What Happened to Johnnie Jordan?: The Story of a Child Turning Violent

A top-rate book....a little wordy in places, but the author was being very specific about showing you this young man's upbringing, and familial background. A truly hard and tough look at the failures of an over-burdened foster-care system, not-to-mention two DEEPLY messed up parents.

This is a story of a child that we, as a society, have failed from day one. As a CASA volunteer my heart bleeds for this child that NOBODY cared about, that NOBODY helped and that NOBODY wishes to remember. We locked him and threw away the key because as a society we could not face him and acknowledge our errors in dealing with children in foster care, we are too scared. What is more scary to me is that his caseworker Tamara is still working and probably ruining other kids' lives. Where is compassion in our world? Certainly not in the welfare system of this country nor in our legal gurus who charged him as adult.

Toth first explored in MOLE PEOPLE the veiled human nature, resilience and compassion that no one pays an attention to in deep hidden place. On her next ORPHAN OF THE LIVING she goes writes about cases of foster children -- other layers of human soul. Toth is consistently taking the path involving the subject and person in depth where the world elides.On WHAT HAPPENED TO JOHNNIE JORDAN? she advances taking a focus on single person yet as much as goes inside of him that entangles the constellation of people and social system he passed through. It's remarkable to me the publisher gave a go-ahead on this seemingly no winning subject.I recommend to read first the Methodology And Acknowledgment at the end of book: "...this book faced a great deal of opposition. Child privacy laws posed the greatest legal roadblock to telling this story."But more often than not, these secrecy laws are used to protect criminal abuses and failings within child welfare and juvenile justice systems." After reading chapters I recommend to read the Methodology... again. This book is made from the people who came forward despite the risk of legal repercussion. There are people who still haven't benumbed their hearts.

This is a really, really good book. Society is so quick to lock up kids who commit awful, heinous crimes, but nobody it seems wants to look inside their heads to find out what makes them tick. Toth tells a terrific, sobering and engrossing story about Johnnie Jordan, who brutally murdered the only person who was ever nice to him -- without explanation. Amazingly, no one in Toledo, Ohio -- not the police, not the judges, not the social workers -- wanted to find out why. Toth did her own investigation and came up with some startling answers.