Game leads to near death, mother says

A woman says her 12-year-old daughter almost died while in a Lawrence foster care facility last week.

“She and some of the other girls were playing a game called ‘pass out,'” said Raquel Jordan, who asked that her daughter not be identified.

In “pass out,” one person positions their fingers under another person’s chin and presses down in a way that cuts off the flow of blood to the second person’s brain. Soon, the second person, who’s lying down, loses consciousness.

As the second person regains consciousness, he or she is said to experience a floating sensation.

“As I understand it, you’re supposed to pass out and then after a minute, you’re supposed to come to,” Jordan said. “But my daughter didn’t come back. She started shaking and going into convulsions.”

Jordan said she was called shortly before midnight Thursday by someone at The Shelter’s emergency shelter for girls in east Lawrence. The caller urged her to go to Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s emergency room because her daughter had stopped breathing.

While at the emergency room, the girl regained consciousness.

“She still has the shakes, but the doctor says they’ll go away,” Jordan said.

Jordan said she resisted efforts to return her daughter to the emergency shelter.

“I got the police called on me,” she said. “But I wasn’t about to let my daughter go back to a place that almost killed her.”

Her daughter is now in a Lawrence-area foster home, she said.

Jordan said she wanted the incident investigated.

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“I want to know how this can go in a place that’s supposed to be safe,” she said. “You can bet that if that happened in my house, they’d be all over me.”

At The Shelter, executive director Judy Culley confirmed that a resident at one of the agency’s two emergency shelters was taken to the hospital late Thursday evening.

“Anytime something like this happens, it’s regrettable,” Culley said.

“I can’t say anything about the specifics of what happened,” she said, “but we did conduct an immediate and aggressive internal investigation, and we’ve notified the appropriate governmental authorities for an independent investigation.”

She added: “We don’t believe we violated our standards of care, but, needless to say, we take these things very seriously. We don’t want to ever see something like this happen again.”

Because the child is a juvenile, the results of the investigation will not be made public.

Instances of “pass out” gone awry are somewhat rare.”We see it, but infrequently,” said Dr. Andy Goetting, an emergency room physician at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.”It’s scary because, essentially, it lowers the level of oxygen reaching the brain, which can cause strokelike symptoms and/or brain damage,” he said.

Jordan said her daughter — the oldest of her five children — has been in and out state custody since she assaulted a junior high principal last year.

Jordan said her daughter had oppositional defiant disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “She can be very hard to handle,” she added.

Jordan said she could not control her daughter.

“But what I’m saying is they’re supposed to be keeping my child safe in foster care and they’re not,” she said. “So what’s the difference between having her with me and having her in foster care? How is she any better off?”