FOSTER YOUTH & ADVOCATE STAND UP TO OVER PRESCRIPTION OF PSYCHOTROPICS — Impact Fund

Khi’s Story

In 2016, I was in a residential facility called Great Circle formerly known as Tom Butterflied Home, now known as KVS. I was 12 when I became a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit for medication abuse.

Before the lawsuit I remember always being angry. I remember the little things used to have me throw the biggest fits. I’ve tried to shut those years out of my mind, because I was just out of it. I remember the weight gain. I’d never really been a big person so to just wake up one day and be so big was crazy to me. I remember for weeks I was in trouble back-to-back. From age eight to thirteen, I was put in restraints for two hours at a time. Then I got my meds changed.

By the time I met Mrs Kris, I was on five different pills. I was a lot angrier than normal. I would just lash out over little things. I remember at one time I got in 5-10 in one week. Over the course of the lawsuit a few things happened. I got off a lot of the pills I was on. My team Caseworker, J.O, and Guardian ad Litem tried their very best to get me to believe Kris did something bad. And they told me I couldn’t see Kris any more. I was so heart broken. Kris is the very first person in my life who never gave up. I’m not a very easy person to love. I pushed her away as hard as I could and she stayed. So, for them to take away from me the only person who had ever loved, just wrecked me.

If you would have asked me at twelve years old how all this made me feel I couldn’t tell you because I knew nothing. Mrs Kris told me about it but not really in a way I understood, and my team wouldn’t talk to me about it. Within the last month I read the part of the lawsuit about me and I cried. I cried for my lost childhood, I cried for that twelve year-old little girl, I cried because for the last nine years I thought I had all these mental illnesses. I cried because I had forgotten about all that anger and to be such a small person with that much hate and anger. And, I cried because the many adults who say they didn’t care hurt so bad.

In the last two years, something I thought would have never happen, has happened. My story was heard. I’ve known since a young age I wanted to be a voice behind a change in the foster care system. These people take a lot of kids that don’t need to be taken from their homes and put them in worse situations. The system is meant to be six months to a year. I was in the system for thirteen years. I suffered mental, sexual, physical, emotional, and medicational abuse from both my family and the state, and team that was assigned to me.

Even now at almost twenty, I’m being failed by the adults around me. No kid should go through what I went through and it hurts me everyday that it’s still being done. Us kids in care are not looked at as people but money. My dream since I was a little girl was to be seen and heard, and to make a difference. I come from a family full of trauma and to be the first person to break away from all that means the world to me. I’m so blessed and happy that I had Kris when I had her. I have no idea what would have become of me without this lawsuit, without Kris caring. I have a mind and a personality thanks to her.

The system tried to break me, something they were very close to doing.I want other children to know that there are people out here that want to hear their stories and to help them. There are people that care about their them and their stories. I’m not done fighting my battles – nowhere near done. There are days I wanna give up. There’s a day when I think about my past and of what I’ve been through and just cry. Even though I want to give up most days, I can’t. There is a future for kids out there who don’t have a Mrs. Kris and who still haven’t found their voice. I’m going to be that voice for them and for me, and for as many kids as I can be in this lifetime.

The case resulted in a court-enforceable order requiring the state of Missouri to reform its child welfare system to require: (a) a proper informed consent policy and procedure, (b) an adequate system for maintaining updated and accessible medical records for children in foster care, and (c) a system for conducting physicians’ reviews to secure second opinions on outlier prescriptions of psychotropic medications before administering them.

Because of their courage and sacrifice both Khi and Kris were inducted into the Impact Fund Class Action Hall of Fame on February 20, 2025.