Former Georgia woman accused in child's death stayed ahead of authorities

<p>A former Georgia woman accused of drowning her daughter and decapitating the child's body was monitored by social-service agencies in three states for alleged child abuse, but moved so frequently she stayed ahead of them, relatives say.</p><p>The dead child, 6-year-old Kyeimah Spann, was removed from her mother's care three times by Child Protective Services officials in California, the girl's grandfather and aunt told The Seattle Times for a report Wednesday.</p><p>But the girl and her older sister were always returned to their mother, Samara Laverne Spann.</p><p>Spann, 30, formerly of White Center, just south of Seattle, has been charged with first-degree murder. She is jailed and awaiting extradition from Sacramento, Calif. Authorities allege she drowned Kyeimah in a bathtub on New Year's Eve or early Jan. 1, decapitating the body before throwing it from a bridge somewhere between Seattle and the Oregon border. The body has not been recovered.</p><p>"I feel like California CPS let us down," said Terri Spann, Samara's younger sister and Kyeimah's aunt, in an interview Tuesday from her father's Sacramento home.</p><p>"We tried to get CPS to take the kids away from her, but CPS would give the kids right back," said Gary Spann, Kyeimah's grandfather. "We always had it in the back of our minds that something might happen to Kyeimah."</p><p>California CPS spokeswoman Laurie Slothower said in a Tuesday e-mail from Sacramento County that California law prohibits the agency from releasing details on child-welfare cases.</p><p>Washington state's CPS was alerted to concerns about Spann's parenting in 2000. The agency got four complaints concerning Kyeimah, two of them after her death, according to a partially redacted summary of the girl's CPS history released Tuesday. Only the 2000 complaint was investigated. The others were deemed low-risk.</p><p>An internal review of the case is planned to help spot and correct flaws in the child-welfare system, said Kathy Spears, an Olympia spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services agency.</p><p>Gary Spann said he first reported his daughter to California CPS seven years ago when he discovered that Kyeimah's sister, now 14, was not attending school in Sacramento.</p><p>After Spann and her children moved to Atlanta in late 2003, Georgia child protection services officials opened a file on her, but she left Georgia before allegations could be investigated, Gary Spann said.</p><p>Spann moved back to Seattle in January 2004. She stayed until February or March of this year, when she returned to Sacramento, her father said.</p><p>Washington CPS's first contact with Spann came in July 2000, when Seattle police advised the agency that she had been caught shoplifting and had apparently stuffed stolen merchandise into Kyeimah's stroller.</p><p>CPS decided the complaint posed a midlevel risk to Kyeimah and investigated, the records show. Over the next month, a social worker met with Spann four times. The worker concluded Spann had neglected her daughter, but assessed the risk to the girl as low.</p><p>While Spann and her daughters were living in Sacramento, a preschool teacher contacted California CPS in March 2003 after noticing a fresh cut under Kyeimah's eye and bruises on the girl's neck, said Terri Spann, Kyeimah's aunt. Kyeimah and her sister were placed in protective custody for a few months and then returned to their mother, Terri Spann said.</p><p>That's the year Gary Spann wrote the California agency, alleging that his daughter abused her children.</p><p>"I wrote a five-page letter about this whole thing and it just sat on someone's desk," he said.</p><p>His daughter and her children moved again before CPS could investigate his allegations, he said.</p><p>In Olympia, agency records show a February call, more than a month after Kyeimah's death, from a White Center resident reporting rumors that Spann had killed her daughter. A social worker called the King County Sheriff's Office, which opened a case file. A deputy visited two White Center addresses but found no sign of the Spanns.</p><p>Gary Spann called authorities after an anonymous phone call June 4 from a man claiming Samara Spann had killed Kyeimah.</p><p>"She hated Kyeimah and I swear I don't know why," Terri Spann said of her sister. "She thought of Kyeimah as her 'demon child.'"</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x1d04f98)</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2005/6/144118