"She's doing beautiful," said Boone, who has two biological children and adopted six others in addition to Marika. She cannot talk or walk on her own, but she loves music, coloring and wrestling. This June, she will graduate from high school and in August, she will turn 21. She was not expected to live past the age of 5. After Marika was born, Boone said, the girl's biological mother told a social worker: "Didn't I tell you to let that die?"īorn with cocaine and other drugs in her system, Marika was given a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, which Boone thinks is related to her mother's drug use. Her Capital Heights house was known as the "reject home" because she would take the children no one else wanted. It was at the height of the crack epidemic that a little girl named Marika came to live with Eunice Boone. Despite decades of research, it can be hard to parse whether children born to crack-addicted mothers have struggled because of early exposure to drugs, troubled upbringings or simple teenage defiance. But national crime rates, predicted to soar when the children came of age, have instead dropped to record lows. Some of these children have been troubled throughout their lives. Many of the crack-exposed infants ended up as boarder babies - abandoned at the hospital by parents who couldn't care for them.
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