Raising Cane
By Rob Perez
Deserted kids had
puzzling historyPeople were rightly shocked when they heard the news last week that a woman allegedly abandoned her three young children at Honolulu Airport.
Get ready to be shocked some more.
The case of Nikki Cliff-Vazquez has taken some bizarre new twists, raising questions about the adequacy of Hawaii's safety network for neglected children and drawing mysterious references to an alleged homicide.
The case has become so bizarre that one almost forgets who the unwitting victims are: three small children who were found wandering at the airport with a suitcase, $517 in cash and a Bible.
That the kids were discovered unsupervised at such a heavily trafficked terminal would be disturbing enough. The new details only add to the tug of the heartstrings.
Neighbors of the 24-year-old mother told the Star-Bulletin that several of them called authorities several times over the past few years to report that her children frequently were neglected. But nothing apparently came of the complaints, they said.
The children, ages 4 to 8, often were seen at their Makakilo apartment complex asking people for food because they were hungry, the neighbors said. The kids also regularly roamed the apartment grounds and parking lot without adult supervision, according to the neighbors.
But when residents called Child Protective Services to register their concerns, agency workers didn't seem interested in pursuing the matter or advised callers to contact police, the neighbors said.
"They didn't offer to do anything," said one woman, who like the others interviewed asked that her name not be used.
The neighbors, of course, can provide only part of the story. They can speak about what they saw, what they told authorities and what was said to them.
They can't speak to what CPS did with their information.
And confidentiality laws involving juvenile matters prevent the state Department of Human Services, which investigates cases of child abuse and neglect, from publicly telling its side of the story.
The whole story, in fact, may not be known until the case goes to trial, if it ever comes to that. The court still must determine if Cliff-Vazquez, charged with three misdemeanor counts of child abandonment, is mentally fit to be tried. She is in custody at the women's prison in Kailua under suicide watch, according to a Department of Public Safety representative.
Even if no more details emerge, however, this case is shocking enough.
Cliff-Vazquez was arrested last Sunday morning at a Pearl City 7-Eleven after her children -- an 8-year-old girl and two boys, 4 and 6 -- were found three hours earlier at the airport.
The children were left at the curbside outside the main terminal by their mother, who drove away after telling them a family member would take them to New York to visit their grandmother, according to court documents.
But the kids had no plane tickets, no flight reservations and no family member to accompany them. A security guard found the trio walking near the foreign arrivals area at the international terminal, carrying a red-and-blue suitcase, blue backpack and their mother's leather purse.
The suitcase contained clothes and personal effects. The backpack held a binder, a flutophone and a Bible. The purse had miscellaneous items, including an opened pack of cigarettes, a video-rental card and a department-store gift card.
While authorities were questioning the children, the 6-year-old boy pulled a wad of cash from a pocket in his blue shorts. Asked what the $517 was for, the boy said his mother gave it to him to buy the plane tickets and a toy he wanted.
The officers who tended to the children said the youngsters didn't complain and were well behaved.
Cliff-Vazquez's behavior, however, was another matter, according to court documents.
A woman believed to be Cliff-Vazquez called police three times that day, saying she wanted to turn herself in, the documents say.
When officers found Cliff-Vazquez at the 7-Eleven, she told them she was responsible for a negligent homicide of a female a year earlier in Waianae, according to a police report. She said her failure to take care of the person resulted in the person's death, the report said. No other details were mentioned.
Police, however, checked their records for a case involving the alleged victim and found nothing, according to the report.
Cliff-Vazquez acknowledged leaving her children at the airport and said she was sorry for that, the report noted.
It also said the woman, at times crying, appeared to be under the influence of an intoxicant and admitted that she had been smoking drugs in a glass pipe.
But a former colleague of Cliff-Vazquez said such behavior, if true, was totally out of character for the young mother.
"She was a very good worker," said Ruta Sua'ava, a home manager for Arc in Hawaii, a nonprofit organization that provides services to mentally challenged adults. "She loved her kids very much. I was very, very shocked and surprised about this."
Sua'ava worked with Cliff-Vazquez in 1999 and 2000. They worked the graveyard shift at an Arc home in Ewa, watching over five clients who lived there. Many times Cliff-Vazquez couldn't get a baby sitter for her children, so she brought them to the home and let them sleep in a manager's room, Sua'ava said.
"She would check on them all the time," Sua'ava said. "She was a very caring mother."
That's not the image portrayed by some of Cliff-Vazquez's neighbors.
Even though the kids didn't appear dirty and disheveled, they often were unsupervised, meaning the 8-year-old girl had to care for her younger brothers, one neighbor said.
The children's father has been stationed in Germany with the Army.
Following the airport incident, police took custody of the children and turned them over to CPS. But the agency couldn't say who has them now, citing confidentiality rules.
One neighbor questioned whether CPS sufficiently investigated the concerns raised about the Cliff-Vazquez children the past several years.
Although human services officials couldn't comment specifically on the case, they said the agency generally does assessments of all complaints phoned into their abuse/neglect hot line. Part of that assessment includes whether multiple calls have been made about the same family and whether substance abuse or domestic abuse is involved.
If the information seems credible and suggests the need to send an investigator into the field, one will be sent, said Amy Tsark, child welfare services branch administrator for the department. "It has to be a pretty serious situation," she said.
If the social worker taking the information determines that a child is in immediate danger, the worker will advise the caller to contact police and will follow-up with a call to police as well, Tsark said. Only police have the authority to take custody of a child, she said.
A police spokeswoman said she was not aware of any calls made to police about the Cliff-Vazquez children prior to the airport incident.
Although it's tough to place blame in a case like this, where all the information isn't available yet, it seems the system somehow failed these three kids.
As neighbors increasingly brought attention to the children's plight, help should have come well before they ended up roaming the airport with nowhere to go.
Star-Bulletin columnist Rob Perez writes on issues
and events affecting Hawaii. Fax 529-4750, or write to
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu 96813. He can also be reached
by e-mail at: rperez@starbulletin.com.
