SCRIPT: Foster Care Revisited 12/05

Dec. 23, 2005 — -- Maybe some of the happiest childhood memories involve the Christmas holidays, but that's not the case for a family of kids we met sometime back. There were no visions of sugar plum fairies dancing in their heads. There were only memories of abandonment and much worse. But this Christmas, we checked back with them. Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross has tidings of comfort and joy.

BRIAN ROSS, ABC NEWS

Christmas will be different this year for the children who live in this house.

KATHY RODRIGUEZ, MOTHER

They didn't have Christmas before. They were deprived Christmas their whole life.

BRIAN ROSS

But not anymore. There now seems to be a happy ending to the harrowing story for these five brothers and a sister, who were orphans until Rod and Kathy Rodriguez adopted them.

JORDAN RODRIGUEZ, SON

Now that I have, you know, a real mother and father, it's great.

BRIAN ROSS

Jesse and Jordan, Joey and Toby and Robbie and Suzanna have somehow managed to stick together and survive.

SUZANNA RODRIGUEZ, DAUGHTER

We did it.

BRIAN ROSS

Despite a childhood of cruelty at the hands of foster parents who seem right out of Charles Dickens.

KATHY RODRIGUEZ, MOTHER

Christmas came to mean another beating, another disappointment, another letdown.

ROD RODRIGUEZ, FATHER

What they've gone through is a serious crime. And I don't know how any adult could do that to any child or any other person, for that matter.

BRIAN ROSS

'20/20" first told the children's story three years ago when they had just escaped from the foster home where they say they were beaten and tortured.

JORDAN RODRIGUEZ

They would hit us with their hands, or...

SUZANNA RODRIGUEZ

Or with the belt.

BRIAN ROSS

You remember the belt?

SUZANNA RODRIGUEZ

Yeah, it hurt.

BRIAN ROSS

It was a damning indictment, in their own sad words, of the Florida officials who took them away from their natural mother, an alcoholic, and left them unchecked for months at a time in the hands of strangers.

JOEY RODRIGUEZ, SON

I used to think every night I wish I was dead so I didn't have to be in this stupid place, in this stupid room.

BRIAN ROSS

You really wished you were dead?

JOEY RODRIGUEZ

Yeah.