Pain and trauma of 1985 Kansas City child abuse case remembered

Thirty years ago, Iyobosa Ighedosa was the victim of a mysterious crime that baffled investigators and frightened families.

He doesn’t remember much about what happened 30 years ago. He was 6 months old.

Ighedosa’s right leg had been broken. So had the bones of five other infants at a child care center called We Serve Humanity, part of the influential Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on Linwood Boulevard.

It took two years, and an extraordinary controversy, before authorities could find and convict a caregiver who had twisted the children’s bones until they snapped.

Much has changed since then. Some of the investigators and prosecutors involved with the case have died. The caregiver has served her prison sentence. Missouri now has laws designed to reduce similar threats to children, laws that some say still don’t go far enough.

Ighedosa, now a 30-year-old Los Angeles musician and poet, says there’s been another change.

“One of my doctors told me my right leg is slightly shorter than my left leg,” he says.

A community crisis

In March 1985, Ighedosa’s parents and the parents of other infants at the center compared notes. Someone at the facility, they firmly believed, had caused 16 fractures among their six children.

They went public, alleging the church was covering up the crime to protect its reputation.

Congregation members struck back, claiming the parents had slandered the church.

“It was nasty,” remembered Alvin Brooks, a former policeman and crime victim advocate who would later serve on the Kansas City Council and run for mayor.

Today, Alen Ighedosa — Iyobosa’s father — remains bitter about the parents’ treatment.

“I got death threats,” he recalled last week.

Iyobosa Ighedosa remembers none of that but says the incident affected his childhood.

“Things that happen when you’re a baby, even if you can’t remember them, do affect you,” he said. “When I was a kid, I had a lot of anger issues and behavior issues that I couldn’t explain.”

His mother, Jeanette, a clinical social worker, says the family hired counselors to work with their son. She believes the trauma he suffered at the day care center contributed to his early challenges in school and at home.

“Kids who have been traumatized have more issues,” she said last week. “They don’t get too close to people. … We had to get plenty of counseling for him.”

Today, she says, “I couldn’t be more proud of the man he’s become.”

The church and day care center were supervised by the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield Sr., one of the best known and most respected pastors in Kansas City. He did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.

But his reputation, and that of the church, suffered little following the incidents. Hartsfield remained pastor at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church until 2008, when he stepped aside and his son, the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield II, took the pulpit.

Dinner and confession

Brooks helped solve the case.

As the controversy swirled in 1985, he conducted an independent investigation of the crime at Hartsfield Sr.’s request.

At first, some of the parents of the victims distrusted him, Brooks recalled last week.

“They were so angry with me,” he said. “They said, ‘Why are you coming in, some supercop, to solve this thing?’”

But he re-interviewed center employees, eventually sitting down for dinner with a caregiver named Lettie Ward, then 33.

Over barbecue, Ward told Brooks she was responsible for the broken limbs.

“She said how sorry she was,” Brooks remembered.

Her attorneys later claimed her statements were made under duress. But the jury found Ward guilty of six counts of child abuse and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

She was paroled in 1992 after serving five years. Ward could not be reached for comment.

License-exempt

We Serve Humanity wasn’t licensed.

It didn’t need a license under Missouri law because in 1985, church-affiliated day care centers were exempt from almost all state oversight.

Lawmakers quickly began discussions about changing the law to hold church-run centers to the same standards as secular child care facilities.

Church leaders, though, said state supervision would interfere with their First Amendment rights.

“How can the state, that is to be blind to matters of faith, understand how our care and training children exceeds the standards of the state?” John Yeats of the Missouri Baptist Convention testified in subsequent debates on the issue.

By the late 1990s, a compromise was reached. Missouri created a category of license-exempt facilities operated by faith-based groups.

License-exempt facilities must submit to annual fire and sanitation inspections but are not subject to rules about nutrition, caregiver training or staffing ratios that apply to licensed secular day care centers.

State officials visit exempt facilities annually, but there is no easily accessible online record of their findings. And there’s no minimum age for caregivers.

“It’s unlikely that’s going to change anytime soon,” said L. Carol Scott, chief executive officer of Child Care Aware of Missouri, an advocacy and referral group. “Legislators really listen to the churches in their districts.”

Wounds that heal

Ighedosa says he notices no physical effects from his childhood injury. He doesn’t recall any physical limitations after the bone healed.

He served in the military for a time. Now he runs on a regular basis, covering five miles in less than an hour.

“I’m out here working, chasing the dream,” he said by phone from California.

He writes songs and poems, plays guitar and helps publish music. He sometimes uses the name Enpho Bonaparte.

“Patience is sacrifice,” he tweeted in February. “Sacrifice is trust. Trust is forgiveness. Forgiveness is Love. Love is scary. Scary is beautiful.”

He’s a health coach. In 2013 he appeared in a short film called “Love Cafe.”

He played an athlete.

But he admits to some remaining frustration with the mystifying crime.

“When you think about it, of course it makes you angry,” he said. “It makes you scared to have kids. You wonder, ‘What’s going to happen?’”

He credits his parents with helping him accept the incident at the start of his life, the parents who fought to protect him three decades ago.

“My parents were great,” he said.

“I had the best dad, the best mom in the world.”

This story was originally published March 14, 2015 at 7:25 PM with the headline "Pain and trauma of 1985 Kansas City child abuse case remembered."