Rilya Wilson Case Unlikely With New Technology
By WILLARD SHEPARD
Updated 3:05 PM EDT, Mon, Aug 16, 2010
"You going to smile for me?" Nancy Brun, a case manager for Our Kids private agency, asks as she snaps a shot of Andy with her cell phone.
Andy is just one of the 3,000 kids in South Florida foster care, and Brun is in charge of gathering their information -- the photo and her laptop computer being the key to their safety and security.
The photo is instantly uploaded into a hard drive and sent to supervisors to prove Andy is alive well and where he's supposed to be.
"You are able to go in the laptop into the system in Tallahasse, and Tallahasse will also say the child was here," Brun explained. "The child was safe and also see the picture of the child."
This process is exactly what didn't happen with Rilya Wilson. Geralyn Graham was given custody of Rilya, her grandaughter, when Rilya's mother couldn't get off drugs and her dad was in prison. The state says its own worker, who told them she was checking on the little girl, lied for 18 months and didn't go to Graham's South Dade home. Prosecutors say Graham is the killer.
"The tragedy of something like Rilya Wilson we never want to have that happen again," Francis Allegra, director of Our Kids program, said, "and isn't there some ready off-the-shelf technology that we can apply to this field to make kids safer and that was the genesis of the idea."
The pictures coming in give the name, exact location of the child from GPS tracking, and the time the picture was taken.
"We had one case where this one child was wearing the same T-shirt every day for a number of months," Allegra recalled. "When you can objectively see the last six months of pictures, you can see the child is going through a phase or there is something going wrong."
First Published: Jul 29, 2010 3:03 PM EDT
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