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Rep. Liz Linehan (D-Cheshire) has a peculiar reflex: every time Connecticut’s child-protection bureaucracy collapses, she blames the parents. Last week, when a horrifying child-abuse case hit the news, Linehan leapt onto Facebook — not to demand accountability from the Department of Children and Families, which already had the family on file — but to lecture homeschoolers.
“Another child supposedly being ‘homeschooled’ to cover up her abuse and murder,” she wrote, before “begging” homeschool families to “make some concessions.” Translation: when the state kills a child through neglect, innocent parents have to pay penance.
The case itself was unspeakable. Police say 12-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres was found stuffed inside a plastic tote behind an abandoned New Britain house, her body decomposing for months. Investigators believe she died in the fall of 2024 while living in Farmington with her mother, Karla Garcia, who’s now charged with murder and child cruelty.
Garcia’s boyfriend and sister are also in custody. Detectives believe Jacqueline’s body was kept in the basement until the family moved. Even the police chief, a 35-year veteran, called it one of the worst cases he’s ever seen.
And DCF? They’d already been in that home. The agency admitted prior contact with the family and promised — brace yourself — “a multidisciplinary review” of its own actions. In government-speak, that means a long, expensive meeting to produce a report that says “mistakes were made.”
So naturally, Liz Linehan made it about homeschooling.
Her post detonated instantly. Within hours, hundreds of parents—many of them Democrats — tore into her comment section with more precision than a DCF audit ever receives. They pointed out that DCF already had an open case, that the child’s family was known to authorities, and that the abuse was not “hidden” by homeschooling but by the same agency Linehan is supposed to oversee.
They reminded her that far more abuse happens inside public schools than in homes. In other words, the legislator got publicly homeschooled.
“Stop scapegoating us for DCF’s failures,” one mother wrote. Another added, “You kicked us out of public schools when you ended the religious exemption, and now you want to invade our homes.” A third dropped the hammer: “Fix DCF before you ‘fix’ us.” Even a registered Democrat chimed in: “If DCF had an open case, homeschooling is irrelevant. Stop scapegoating our happily homeschooling families and fix what’s broken on your end… If you touch our rights, you’ll most definitely lose Dem voters.”
Linehan’s smug reply? “I await the reports to see where DCF failed, and then yes, I will absolutely call for changes.”
How gracious. It would have been nice if she’d afforded homeschooling parents the same courtesy before accusing them of harboring murderers.
This isn’t even her first time using a tragedy to push her pet cause. After a Waterbury woman was arrested in March for allegedly keeping her stepson captive for two decades, Linehan went on NBC Connecticut to declare that “Connecticut is lacking the checks and balances within the homeschool system to require families to check-in.”
There it was again — another horrific case, another knee-jerk push for “oversight.” Never mind that DCF already had prior complaints about that home too. Never mind that both the school and police had referred concerns to the agency. Her solution was the same: regulate parents. When in doubt, blame the people who didn’t fail.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s public schools can’t even keep track of their own students. Nearly 83,000 kids (17%) are chronically absent. The state doesn’t know where they are, what they’re doing, or if they’re even alive. But Linehan’s priority is regulating the parents who do know where their kids are.
When bureaucrats fail, Democrats regulate. It’s the one growth industry they’ve mastered. DCF loses a child, and instead of accountability, politicians like Linehan find softer targets — law-abiding families who don’t rely on the system. It’s like taxing sober drivers to fix drunk driving.
Even her phrasing — “the law allows abusers to hide amongst you”—oozed projection. No, Representative, the law didn’t hide them. Your agency did. The state was already “monitoring” that home. The abuser didn’t vanish because of homeschooling. She vanished because your government couldn’t find its own files.
Linehan’s call for homeschoolers to “join the conversation” was almost funny. This is the same legislator who ignored thousands of parents begging her not to repeal the religious exemption on school vaccine requirements in 2021. Now she’s back, claiming to “trust” homeschool families even as she paints them as potential murderers. The only “conversation” she wants is the one where parents grovel while the state rewrites their freedoms.
And let’s be honest: this isn’t about protecting children. It’s about control. Homeschooling has exploded in Connecticut because parents are fleeing the ideological dumpster fire of public education. They watched teachers’ unions hold kids hostage during COVID, watched classrooms turn into gender-studies labs, and decided enough was enough. Every child educated outside the state system is one less taxpayer-funded hostage — and politicians like Linehan can’t stand it.
Homeschool families see through it. They’re not “hiding” children — they’re saving them from the same bureaucrats who lose them. These are parents who pay taxes to fund a system they wouldn’t trust to water their plants, let alone educate their kids. And for that, Liz Linehan wants them monitored.
Here’s a radical thought: maybe the people who lose track of thousands of kids shouldn’t be trusted to keep tabs on the ones who aren’t lost.
If Liz Linehan really wants to protect children, she can start with the ones her own government keeps losing. Until DCF can locate the students still missing from its classrooms, she has no business peering into the living rooms of families who actually know where their children are. Connecticut’s homeschoolers don’t need a lecture in responsibility. The state does.
Maybe next time, instead of “begging” homeschoolers to make concessions, Linehan can beg DCF to stop killing kids through incompetence.
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