Editor’s note: This story contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you love is considering self-harm, support is available 24 hours a day at the national suicide crisis lifeline. Just call 988.
Like many kids placed in foster care, Jacob Doriety bounced around, moving more than 50 times between short-term rentals, residential treatment centers and foster homes. But he spent much of the last two years of his short life living in a hotel in Eugene.
Jacob was staying at the hotel on Saturday morning when he died by suicide.
Oregon child welfare officials have spent years struggling to find appropriate places to house the state’s most vulnerable children, eventually putting many in hotels.
Illustration by Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
The 17-year-old’s death is the latest blow to a trouble-ridden system that has struggled for decades to take care of its most vulnerable kids. The state was responsible for Jacob for the majority of his life. Six years ago, Oregon Department of Human Service officials promised in a legal settlement to stop placing kids in hotels recognizing the harm it does. But it didn’t stop. Instead, Oregon spent millions of dollars housing hundreds of kids in hotel rooms.
Jacob was one of those kids.
His life was often marked by dehumanizing moments. Like, when Eugene hotel rooms were in demand — University of Oregon students were graduating or the Prefontaine Classic track and field meet was happening — state officials would tell Jacob to pack up his belongings. He would throw what he had into plastic storage bins and move into a Salem hotel until the event was over.
Or the time when he broke his foot but it took so long for him to get medical care it healed incorrectly and he needed surgery. Or the time he moved placements and lost half of his limited clothing, including a beloved pair of Nike basketball shorts. Or at the boy’s home when seven grown adults physically restrained him for an extended period of time after he acted out demanding to call his attorney.
But Jacob was also a younger brother who promised his older brother, Josh, who had developmental disabilities, they would live together someday. The two brothers loved going to the movies together. Jacob talked a lot about “getting out of DHS.” He loved strawberry cheesecake flavored Blizzards from Dairy Queen. He liked drawing and loved Mexican popsicles. When he was little, he would watch the 1937 black-and-white Captains Courageous movie with his grandmother on repeat.
OPB is choosing to use Jacob’s full name because his attorney and members of his family believed he would have wanted us to humanize him as much as possible.
Jacob Doriety is seen in this undated image provided by his attorney. The 17-year-old had spent years bouncing between residential treatment centers, foster homes and short-term rentals, and died by suicide on Saturday.
Courtesy of Annette Smith
Jacob was in foster care most of his life after the age of about 2-years-old.
He spent some time with foster families, but mostly it was in and out of facilities and group homes and hotels and short-term rentals. The truth is even though hotel living wasn’t ideal, he preferred it compared to the facilities where he had lived much of his life, according to his attorney.
His trauma, said his attorney, Annette Smith, was compounded over his life.
Jacob struggled with mental health issues, but sustained treatment was nearly impossible without a stable place to consider home. Oregon has struggled with providing adequate care to those struggling with mental health for years. The state consistently ranks as one of the worst in the country in providing access to mental health care.
The Oregon Department of Human Services announced the teenager’s death in a news release earlier this week. The agency is required by law to tell state leaders when a child dies in their care by abuse or neglect. It’s unusual, however, for the agency to send out a press release about a child’s death. What is less unusual is Jacob’s trajectory while in state custody.
The state has been unable to find adequate housing for kids placed in its care for years. Oregon was sued for placing kids in hotels and promised in 2018 to stop the practice. They ignored the order and have spent upwards of $25 million placing hundreds of kids in hotel rooms and short-term rentals.
The Monday news release said the state’s child welfare program and health agency had been working together to try to connect the child with behavioral health support for an extended period of time. Both agencies said they plan to review the circumstances around the teenager’s death and intensify their “efforts to ensure all children have access to appropriate behavioral health services.”
Smith, Jacob’s attorney, said his care team was aware he wanted to kill himself. She, along with Jacob’s caseworkers and attorneys for the state had been consistently meeting with a judge leading up to his suicide to find an adequate placement to care for him. Instead, he remained in the hotel room with rotating shifts of caseworkers tasked with looking after him.
One of the people who was staying with Jacob at the time of his death, one of the state’s safety and service providers, ran after him in the streets early in the morning trying to catch the 17-year-old before he died, according to Jacob’s attorney.
“It is too much to ask caseworkers to serve as front-line crisis workers,” Smith said. “And I recognize the trauma this death had on them too.”
In 2023, a federal judge took the rare step of appointing an outside expert to oversee the state’s Department of Human Services, noting the agency could not figure out how to wind down the practice of “temporary lodging” on its own. The 2023 report from the outside expert noted, “Everyone agrees that temporary lodging must end because it is not good for children.”
The state also recently settled a lawsuit and has agreed to have an expert oversee the foster care system and offer recommendations to improve the system as a whole.
So far this year, the state has looked into the deaths of 12 other children ranging in age between one-month and 17 years-old. The state is required to investigate the deaths of children who come in contact with the agency who die and write a Critical Incident Review Team report with the hopes of understanding what happened to prevent it from happening again.