Cameron, TX — While many think that the state taking children from parents is a noble gesture to protect the child, all too often, the state removes kids from a bad situation and throws them into a situation akin to a horror film. Many times the children are taken from caring parents, who happened to hit a rough patch in their lives, and thrown into torturous and outright sadistic situations where they end up raped, tortured, and, as the tragic following case highlights, even murdered.
Alexandria Hill, a 2-year-old little girl, was taken from her father because he used marijuana to treat his seizures. In 2012, Joshua Hill told a case worker with Child Protective Services that he would smoke marijuana after little Alexandria would go to sleep at night to treat his medical condition. This would prove to be a grave mistake.
The case worker couldn’t have cared less that the marijuana helped stave off his seizures. Instead, because this loving father dared ingest a plant that helped him, the case worker recommended Alexandria kidnapped and placed in a foster home.
“Mr. Hill admitted to smoking marijuana in the house when his daughter has been upstairs sleeping,” the caseworker representing the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services noted in court records.
Alexandria was placed in foster care in 2013. She would not make it to her third birthday.
During their supervised visits, Hill and his wife Mary Sweeny told CPS that they were finding bruises all over Alexandria. However, CPS did not care. The state removed a child from a home with loving parents over marijuana and put her in a home with an abusive woman, Sherill Small, and her crack addict husband who ran a racket keeping foster children.
Prior to placing Alexandria in the foster home, CPS never told Hill that Small had racked up 15 violations as a foster parent. Nor did they know that over one hundred more violations would soon follow.
As the Houston Press reported at the time:
While the idea of removing a toddler from her parents’ care not for abuse, but for simple marijuana use, is puzzling at best, what’s even more disconcerting is that the same rules didn’t apply to her foster family.
Turns out Sherill Small’s third husband, Clemon Small, had a pretty legit criminal history, including multiple drug charges.
During the home study portion of the couple’s foster application, Clemon described himself as a recovering crack cocaine addict, and admitted to multiple drug charges. Small also admitted to the home study investigator that she had also been out of work for months. Rather, she made a living by keeping foster children.
After jumping through multiple hoops and suffering without his medical marijuana, Hill finally received word that he would be getting his daughter back soon. Tragically, however, it would be too late.
Four months before Alexandria was to be reunited with her parents, Hill got a call that she was in the hospital.
Hill and Sweeny arrived at the hospital to find Alexandria hooked up to life support machines. She was completely brain dead and unable to breathe on her own. They had no other choice but to tell their little girl goodbye forever.
They were told it was an accident. Little Alexandria had fallen while playing a game, according to Small. Once Alexandria’s body was autopsied, however, they would discover bruises all over, including her neck, head, back, arms, and legs.
These monsters — who were entrusted by the state to keep children — had slammed Alexandria on the ground so violently that she had “subdural hemorrhaging, subarachnoid hemorrhaging, and retinal hemorrhaging in both eyes.”
Small would eventually be arrested and tried for murder. On Tuesday, according to KLFY, she was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Alexandria Hill.
Adding to the perfidious nature of kidnapping a child from caring parents over marijuana use is the fact that prior to receiving Alexandria, Small’s husband Clemon had been arrested three times for marijuana.
Alexandria would have turned 10 this November.
