Missouri and Kansas leaders, we must prevent another murder like Karvel Stevens’

As a mother, I was horrified to read the gruesome details of the murder of 6-year-old Karvel Stevens, alongside the rest of Kansas City last week. However, as a child welfare advocate, I was waiting in anticipation for the next shoe to drop. With a resounding thud, it dropped in Star reporters Bill Lukitsch and Matti Gellman’s news story about the tragedy. There it was, just as I had anticipated: the family’s first connection to foster care. Tasha Haefs, the child’s mother who is charged in his murder, was in the Iowa foster care system as a child because of her mother’s stint in federal prison for drug crimes.

In 2019, The Star published an award-winning series of six stories exploring the connection between foster care and incarceration. The Star conducted a survey that found 25% of participating inmates in 12 states reported having been in foster care as children. While that number is fairly high, it is my personal belief that the actual percentage is much higher.

I’ve spent 30 years of my life fostering children who suffered abuse and neglect. I’ve experienced firsthand the lasting impact that childhood trauma has on a person’s ability to regulate emotions. I’ve seen firsthand the impact of genetic predisposition for mental health conditions, which are later exacerbated by the use of drugs and alcohol. I know the tragic impact of aging out of the foster care system and never finding a permanent connection to a stable adult. I’ve lived the struggle to find and obtain the needed mental health resources to assist these children, their parents and their caregivers.

However, even people without my life experiences must be able to picture the confluence of circumstances lived by Tasha Haefs as described in The Star’s coverage: childhood trauma, foster care, poverty, increased recent struggles, mental illness with little access to resources, and parenting three children alone during a pandemic in which the world is experiencing a mental health crisis like never before. She was in trouble long before this heinous crime was committed.

What we fail to do, each time a tragedy like this happens, is to own our moral obligation as a community to address the root causes. We have to tackle issues such as childhood poverty, mental illness and substance abuse, while we work together to increase resources rather than deplete them. We should have been there for Karvel, his siblings and his mother long before Tuesday night.

When we can’t preserve and bolster at-risk families, we need foster parents and more of them — particularly those who can make a commitment to kids who are older and who have often experienced far more pain than any of us can imagine. Moreover, when we place kids in these foster homes, we need to make sure they have access to all the supports and resources they need to heal and to thrive.

This week, legislators in both Missouri and Kansas are considering bills that would limit Medicaid eligibility and access to services for those most at risk. Within the next few weeks, the state of Missouri will also award its first sole contract for the provision of mental health services to a managed care insurance entity for Missouri’s foster care population.

Will our elected officials make wise decisions? For Karvel’s surviving siblings, and many other children and families in our community, I hope so.