A Tennessee woman was found dead in a parking lot Monday, shortly before she was due to be arrested.
Deborah Barnes, 62, was the foster mom of a 2-year-old boy who died in September from injuries to his head and neck.
Authorities said that she took her life before her arrest on criminal homicide charges. She had fostered a total of 44 kids since joining a federally-funded program in 2009.
The boy’s biological mom, Eriyuan Carter, had been reporting the evident abuse to their grandmother. All her three kids were placed under Barnes’ care following a domestic dispute involving the children’s violent dad.
“Every visitation she had with her children she complained. She would call me and let me know, this is going on, or this is going on. She would always complain because so and so had a scratch or a bump,” the grandmother told reporters.
“I mean, if they’re going to step in and, you know, remove children from home, then they need to monitor these foster parents…in this case, if there’s one person like this they work that works for the state, how do we know that there’s not a million people out there like this that work for the state?”
