Social workers fretted over how to protect the boy. They finally recruited new parents to raise him.

Sean, 4, died at the hands of his adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock. She beat him and bound him in a dark, drafty attic in her Johnston County farmhouse. This month, a jury sent Paddock to prison for the rest of her life.

Sean's death rattled the system the state built to protect children like him. The state funnels foster children into adoptive homes, sparing them years in limbo while their parents straighten up.

To make the system work, the state attaches a dowry of sorts to children like Sean. The state pays new parents and pays private adoption groups such as Children's Home Society to help recruit families.

But Sean's death shows how the system can fail the children it was meant to protect.

Nearly 12,400 former foster children are currently being reared by adoptive parents recruited through this system. It's not clear how many have been adopted into dangerous homes. Adoption records and social services reports of abused and neglected children are confidential in North Carolina.

But Paddock's trial, a review of state contracts with Children's Home Society and documents obtained by The News & Observer show how easily Sean ended up in harm's way.

Social workers had plenty of warning that Sean might be harmed at Paddock's home. Wake County social workers had misgivings about putting him in the crowded house, miles outside the nearest town; a bruised backside after his first visit made them even more nervous.

And, over a decade, a social worker from Children's Home Society spotted unsettling risk factors in Paddock's home. But her agency had no incentive to walk away. The state pays the agency for completed adoptions.

The state Division of Social Services might have noticed something was amiss, but its annual audits don't go beyond a technical review of contract obligations.

In 2005, social workers declared the Paddocks' home the best place for the Ford children to grow and thrive. The state sent the Paddocks their first monthly check for $1,270.

All the while, Lynn Paddock was coming undone.

Moment of reckoning

North Carolina's child welfare officials had a moment of reckoning in the early 1990s. Abused and neglected children were growing up without parents. The state had found their birth parents unfit, and they had been sent to live in temporary homes while social workers waited on their parents to get it together.

The state set deadlines for these parents. If they couldn't shape up in about a year after their child was taken, the state would look for replacement parents.

Finding them would be difficult. Most of these children were damaged: beaten, starved, molested. Persuading parents to adopt them would be a tough sell.

The state carved out money to pay private adoption agencies to recruit and prepare adoptive parents. Agencies such as Children's Home Society earn from several thousand dollars to $15,000 for every child placed. Children's Home Society could have earned as much as $45,000 for placing Sean and his two siblings, though the state won't say exactly how much the agency earned.

Adoptive parents would be paid, too, for taking on such a responsibility. Depending on the child's age, they earn between $390 and $490 a month until the child is 18.

In the mid-1990s, the number of foster children adopted each year jumped from about 250 to about 1,300. This year, the state offered nearly $26 million to adoptive parents caring for 12,384 former foster children.

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