Alexandria Hill was a happy 2-year-old living with her loving parents in Round Rock, Texas. That was before the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services decided that her parents smoking a little pot while their daughter was asleep was reason enough to remove the girl from her home. “Neglectful supervision,” they called it. She was placed in a foster home where she was mistreated. CPS moved her in January to a home with foster parent Sherill Small where she was, eventually, murdered. The Hills were limited to supervised visitation. Alex’s father told KVUE News about the last visit:

“We got to sit down at McDonalds and have lunch and play for a while. She got a little ‘Despicable Me 2’ toy in her happy meal and she loved it. She kept climbing up in my lap and she fed me french fries.”

That was Thursday, July 25th. On the following Monday night, the Hills received a phone call telling them that Alex was being rushed to the hospital with severe head injuries. She was then flown to Scott and White Children’s Emergency Hospital in Temple and ended up being placed on life support.

“They wouldn’t tell me what condition she was in or what was wrong or what had happened. The only thing they would tell me is I needed to be there. When I got there, I found out that Alex was in a coma.” (source)

Alex’s parents held on for two days, hoping and praying that their daughter would wake up. She did not, and was taken off life support. The Hills were four months away from getting Alex back.

CPS, who never should have taken the child in the first place, passed the buck. They said that they work through private child placement agencies to contract foster parents. In this case, it was an agency called Texas Mentor that allowed a killer to sign up to be a foster parent. Texas Mentor has a poor record, with 15 violations in the past two years, 4 of them for failing to perform thorough background checks on prospective foster parents. Now one of those foster parents is in jail for murdering one of her charges. There damn well better be fines and a loss of their state contract for Texas Mentor if not actual jail time for this kind of criminal negligence.

The Hills did not neglect their daughter. They did not beat her or starve her or dress her in filthy clothes. They were loving parents who smoked marijuana while their child was sleeping.

“We never hurt our daughter. She was never sick, she was never in the hospital, and she never had any issues until she went into state care.” (source)

She was fine until CPS removed her from her home. And for what? Because her parents were smoking a joint? I’m pretty sure that they don’t remove children from homes where the parents have a beer or three, even while the kids are still awake. This is yet another reason why we need sensible marijuana laws in this country. That poor little girl was separated from the only parents she knew, abused and, finally, murdered all because of the archaic views still held by government agencies about pot. Here’s more blood on their hands.

Here is the video report from KVUE News: