A teenager takes his life in foster care

Those who knew the boy described him as a caring young man who was supportive of the other foster youth living in CYFD facilities. His death comes after consecutive years of the state’s failure to provide stable foster homes and mental health care for teenagers in its custody.

This story was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico, a NMPBS partner.

By Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia took his own life at a makeshift home for youth who lack foster placements.

Jaydun’s family included four brothers and a baby sister. He was very close to his siblings, those who knew him said, and a close friend to many kids in foster care.

“He was always building us up, like helping us all,” said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun’s who lived with him for months in the Albuquerque office building of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, where case workers have often housed kids who don’t have foster homes available to them.

“Hearing that he’s gone, it just like broke us, and it took a piece out of us,” she said. Jaydun and Jacie both belonged to a tight-knit group of foster youth — teens who had spent much of their lives in foster care and had spent years held in group facilities. Jaydun loved to draw and was an athletic kid who loved basketball, especially the Los Angeles Lakers — a person whom friends would seek out when they needed someone to talk to.

For this story, Searchlight spoke to six people with direct knowledge of the circumstances of Jaydun’s death. Most of them asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak with the media, or because of sensitivities related to the case.

“He was always building us up, like helping us all,” said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun’s. “Hearing that he’s gone, it just like broke us, and it took a piece out of us.”

In an email, CYFD communications director Andrew Skobinsky wrote that the department could not comment because of confidentiality laws. “We are only authorized to release information when it is determined that abuse or neglect caused a child’s death,” he wrote. “Accordingly, no further information can be provided.”

Jaydun’s death comes after years of promises by CYFD to stop housing its foster youth in group settings and to provide them adequate mental health care — promises that were made as part of the 2020 settlement of a class action lawsuit that claimed the state’s child welfare system was “locking New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.”

Now, half a decade later, CYFD has failed year after year to meet its commitments to those promises, according to independent monitors.

Instead, it has housed children with serious mental and behavioral health needs in youth homeless shelters and its office buildings, where they have been sexually assaulted, injured by armed guards and exposed to fentanyl and other drugs.

“When I go visit a client who is living in these settings, I see their mental health declining sharply,” said Sara Crecca, an Albuquerque-based youth attorney who was co-counsel for the plaintiffs of the class action suit.

Amid mounting criticism from attorneys, legislators and advocates, CYFD in June 2024 began moving youth from its office complex to a new building: a former Albuquerque halfway house built for girls transitioning out of juvenile detention.

It was in that building that Jaydun died last weekend, discovered in the bathroom by his roommate, another teenage boy.

The death in itself is beyond tragic, friends and attorneys say — a loss made all the more painful by the fact that CYFD had continued to house Jaydun and other youth in congregate care despite barrages of warnings that such housing was a “clear and urgent safety risk for children,” particularly those who were suffering mental crises, with staffing shortages sometimes leaving kids with nowhere to turn.

“They’re supposed to be the one people that we trust, the ones that we go to when we have problems,” Jacie said of CYFD. In the wake of Jaydun’s death, nobody from the department had reached out to Jacie to offer therapy or counseling, she said.

“If they really cared, they would be on top of getting us therapy. They would be on top of us having a home — a forever home, an actual home with parents’ love — not removing us, not putting us in shelters, not putting us in the office. We’re not getting that.”

Still, the events of last weekend felt unexpected to those close to Jaydun.

“CYFD had promised him a lot of support” during the last year, a close acquaintance of his told Searchlight, asking that they not be named because of the sensitive nature of the case. “He seemed to be optimistic about his future.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Jaydun’s age in relation to two of his siblings. This story was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico, a NMPBS partner.