( Courtesy of the Law Offices of Croley and Foley)On July 17, 2022, two staffers at Louisville’s Brooklawn foster care psychiatric treatment facility had 7-year-old Ja’Ceon Terry in a physical restraint, with one holding his legs out straight and another pushing against his back until his nose a lmost touched the floor. They held Ja’Ceon until he vomited and lost consciousness. The coroner ruled the death a homicide.This Wednesday, nearly four years later, Louisville prosecutors announced second degree manslaughter charges against those two staffers – Deborah Francis and Jillian Parks – as well as Amanda Whitlow, who had been helping to restrain him earlier. The charges are felonies, and carry five to ten years of jail time.All three had bond set at $15,000 cash, and will be arraigned on Monday morning.State Sen. Keturah Herron said that it is important to ensure that people working with kids have proper training, and face consequences “when things go awry.”“It is important for this to play out in the judicial system,” Herron said. “And so, obviously, this is a beginning stage of that process, and I am pleased to see that our system has brought down an indictment to ensure that Ja’Ceon gets justice.”Herron and former Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott both thought charges were overdue.“Four years is a ridiculously long amount of time. It's overly lengthy,” Scott said. “It says a lot – and I've said this before – about how Black lives ultimately do not seem to matter in these cases, and a young life at that.”Asked why four years passed between Ja’Ceon’s death and the indictments, a spokesperson for the Jefferson Commonwealth’s Attorney said that a court rule limits what information he could provide, and that prosecutors would save statements for the courtroom.In 2023, Ja’Ceon’s estate and Uspiritus-Brooklawn settled a wrongful death lawsuit, in which Whitlow testified that she had the situation under control before Parks and Francis intervened.Caretakers in situations like this face difficult decisions and criminal charges against them are rare, according to John Myers, a leading child abuse expert at the University of California Law San Francisco. He did not have time to refresh himself on the details of Ja’Ceon’s case in light of the indictments, but re-emphasized what he told KyCIR last year.“I think lots of people in the public would say, ‘this is easy, this little kid was killed and somebody needs to pay,’” Myers said in 2025. “I think that's naïve and doesn't actually have an understanding of the complexity of taking care of these children.”According to a state investigation, Ja’Ceon had wet his pants, threatened to throw a water bottle at a staff member and was fighting hard to get out of the hold.The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting obtained records, including that investigation in 2023, that showed in his final hours alive, Ja’Ceon was publicly shamed, verbally abused and left alone in his room for nearly six hours.According to Whitlow’s testimony in the state investigation, Francis had said earlier in the day that she “was going to hold [Ja’Ceon] and make him throw up.”Whitlow was not holding Ja’Ceon when he became unconscious. She told investigators that when she left the hold, Francis pushed Ja’Ceon so far forward that his nose almost touched the floor, with his legs still straight out in front of him.Francis, Parks and Whitlow were all suspended days after Ja’Ceon died. Francis and Parks were fired about a month later. ...read more read less