Oklahoma mom imprisoned for child abuse she didn't commit
Guardian | Published Jan. 30, 2019
BY AARON MORRISON
A few days after Christmas in 2016, Tressie Shaffer got up early and fed her then-six-month-old daughter a bottle. She burped and changed the baby, then quickly dressed for her shift at Wendy’s.
Just before leaving, Shaffer nudged her boyfriend, Jason Scott, awake. They had just celebrated the holiday together in a rent-subsidized three-bedroom apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that Shaffer qualified for on minimum wage. Her Snap benefits kept just enough food in the house, but she could barely cover rent and utilities. Scott, who wasn’t working that day, would assume care of six children.
The older children, ranging from ages three to seven, were on break from school. It wasn’t the first time Scott, 29, had looked after the six-month-old, Zaylei, his daughter with Shaffer, as well as Shaffer’s other three children and his two sons from previous relationships.
Just a few hours into her shift, Shaffer received word of an emergency and rushed home, where she found paramedics out front working on her unresponsive six-month-old, who was having seizures and had stopped breathing.
At the hospital, a CT scan revealed Zaylei had bilateral subdural hematomas – bleeding on her brain – which medical professionals often attribute to shaken baby syndrome.
Scott would later admit during a police interrogation that he once playfully shook his daughter by her legs, while in Shaffer’s presence. He stopped after Shaffer worried about its impact on Zaylei’s Marfan Syndrome, a serious medical condition known to delay development and restrict body movement. During her own interrogation, Shaffer told detectives she noticed a bruise on her daughter’s cheek a day before the emergency hospitalization, but she was not alarmed.
“I never, ever could imagine him ever hurting our daughter, or any of the children,” Shaffer, 31, recalled nearly two years later. “He was so good with them. I had a Super Nintendo from my childhood, so he’d be down on the floor playing with them. At one point, I came home and they were making Play-Doh.”
The state launched child welfare investigations into both parents, and criminal charges for both followed. But it was Shaffer who faced punishment first.
In November, a Tulsa jury found Shaffer guilty of permitting child abuse by injury, a felony offense. Jurors handed down an 18-month prison sentence, which Shaffer is currently serving, although the assistant district attorney who handled the case suggested Shaffer be put away for life. Scott is still awaiting trial.
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What happened to Shaffer wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t poor, according to the national public defender’s office, Still She Rises, which exclusively represents women and mothers and worked on her case.
Through their work, they’ve found that many single mothers who are the sole breadwinners in their families, like Shaffer, face a choice: Don’t go to work, or be willing to face swift imprisonment if anything happens while your children are in someone else’s care.
The latter appears to be happening increasingly in Oklahoma, where women are being incarcerated at more than twice the national rate and more often the perpetrators in child abuse cases.
Although it’s unclear if Oklahoma child abuse cases alone are accounting for an increase in mothers who are incarcerated, what is clear is that the state leads the nation when it comes to putting women in prison. About 149 out of every 100,000 women are incarcerated in Oklahoma, compared with 57 out of every 100,000 nationwide. And this rise is in tandem with an increased number of reported child abuse cases. Oklahoma’s department of human services, an agency that investigates child abuse and neglect, assessed 62,828 cases in 2017 and substantiated 15,289 of them, about 24%. That’s compared to 16.5% of cases substantiated nationwide, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ 2016 report on child maltreatment.
In Oklahoma, mothers were identified as perpetrators in substantiated cases more often than fathers.
In Tulsa county, where Shaffer and Scott live, substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect spiked 102% between 2012 and 2016, according to the state’s department of human services. Tulsa child welfare advocates interviewed in April 2018 by the local news outlet, TulsaPeople, suggested the spike corresponded to an increased frequency of reporting by citizens. However, police were the most frequent reporting source for substantiated allegations.
“I think it really comes down to, if you’re a mother living in poverty and anything happens to your kid, it’s your fault that you weren’t wealthier and don’t have more resources,” Ruth Hamilton, the attorney who represented Shaffer during her criminal trial, told me.
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