Lena Hale and her daughter, Rosalee, play outside her parents’ house.
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When her little girl transitioned from breast milk to baby food, Lena Hale prepared it herself.
She peeled and boiled apples, processed them in a blender and poured the puree into ice cube trays for freezing. She did the same with peas and carrots. Unhealthy additives lurked in name-brand jars, and she wanted only the best for her baby.
She found comfort in routines. Drinking coffee overlooking the boat slip behind her Beverly Beach home before heading off to hot yoga. Driving her son to school. Preparing her kids’ dinner after a day spent balancing books and paying bills at her husband’s moving business.
The routines provided order, structure, some semblance of control. Outside them, chaos reigned, especially after her husband arrived home from work.
Lena and her son, William, play hopscotch.
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Lena never knew which side of him she’d see. He might kiss her – or kick her feet out from under her.
Though their two-story, canal-side residence looked like a mansion, behind the arched windows and white wooden blinds, Lena said, “it was like a big, huge prison.”
Her husband battered her, belittled her and expressed contempt for her children. After she reported two brutal attacks to police, requested restraining orders, moved out and filed for divorce, child welfare workers still blamed her for the abuse.
The Florida Department of Children and Families considers exposing children to domestic violence a form of child abuse. Even if a mother is the victim, DCF holds her responsible for not protecting her kids from witnessing the violence. It’s the reason DCF took custody of Lena’s kids in January 2019.
About the series
This is an ongoing series about Florida’s child welfare system, which has taken an increasing number of kids into foster care without enough safe places to put them and has blamed victims – mostly mothers – when their children witness domestic violence. Reporters at USA TODAY spent more than a year analyzing data and interviewing families, insiders and advocates, revealing how overwhelmed state officials put nearly 200 children into the arms of abusers and how the system is stacked against battered women.
Contact the reporters
Pat Beall, pbeall@gannett.com
Michael Braga, mbraga@gannett.com
Daphne Chen, dchen@gannett.com
Suzanne Hirt, shirt@gannett.com
Josh Salman, jsalman@gannett.com
Community Partnership for Children, a nonprofit that contracts with DCF to provide child welfare services in the area, shuffled 7-year-old William – born from a previous relationship – and 3-year-old Rosalee between relatives and foster homes for months.
Lena spent a year completing therapy sessions, mental health and substance abuse evaluations, parenting courses and random drug tests. She picked up food service and bartending shifts to stay afloat because Community Partnership’s case plan requirements took up so much time that they made it hard to hold a 9-to-5 job.
Lena’s husband, Carmine Lania, twice was charged with beating and strangling her. A court deferred prosecution for the first instance on the condition that he take anger management and domestic violence courses. The second time, he pleaded no contest. A judge withheld adjudication and sentenced him to 12 months of probation.
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I would’ve taken a beating every day for the rest of my life if I knew this would happen.
Lania’s Community Partnership case plan required him to take a batterers’ intervention course and weekly drug screens.
Just before Thanksgiving 2019, a judge granted Lania – the abuser – full custody of Rosalee. Lena was limited to hourlong, supervised weekly visits.
Case notes show that Lania had complied with case manager requests, offering to double up on batterers’ intervention classes to complete his case plan sooner.
Lena was less cooperative. She didn’t follow instructions to the letter. She complained that her assigned therapist was unlicensed. She did not always keep her appointments, and when case managers pointed out her missteps, she wrote a rebuttal.
Community Partnership characterized her as an “extremely manipulative” person who “feels as though she needs to prove her innocence,” records show. CEO Karin Flositz declined to comment.
In Lena’s view, she was fighting desperately to keep her children.
“I’m all they have and I couldn’t protect them,” said Lena, 36. “I would’ve taken a beating every day for the rest of my life if I knew this would happen.”
Meek and submissive
She couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe. Felt her esophagus closing, forcing into her mouth the taste of her dinner.
Lania tightened both hands around Lena’s throat and kicked her legs, knocking her to their porch floor. His 5-foot-11, 220-pound frame hovered above her, still squeezing, and slammed her head into the concrete, Lena told deputies, according to a March 2017 arrest report.
Lania, who declined USA TODAY’s interview request, told police the argument never became physical.
Lena’s outspoken nature and steely exterior disappeared in Lania’s presence. The cheeky, challenging woman who took pride in befriending underdogs and fearlessly facing down bullies faded into the background, she said.
She became meek and submissive, and at first would not disclose details of the attack to Flagler County deputies. She corroborated her husband’s version of events until her mother and stepfather, Rosemary and Jerry Hale, arrived.
They’d hastened to Lena’s home on the heels of a disturbing call from a concerned out-of-state friend.
“Your daughter’s in danger,” Rosemary recalled the woman’s warning. “I’m afraid he’s going to kill her.”
Lena feared it, too. She’d recorded recent phone calls from her husband and forwarded the audio files to a friend in case anything happened to her.
USA TODAY News · Recorded call from Lania
“You haven’t even seen a f—ing beating from me yet,” said Lania, now 42, who acknowledged during the call that Lena was recording it. “I don’t care if I’m in the f—ing middle of the f—ing police department, I will f—ing break your f—ing jaw the next time I see you.”
And of their 19-month-old daughter and William: “Take that f—ing child and throw it in the f—ing dumpster. And you should do the same thing with the other one.”
Lena played the messages for the DCF investigator who visited the next day, even as Lania bonded out of jail, records show. The department didn’t take Lena’s kids that morning – not yet – but opened a case to supervise her.
Lena filed a restraining order, and a judge granted her and the children use of the family’s home. She changed the locks, filed for divorce, secured a job.
And then William fell ill.
He spent weeks in a hospital fighting fever and inflammation throughout his body, and was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease. He asked to see Lania, whom he considered his father, and Lena – unsure if William would survive the sickness – agreed.
Lania seemed like a changed man, Lena said. He was kind, loving. William recovered, and in September 2017, Lena informed her case manager that she and her husband planned to reconcile.
Renewing the relationship cost Lena her best friend. She remembers her friend’s parting words: “I won’t watch him kill you.”
DCF closed the case with “no safety concerns,” records show. But first, child welfare workers warned Lena – in Lania’s presence – that if further violence occurred, they’d take custody of the kids.
This knowledge gave Lania even more control, Lena later realized. He knew she’d endure anything to keep her children.
“I should never have gone back,” Lena said. She knows her choices may incite a chorus of detractors on social media who don’t understand the power dynamics at play, her desire for William to have a father or her dread of financial instability.
Those are three of the common reasons – along with embarrassment, shame, fear and low self-esteem – that explain why people stay with abusive partners, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In fact, leaving the perpetrator can be a dangerous decision.
More than half of American women slain from 2003 to 2014 were killed by a current or former romantic partner, a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found. Studies indicate battered women are most vulnerable and at risk of homicide or violence at or after the point of separation.
Reason to stay sober
A deeper dive into Lena’s past reveals a decade-old stint of substance abuse that both her husband and child welfare workers have used to discredit her.
Lena first experienced the euphoric effects of opioids at age 25. A vehicle collision in late 2009 landed Lena in an emergency room, where a physician prescribed oxycodone for her minor injuries.
The painkillers did more than diminish her physical discomfort. A deeply buried unhappiness she’d felt since childhood disappeared as well. “This is what life’s supposed to feel like,” Lena remembers thinking as her body responded to the medication. “But it turns on you so quick.”
A few months later she was falling asleep in her bathtub and at stop signs. Her health declined and she contracted bronchitis, and a hospital test revealed she was pregnant. Her parents utilized the Marchman Act – a state law that provides a means of submitting family members for involuntary or voluntary substance abuse assessment and treatment – to put Lena in a recovery program.
Lena kisses her son, William.
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William was born drug-free in April 2011, DCF records confirm. Lena’s first sight of her son’s face gave her a reason to stay sober, and breastfeeding kept her accountable.
Caring for William gave her the time and strength she needed to resume a healthy life, she said.
She ended her relationship with William’s father, and met Lania a year later in September 2012. She remembers the exact date: Friday the 13th.
‘Systematic torturing’
He was intimidating, assertive, “large and in charge” the day he arrived at her parents’ home with one of his company’s moving trucks. Lania towered over petite, slender Lena. She was attracted to his broad-shouldered, muscular frame and the fact that he, too, was Italian.
“I knew he could keep me safe,” Lena said of her decision to start dating him.
At first the abuse was verbal, psychological. He made her doubt her memory, question her sanity. He degraded her, records state, with expletives and insults that eroded her self-esteem: bitch, retard, go kill yourself.
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You’re told every day what a piece of garbage you are. You start to believe it.
“You’re told every day what a piece of garbage you are. You start to believe it,” Lena said. “That systematic torturing, it gets in your brain and it changes your core beliefs about yourself.”
In late 2014, Lena and William moved in with Lania, and soon Lena became pregnant with Rosalee. That’s when the physical attacks began. “He knew I wasn’t going anywhere then,” Lena said.
She wasn’t the only one who accused Lania of violence. He was charged with aggravated assault in 2015 after one of his employees said Lania threatened him with a crowbar, an arrest report states. Court records indicate additional charges for alprazolam and marijuana possession and grand theft. None were prosecuted.
Lena and Lania married in November 2015, soon after Rosalee’s birth. By the time DCF opened the March 2017 case, beatings had become normal, Lena told a department investigator. Lania criticized her appearance, her housekeeping – she could do no right. He punched her face, swept her feet out from under her in the shower.
He kept prescription painkillers in a locked safe, Lena said. During arguments he would take them out and rattle the bottle, tempting her to take them.
Lena cries as she talks about her ordeal during a day of drug testing and running other errands.
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When she sensed his rage building, she turned on whirring fans and white-noise machines in the children’s rooms and tucked them into bed early. She went out to the veranda to keep Lania’s outbursts out of sight.
After the pair reconciled over William’s illness, old patterns reemerged. Lania isolated Lena from her friends and forbade her to work anywhere but his office, where he kept several cameras trained on her desk. He’d beat her and then buy her presents, she said – an expensive ring, an edible arrangement, a Louis Vuitton handbag.
“He controlled every sense of my world,” Lena said. She grew paranoid, afraid to fall asleep, afraid for her life – and afraid that if she reported the abuse, she’d lose her kids.
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“I remember praying to God, being on my knees, tears pouring down my face like: ‘God, please just let me get through the next 18 years. Just let me get my kids out of the house and I’ll leave him,’” Lena said.
That autumn, worry about the children’s well-being consumed her thoughts.
She moved with the kids into her parents’ home, and filed another restraining order on Nov. 27, 2018, stating that Lania had restricted her breathing with a pillow, forced her to have sex against her will and threatened to kill her family, records show.
Lania tried to force Lena into substance abuse treatment under the Marchman Act the same month, records show, but the petition was dropped and DCF found no evidence that Lena was abusing drugs.
His efforts fueled one of Lena’s greatest fears: that Lania would twist the truth to undermine her credibility.
Begging him to stop
Rosemary and Jerry provided Lena and the kids with food and shelter, but Lena struggled to find work. Lania had canceled her insurance, and she needed money for her thyroid medication. She moved back to their Beverly Beach home.
Two days later, Lania became furious that Lena refused to drop the restraining order. He chugged a few beers and followed her from room to room, screaming insults in her face. He wrenched from her grasp the knife she’d grabbed to defend herself and hurled a rubber mallet that missed Lena but broke the blinds behind her, according to a January 2019 charging affidavit.
Rosemary Hale, Lena’s mother, bakes a cake with her grandchildren, William and Rosalee.
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Lena dashed out to the veranda, begging him to stop. He threw her down into a deck chair and squeezed her throat as she battled for breath.
When he let go, she ran inside. Lania snatched Lena’s phone from her hand and left with her purse. Police apprehended him several days later.
The state later dropped the domestic battery charge and reduced his violation of the restraining order to a misdemeanor.
The department investigators who visited Lena at her parents’ home the next morning gave her an ultimatum: The children could stay with Rosemary and Jerry, but Lena had to go.
‘More harm than good’
Lena dealt with losing her kids the only way she knew how. She put on a brave face and her Balenciaga blazer, grabbed her Louis Vuitton handbag and walked into a conference with child welfare workers carrying a binder with a picture of her and her children on the front.
She’d written a table of contents, outlined her goals and shortcomings. “I was going to run that meeting,” she said. “They sat there and rolled their eyes.”
The facial expressions Lena observed at that Community Partnership meeting foretold the disdain she later felt emanating from every interaction.
Lena’s first case manager, Christiana Griffith-Keith, described her as an attentive, affectionate mother who “strives to ensure (her children) have the best of the best,” according to a March 2019 assessment. A court approved the woman’s recommendation to reunite Lena with her kids on April 17, 2019 at her rented residence in Palm Coast.
In May, Lena twice tested positive for cocaine, a drug she denied using. She pointed to inaccuracies in the lab paperwork and, according to Community Partnership records, provided a doctor’s note that alleged a “false positive,” potentially because she’d been taking a prescription antibiotic.
Lena completes paperwork with a lab employee following a random drug test.
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Lania told Community Partnership that he’d never known Lena to use cocaine, records show, but he used the failed tests to push for custody of both Rosalee and William.
Lena’s troubles multiplied after Griffith-Keith resigned, citing long hours and little reward.
“You want to believe you’re saving lives, saving kids, but I saw in so many instances that it caused more harm than good,” Griffith-Keith said in an interview. “(A mother) needs time, needs somebody to walk this out with her, needs support — and that doesn’t exist.”
Two other women took over Lena’s case, and Lena pinpoints the personnel change as the moment the tide turned against her.
She was sunning poolside at her apartment complex on May 19 while her kids visited their grandparents across town. A neighbor approached, accused Lena of an affair with her husband and attacked Lena with a hairbrush, a police report states.
On May 21, she tested positive for barbiturates. Lena said she’d taken Fioricet, a prescription medication to ease tension headaches, not realizing it would be an issue.
Lena’s new Community Partnership supervisor visited that day and noted Lena had two black eyes and several bruises. The woman’s indifferent demeanor so troubled Lena that she filed a complaint with the state inspector general, begging for someone to intervene before she lost her kids.
The supervisor returned on May 24 to take William and Rosalee to a foster home, citing the neighbor’s attack as evidence Lena couldn’t protect them — even though the children weren’t present when the incident occurred.
Community Partnership refused to place the children with family because Rosemary and Jerry disputed the agency’s allegations, which included drug use.
Substance abuse alone wouldn’t be sufficient cause to take someone’s kids if the agency could provide support services and develop a safety plan with a mother and trusted adults in her life, Griffith-Keith said.
“You need somebody who can come over when you say, ‘I need a break right now, I’m having a weak moment. Make sure my kids are OK,’” she said. “Then the safety threat is mitigated.”
Community Partnership documented concerns that Lania struggled with substance misuse, too. Alcohol consumption preceded his attacks on Lena, and his ex-wife reported he had a pill habit that stemmed from a hip injury, records state. But Lena’s new case managers still seemed to favor him.
‘They hate me’
Community Partnership allowed Lania eight unsupervised hours per week with Rosalee. Lena was limited to one – at a visitation facility.
She frequently texted caseworkers about William and Rosalee’s well-being. She complained that a case supervisor called her names. She offered to prepare her kids’ lunches and wrote daily notes reminding them of her love. Caseworkers returned the letters unopened.
Notes Lena wrote for her children while they were in foster care.
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“Please understand that those children are my life,” Lena pleaded. Community Partnership labeled her impulsive and uncooperative.
“They hate me,” Lena said.
Lena believes they only saw the way she projected herself – “I’m tough as nails” and “Nobody sees me sweat” – without recognizing the wounded woman behind the bravado.
“It doesn’t mean I won’t come home and cry in the shower,” Lena said.
Rather than building rapport with Lena and helping her regain power over her own life, case managers seemed to take Lena’s defensiveness and distrust personally, said Angie Pye, director of the Beacon Center, a Daytona Beach domestic violence shelter that provided Lena an attorney.
“What she needed was to be heard and validated for the violence she was a victim of,” Pye said. “Instead, she really just got more blame.”
‘My worst nightmare’
A judge returned Lena’s kids to Rosemary and Jerry in August 2019. Lena couldn’t be alone with them or spend the night at her parents’ home, but she could visit daily.
The reprieve was short-lived.
Lania completed his case plan and pushed for custody of Rosalee at a court hearing the week before Thanksgiving.
“I went in there like a zombie – devastated, terrified,” Lena said. “This is my worst nightmare.”
She walked out during the hearing, unable to listen any longer. As she left, she recalled seeing a familiar smirk on her case supervisor’s face.
The judge awarded Lania full custody. Community Partnership did not object.
I close my eyes, and I see their little faces.
“How can you charge me with failure to protect, and then a 41-year-old man just changes in five months and that’s who you’re going to give my kid to?” Lena said. “Every person who did not object to that should be charged with failure to protect.”
The despair she fought off for so long gripped her, sunk its teeth in, dragged her down into its depths. She distanced herself from William, knowing her pain would weigh heavy on his tender heart. She exhausted herself with waitressing and bartending shifts to distract her from a very real fear – that her days as a full-time mother were behind her.
“I close my eyes, and I see their little faces,” Lena said, sobs shaking her voice. “You wanted to break me, you broke me. I’m done.”
‘In a bad place’
Lena packed away the pink stuffed unicorns and the battery-powered blue dinosaur in the bedroom she’d decorated for her kids and rented it out to help pay her bills.
She ignored several drug screens. She skipped an 8:30 a.m. therapy session because she was too exhausted after a bartending shift that ended just a few hours before dawn.
She saw Rosalee for an hour a week at a supervised visitation facility. She questioned if she should cancel future visits. “Should my daughter have to see me?” she wondered. “Is that what’s best for her?”
She’d been called an unfit mother so much that she started to believe it.
Lena realizing her children may never sleep in the bedroom she decorated for them at her Palm Coast duplex.
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The pain and loss with which Lena reckons could push her to a precarious place as a person who has battled substance abuse.
“Certainly stress and trauma can be precipitants for a relapse,” said Dr. Robert Leeman, associate professor at University of Florida’s Department of Health Education and Behavior. But “resilience factors” such as family support and a desire to stay drug-free to regain custody could work in a mother’s favor, he said.
At times Lena gives up, ponders steps she can’t bring herself to say aloud. Rosemary worries that Lena has lost hope, and with it her incentive to stay clean.
“I feel like they pushed her to the edge and she just wants to die now,” Rosemary said. “She’s not a bad person, she’s in a bad place – and they’ve put her there.”
