She was crazy.” That was the immediate reaction of one of Shemene Cato’s neighbors when he found out that she was charged with murdering her 9-year-old daughter, Shalom Guifarro, using an electrical cord among other things. 

The girl, who had cuts and bruises to her head and bite marks on her back when she was found in her apartment on Sunday, was regularly berated by her mother in public. At least one neighbor saw her shoving the child in a laundromat. “She was always screaming at her kids so loud it would startle you,” another neighbor said, “It was like, Why are you screaming at your kids like that?” Police made 14 visits to the home on complaints of domestic violence. 

Police say that the girl and her sister seemed unharmed and did not contact the Administration for Children’s Services. And no one has said whether the mother received any kind of mental health evaluation. No one ever seemed to consider whether these girls could safely remain in a home with someone who was clearly disturbed.

We have learned in recent years how the mental-health crisis in this country has contributed to mass shootings like the one in Buffalo and widespread homelessness, but there is little acknowledgment of how untreated mental illness among parents is affecting children in their care.

According to the most recent federal data, of children removed from their homes and placed in foster care, 13% of the cases involved a caretaker’s “inability to cope.” Another 41% of cases involved a caretaker’s drug or alcohol abuse, which often masks mental illness or occurs alongside it. And 5% involved a parent simply abandoning a child — probably a sign that the parent is not all there. 

In many of these cases the system has tried to provide services for parents — therapy, psychotropic medications, etc. — in order to get the family back together. But there are plenty of children out there who are still at risk because of their parents’ mental illness.