LaneDeGregorywrites

I think if the child protection workers had taken Dani away when they first visited her, when she was 2, then again when she was 3, or even if they had at least revisited her to do a welfare check, or insisted she be put in some sort of day care or pre-school, or visit a doctor, they would have had four extra years to help repair / heal her and make up for the severe neglect and malnutrition which have damaged her for life. I think, once Dani was discovered, that so many folks did so much to try to help her, I'm not sure how much more they could have done ... For that first year she was with the Lierows, she got every kind of therapy imaginable. But once they moved from Florida to Tennessee, and lost the umbrella of protection the Florida adoption folks provided, Dani's new parents stopped taking her to outside therapies and left her instruction entirely to the public school. So I don't know if more individualized speech / occupational / physical therapy would have helped from age 10 til 19 ... but it might have.

Here's a link to the most recent story that just came out. I visited her for her 19th birthday: http://www.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/ Short answer: She didn't recover much over the last few years, in fact she seemed to have regressed a bit. But she's much more content, not running away or lashing out. She let me hold her hand. And she actually laughed, which made me so happy to know there's a bit of joy in her now.

When I set out to write Dani's story, I truly didn't know that she couldn't talk. It wasn't until that first day when I met her in person that I realized how lost ... or locked-in ... she was. So I had to shift my reporting perspective entirely and write the story through the perspective of her rescuers and new family rather than her own eyes. You're right: I always want to share the story from the main character's viewpoint. But that just wasn't possible for this one. I so wish I could have navigated enough to know what was going on in her mind ...

I had never heard of a feral child before I started this story. When the foster care workers called Dani that, I only thought of Mowgli from the Jungle Book. I didn't know that was possible in 2007 central Florida, in a neighborhood where folks could see into each other's windows ... so the reporting and research were what really informed me about early childhood development and brain pathways that could shut down if they weren't used ... the psychologist said that even if Dani had been left with a TV on, or even a radio, she might have been able to develop some speech patterns that weren't possible since she seemed to be raised almost entirely in silence. ... On a personal level, this story was very difficult. My youngest son is the same age as Dani, and I was travelling weekends to visit Dani's new family, who lived three hours away. So I had all this mommy guilt about missing dance recitals and birthday parties and Little League games while I was reporting this story, then I had all this disgust at the birth mother for neglecting her child almost to death, then I had all this admiration / I could never do that ... for the Lierows, who took her in. So there were all these consuming, conflicting emotions which made it hard to be objective, especially about the birth mother.

It took us awhile to work up the courage to knock on her door. But when we did, she opened up and asked what we wanted. I told her we were working on a story about her daughter and she started crying, "My daughter? Have you seen my daughter?" Then she invited us in and offered us coffee, cigarettes or kittens ... and thanked us for wanting to hear her side of the story. She also gave me a trash bag full of court and medical records that I never would've been able to get on my own because of privacy reasons!

But when we went to see her this time, for this follow-up story, she threatened to call police on us for trespassing!

She never even finished the probation or community service she was assigned to do as meager punishment ... the police detective said she lied about leaving the state to her parole officer to get it terminated. But she still lives about a block from that awful house where she kept Dani.