Thomas Frawley Retired

Lincoln County, Missouri Judge Thomas Frawley sentenced 70-year-old foster mother Brenda Deutsch to seven years in prison for felony child endangerment — for sending a teenage girl in her foster care to live with an unvetted friend in Texas without ever inspecting the arrangement — then suspended execution of the entire sentence, placing her on three years of probation instead. The Texas home was later found unsanitary, and the teen was sometimes left alone there for days while the friend tended exotic animals; she was eventually recovered by Child Protective Services.

Lincoln County Prosecuting Attorney Mike Wood said his office had received more than 200 calls to Missouri's child-abuse hotline concerning the home Deutsch was operating before her arrest, but that not a single corresponding police report or referral for prosecution ever reached his office — meaning the warning signs existed for years without triggering any intervention.

Frawley revoked Deutsch's foster care license from the bench, calling her conduct "reprehensible," and used the sentencing to criticize the state of Missouri for allowing her to keep that license as long as it did, telling those affected he was "sorry the system had failed them." He also stated directly, on the record, that Deutsch "did not abuse anyone, engage in patterns of abusive behaviors, trade a child for a monkey, or anything else that has been said" — a pointed rejection of the more sensational version of the case that had circulated in national coverage since her arrest, and a reminder that the felony endangerment conviction is the full extent of what the record actually supports.

But having condemned both the state's failure and Deutsch's own conduct as reprehensible, Frawley's actual sentence left her facing no prison time at all, provided she completes probation without incident.