Michelle Gochenaur was fighting to bring her 6-year-old daughter home to Lancaster.
The 28-year-old says she cleaned up her life since losing Taylor Webster to a foster family while serving a two-month prison term in 2002.
She got an apartment on East Grant Street, a block from the Lancaster County Prison, and is busy raising two children on her own.
"People change," she said.
But just days before her open-adoption case was to be heard in New York last week, Gochenaur got the phone call she never expected.
Her little girl was dead.
Webster, living in East Harlem, N.Y., died after her foster mother allegedly placed a patch containing the powerful painkiller fentanyl on the girl's neck when she complained of a headache.
The girl died on May 18.
And Gochenaur, her biological mom, has now filed a $50 million notice of claim against the City of New York and its Administration for Children's Services, claiming "negligent supervision of the foster home" and "failure to provide the infant with a safe environment."
In an interview with Gochenaur at her apartment this morning, she said she had been worried about her daughter's welfare for years.
"I was very concerned. That's why I was trying to get her out," she said. "But it has been very difficult to get any information about my daughter — until my daughter died."
Last week, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the city's Administration for Children's Services. "There was no reason to go to court and try to remove the child," he was quoted as saying by the New York Daily News.
"There's not any evidence that she deliberately tried to hurt the child, so it's a little bit different than other situations," he said.
The agency, however, had already investigated the Harlem foster mom, 54-year-old Joanne Alvarez, for excessively spanking Webster and for raising her two foster children in filth, the newspaper reported.
Alvarez was charged Friday with criminally negligent homicide and was indicted on a charge of endangering the welfare of a child.
Webster, born in Harlem in March of 2002, lived with Craig Webster, who had signed the birth certificate as her father, until he died. She was 6 months old at the time, and her mother was in jail on charges in New York that she declined to specify today.
"I was very stupid in my past," Gochenaur said. "It was stupidity, what I had done."
Gochenaur's attorney, Howard R. Sanders of New York City, said, "She had some difficulty taking care of her daughter when she was younger. The father who's on the certificate passed away."
At 18 months, the girl was placed with a foster family, where she has lived since then while her biological mother has tried to be part of her life again.
The last time Gochenaur saw her daughter was in 2005, in court.
"I spent time with her. She liked making jokes, doing pictures," Gochenaur said. "She kept crying all the time as I was leaving. That's the one thing that bothers me all the time."
Gochenaur said she was trying to get Alvarez to agree to an open adoption, which would allow the biological mother more chances to spend time with her daughter. But Alvarez resisted, she said.
A court hearing was scheduled for this past Thursday.
By then, Webster was dead.
"It doesn't make any sense," Gochenaur said.
She is making plans for her daughter to be buried here.
"I finally get to bring my daughter home," she said sadly.
Staff writer Tom Murse can be reached at tmurse@LNPnews.com or 481-6021.
