You see, Marcus was a child who had a hard life in his short three years on this earth. His life was tragically taken by the very people who were supposed to love him, protect him, and help him navigate the world. All of this happened because they claimed he was simply too hard to handle. Marcus himself was born on June the 24th, 2003, in the state of Ohio. Those who knew him in his earliest days described him as a very outgoing, vibrant, and loving child who had a bright spirit despite his circumstances.
However, his home life was far from stable. He was officially taken out of his birth mother’s home in 2006 after a deeply concerning incident where he was found wandering around all by himself on the busy, dangerous public streets. Marcus’s birth mother, whose name was Donna, was reportedly trapped in a highly toxic and bad relationship at the time. Furthermore, the home she owned and lived in was in a horrific state of neglect, completely covered in bugs and feces. Because of all of these terrible conditions, the authorities stepped in, and Marcus was placed into the foster care system.
Following his removal from Donna’s custody, Marcus was sent to live with Liz and David Carroll, who resided just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. At the time, Liz and David seemed to have a bustling household, as they had three other children of their own biological lineage, as well as a one-year-old foster child already living under their roof. When Marcus first arrived, Liz noted that he struggled significantly at the beginning of his stay, finding it difficult to adjust to his new surroundings.
However, she claimed that once all the other children in the house made an effort to make him feel welcome, he grew to love it. To outside observers, the home appeared to be a haven for children. Liz ran a full-time daycare right from their residential home, and David helped out with the daily operations.
David himself had severe issues holding down a regular job, largely because he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was required to take daily medication to manage it. The family dynamic was highly unstable; David did move out of the house for a while due to marital friction, but he eventually came back after Liz begged him to do so.He did not return alone, though. When he moved back into the family home, he brought along his girlfriend, a woman named Amy Baker.
Let me tell you that remarkable detail again so it completely sinks in. You had Liz and David, who were legally husband and wife, and you had Amy, who was David’s girlfriend, all living together simultaneously in the exact same house. What could possibly go wrong in a household like that? Liz stated to others that she was entirely fine with Amy living there with them because she felt she simply could not raise all the children on her own without extra hands. Liz, Amy, and David also engaged in a three-way romantic relationship, an unconventional arrangement which really shocked the extended family when they found out.
Now, regarding the specific incident itself in which Marcus mysteriously disappeared, the official story began in August 2006. According to the family, Liz, Marcus, and a few of the other children went out to a local public park to spend the day. While they were there, Liz allegedly fainted due to a sudden episode of low blood pressure, and an ambulance had to be called to the scene to treat her. David was also urgently called so that he could come down to the park and take care of the rest of the children while Liz was being attended to by medical personnel. When David finally arrived at the park, he claimed that he looked around and noticed that Marcus was missing.
A massive, intensive three-day search for little Marcus was soon underway, utilizing high-tech helicopters and highly trained search dogs to scour the entire area. By the third day, however, authorities made the difficult decision to stop searching because they simply did not find any physical evidence whatsoever. The park had been filled with crowds of people on the day of the alleged disappearance, yet not a single witness remembered seeing Marcus there that day. At the time of the active search, Liz actively stated to the media:
“I need help from the public to help my son. Please, people think foster care is temporary, but I want him now. Please return him to a hospital. Waking up every morning and not having him run to me is very difficult. I am closer to him than his birth mother.”
However, the police did not buy Liz’s emotional statements to the press, and they heavily started to think that something far more sinister had happened to Marcus behind closed doors.
So, acting on their growing suspicions, the police decided to thoroughly interview Marcus’s assigned caseworkers from the foster care agency. During these interviews, one of the caseworkers cracked and confessed a shocking truth: she actually had not seen Marcus in person since the year before, exposing a massive failure in oversight. Armed with this information, the police then conducted polygraph tests for David, Liz, and Amy. Every single one of them failed the test completely. Realizing that they were all lying, the police decided to make a strategic deal with one of the parties involved to definitively determine where Marcus was located.
In 2006, Amy and Liz were officially told to report to court to testify before a grand jury. The police then decided to formally solidify their deal with Amy, offering her absolute immunity from prosecution as long as she didn’t have anything directly to do with the actual physical act of Marcus’s death. With the immunity deal signed, Amy’s story completely changed, and she spilled everything. Amy revealed that she, Liz, and David had traveled to Kentucky between August 4th and August 6th to go see Liz’s extended family. Liz had explicitly stated beforehand that she did not want Marcus to come along on the trip. Because they wanted to leave him behind, Liz and David wrapped Marcus tightly in a blanket, put heavy tape all around him so he could not move or escape, and locked him securely inside their home closet.
Liz herself also confessed to this horrific series of events in front of the grand jury. She admitted under oath that they had left the three-year-old boy in there without a single drop of food or water, but she shockingly claimed that they did not have any real intentions of hurting him. What? You sit there in a court of law, you look a jury in the eye, and you tell them that you starved a toddler, that you left him to become entirely dehydrated, but you didn’t mean to cause him any harm? You silly cow.
Now, when the trio finally got back home from their trip on August the 6th, they opened the closet and discovered that Marcus had died. Authorities believe his life was taken by the extreme, suffocating heat of the enclosed space rather than standard dehydration or starvation alone, as the temperatures inside that locked closet may have easily reached a scorching 110 degrees. His poor remains were eventually found on August the 28th by the police, hidden away on a grass property located in Ohio.
The legal ramifications for this horrific crime were complex and spanned multiple states. On Friday, April the 20th, 2007, the Commonwealth of Kentucky officially charged Amy Baker with evidence tampering. The prosecutors in Kentucky claimed that the total immunity she was previously granted was only legally binding within the state of Ohio, and they argued that Kentucky held proper jurisdiction over crimes connected to the Ohio River area. She initially waived extradition and defended herself against the criminal charges brought against her in Kentucky, which carried a maximum five-year prison sentence. Her defense attorneys quickly moved to dismiss all charges against her and sought to completely suppress all testimony given by her in the prosecutions of Liz and David. They alleged that the Kentucky prosecutor had originally promised Ohio prosecutors that Amy would be given full immunity in Kentucky as well. Her trial was officially set for November 2007, but all of her charges were then completely dropped in early 2008.
Meanwhile, Liz and David faced the full force of the law in Ohio. They were indicted on two counts of child endangerment and one count of involuntary manslaughter. David was also indicted for one count of gross abuse of a corpse for his role in disposing of the boy’s body. Furthermore, they were both indicted for one count of making false alarms and inducing panic due to the massive, fraudulent search they triggered. Liz was additionally charged with two counts of perjury for lying under oath.
Liz went to trial in February 2007. She was found guilty on the charges and was sentenced to a harsh term of 54 years to life in prison. David chose to avoid a full trial and accepted a plea deal, and he was given a sentence of 15 years to life in prison.
On June the 24th, 2007, on what would have been Marcus’s fourth birthday, a memorial bench was dedicated to his memory in Georgetown, Ohio. The private foster care agency that had originally placed Marcus with Liz and David, which was called Lifeway for Youth, had their operating license permanently revoked by the state. Fair play. Completely deserved. As for Amy herself, she eventually went to prison in 2009 for an entirely separate crime involving drug trafficking; she was caught selling prescription pills to an undercover police informant and was sentenced to two years in prison. Finally, David actually became eligible for parole in the year 2022, but a state parole board thoroughly reviewed his case and decided against his release, keeping him behind bars. That was absolutely the right decision. I don’t know why Liz was so deeply ashamed of Marcus that she did not want her family to see him, but I’m glad she will never get out of prison. And I’m glad David seems like he won’t either. As for Amy, well, at least she did some time in a cell, but she should probably be in prison for life right alongside them.
On October the 9th, 2007, Colorado Sheriff’s deputies were urgently dispatched to a residence on Calala Kovo Drive. The emergency call was regarding an unresponsive two-year-old child who was lying perfectly still in a bed, located near a highly disturbing, blood-stained table in the living room. After being rushed by emergency services and transported to Memorial Hospital, little Elise Vick was officially declared dead due to a fatal, massive brain injury she had sustained. At the time of her passing, she was under the direct care of a woman named Jules Cuneo in a foster home setting. Elise had ended up in the foster system because her biological mother had been arrested on drug charges, and her biological father was currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for assault.
Now, before I continue any further into the details, the overarching theme of this video centers around foster parents and their horrific treatment of the children placed in their care. So, I will have two more distinct cases for you in this video after this one concludes.
Upon initial questioning by police detectives, Jules revealed a story claiming that she was simply holding Elise on her knees when the toddler suddenly fell right off her lap and accidentally landed her head directly onto the wooden coffee table. She also added to her story, claiming that earlier in the day, Elise had fallen on her face in a Target parking lot and had scraped her knee. Jules claimed that after the coffee table incident occurred, she immediately took Elise into a shower in a desperate attempt to revive her, which, as we know, was completely unsuccessful.
However, Dr. Paul Grabb, the neurosurgeon who performed the medical autopsy of Elise, completely dismantled her story. He determined that there were absolutely no external injuries to her body that were consistent with the extreme, massive amount of trauma she suffered to the interior of her brain. This medical data further indicated that a simple fall from a lap wasn’t nearly severe enough to cause Elise’s death as described by Jules. So, somewhere, someone was clearly lying.
This key scientific information was immediately picked up by the detectives on the case, who started interviewing Jules again. After confronting her for hours on end with the undeniable medical evidence, Jules finally cracked. She revealed the shocking truth: after Elise fell onto the coffee table the first time, Jules picked her up and deliberately slammed her down a second time onto the coffee table with immense force. It was so hard that the child landed flat on the floor, where she was completely unable to talk and never spoke a single word again. This horrific act was all done simply because Jules was angry with Elise because she wouldn’t talk to her. In other words, Jules took Elise’s life because she felt personally rejected by a two-year-old. What?
However, this was not the first time Jules was caught severely upsetting and abusing the victim. You see, months prior on August the 5th, 2007, a detailed letter had been sent to the Department of Social Services. The sender of the letter chose to remain completely anonymous out of extreme fear of what Jules would do to her family if she ever found out who sent it. Crucially, the anonymous sender also attached actual audio tapes proving the horrific way Jules treated the victim. The audio captured Jules literally sitting directly on top of Elise and squeezing the entire tiny body of the two-year-old under her full adult weight.
The audio also recorded how Jules would cruelly teach the toddler to say:
“Get off me. Elise is stupid. Elise is chicken.”
And this abusive behavior wasn’t even done in private away from others. As noted in the letter, the sender wrote at the very end that sometimes the other children living in the house would openly mimic Jules’s behavior and treat Elise badly as well. So the conundrum here is that Jules initially tried to say this was an accidental fall. But given the evidence from the letter and the audio, it is clear that Jules gets genuine satisfaction from sadism and humiliating a helpless child.
But it gets even worse. Keep listening to what she confessed to the police. Jules also confessed about causing more injuries to Elise over a period of several months, ranging from fractured front teeth to severe facial bruises and a painful injury to the frenulum inside her mouth. From March to June in 2007, Jules described around 15 distinct injuries caused to the child, whether she dismissed them as a simple rug injury or a skinned knee. And it seems that Jules wasn’t just a sadist; she even had severe attachment issues regarding Elise.
As one example, while they were having dinner outside in a public restaurant, Elise gave a warm hug to a complete stranger. It is quite evident from this action how much basic love and attention the little girl needed; she wasn’t getting any affection from her foster mother, so she just sought it out from a random stranger. That’s quite telling about her home life. This innocent act completely enraged Jules to a point that she immediately carried her out to the home and then harmed her again.
Now, to the police, Jules described her deep anger and unhappiness with the child after she returned home from visiting her grandparents. That’s when Elise allegedly started to throw massive tantrums before bed. She refused to eat her meals on time and was always angry with everyone around her. And on a side note, as anyone who has kids knows, one of the hardest things to do is to get them to eat. So this behavior should not be surprising to any adult. In fact, what Jules told the police is that sometimes she would try to comfort her, claiming that if she didn’t want to eat the food, she would say:
“It’s okay. We love you.”
And give her a hug.
However, when the detectives spoke to Jules’s biological daughters, they painted a completely different picture. They said Jules would constantly complain about little things, like Elise being given candy or her hairstyle being changed. And earlier where I mentioned the grandparents, well, because Elise’s biological parents were completely missing from her life, she would often go to visit her grandparents. During these visits, her grandmother would notice the child’s extreme, fearful behavior of not wanting to go back to the foster home with Jules. Elise would openly cry, saying she doesn’t want to go back to that house. Her grandmother, however, Miss Hale, would initially try to soothe her, ignore the deeper implication, and tell her everything’s going to be okay.
In fact, to police, Miss Hale later described all the injuries the poor girl had sustained, explicitly stating that these injuries were never present before she ever got placed in Jules’s house. Elise would directly tell her grandmother:
“Mommy had did this.”
She was explicitly referring to Jules. Miss Hale was at first hesitant about lodging a formal complaint because the grandparents didn’t want to blow their chances of being able to meet and see Elise in the future. But the rising abuse did not stop them from eventually complaining about this incident to social services. Miss Hale did speak to them directly, and the agency workers told them they would look into it. But when Elise’s situation did not improve, Miss Hale would complain again, presenting all the physical evidence she had gathered, but she’d be told the exact same thing again:
“Don’t worry, we’re going to look at it by child services.”
You could argue that the grandmother at this point should have just bypassed the system and called 911 or the police directly, but I don’t really fault her. I mean, she did go to social services repeatedly. What else could she really do within the system? By this point, Elise was so deeply traumatized that even the loud sound of a car door slamming shut would fill her with absolute fear.
Now, in these interviews the police conducted, when the detectives listened to the audio tape of Elise crying, the voices of pain would be described by listeners as completely atrocious and horrific. Jules would even intentionally complain about her grandparents to the agency so that she could put a permanent end to their regular visitations, probably so she could continue her sadistic moments without getting caught by outside eyes. Elise was even forced by Jules to say that she loves living with Jules, or else she’d be threatened with being abandoned outside in the cold.
Now, even to this day, it’s still completely unknown what exactly made Jules literally take the girl’s life, even though she mentioned Elise not talking to her, which angered her to a point she did this to her on the table. But she herself was a single mother of two daughters. It’s safe to assume that her own biological children would have thrown tantrums when they were young. I mean, what was so particular about Elise that triggered her deep sadism to commit such heinous acts and even made others in the house do the same to Elise?
Elise’s grandfather described her as a beautiful, sweet little girl who genuinely enjoyed life even through the terrible situation with foster care. To the grandparents, the last time Elise was ever seen alive was in September 2007 at a family wedding, where her injuries weren’t visible due to a dress she wore, but she did appear visibly thin. This was just 10 days before she died.
And it was in 2010 when things could not get worse about Jules. There were letters written by Jules that her own daughters were reading out loud in court. They told the court that their mother had put Tabasco sauce and vinegar directly into their eyes and on their tongues, and had stung their cheeks with hot metal tongs. What? They even said their mother sat on all the kids in the house until some of them literally passed out from lack of air. Wow. So, from a table coffee incident to Tabasco and vinegar in the girls’ eyes, it suggests to me that all the girls in that home were tortured. Maybe the coffee table incident was just what finally took Elise’s life, but given the description of what Jules did to these girls, Elise was about to die at some point anyway under that roof. It seemed that’s just brutal. Tabasco in the eyes? What? That is a specific, agonizing kind of pain. If I was to put Tabasco in your eyes, it’s not like you can just be like:
“Okay, I can let the pain go away.”
You’re going to scream. It’s that kind of intense pain.
In fact, during the trial, Ashley Lindenberg, who was Elise’s biological mother, was crying out in the courtroom, saying:
“Are you kidding me?”
But when she found out that Jules was only sentenced to a mere 32 years, Ashley probably deeply regretted allowing her daughter to be taken into foster care in the first place. The presiding judge called it the cruelest case he has ever heard in his entire 38 years of legal practice. El Paso County was also subsequently sued for the death of Elise, as the lawsuit detailed how all the social workers systematically ignored the clear signs and reports of her abuse by Jules. So Jules had a foster child she did not want. She was obviously pissed off in her life because she was single, had all these kids she had to deal with, had to go to work, and do it all by herself. So she took out her anger on this poor child. There’s many cases I’ve covered, right? More of which are about to come, where the child services have completely let the children down. But sometimes the adult in the equation, well, you got to take full responsibility. 32 years? What a lot of bollocks.
Now, I’m going to move on to my final case of Jennifer Rosenbaum. So on November the 17th, 2015, Leila Daniel, a two-year-old foster child, died while in the care of Jennifer and Joseph Rosenbaum. They were quickly arrested and subsequently charged in a massive 49-count indictment for Leila’s death. They were also charged for the alleged physical treatment and abuse of Millie, who was their second foster child and Leila’s older biological sister.
But I’m going to start with the background of Leila. See, Leila desperately needed a good, stable home. She had lived with her biological mother, who had spent months in jail, and her father had been away serving an even longer sentence. The constant disruption of her life seemed to take a heavy toll on the child. Sometimes she would cry out, and sometimes she would scream. Her troubles began well before she ever met Jennifer. This was back when she was living with her mother, Tessa. Now, the DFCS or child services, their caseworkers responded to a handful of complaints about the care and supervision of Leila and her older sister, but they didn’t always get in the door to check on them. After the agency opened one official case in early 2014, Tessa suddenly moved to North Carolina. She did not leave any forwarding address, so the child services simply closed the case. After another complaint was filed, the caseworker said no one in the home would answer the door. Tessa yelled at the caseworker over the phone, so they decided to just close the case.
In January of 2015, Tessa was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to distribute meth. The county sheriff’s office said it had been listening to a wiretapped cell phone of a known drug dealer when Tessa called the phone. She spent three months in jail before being released. So, because of this arrest, the child services took Leila and her sister into state custody. They officially became foster children. And in many ways, Leila was like every other kid. She enjoyed eating hot dogs and chicken nuggets. She loved playing with her toys. But she started showing signs of aggression. She was afraid of sudden movements, and she hardly spoke at all to anyone. In fact, Tessa’s mother, she was actually a former foster child herself. She acknowledged she had some problems, but insisted she was not a habitual drug user. Most of all, she said she loved her kids. She said:
“They were the center of my world. They helped me make it through my day. They were always fed, clothed, and loved.”
So, shortly after Leila and her sister entered foster care, they were at the Henry County Juvenile Court. This is when they were introduced to a young law intern. The intern recognized their mother’s name. She remembered that years ago, the two of them had spent time together at a foster children’s shelter. This intern was Jennifer. So now let’s look at her background.
Leila officially moved in with Jennifer and Joseph on July the 24th, 2015. Child services performed a full home evaluation and ran criminal background checks on the couple. It seemed they were completely stable and reliable. They also appeared to greatly love children. The Rosenbaums love the girls, or so it seemed. Several friends and family reported Jennifer helped Leila learn numbers and letters. The child services recorded positive changes in Leila. They wrote:
“Leila is doing well and has come a long way. She’s able to count to five and recognize the amounts when counting on fingers.”
For Jennifer, this was a culmination of her lifelong dream to help foster children. That dream had its seeds in Jennifer’s own time in Georgia’s foster care system. Growing up in Henry County in the ’90s, Jennifer’s family was sometimes completely homeless. Sometimes they were living on the street, or in a tent, or out of a car at truck stops. The children in the family were sometimes assaulted, and child services removed them in 1997 and placed them in foster care. At the time, Jennifer was around nine years old. She had a smart mouth and sometimes fought with her sister. But Jennifer turned her life around and did not look back. Jennifer seemed nothing like the people who are typically charged in the death of a child. She isn’t some drug-addicted mother guilty of neglecting her child, or the live-in boyfriend who lashed out, or the father who trapped his child in his own mental illness. She seemed like a very promising foster parent: caring, committed, and involved in her community. It seems she fooled everyone.
So now let’s look at the incident itself on what happened. See, Jennifer seemed infused with positive energy and ambition when she took the child in. She was a candidate for the Henry County Commission, an Emory Law student, and an intern at the state legislature and local juvenile court. Four months after Leila’s move into the house, the toddler was dead. Jennifer had been charged with murder and child cruelty, though her lawyer asserted the child’s death was likely a tragic accident.
In the trial, the prosecutors found that the child services missed massive red flags that might have saved the child’s life. Out of nowhere, the child experienced a broken leg, but there was no investigation. In October of 2015, there were text messages sent to child services saying Leila had broken her leg at a gymnastics center. In the text, Jennifer said:
“She’s doing okay. She’s laughing, playing, singing, and hasn’t cried once, not even when it happened.”
The caseworker did not investigate the broken leg any further, which directly violated agency policy. You see, whenever a foster child suffers a serious injury, the caseworker must file a report that begins an investigation into the cause.
So, on November the 17th, 2015, this was Jennifer’s birthday. It was also Leila’s last day on Earth. Jennifer and her husband, Joseph, who was a corrections officer, planned to celebrate with the girls. The couple had already begun buying Christmas gifts for them. When Jennifer called 911, she told the dispatcher that Leila was choking on some chicken. She said the blockage was out, but the little girl’s breathing was slow and her eyes were rolled back into her head. She said:
“I’m trying to do CPR, but she keeps going white on me. I’m hoping I didn’t break her rib. I’ve been pushing hard. I don’t really know how to do this.”
So, after several minutes, the ambulance arrived.
Eventually, Jennifer and Joseph were arrested on December 4th. Jennifer’s arrest warrant said that she is the one that took Leila’s life by striking her abdomen. It was done with such force that the child’s pancreas was transected. What? The child was believed to have entered shock due to the massive blood loss resulting from the injury. The warrant noted that Leila was injured about her body in its entirety.
The autopsy report certified the manner of Leila’s death as homicide. There was a liver laceration and a laceration to the pancreas. The laceration of the pancreas actually separated it completely into two pieces. The medical examiner said the description of Leila’s death indicates a terminal seizure. She mentioned Jennifer saying Leila was shaking, and at one point the toddler’s eyes rolled into the back of her head. She told the court she found absolutely no food or food particles in Leila’s esophagus. This would have indicated choking as she mentioned to the 911 operator. The medical examiner said there would have been food debris if the child was actually choking. There was also evidence Leila had an old injury to her liver, perhaps one to three weeks old, that went completely untreated.
Jennifer’s attorney said the couple never did this to the girl. She said Leila died after Jennifer performed the Heimlich maneuver and CPR when the child was choking on a chicken tender. She argued the force of the compressions may have caused the injury to the pancreas. Now, the defense attorney attributed the child’s other injuries to what may have been incidents that occurred before her stay with the Rosenbaum family.
After Leila’s death, child services reviewed its handling of the entire case. Agency investigators looked into the girl’s broken leg. Plus, they went to the gymnastics location where this apparently happened. But when they went there, the staff told them:
“Leila doesn’t come here. She’s not enrolled here. In fact, her sister did go, but Leila did not.”
Then, child welfare experts who reviewed Leila’s history said they spotted troubling signs in the way child services handled the case. Time and time again, the child services tried to bend over backwards to help Jennifer, who was well-connected with the court and the community. Several experts pointed to an incident that occurred just before Leila entered the home. The girls had been staying with another foster mother, her name was Patricia, but occasionally visited the Rosenbaum family. Patricia noticed Leila return from some of those visits with injuries. She took Leila to the Henry County Child Services Office to show them, but no investigation was opened. Months later, after Leila’s death, investigators questioned the caseworker and supervisor about their response to the concerns.
So, after the arrest, Jennifer walked around her home with an ankle monitor. This was a condition of her bond. She could not leave the state. Her husband was charged with child cruelty, and he was also out on bond. In fact, at the time, the Facebook page that announced Jennifer’s candidacy for the Henry County Commission had been taken down. In the trial, Leila’s sister, Millie, also took the stand and gave unsettling testimony about how Jennifer would treat the girls and discipline them with objects. Jennifer was eventually sentenced to life plus 40 years. Joseph was sentenced to 50 years in prison, with 20 of those on parole. As for Tessa, Leila’s biological mother, she said she’s not doing any drugs. She has given birth to another child who looks like Leila. Leila herself was buried in Berea Cemetery, a small burial ground. The child services paid for the burial.
There’s no way to try and rationalize the behavior of all the individuals in these three cases. And there’s many times where you and me have looked at the child services and ridiculed them, rightly so, for not doing enough. It’s their job to do more. But what on earth are these adults playing at? Why would you do this? Jules, I know you’re pissed off, but the girl did not deserve to be treated that way. No child is. As for that gruesome threesome, Liz, David, and Amy: muppets. But the case of Jennifer is the most peculiar one. She literally had no reason to treat the child the way she did. There’s actually no reasoning behind it. Maybe she’s the worst of the lot. She had everything, and she threw it all away for what? Anyway, comment. Tell me what you think.
