OTHER LEGAL NEWS Teen suicide's mother sues for $25M

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The mother of a 15-year-old girl who hanged herself at the Thomas J.S. Waxter Children’s Center last year has filed a $25 million civil rights and negligence action against the state.

Hilda Salmeron alleges that her daughter Vanessa, while committed to the Waxter Center in Laurel last March, was left unmonitored in a non-suicide safe room despite the girl’s threats of suicide and psychiatric evaluations indicating she was an “extreme danger to herself.”

Vanessa “tied her shoelace to a hole in the metal frame of her bunk bed and hung herself with a makeshift noose,” the complaint says.

“In interviews with the police,” the center’s youth supervisor “expressly admitted to the police that she had disregarded procedures which would have saved Vanessa’s life, stating that Vanessa ‘should be here. … It’s my fault. … I told my girls that day I’ve never hurt a child in my life and then this happens,’” the complaint alleges.

Vanessa had “numerous incidents of truancy and self-destructive behavior that arose out of her deeply troubled childhood,” the complaint alleges, noting that her childhood trauma included “two incidents of multiple rape before she turned twelve.”

Two state-performed psychiatric evaluations shortly before her December 2001 placement at the center “concluded that she was an ‘extreme risk to herself’ often entertaining ‘ ideas of her own death,’” and recommended that she be placed in a “treatment program with a strong therapeutic component, which includes individual and family therapy,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit names the state, Youth Supervisor Betty M. Graham, center employee Kimberly Maultsby and John and Jane Does 1-10 as defendants.

Hilda Salmeron, of Silver Spring, filed the suit as a survivor and representative of Vanessa’s estate, and to the use of her husband, Martir Salmeron, Vanessa’s father, in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

The four-count complaint includes three federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. §1983 alleging deprivation of Vanessa’s personal security, physical integrity and privacy, as well as a negligence claim under the Maryland Tort Claims Act.

Assistant Attorney General Robert T. Fontaine, deputy counsel for the state Department of Juvenile Justice who is handling the case, declined to comment on the matter.