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(Testimony of John Carro)
Mr. Carro.
if it is a worthwhile home, and to see if there is a realistic plan or just not an effort on the part of the parents to take the boy out of the jurisdiction of the court, and you know if such a plan in reality exists and how feasible and how good is it in the interests of the welfare of the child, because for all the court may know, this is just a fiction on the part of the person to say, "I am moving out to Philadelphia," and they may not be moving at all. You go up to the court, get the child discharged, and they just remain where they are. And this way the boy doesn't have to report to the court any more and the parent doesn't have to bother herself with this sort of thing.
So she came in to tell us, and she was told that the matter would have to be put on the calendar and that the judge would have to pass on this.
Mr. Liebeler.
But despite that fact she left the jurisdiction?
Mr. Carro.
I wrote to her to come in, having heard, and the letter was returned "Moved, address unknown." I was asked about what happens then, and, well, there is very little that one can really do. We don't have extra-state jurisdiction, and we didn't even know where she had gone. This is about the sum total of what happened there.
Mr. Liebeler.
Did you yourself try to find a place to place this boy?
Mr. Carro.
Yes; from the very time that we had the recommendations of the psychiatrist, those that I had made were before the judge, and he went along and felt that this boy should be helped, and the next almost 9 months I spent in making referral after referral to the various institutions, the various clinics, to see if they would be able to service this boy either at home or within the institutional confines, because the psychiatric report was very distinctive in the fact that this boy did need this kind of help; and I mentioned that the tragedy of the whole thing was in this instance that because of his tender age and his religion, the facilities that we had here in New York were taxed, and somehow one factor or the other kept us from getting him the kind of help that he needed. It was either that it was a Protestant place and he was--well, he was a Lutheran, it was either a Catholic and he was a Lutheran, or one thing or another, but something mitigated their being able to service him.
I remember, for example, that the Salvation Army got a referral, and they felt they just didn't have the facility to give this boy the intensive treatment he needed. This was their reason for turning him down.
Children's village at the time, which could have given service to this boy and had the kind of setup, did not have any vacancies at this particular time of the year for this particular age boy; and so on down the line. Finally, the only recourse we had was to send it to our own psychiatric clinic, where we would do both, have him seen by a psychiatrist at our clinic, which normally we didn't even do, and at the same time receive the support of help from the Big Brothers, which was one of the recommendations that he should be seen by a male figure preferably because of the fact that he lacked a father, and we were actually complementing both without removing the boy from the home, and this is actually when the mother left. So that the boy was not going to be taken away; we were going to try to work out within, you know, the limits of the situation we had with the boy at home.
Mr. Liebeler.
You mentioned that the boy was going to go to your own psychiatric clinic. That is a different proposition from the Youth House, is it not?
Mr. Carro.
Yes. This is the psychiatric court clinic, that is on 22d Street, which in some instances, where we are not able to effect the kind of placing we need or so, we will utilize that as a last resort, and the boy would go there periodically and be seen by the psychiatrist.
Mr. Liebeler.
It would be an outpatient-type situation?
Mr. Carro.
An outpatient-type of situation, yes.
Mr. Liebeler.
He never actually did do that, however, because he left the State?
Mr. Carro.
No; because of the mother's own resistance to the thing and having left the jurisdiction. I don't think they got to see him once.
Mr. Liebeler.
Would you say that Oswald was more mentally disturbed than most of the boys that you had under your supervision at that time?
Mr. Carro.
Not at all, actually. I have handled cases of boys who committed murders, burglaries, and I have had some extremely disturbed boys, and
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