West Virginia faces legal reckoning over foster care crisis

A steady job, apartment and boyfriend, 20 year old Naomi Bennett is one of the lucky ones. But that doesn't mean it's easy. I have a lot of nightmares, night terrors or something. Are you battling depression right now? Yeah. Yeah. Naomi entered the West Virginia foster care system when she was roughly 12 years old. For the next four years, she was shuttled between more than a dozen different facilities. It was definitely draining. Each place I went, I would stop talking to people because it hurt to get close to the staff or the kids. Because Naomi felt unsupported in the system, she says she acted out, destroying property and running away a few times, ending up in juvenile detention. The first time I met Naomi, it was her birthday and she was in shackles. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that. Shackles. Mm Hmm. Yeah. Hello. Lane Diehl is Naomi's state appointed attorney. She's represented dozens of foster care children. There have been instances where the department has not been able to find a placement for a child and they have been reported to have to place the child in a hotel. West Virginia's foster care system is maxed out largely because of the state's intractable opioid epidemic. It has the nation's highest rate of children in foster care, but not enough foster care families or caseworkers. The foster care system is really on a Cliff. Mike Folio worked as assistant general counsel for the state's Department of Health and Human Resources. He's now a government watchdog. You may have acps worker handling 100 or so cases. It's humanly impossible for anyone to handle that many cases. According to a class action lawsuit filed in federal court by a nonprofit and folios organization, children in West Virginia have been abused and neglected, put in inadequate and dangerous placements like Naomi, who ended up in out of state facilities, including foundations for living in Mansfield. OH, they had cameras there, but in the staircase they didn't. So sometimes if, if it's just a kid and a staff, sometimes if the staff didn't like them, then they would just start hitting them like they'd fight in the stairwell where there were no cameras. Yeah. An NBC News investigation obtained records of incidents provided by foundations for living to the state of Ohio, revealing reports of multiple cases of abuse and neglect, 5 assaults by non staff, and seven cases of inappropriate seclusion or restraint of children that were substantiated by the facility or the government. West Virginia no longer sends foster children to this facility, and its CEO says that while she can't comment on individual patients, they are committed to providing high quality care. But West Virginia still has to rely on other out of state institutions. And when the foster care system is maxed out, who suffers as a result of it? The children and the families. Everybody, really. Governor Jim Justice has acknowledged there are challenges. There's still tons of work to do. Tons and tons and tons of work to do. There have been some leadership changes and the agency has been reorganized, but Folio says it's not enough. Do you have a system in chaos and kids who live in trauma? I don't have this utopian view that we can wave a magic wand and fix it. It's going to take decades to do it, but you can't keep kicking the can down the road. The state says Folio is a disgruntled former employee, denies the allegations in the class action lawsuit and has sought to get it dismissed. But Naomi says she's left to pick up the pieces. My hope is for myself to never give up, to pursue my dreams and don't let my anxiety hold me back. Who do you hope is listening to you right now? Anyone that can do anything about it. Anyone, anyone. Stephanie Gosk, NBC News, Martinsburg, WV.