South Carolina agency gave child to 'monster,' lawsuit says

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

A South Carolina state agency meant to protect vulnerable children left a teenage girl “in the hands of a monster,” a lawsuit alleges.

Gregg Martin, an alleged predator facing more than a dozen sex crime charges since 2022, allegedly groomed his victim, injected her with drugs and mentally and physically abused her for six weeks, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit targeted the state Department of Social Services and individual social workers for allegedly ignoring the victim's mother's “repeated requests” to remove her daughter from the home – even before the allegations of sexual abuse was revealed – and for failing to ensure that the Martin House was a “Safe Environment.”

“What this child suffered at the hands of a monster was nothing short of unbelievable,” the family’s attorney, Debra Butcher, told Fox News Digital.

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Fox News Digital sent the South Carolina Department of Human Services a list of questions, but a spokesperson declined to comment.

“DSS does not comment on pending litigation or cases involved in litigation,” a spokesperson said in an email.

Martin, 56, was arrested by the Richland County Sheriff's Office in South Carolina as recently as March on warrants for alleged sex crimes against a minor in Gwinnett County, South Carolina. Georgia.

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Peach State criminal charges include using computer services to seduce, solicit, lure or induce a child to commit illegal acts; electronic furnishing of obscene material to minors and obscene contact over the Internet with a child. That brings the total criminal charges to 14 in South Carolina, most of which stem from alleged abuse of the teen in his care in 2022, plus at least three in Georgia, according to court records.

A judge revoked Martin's bond in mid-April and he is being held in a Richland County jail. His attorney could not be reached for comment.

The teen was initially removed from her home by the Department of Social Services while it investigated allegations of abuse and neglect against the girl's father.

She was sent to live with Martin, who was the victim's best friend's family, over her mother's objections, according to a lawsuit filed in South Carolina in February by the Foster Care Abuse Law Firm.

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But the victim's family thought they couldn't say no after protective services allegedly “threatened” to place her in foster care and essentially forced them to sign a safety plan.

A safety plan, also known as an alternative living arrangement, typically places a child with another relative or close family friend during an abuse investigation, one of the family's attorneys explained, Robert Butcher, at Fox News Digital.

In this case, the state placed her in Martin's care for approximately five to six weeks.

During that time, no one from the agency monitored her, according to the lawsuit, which allowed Martin to take explicit photos of his victim and abuse her, Debra Butcher said.

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“DSS (Department of Social Services) has not come to this house once,” Butcher said. “During those five weeks or so, her mother kept saying, 'My husband can leave the house. We can put her with a relative. We put her with a neighbor. … We don't want her to stay there- down.' [in the Martin home].'”

This was before the criminal allegations even surfaced.

Texts between the mother and a social worker, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, reportedly show how hard the teen's mother fought to get her daughter back.

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In several text messages between late February and mid-March 2022, the victim's mother said that her daughter's father would move if his daughter could come home. She also left voicemails, Debra Butcher said.

“I have been trying to communicate with you since 2/23 and I have not heard from you yet,” the mother texted the social worker. “Is everything okay? I'm concerned about the lack of communication.”

Another week passed with no response. Again, the victim's mother texted the social worker and begged her to respond.

“I don’t understand the delay and why no one is calling us and responding to our requests,” his mother said in a text message.

After about a dozen messages — most of which went unanswered — the caseworker said he couldn't evict the victim from Martin's home because the paperwork was already signed.

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About six weeks after protective services left the victim with Martin, a new social worker took over and removed the child from Martin's house, Debra Butcher said, and the victim and her mother eventually was able to speak “freely”.

That's when “the child revealed what happened,” Debra said, and Martin was arrested shortly after.

The trauma still haunts the victim more than two years later.

“She talked about it probably two weeks ago. And when she finished, she had to get up and leave and she was in tears and shaking,” Debra said. “It’s still very traumatic for her.”

The Foster Care Abuse Law Firm has three — soon to be four — other lawsuits alleging the state agency performed unnecessary and invasive examinations on children under the guise of checking to see if children had been sexually abused.

But there were no allegations of abuse or physical symptoms suggestive of sexual trauma, according to the lawsuits.

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All lawsuits against two groups and four doctors were filed in South Carolina on May 15 and reviewed by Fox News Digital. Robert said a fourth lawsuit was in the works but had not yet been filed.

The language and allegations are similar in each trial, and the victims are young girls and boys.

The lawsuit includes serious allegations that attorneys say are “essentially rape,” and asks the courts to stop the defendants “from conducting unnecessary and intrusive pediatric genitourinary examinations… when there is no There are no allegations, or even suspicions of sexual abuse. a result of Defendants' long-standing and well-documented failures…the children…have been and continue to be physically, psychologically, and emotionally harmed and continue to be at ongoing risk of such harm. »

Robert Butcher said it was concerning that there were “perhaps hundreds of thousands of images of children's genitals” in the possession of Prisma Health, which was named as one of the defendants.

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Prisma Health said it does not comment on pending litigation.

The so-called examinations described by the butchers are graphic and disturbing. Their bodies are exposed and physically probed, lawyers say.

“Sometimes, in wanting to do good, some of these people do harm to these children,” Robert Butcher said.

“This is sexual abuse,” Debra Butcher said.

Each of the lawsuits implores the courts to prohibit the Department of Human Services and Prisma Health from conducting these types of examinations without allegations.

Original article source: South Carolina agency gave child to 'monster,' lawsuit says