NORWAY – When Terrilyn Simpson of Augusta spoke at the Public Interest Forum Thursday evening, she began with events that led up to the origin of the newspaper she started publishing late last year.

The first issue of “Common Sense Independent” was devoted to an extensive investigation of circumstances surrounding the death of the child, Logan Marr, who died in Department of Human Services foster care.

Simpson said the response to the first run of 10,000 copies, distributed free, was so overwhelming that she has had to delay publishing follow-up editions in order to distribute another 10,000 copies.

Since an advocate for families and children nationally asked her to create a Web site to send this information out to journalists, calls nationwide have come in asking for more copies. She expects to get the next edition out soon and to publish every two months thereafter, exploring a variety of topics.

A seventh-generation Mainer with 20 years experience in journalism, Simpson said when she took the job in the early 1990s as editor of the Bucksport Free Press in the “sleepy little town of Bucksport,” she feared her career in “real” journalism had come to an end. Instead, events at the largest industry in the Bucksport area, Champion Paper mill, led her into the area of investigative journalism.

Her investigation of the death of a young worker and illness among many other workers following an unreported chlorine leak at the mill won her the Paul Newman First Amendment Award in 1998. She has also earned other regional and national awards.

In her talk at Norway Memorial Library, Simpson detailed the ways management at Champion got cooperation from state and national officials in keeping information about chemical accidents and illness among workers out of public awareness. For example, the clinic at Champion routinely made light of workers’ complaints, telling them they were suffering from the flu, female complaints or the effects of shift work.

A few workers began making the connection between their symptoms and their frequent exposure to toxic materials. Simpson began talking with ill workers and their families after a worker notified DEP. Champion made some improvements, with great fanfare, but Simpson kept the issue in the public eye by publishing nearly 40 articles over three years. She eventually lost her job there.

As she detailed abuses of power in Child Protective Services of DHS in the Logan Marr case and others, Simpson described a bureaucracy out of control. The Marr sisters were taken by DHS from their mother, poor and uneducated but with no history of abuse, and put in a home where they were abused and Logan was killed. Nobody would listen to the distraught mother’s concerns that foster mother, Sally Scofield, a long-term DHS staffer, was abusing her daughters.

During audience participation, Ken Carstens said until he read her newspaper, he had had only favorable opinions of DHS and respect for the way the agency works with developmentally challenged people. “The weak and powerless are victims of bureaucracies and their tendencies to abuse power,” he said.

Tom Whitney, a pediatrician in Norway, said we need DHS and that child abuse was much worse before its establishment. Simpson agreed but said it is a bureaucracy that needs to be reined in, that there needs to be more accountability, noting that that the missing $32 million is indication of a system run amok.

jwhite@sunjournal.com

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