Could Anything Have Prevented Diabetic Child From Dying In Arizona Foster System? Guess We'll Never Know!

Jakob Blodgett was nine years old.

Jakob Blodgett, a nine-year-old boy from Arizona, is dead. He shouldn't be.

His father, you see, was in a lot of pain. Richard Blodgett had undergone weight loss surgery, losing 300 pounds. A side effect of this procedure is severe chronic abdominal pain, resulting in 4 to 14% percent of patients engaging in persistent opioid use for one to seven years afterwards. Because of the opioid crisis, many people who are in severe enough pain to necessitate opioids cannot legally get them, or cannot legally get them in doses sufficient to dull the pain.

“I wasn’t getting high. I wasn’t abusing them. I was using them to be able to work and provide for my son,” Blodgett, a single parent, told the Associated Press. “Unfortunately, they are illegal. I can’t get around that. But they were stronger than my meds, and they were working.”

Jakob was a Type 1 diabetic. On average, with insurance, insulin costs $494 a month in the United States, but it can run up to $1000 month for those with poor coverage or no coverage.

It seems unlikely that Blodgett, who had also lost one of his arms in a construction accident, had very good coverage. He was working as a backhoe operator at the time. The average wage for a backhoe operator in Flagstaff, Arizona is $18.77 , 25 percent less than the national average — perhaps because they are a right to work state, perhaps because much of the construction work in the state is done by inmates at correctional facilities. The living wage for an adult with one child in the county is $34.09.

SURELY UNRELATED: Arizona Can't Function Without Forced Labor, Is That Bad? 

One day after work, police saw Blodgett, who had another drug case pending, taking a nap at a gas station after having worked a backhoe with one arm all day and they thought he may have nodded off from opioids — ultimately finding more than 4,000 of them in his possession.

Blodgett was taken to jail and booked on drug possession. A police officer went to the motel where Blodgett and Jakob were staying, picked the boy up, and soon DCS placed him in the house of some strangers he'd never met before. Just a few days later Richard Blodgett was told that his son was brain dead and on life support. After he passed, the medical examiner listed his death as "natural with complications from diabetes."

"Natural."

Type 1 diabetics are insulin-dependent and require regular blood glucose monitoring. If they are deprived of insulin, they will go into ketoacidosis, which if untreated will result in brain swelling (cerebral edema) causing a coma and eventually brain death. It just wouldn't happen if the kid had been getting his insulin. Does that really count as a natural death?

Richard Blodgett says he believes the Arizona Department of Child Safety failed to take care of his son, which they obviously did. He would very much like to know if his insulin pump was removed, if his blood glucose was monitored, if his regular doctor was consulted. So far, the Department of Child Services has not given him any answers.

A spokesperson for the agency assured the AP that foster parents are always required to receive training on a child's medical condition before taking them in. If this is the case, someone either forgot to do that or forgot to fully investigate the foster family or properly monitor the situation. Symptoms of ketoacidosis usually start about 24 hours beforehand and involve vomiting, frequent urination, slurred speech and a bunch of other very obvious signs that something has gone wrong. In fact, it's pretty obvious from their demeanor when a Type 1 diabetic is just a little overdue for their insulin (source: I lived with one for several years).

What I'm saying here is that there would have had to be some pretty serious neglect happening for all of this to have happened the way that it did.

“Rest assured, somebody is going to look into it if there's an inkling that the death was a result of negligence or abuse," Karin Kline, director of child welfare initiatives at the Family Involvement Center in Phoenix told the AP.

Karen, there is a little bit more than an inkling here.

The thing about this entire story is that it is a Rube Goldberg machine of systemic failure. The timeline had to fail in so many ways, so many times to get to the point where Jakob Blodgett is dead.

If instead of sending drug addicts to prison, we actually treated them and treated drug addiction like the disease it is instead of a moral failing ...

If we stopped putting police in charge of things like mental health episodes and drug addiction ...

If human beings were paid enough to live and pay rent and take care of their children ...

If insulin were not so absurdly expensive ...

If we had single payer ...

If we stopped "dealing" with the opioid crisis by depriving people with a legitimate need for pain management of needed medications ...

If we eliminated pre-trial detention for non-violent offenders ...

If we found alternatives to prison ...

If the foster parents had either been vetted better or given the right information — we don't know which right now because this whole system is not particularly transparent ...

If we made it a priority to place children in these situations with family or friends of the family rather than immediately placing them with foster parents or in a group home ...

If it were not considered more important to put a nonviolent offender in pretrial detention than to not stick a nine-year-old child in a home with strangers who for some reason didn't know how to manage his diabetes ...

If just one of these things had been the case ... Jakob Blodgett would very likely be alive today.

Unlike so many other tragedies, these were not mistakes or inevitabilities. This was not any one person's ineptitude. They were calculated choices. They were systemic failures. In many cases they were things many people think are wonderful and necessary, regardless of what results they actually produce. Or maybe they were things people decided were not not important enough to do anything about. Not bothering is also a choice.

Arizona will not be found guilty of murdering this child. Neither will the United States of America. Neither will the politicians who push for the policies that led to his death.

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. Click below to tip us!