Not long afterward, Larry and Hannah heard about Andrew at their church, Calvary Chapel of the Coastlands, which Andrew’s foster mother also attended. They considered adopting a nine-year-old girl who was deaf, but when, after much prayer and deliberation, they decided to move forward with the adoption, they learned that the girl had been placed with another family. In 2005 the Overtons began to pursue the idea seriously. As a former private-duty nurse, Hannah felt equipped to handle the challenges of a foster child she had spent several years caring for special-needs children, some of whom were profoundly disabled. The experience had affected her deeply, and she told Larry that she was willing to adopt a child with disabilities or an older child who had been unable to find a permanent home. Both Larry and Hannah had done missionary work, and as a teenager, Hannah had spent holidays volunteering at an orphanage across the border, in Reynosa, where she had fed, bathed, and ministered to kids who had been living on the streets. But as devoted Christians, their desire to adopt a foster child was rooted in faith more than in practicality. The Overtons already had four children, and Larry’s income-he installed landscape lighting-was barely enough to make ends meet. If not for a Corpus Christi couple named Larry and Hannah Overton, Andrew might have lingered in state custody, shuffled from one foster home to another. His mother’s and father’s parental rights were terminated soon after he turned three.

When Andrew was two-and-a-half years old, CPS determined that he was in “immediate danger,” according to an affidavit, and he was put in foster care. Four subsequent investigations were triggered by reports of abuse or neglect, including one allegation that both his mother and maternal grandmother were incapable of properly caring for him because they used methamphetamines.

CPS launched its initial investigation into Andrew’s well-being shortly after his first birthday, when his mother took him to a local hospital with a broken arm. She would later admit, according to one report, “to using alcohol, methamphetamines, cocaine and crack cocaine, LSD, marijuana, cigarettes, and taking prescription Xanax.” His father was seventeen and worked for a traveling carnival. His mother was just sixteen, the file shows, when she gave birth to him in Corpus Christi on July 28, 2002. What little is known about Andrew Burd’s early life is contained in a slim Child Protective Services case file that chronicles the boy’s descent into the child welfare system.

Island Girl by Sandra Byrd