Update: The coroner says Tashia Burch-York died of natural causes and not from injuries stemming from an assault by a youth she was working with at the county’s Department of Children and Family services. (Cleveland.com)
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Special credit is due to those who toil in the ranks of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services. Saying the job is tough is about the single greatest public service understatement out there. Not only do they face down society’s difficulties on the day-to-day, they deal with the kids who have to shoulder all this shit — poverty, abuse, broken homes, missing meals — all the stomach-turning stuff. Want to cry, go check it out.
Heavy as these gigs are, it’s not the type of work people usually lay down their lives in the service of. But that may be what happened to one Cuyahoga County employee.
42-year-old Tashia Burch-York died yesterday, a week after the county adoption services supervisor was reportedly assaulted by a youth. The incident went down at the Jane Edna Hunter building on Euclid Ave. According to WKYC, the teen has not yet been arrested.
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2011.
This teenagers needs to go away for life, because he will do that to others too.
I can easily understand how something like this happened, social workers still bring out an instinctive feeling of hate in me. You have no idea how horrible it is until you’re trapped in it. What it’s like to know that there is NO safe & that everybody has more power over your right to exist than you do, that they can do anything they want to you & get away with it. You fight as hard as you can because everybody is stronger, sometimes you win. Sometimes winning is just another way to lose.
I’m sorry she, as a person, died. But as long as kids have to fight for their own safety, fight just to survive, this is going to keep happening.