Former North Bend residents Jeffrey and April Henderson were each sentenced to nine months of electronic home detention last week, for their roles in the abuse and neglect of a severely handicapped 19-year-old girl.
The two initially entered pleas of not guilty at their April 24 arraignment on charges of second degree criminal mistreatment and Medicaid fraud. In late September, both changed their pleas to guilty of criminal mistreatment. Residents of Florida since the summer of 2013, the Hendersons have been in custody in North Bend via electronic home detention since April, when they returned to the state for their court appearances.
Charges against the Hendersons, as documented in the statement of probable cause from investigating detective Belinda Paredes, were filed after Paredes and Child Protective Services conducted a welfare check on the child the Hendersons were supposed to be caring for, Oct. 21, 2012. The girl’s room was “filthy, littered with used diapers, soiled clothing, dried vomit, trash, etc.,” the report states, and the girl was lying on the lower bunk of a bunk bed, “naked except for a soiled diaper” and “severely thin, skeletal like.”
Authorities called an ambulance and removed the girl from the couple’s home that day, along with their four children. During follow-up investigations, Paredes wrote, they found conflicts between April’s statement that she took the girl to all her medical appointments and the medical records, which led to the fraud charges that were later dropped. Also, “it has been determined Heather has not received dental care and now requires 18 root canals,” Paredes wrote.
According to the detective’s statement, the Hendersons said they had been caring for the girl for nine years. They had no training on how to care for someone in her condition, blind, with cerebral palsy, and the girl was of no relation to them. Jeffrey’s mother had been caring for her, until her death, when the Hendersons agreed to take over her care, according to court papers.
Jeffrey Henderson was unemployed, per the charging papers, and April was being paid between $3,500 and $4,000 per month to care for the girl. Jeffrey was also receiving the girl’s Social Security income, of about $700 per month. These were the sole sources of income for the family when the girl was removed from their home. On November 5, 2012, according to the detective’s statement, April filed an unemployment claim.
“She told them she had been laid off from her employment due to lack of work,” the statement read.
King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg had asked for sentences of six months in jail for Jeffrey and 12 months in jail or a work-release program for April in his sentencing recommendation.
“The conditions in which (the girl) was found are not conditions which could occur overnight, or even within a week or two,” Satterberg stated in his sentencing request. “It was a state that was the result of weeks and months (and even years in terms of the lack of dental care) of extreme long-term neglect.”
