It was a victory, but to Vanessa, not a satisfying one.
Sitting in a windowless federal courtroom at Sixth and Market Streets, the 41-year-old librarian quietly absorbed the news. The City of Philadelphia had agreed to pay her adopted daughter $1 million for the harm she'd suffered while under the supervision of the Department of Human Services.
In the careful language of such arrangements, the city admitted no wrongdoing. But to Vanessa, who had taken the girl known in court records as T.J. into her home three years before, the seven-figure number spoke for itself. It was one of the city government's biggest civil-rights awards in memory.
The money, in addition to $1.85 million T.J. had received from two city-funded private agencies involved in her care, would ensure that the 15-year-old would be secure for life.
But T.J. had been hurt in ways that money couldn't fix.
At the age of 8, she had been indecently assaulted by a convicted bank robber who DHS had decided would make a good caregiver.
In hours of deposition testimony, no one from DHS expressed contrition, or took responsibility or promised to fix any of the astonishing lapses that led to this child's suffering.
When do we hold these people accountable? Vanessa wondered. When do they see the kid face to face and say, "I damaged your life"?
Before the agreement was signed in March, the federal mediator asked Vanessa if there was anything else she wanted from the city.
"An official face-to-face apology," she replied.
The city doesn't do apologies, the lawyers responded. But it did agree to a sit-down with Vanessa, T.J., the head of DHS, and the two workers who had made key decisions in her case.
Vanessa imagined how she might begin:
"Meet T.J., 14 years old, HIV-positive, life expectancy, 42."
At library, striking up friendship with sisters
Vanessa was an inner-city librarian - and a good one. It wasn't just about books, though she had her master's degree. Having grown up in a tough neighborhood herself, she could relate to the boisterous kids who'd stream in after school, flirting and laughing. A mother of three daughters, she was part social worker, part teacher, part disciplinarian.
In the summer of 2000, in a Free Library branch in one of Philadelphia's most impoverished sections, she met T.J., then 9, and her half-sister K.J., then 12.
K.J. was as talkative as T.J. was reserved. From K.J., Vanessa learned that the girls were in foster care, and had been for much of their lives.
They spent hours at the library because their latest foster parents wouldn't allow them at home while they were working.
Vanessa struck up a friendship with the sisters, who bonded closely with this woman who seemed so interested in them. In the week before Christmas, 2000, they brought Vanessa gifts.
Parts of their story spilled out in preteen bursts. Others Vanessa would learn only later.
In 1994, when T.J. was 3 and K.J. 6, DHS, the city agency tasked with protecting children from abuse, had taken the girls away from their drug-addicted mother, who had left them hungry and alone. T.J.'s father was out of the picture.
The girls were sent to a series of foster homes. They spent time in an orphanage.
Rarely did the two half-sisters see their mother. But in 1997, they were told that K.J.'s father, a smooth-talking, broad-shouldered man named John Aloysius Lyles III, wanted to be in their lives.
Lyles was a criminal. He was on work release from state prison when he began visiting with the girls under DHS supervision.
