Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Theresa Coleman of San Francisco has taken responsibility for a niece’s four young children, one of whom is an infant

Last October, Theresa Coleman received a call from a child-welfare investigator. Four young children, distant family members, had been discovered in a Georgia motel room filled with drugs, alcohol, a half-loaf of bread, a half-jar of peanut butter and a dwindling supply of baby formula.

Coleman, who lives in the Bayview district of San Francisco, was told she had six days to pick up the children.

Unable to afford a plane ticket, Coleman rode the bus 2,200 miles to Marietta, Ga. After a brief hearing, Judge James R. Whitfield of Cobb County Juvenile Court granted her temporary custody of two boys — an infant and a 6-year-old — and two girls, ages 1 and 2. The children’s mother is her niece, who was working out of the motel as a prostitute, Coleman said.

Coleman, 49, brought the children back to the Bay Area, and she is now struggling to support them and the rest of her family. Eleven people live in her four-bedroom home, including a teenage foster child and five relatives ages 11/2 to 23.

Officials in Georgia have denied financial assistance and officials in San Francisco have been slow to provide access to government services for the neglected children after Judge Whitfield declined to use an interstate transfer agreement that would have qualified them for support.

Judge Whitfield said he did not use the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, a standard legal procedure that ensures continuity of services and financial aid when state-dependent children are transferred across state lines, because the process can take months. He said he wanted to place the children as soon as possible because a relative was available to care for them. Coleman’s niece had identified her as someone who could take the children.

“It appears Georgia has dumped the children; I’m feeling the weight of what I’ve gotten myself into,” said Coleman, whose living room is now crowded with two cribs and two beds.

Coleman’s predicament is not uncommon, according to local officials and child welfare advocates. Caregivers must navigate a confusing bureaucracy, even when it comes to drawing support from a system designed to protect abused and neglected children. The situations are particularly confusing when the children are transferred across state lines, local officials said.

Bobby Parnell, director of child advocacy at Justice for Children in Houston, estimated that 10 to 15 percent of the cases did not go through the interstate-transfer agreement. “That’s probably not a good idea to do it that way, but it does happen,” Parnell said. “Judges usually overstep their bounds in my estimation by expediting the placement.”

Without proper guidance from a judge or local officials, custodians can be bounced between various agencies. “This is pretty typical for families that are living in poverty,” said Sonja Lenz-Rashid, an associate professor at the School of Social Work at San Francisco State University. “Unfortunately, they aren’t told what they should be told.”

With the four Georgia children in limbo, San Francisco nonprofit organizations are scrambling to cobble together food, diapers and other supplies.

Last month, representatives from several community groups gathered in Coleman’s kitchen — the living room was too cluttered — as the children watched cartoons in an adjoining room. They discussed ways to patch together a plan for food delivery, dental care and other services.

“This is a lot of people here at one time for them,” Coleman, who is nearly blind in one eye and suffers from a degenerative knee condition, told the group. “It’s good for them to know that everybody’s not a rapist, that everybody’s not going to hurt them.”

The children have chronic asthma and have shown signs of abuse, Coleman said. They have nightmares, she said, and sometimes mimic what appear to be sexual acts with one another.

Coleman said she had decided to take custody of the children to prevent them from disappearing into the Georgia foster-care system. She said the child-welfare investigator told her that the 6-year-old had been the main caregiver for his siblings while their parents engaged in prostitution to support drug habits.

By expediting their placement, Judge Whitfield removed them from the Georgia child-welfare system, leaving them ineligible for foster care payments and services.

“That order relieved the Cobb County Department of Families and Children of any obligation to the four kids,” Judge Whitfield said, adding that Coleman “left here knowing pretty clear that she would be on her own providing for the children.”

Coleman disputed that assertion.

“The order doesn’t make it clear that there would be no support,” she said, “because I was looking for that.”

Thomas Kearns, the investigator who contacted Coleman, said in an interview that Cobb County social workers always recommend an interstate-transfer procedure before placing children with out-of-state relatives. But, Kearns said, the final decision rests with judges who are not always privy to those recommendations.

“There’s really no legal opportunity to present a recommendation to the court before the hearing,” said Kearns, who agreed to speak about agency protocol, but not specifically about Coleman’s case.

Coleman said she first realized something was wrong when, at the Marietta courthouse after the hearing, she was left ill prepared to travel with the children.

“Where are the bags?” she said she asked. “Where is the paperwork? Where are the car seats, the Sippy Cups, the diapers? If they have chronic asthma, there should be some medicine.”

Kearns said his agency was not responsible for such provisions.

“Once a relative is given responsibility by the court, that relative is responsible to take care of those needs,” he said. “We don’t have the ability to do that.”

Coleman said she had to borrow nearly $2,000 from friends in the Bay Area to buy plane tickets home after Cobb County refused to pay the children’s airfare.

By December, Coleman said she was still unsure why the children were not receiving assistance. After repeated calls to agencies in Cobb County and San Francisco, she and a San Francisco County caseworker spoke with Keisha Green, a social worker involved w ith the case in Georgia. Green confirmed to them that Cobb County would not pay for any services.

Trent Rhorer, executive director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency, said in an e-mail that San Francisco child-welfare workers helped Coleman get access to food stamps and financial aid.

Coleman said the temporary benefits totaled about $600 a month for the four children. If Cobb County accepted responsibility for the children, she would be entitled to at least $500 a month per child and perhaps significantly more.

Joanne Royer, clinical director of Raphael House, a nonprofit family support agency in San Francisco, has offered Coleman some case management and mental-health support. Royer also filed a report to the Human Services Commission in November regarding the possible abuse of the four children in Georgia.

“My intent was to hopefully get them acknowledged and get them linked up somehow with services in the child-welfare system,” she said. “I think cases slip through the cracks sometimes.”

Judge Whitfield said Coleman had options if she thought she had taken on too much responsibility; his court order allows her to relinquish custody and return the children to Georgia.

“They are our responsibility,” the judge said, “and we will take them back.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.