Prior abuse allegations in boy's cancer

DSS has investigated his parents 4 times since 2005

The Department of Social Services investigated the parents of cancer-stricken Jeremy Fraser four times since 2005, but officials said yesterday that the agency only substantiated child abuse allegations in February, after doctors discovered that the boy's cancer had returned because his mother had allegedly failed to get him medical care.

DSS spokeswoman, Allison Goodwin, said the agency received reports of abuse or neglect involving Fraser's mother, Kristen LaBrie, twice in 2006 and again in February when doctors reported that the child's cancer had returned with a vengeance.

LaBrie is charged with one count of child endangerment in allegedly failing to provide her autistic son with prescriptions or doctor visits needed to treat his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. LaBrie, 36, who pleaded not guilty, could not be reached for comment.

Jeremy, 8, now has fully developed leukemia and his father, Eric J. Fraser, says he will die soon.

Goodwin said complaints alleging that LaBrie was neglecting or abusing her son in June and September 2006 were "screened out" because "there was not enough information to warrant investigation."

Eric Fraser was the subject of a 10-day inquiry in August 2005, but that case was closed when social workers concluded he had not neglected or abused the boy.

Fraser said he initiated the August 2005 investigation after seeing bruises on his son.

"They came by; they checked my house," he said.

"I talked to them for about 10 minutes, and they said it was unsubstantiated," Fraser said, who added that he did not complain to DSS about his former wife.

Goodwin would not identify who made the complaints against the parent, but Eric Fraser has said he and his former wife could not cooperate in raising their child.

Bob Gass, executive director of the Northshore Education Consortium, where Jeremy has been a student since age 3, said yesterday that his staff had no problems with the boy's parents.

"His mother always tried to be cooperative with us, in trying to support her son," he said. "That was our experience. Both parents cared a lot about their son and wanted to do the best for him."

He declined to discuss Jeremy's medical status at the school, citing student privacy laws. "This is a kid people cared about," Gass said about the staff.

Even when patients receive good care, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma recurs about 15 percent of the time, said Dr. Leslie Lehmann, clinical director of the Pediatric Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Unit at Children's Hospital Boston-Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

In leukemia or lymphoma, the return of the disease is always worse, she said. Because the cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy, "you always need to do something different," Lehmann said. "You can't just do the same thing again."

When the lymphoma recurs, it may infiltrate the bone marrow, thus qualifying as leukemia, she said. Or it may return in the same form as before, as masses in the chest and abdomen.

Fraser said that Jeremy's lymphoma returned as leukemia.

It is extremely harmful to miss scheduled treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Lehmann said. Studies have shown that timing is important to the success of chemotherapy, and the theory is that if chemotherapy is delayed, the cancer cells that it targets have too much time to recover and are thus harder to destroy.

"It's definitely not a good idea" to miss treatments, Lehmann said. "What I say to parents is that you want to stack the odds in your favor as much as humanly possible."

Over the course of two years, a patient might well have 100 appointments, she said. One-third would be for chemotherapy infusions; the rest would be blood-count checkups or admissions for fever.

A patient might spend the first month or two of treatment in the hospital and then come in weekly for three months or so, then every three weeks for infusions.

"We have an increasing appreciation of how difficult this is for parents and families and children," she said, "and we need to work on having enough resources available to support them during it."