Parents Leave Kids With 'Safe Haven' Loophole

Safe Haven: Fear and Desperation

"20/20" spent the last several months investigating and found that the Safe Haven families may be not what you expect. The cases are all different but many are people with no idea how to keep their severely disturbed offspring from destroying the family.

Lavennia Coover is a kindergarten teacher and mother of three who says her main goal in life is to get help for her youngest son, Skyler, 11. She said she used the law because Skyler is dangerous. She was worried about the danger to herself but especially to her other son, 12-year-old Colby. She says Skyler often beat up his older brother and threatened him with knives and sharp sticks.

Coover says her efforts to help Skyler began when he was 8. She said he had attacked her, kicking, scratching and biting her, so she took him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed bipolar disorder among other mental disorders.

In the years that followed, she took him to other therapists and hospitals, but says she feared his behavior would not truly improve without full-time residential care which she could not afford.

But while Coover was seeking a place for Skyler, she believed she and her family were in danger. She used the Safe Haven law because she said she couldn't afford to wait until something tragic happened before Skyler got more help than she could give.

Some kids were dropped off not by parents, but by uncles, aunts or grandparents. Every weekday morning Cindy Spangler gets up at 6:30 to make her grandchildren breakfast. There is 13- year-old Keerstyn, 11-year-old Sierra and 8-year-old Samantha. But someone is missing: their 12-year-old brother, Bryan.

A few weeks ago Spangler asked her daughter Cynthia, Bryan's aunt, to bring him to Immanuel Medical Center, back to the residential treatment care program where he'd been for the last 11 months.

"I mean, he threatened to kill the next-door neighbor little boy, screaming to the top of his lungs," Cynthia said. "I've tried to explain to him by doing that -- if somebody else was to do that -- they would take you to jail. That was where he was going to end up if we didn't do something."