Jessie Carter had been worried about the teenager since she and her husband brought him into their Chelsea home two years ago.

The 16-year-old was in state custody, Carter said, and although it’s unclear when he was removed from his parents’ home or why, she said he had been shuffled through foster homes and hotel rooms as caseworkers struggled to manage his declining mental health.

Carter said her husband, Christopher Hunnewell, had agreed to take the teen in almost as a last resort. He was family, the son of Hunnewell’s uncle, and Hunnewell’s own troubled upbringing inspired him to help the boy, Carter said.

Now, Hunnewell and another man, his adopted son Tyler Carter Hunnewell, 22, are dead, Tyler’s fiancee is recovering from near-fatal injuries and the teen stands accused of murder. The broader community, meanwhile, waits for answers about how a teenager in state custody reached the point of crisis even after his family attempted to get him help.

Details about what exactly happened on June 11 remain scarce. So does information about the teen, whom the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram is not naming because he’s a minor. Thanks to the strict privacy rules that govern juvenile criminal proceedings in Maine, most court records will remain sealed until and unless the state moves to prosecute the teenager as an adult through what’s known as a bind-over procedure.

Neither police nor the Maine Attorney General’s Office, which handles all homicide cases in the state, have released any information about the teen, who is being held at Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland. They won’t even say whether he has a lawyer.

Days after the slayings, however, Carter told the Press Herald that she and her husband had raised concerns about the boy’s mental health with the Department of Health and Human Services. She said it had become clear to her soon after he moved in that “something was wrong.” The teen was violent. She and her husband sought another foster home for him, but Carter said no one listened.

“There were things going on that we weren’t aware of when we took him in that we should have been. I believe workers and people knew, but they had nowhere else to put him,” Carter said. “I feel they played on my husband’s feelings and emotions. He wanted to help this kid.”

Family members, including Carter, have since stopped responding to media inquiries.

Though much remains unknown, the central Maine case raises questions about a child protective system that for years has faced scrutiny and a juvenile mental health system that advocates call fractured and inadequate.

“There are a lot of little gaps all over the place,” said Hannah Longley, clinical director of advocacy and crisis intervention at the National Alliance on Mental Illness Maine. “And then there are huge crevasses that people fall into.”

Several experts who spoke to the Press Herald, including Longley, said they could not speculate on the specifics of the Chelsea teenager’s case. They also stressed that people with mental illness are no more likely than the general population to commit violent crimes.

Still, they said the state’s longstanding inability to properly identify and meet the behavioral and mental health needs of Maine kids has destructive and expensive consequences, including funneling more minors into the juvenile justice system.

A 2018 report from the Office of Child and Family Services noted access problems “across the spectrum of children’s behavioral health services.” A 2020 assessment of Maine’s juvenile justice system found that this pattern was resulting in too many kids being detained at Long Creek for too long. And last year, the child welfare ombudsman reported that the resource shortage was causing “increased trauma for kids in state custody” — a finding DHHS publicly endorsed.

Though the state has pledged to address the problem, experts say lawmakers have not committed the money it will take to build the support systems Maine children need.

“We haven’t really made progress,” said Atlee Reilly, a managing attorney at Disability Rights Maine. “On the ground, it doesn’t feel that way for families.”

‘THESE THINGS ACCUMULATE’

Adverse childhood experiences — a term experts use to describe a range of potentially traumatic events, like suffering abuse or losing a parent to suicide — can have long-term impacts on kids’ mental, physical and emotional well-being. That can make it harder for them to make connections and succeed in their schools and communities, causing compounding problems over time.

“These things accumulate,” Reilly said. “A lot of these youth, they’ve had a lifetime of severed ties and connections.”

The goal of a properly functioning child welfare system is to identify and meet needs as early as possible so that kids can develop the resilience skills they need to succeed without falling into a negative cycle.

Ideally, kids in state custody would receive a needs assessment before they even reached kindergarten, Reilly said. From there, the child’s advocates, which could include a foster parent, a DHHS guardian, or a caseworker, can connect them with the specific resources they need, from school-based services to medication management to intensive day treatment programs.

That’s often not how things play out in practice in Maine.

“We’re so far from all that right now. It just seems almost like a fantasy to talk about it,” Reilly said.

Though the state has agreed to begin providing comprehensive needs assessments to all minors in state custody beginning in 2026 as part of a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the practice remains too rare for now, experts said.

And even when there is a recognition that a child needs additional support, those resources are often in short supply, if they exist at all.

Children in rural parts of the state can wait eight months or longer for basic outpatient services depending on where they live, Longley, the clinical director from NAMI, said. Telehealth services have helped ease the crunch somewhat, but they’re not always as effective as working with a child in person.

In January, the last month for which data was available, 422 Maine kids were waiting for home- and community-based treatment services, according to the Office of Child and Family Services. It’s not clear whether the Chelsea teenager was on that list.

Many kids are left to struggle at home and in school as their issues worsen, or else they are moved out of their community altogether — a harmful pattern Longley said happens too often in Maine.

‘IT’S UNACCEPTABLE’

When children like the Chelsea teen are shuffled between different homes and facilities, they lose the community bonds that experts say are critical for supporting kids with adverse childhood experiences.

If a child reaches a point of crisis, the goal should be to stabilize them, in a hospital if needed, and then connect them with the resources they need in their community.

But because those resources are so scarce, the state often ends up isolating kids further.

Some kids with psychiatric needs sit in hospital emergency rooms for months because they require a high level of care but no inpatient bed is available to them, Longley said.

Maine’s hospitals cumulatively had fewer than 600 inpatient mental health beds as of February, according to DHHS spokeswoman Lindsay Hammes, although the state doesn’t track beds specifically for juveniles.

Some experts say that should be enough, but staffing shortages limit how many beds are available in practice. And some beds are filled by kids who are ready to be discharged to a lower level of care, but can’t go home because there are no resources in their community that actually offer those services, like therapeutic foster homes.

As of January, 192 Maine kids were receiving treatment at residential centers, including more than 60 who had been sent to facilities out of the state.

A similar story plays out in the juvenile justice system, said Maeghan Maloney, district attorney for Kennebec and Somerset counties. Though ostensibly set up to rehabilitate rather than punish minors, the court’s power to do so is limited by the same lack of resources that contributes to some kids’ behavioral and mental health struggles in the first place.

“When there is no rehabilitation to offer, all we can say is, ‘We’ll try to get the teen in for therapy off a waitlist as soon as possible,’” Maloney said. “It’s unacceptable for the teen, and it’s unacceptable for the community.”

She knows firsthand how difficult it is to be faced with two bad options: Sending a child to Long Creek when they don’t really need to be locked up or returning them to a home that isn’t equipped to meet their needs and where they don’t feel safe.

“There needs to be a third option,” Maloney said. “There are juveniles in extremely abusive homes, and they have no place to go.”

Hammes said DHHS has worked over the last six years to recruit more service homes, increase the availability of mental and behavioral health services, and develop plans for a locked residential treatment center for children.

But even as the state prepares to implement the changes laid out in its settlement agreement with the Justice Department, which include ensuring access to more comprehensive “wraparound” services, the situation is in some ways worsening, experts told the Press Herald.

Multiple residential treatment facilities for children have closed in recent years because of workforce and budget shortfalls. Maloney said one key resource her team regularly works with, the Augusta Teen Center, was recently told they will receive no state funding this year.

Longley cited the recent sudden closure of the Edmund Ervin Pediatric Center at MaineGeneral Health in Augusta, which for decades provided a wide range of services to kids, including those in the foster care system.

She, like other experts, said that the people working in the child welfare system in Maine are doing the best they can with the resources they had. But even before possible federal spending cuts that could have dramatic impacts on MaineCare users, those resources were not enough, and the appetite to fund them does not appear to be there.

“I’m concerned that we still haven’t really taken a look at what it would take to crawl out of the hole that we’ve dug for ourselves,” Reilly said. “We really haven’t faced up to the scale of the problem because of the fear that the answer is not going to be the one that we’re looking for.”