Tears for girl bind KC, Oklahoma

By JOE ROBERTSON and LAURA BAUER

The Kansas City Star

MUSKOGEE, Okla. — Erica Green, the little girl known for four years only as Precious Doe, had a pink Easter dress waiting for her that she never got to wear.

“I never let anyone have Erica's clothes because I was always hoping she would come back," said Betty Brown of Muskogee, Okla. Brown, who helped raise Erica Green, spoke Thursday at her home.

“She loved her little dresses,” said Betty Brown, 72, who cared for Erica after her birth.

But just a few weeks before Easter in 2001, Erica's mother took her on a trip. Brown never saw Erica, then 3 years old, again.

Brown, as well as Erica's teenage babysitter and the neighbors who remembered the spirited little girl all kept asking about her.

“How's the baby?” Brown would ask Erica's mother, Michelle Johnson, when she saw her.

Johnson always had a story, Brown recalled. The child was in Chicago. She was in Kansas City. Someone was caring for her.

Then on Wednesday, before noon, a Kansas City police detective knocked on Brown's door. Brown remembers something about the detective asking if Erica had a certain birthmark on her shoulder.

“I can't remember what happened,” she said. “My daughter says I screamed.”

She knows now that the little child who loved the Teletubbies had been dead all along. It was Erica whose decapitated body was discovered four years ago in a wooded area of Kansas City.

“My heart is heavy,” Brown said through tears on the porch of her home. “That baby was blessed, being around people who cared for her, who were going to protect her.”

Erica was big for her age, but dainty, she said. And spirited.

One Sunday when she was barely 2, when seeing the older children singing in the choir at Evangelist Temple Baptist Church, she marched up and joined them.

“That's just the way she was,” Brown said. “She was a smart child.”

Brown said she had cared for many foster children over the years, and in 1997, Michelle Johnson needed help. She was pregnant with Erica — and in prison.

Brown said she knew Johnson's mother-in-law, Betty Green. She hardly knew Johnson.

She said she picked up the baby from an Oklahoma City hospital, and recalls signing paperwork that stipulated that the mother would be able to get her child after she got out of prison.

Brown said she raised Erica in her house, which still hosts many children after school. Like all the other children, Erica called her “Granny.”

When Johnson was released, Erica remained in Brown's home. Brown said she even began talking to Johnson about adopting the child.

And that would have been the best for her, said Joseph Brewer, now of Tulsa, who was Brown's neighbor at the time.

“She was in a wonderful place,” Brewer said. “They treated her like one of their own.”

But in early April 2001, Johnson said she wanted to take Erica with her for a few days to go to a family reunion. Brown packed up a couple of outfits for her, with some extra dress shoes.

Within weeks, Erica was dead.

Jamesetta Russell, a friend of Brown, knew that Brown ached to see the child again. They saw Johnson again over the next few years, but never with Erica.

“We always wondered where she was,” Russell said. “People at church thought she was just precious.”

Russell paused. “They gave her the right name.”

Erica's birth father says she wasn't the type of child to act up. “She wasn't a crybaby,” Larry Green said Thursday in an interview with the Muskogee Daily Phoenix in the Muskogee County jail, where he's being held on a parole violation. “She was the kind of girl anybody would like to have. She was so smiling.”

Michelle Johnson had eight children, according to court records. At least three were younger than Erica.

Only one, an older brother, shared her last name.

In 2000 he was in state custody and the Oklahoma's Department of Human Services wanted Michelle Johnson to pay child support.

The three younger children were all in state custody, according to court documents in 2003 and 2004, including a child born less than eight months after Erica was killed.

DHS officials said Thursday they could not comment on whether Johnson's children were in state custody, or even whether they had been aware Johnson had another child, Erica.

Esther Rider-Salem, programs manager with DHS' child protection services, said the agency launched an investigation after Michelle Johnson's arrest.

“Any time a situation like this comes up, we definitely go back and look at what our involvement is,” Rider-Salem said.

Erica's short life gives some details on how she may have gone undetected by the system.

Rider-Salem said the department of child protection services doesn't automatically take children born to an incarcerated mother. It gets involved with a child only when a report is made.

“Just because a child is born in prison doesn't necessarily mean there's abuse or neglect,” Rider-Salem said.

“If a friend or relative is willing to take care of the child, we may never get involved. We may not be notified.”

Added Dustin Pyeatt, DHS spokesman: “We can't keep track of every child born in the state of Oklahoma.”