will collect a modest check and the case will be closed.
But what will happen to the others who end up in the county's Juvenile Detention Center?
That concerns Phylicia more than any money she might see.
She reaches into her lilac backpack and pulls out the folded, yellowed newspaper article I wrote last year about her suicide attempt at the detention center.
Phylicia was a troubled runaway whose mom did drugs. When Phylicia was born, her grandma took her home from the hospital and raised her. Phylicia was her pet until three of Phylicia's siblings moved in. After that, Phylicia started running away to get attention.
Her grandma wanted to guarantee her safety, so she turned to the Juvenile Detention Center. Phylicia went to a youth detention center in Hudson. She got sent to the county detention center after she threw a fit over losing weekend privileges to visit her grandma.
After telling the staff she wanted to die, Phylicia had to wear a wristband marked "S," for suicide watch. But no one was watching when she went into a closet and drank a cup of cleaning fluid. She fell to her knees vomiting. The fluid burned her mouth, throat and esophagus.
Instead of sending her to the hospital, the staff sent her to The Box.
"It's a cold, hard room with nothing in it but the floor," Phylicia says.
No one took her to the hospital until 20 hours later, even though her mouth was too swollen to let her swallow water, even though she had vomited blood. She stayed in the hospital six days on IV fluids.
Why did she drink the poison?
"It was so nasty there, like a prison," she said. "My heart was just hurting so bad. I had nowhere to run, nowhere to turn."
At 17, her life is back on track. Phylicia moved into her grandma's home on the East Side of Cleveland a year ago. She braids hair to make money and attends classes at an alternative school called LifeSkills Center.
For the first time since she was 13, she's off probation.
She pulls out her report card to show off the A's in science, reading, geometry and pre-algebra. She wants to go to Cuyahoga Community College and become a nurse.
"I ran away and the streets ate me alive," she said. "I been through more than anybody could imagine. My life is going somewhere now."
Attorney Scott Levey filed a suit on her behalf in federal court against the county commissioners and the detention center staff. He asked me not to disclose terms of the proposed settlement, since it hasn't been signed.
For Phylicia, the money isn't the issue.
"It ain't gonna make or break me," she says.
What bothers her most are the stories she hears. She rattles off the names and streets of the kids in her neighborhood who have ended up at the detention center. They tell her nothing has changed.
"Could the same thing happen to somebody else?" she asks. "The next time it might be somebody's life."
Original story.
(c) 2003
The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.