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“Healing Autism: No Finer a Cause on the Planet”
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Boy Genius
Prodigy or pawn? The troubled saga of Justin Chapman
[In depth article By Julie Poppen.] http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/justin/index.shtml
The mother of Justin Chapman, 8, has recently
admitted she falsified records used to document
claims about her son’s intellectual gifts
When Justin Chapman and his mother, Elizabeth, moved to
Drumrolls of media fanfare followed his every
brilliant act.
He picked up the violin at age 2; competitive chess at 3.
At 4, he enrolled in a prestigious interactive program through
At 6, Justin became the youngest person ever to take a
for-credit course at the
On April 4, 2000, three months before Justin turned 7,
Linda Silverman, director of the private Gifted Development Center in Denver,
tested Justin’s IQ at 298-plus, the highest ever recorded.
A month later, word came that Justin had scored a perfect
800 on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and achieved a verbal
score of 650.
The media seized upon Justin’s story, and the commercial
world took notice, as well. In one striking advertisement, Justin’s remarkable
little head was shown safely cocooned in a
But the crescendo surrounding Justin has fallen silent.
In recent months, the 8-year-old has gone from being a
symbol of childhood genius in
Justin threatened suicide in November, according to his
mother and hospital reports. Afterward, testing at Children’s Hospital found
him to be of average intelligence.
A psychological evaluation from the hospital said, “His
recent suicidal gesture . . . exemplifies his inability to continue the
existence that has been assigned by his mother, the gifted community and most
likely by himself.”
Justin has been placed with foster parents by the Health
and Human Services department in
“This child doesn’t seem to have the degree of
intellectual capacity he is purported to have,” Michael Grills, Justin’s
court-appointed guardian, told a judge Feb. 6. “Either these folks who did the
testing at Children’s are flat wrong or the extraordinary gifts this child
currently has are a fiction—something that has been contrived.
“The picture that is painted of this child being
extraordinarily gifted and talented does not seem to bear out.”
Many of the claims about Justin’s ability and potential
could not be independently verified in an extensive investigation by the Rocky
Mountain News. Records are nonexistent or cannot be confirmed.
Proponents now say that their relationship with Justin was
based entirely on e-mail, that they had no firsthand knowledge of his work.
Many acquaintances simply have clammed up.
Still, Justin has his true believers.
“My observations of him are that he’s exactly what he was
claimed to be,” said Tracy Neal, director of the Malone Family Foundation.
The foundation was created in 1997 by John Malone,
chairman of Liberty Media Corp., and his family to improve access to quality
education for extraordinarily talented young people who lack financial
resources.
Neal said the newly formed
Elizabeth Chapman complains that her only child is grossly
misunderstood and not receiving the specialized help he needs as a profoundly
gifted child with a learning disability, which, she said, is an inability to
process the spoken word.
“People just don’t understand these kids,” Chapman said in
one of many interviews with the News during the past six months. “People fear
what they don’t know or understand. They don’t come with manuals.”
“I don’t want to be me anymore.”
·
Justin Chapman, as quoted in a
Justin Myles Chapman was born
He was working a manufacturing job at IBM. The two dated
for a few months but “irreconcilable differences”—Maurer’s words—kept them from
taking the relationship further. He now lives at the YMCA in
Chapman, pregnant, returned to
She said she was determined to raise her son differently
than she had been raised—which she described as “totalitarian.” Her parents
were strict Catholics, she said, and she attended private Catholic schools.
Chapman’s father, George, works as an electrical engineer
and computer programmer for Rochester Gas & Electric. Her mother, Jane,
stays home. Chapman said she sought refuge by becoming a competitive gymnast.
She said her parents thought she was “obsessed” with the sport.
As a troubled teen, she was counseled by a clinical social
worker in
After high school, Chapman studied physical education at
the State University of New York at
Chapman said in one interview with the News that she
received a master’s degree in elementary and secondary education through
When her son was born six weeks early, she was enrolled at
It wasn’t many months before
Walking at 7 months.
Reading aloud at 2 years, 4 months.
Chapman often brought the toddler to the
As a toddler, Justin ate with a fork and hated to be
messy.
“He was obsessed with reading. I read him my college
textbooks. The only way to keep him quiet and calm him down was to make things
really complicated,” she said.
Chapman decided to teach her son at home. She wanted to
nurture his talents and follow his lead, letting him eat, sleep and study
whenever he wanted; his upbringing would be the opposite of her own.
Psychologist Thomas Arnold gave Justin, then age 3, a
Wechsler Intelligence Scale test for preschool-aged children, his mother said.
She said Justin’s IQ was tested at 160, placing him in the “exceptionally
gifted range.”
Not long after the Wechsler test, Chapman refused a
request by the public school system in
At age 4, she enrolled Justin in Stanford’s Educational
Program for Gifted Youth’s interactive computer mathematics program. He
received a B in honors intermediate algebra, an A in elementary writing and “satisfactory”
ratings in accelerated 3-4 math, accelerated 5-6 math and honors pre-algebra,
according to a program transcript. The work was performed via the Internet.
At age 5 ½, Justin began taking high school classes via
the Internet.
At age 6 in 1999, Justin burst into the media spotlight
when he was enrolled in college courses at the
According to one transcript, he received a B in a
four-credit-hour religion course called The Ancient World for a paper on
Babylonian creations, myths and Homer’s The Iliad. He audited a physics course.
Justin’s Web site states that he then enrolled full time.
University officials declined comment and refused to confirm Justin’s course
schedule.
In Justin’s free time, Chapman said, he behaved like a
regular child, engaging in pillow fights, playing soccer, swimming or reading
Harry Potter books.
Justin is credited with writing a syndicated column
through Paradigm News called The Justin Report, in which he opined on topics
ranging from family car trips to the merits of the nation’s education system in
1895. One of his columns, about his crusade against age restrictions, was
published in the Christian Science Monitor.
Justin’s Web site contains the entire run of columns,
which were distributed weekly from
Paradigm News declined to talk about Justin or his
columns.
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The media descended on Justin, but Chapman said it never
was her intention to make her child a celebrity.
She turned down 115 requests for media interviews and
accepted 14, according to a record of media interviews kept by the
In May 2000, when Justin was almost 7, he took the SAT
test at
“The scores are the property of the student,” College
Board spokeswoman Janice Gams said.
A copy of Justin’s score report, taken from a transparency
he made for a presentation, does not include a test center code number or the
name of the testing site.
Mike Sullivan, an assistant principal at Penfield High,
said he did not recall ever seeing Justin taking the SAT with juniors and
seniors at his school and said he no longer is in possession of SAT records for
that date.
Regardless, Julian Stanley, director of the Study of
Mathematically Precocious Youth at
“He’s a very bright kid, assuming these scores are
correct,”
In July 2000,
In August 2000, one month after he turned 7, Justin
graduated from the
Academy Principal John Fox said most of his interactions
were with Justin’s mother, but he praised Justin’s work.
“As flexible as our program is, he was challenging us to
keep up with him as far as sending in his work,” Fox said. “Usually in ninth
grade we require two credits of electives. He submitted proposals for 14 of
them and he did them all.”
Fox also lauded Justin’s efforts to end age discrimination
in education.
Indeed, Justin and his mother have taken his crusade
across the country to conferences for educators and parents of gifted students.
At a typical seminar, he stood on a box and read a
presentation while exhibiting transparencies of bell curves and graphs. He
quoted Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But it was during these
conferences that his inability to answer questions was noted.
Chapman said Justin thinks of too many possible answers
and can’t answer simple questions such as, “What’s your favorite color?” Other
experts who have treated Justin say his auditory processing problem makes it
difficult for him to respond.
Michael Piechowski, a researcher in the field of gifted
education and educational psychology, first heard Justin speak at the May 2000
Hollingworth Conference on the Highly Gifted in
“His arguments were presented logically, and from the way
he emphasized his points, it was clear that he understood what he was saying,”
Piechowski said in a recent letter supporting Chapman’s quest to regain custody
of her son.
“My favorite subject is physics and anything related to
Einstein. Why? He never combed his hair and he never wore socks.”
·
Justin Chapman, quoted by the Rochester Democrat
and Chronicle, November 1999
Silverman, of the
In fact, she was instrumental in helping Chapman move to
It was early 2000 when she first saw Justin’s Web site,
Knowledge Quest—Chapman says Justin built it by himself in six hours—and she
was “blown away.”
Much of Justin’s mesmerizing effect was achieved through
e-mail to mentors and prospective peers around the country. Many of these were
signed off late at night, when most children his age are asleep. Silverman
recalled her early e-mail exchanges with the boy as “incredible.”
“He would e-mail things at a profound level of knowledge
that I knew I couldn’t get him to tell me in words,” she said.
Silverman, who earned a doctoral degree in educational
psychology and special education from the
“For anyone else to be able to ghostwrite what Justin does
on e-mail, they would have to be a greater genius than Justin and they would
have to be the stupidest person on the face of the Earth, because they’d be
found out,” Silverman said.
In Silverman’s test of Justin’s intelligence, she used a
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M). That test has brought much
controversy to Silverman’s career, in which she has tested the IQ of more than
3,000 people, because it last was revised in 1972.
Jerome Sattler, a nationally known IQ testing expert and
author who helped update the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition
in 1986, said results from the 1972 test are not valid. People have more
knowledge now, meaning that scores compared with norms from 30 years ago are
inflated.
“The idea is, one should use the most current version of a
standardized test because it better reflects what is known in the population,”
said Sattler, professor emeritus at
But Silverman and her staff argue that the Stanford-Binet
Form L-M is the only test that distinguishes those who rank above the 99th
percentile on other intelligence tests. She said there is a formula in the
Stanford-Binet manual that describes how to calculate a score when the ceiling
of the test is reached.
Despite her loyalty to the Form L-M test and the
professional duels that has caused, Silverman is a member of an advisory
committee to the team of editors and psychologists revising the fifth edition
of the Stanford-Binet, which is expected to be released in 2003.
The Stanford-Binet tests skills in vocabulary, verbal
abstract reasoning, mathematical induction, spatial perception, auditory
short-term memory, visual memory, visual-motor performance, arithmetic
reasoning, social cognition and verbal fluency.
Justin slept only two hours the night before the first day
of his testing, according to Silverman’s report. She said she allowed him to
take the test in his mother’s lap because she could not always understand his
responses.
Silverman noted that there were several times she had to
ask Chapman what her son was saying.
Special testing arrangements aren’t common, although they’re
not unheard of. But Sattler said he would not accept as valid any answers
translated by a parent.
Regardless, Justin’s score blew off the charts. At
298-plus, according to Silverman, it was almost three times the average IQ of
100.
“Justin’s extraordinary strengths in all of these areas
surpassed the limits of this instrument,” Silverman wrote. “He performed beyond
the level of an individual 19 years, 5 months.”
Sattler said there is no valid way to achieve a
score of 298.
“That number doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in any normed
group. You cannot find a number in any standardized manual that’s much higher
than 160.”
The voices of critics failed to dampen Silverman’s
awe.
“It was the most incredible experience testing this kid,”
Silverman said. “I’ve never had anything like this happen to me in my entire
life.”
Other experts have weighed in to support Silverman. “If
his score was really that high, there is almost no testing modification you
could make that would make that big of a difference,” said Jonathan Plucker, a
testing expert and associate professor of educational psychology at
“(Justin) also disclosed that the world is going to end in
five years and that he has known this since World War III started on
·
Justin Chapman’s admission report at Children’s
Hospital, November 2001
As Justin continued to roll up intellectual feats and
acclaim, there were unmistakable signs that all was not well.
Four months after administering the IQ test to Justin,
Silverman received an e-mail message in
Kociuba warned Silverman that Justin “is only loved for
the monetary gain, prestige and power he can bring to his mother.
“He cannot play unless he works, he cannot laugh unless
she approves, he must be first to get the ‘highest IQ’, swim the fastest, is
the first to enroll in college, be the youngest to graduate HS, be the first
syndicated columnist and test the highest in all your hundreds of tests she
brags about.”
Kociuba said Chapman prepared Justin for days for the IQ
test with Silverman. She accused Chapman of pulling information off the
Internet, “perhaps the very tests you use.”
A quick search on eBay offered a 1960 test book with all
the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M) answers for $5.
When contacted by telephone, Kociuba described herself as
a photographer and rehabilitation counselor, and as a former Chapman friend. “The
biggest fear I have is that unless he’s gifted, she will not accept him. He’s
deathly afraid of losing her love.”
At one point, according to
During that investigation, Silverman defended Chapman in a
letter to the
Chapman, in an interview with the News, dismissed Kociuba
as a jealous mother. She said Kociuba was particularly upset that her
16-year-old son, a gifted student also taking courses at the
Chapman and her son moved to
Chapman said her son couldn’t understand words spoken into
his right ear.
With Silverman’s assistance, Chapman sought help from Ron
Minson, the director of the center.
Minson’s alternative therapy is based on The Tomatis
Method, a 50-year-old sound therapy program that uses hearing exercises to help
patients better process the sequence of sounds and tones. Minson says that the
technique, while not mainstream, can help children overcome learning
disabilities without medication.
Justin visited Minson’s office to have his right ear
stimulated. During an August visit, Justin listened to music on the headphones
in a room with other children. He was playing with plastic dinosaurs. In a
smaller room, he underwent light and sound therapy as he reclined on a soft
chair with lights flashing inside special eyeglasses.
Not long after the treatment started—about a year after
the phenomenal IQ test—Justin began to regress, Chapman said. She said he began
acting like a 2-year-old.
Before that, Chapman said, Justin was a dedicated vegan
who thrived on a few hours sleep every night.
Suddenly, the 7-year-old was eating meat and giving up his
late-night e-mail exchanges. He was sleeping late. His photographic memory
disappeared. He started sucking on his finger. Instead of science kits and
Legos, Justin played with toddler toys, his mother said.
In early June, when the family still was commuting to
“I am now Joe. I am nothing like the Justin I read about.
Hard to believe I wrote those things so I must be someone new—so gave new name
to myself.” Two days later, he wrote: “I cannot find Justin? Have you seen him?
Please help me this does not feel right. I cannot think at all. Acting stupid.
I need to do better. So what—I can hear—too noisy cannot see words.”
In the fall, Chapman enrolled Justin in the
As the school year progressed, Justin began throwing
temper tantrums, kicking a hole in a school wall and becoming increasingly
convinced the world was going to end five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, according to his mother.
In October, Justin told a social worker at Brideun that he
“didn’t want to live anymore.” At the time, his abilities ranged from second-
to 12th-grade levels, according to a letter from school director
Marlo Payne Rice.
Despite Justin’s apparently deteriorating mental state,
Chapman took him to the National Association for Gifted Children’s national
conference Nov. 7-11 in
“He put together a presentation two weeks before,” Chapman
said. “We were hemming and hawing about doing it at all.”
In the end, Chapman decided it would be a safe environment
for her son because Silverman and other friends would be there.
Piechowski, professor emeritus of education and psychology
at
“He was happy to be with people who accepted him and
understood him. He was happy to see again his gifted friends, his true peers.”
“Justin can no longer meet the expectations that have now
become his identity.”
·
Children’s Hospital
On Nov. 18, Chapman took Justin to see the movie Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Just after it started, Justin began screaming
in pain because of a headache. Chapman took her son to St. Anthony Hospital
North. She said doctors gave Justin liquid Motrin and sent him home.
Later that day, Chapman found her bottle of Motrin, empty,
on the floor of Justin’s room. She said she had hid the Motrin in a cupboard
above the stove. She took her son back to the emergency room. Tests came back
negative for any overdose, she said.
In speaking of the episode, Chapman said she interpreted
Justin’s actions as a “cry for help” rather than a suicide attempt. She
expressed regret at taking Justin to St. Anthony’s a second time.
The hospital placed the child on a 72-hour mental health
hold. And Chapman was reprimanded for trying to leave the emergency room with
her son.
“Justin wanted to go home,” Chapman said. “I tried to take
him out of the hospital. I tried to sign him out and leave.”
Justin was transferred to the Devereux Cleo Wallace
inpatient hospital in
Founded in 1943, Devereux Cleo Wallace treats psychiatric,
emotional and behavioral problems in those ages 5 to 21.
Devereux psychiatrist Cathy Collins wrote in her report
that Justin was mentally ill, “a danger to himself” and “gravely disabled.”
Chapman provided the report to the News. Several key
findings of the report became elements of
“The mother’s treatment of the child by means of a
rigorous speaking and travel schedule in order to display her son’s
intelligence has produced an identifiable and substantial impairment of the
child’s psychological functioning or development,” Collins wrote.
A staff report from Devereux noted that Justin could not
spell “fire” or “get” or define the word “sum,” yet he continued to say he was
at an eighth-grade spelling level. The report noted that Justin would become
agitated and try to keep a distance between himself and his mother during her
visits.
In a letter provided by Chapman to the News, Collins
wrote: “It is my impression that he is gravely disabled as evidenced by his
violent tantrums, regression to infantile-like behaviors and suicidal ideation.”
She suggested that Justin might have bipolar disorder.
In defending herself against the complaint, Chapman said
that Justin had given only seven speaking presentations in 19 months, and that
he enjoys the engagements.
Justin was transferred Nov. 28 to Children’s Hospital,
where he remained until the week before Christmas.
Of the suicide attempt, Justin told the staff at Children’s
he had consumed only one Motrin. “He alleges that his cats ate the rest,” the
report states.
There, the neurology department found Justin to be “without
any apparent neurological deficit.” A child depression index found that Justin
was having “excessive tearfulness,” according to a report by attending
psychiatrist Harriet Stern. Justin said he felt tearful only since being in the
hospital and not before that.
As he was given an intelligence test, Justin became
frustrated when he did not know the correct answer, and he would hide under a
piece of furniture, Stern reported in a document Chapman gave to the News.
Justin’s performance on the Wechsler test indicated he had “an approximately
average intelligence level,” Stern wrote.
Chapman responded by defending her son’s results on the
Wechsler test. She said Justin could not possibly do well, because he was
traumatized. She also said the Wechsler test is inappropriate for gifted
children because the ceiling of the test is not high enough.
But the dramatic change in test results raised a red flag
for
“People like that don’t deteriorate to average on a
Wechsler,”
Chapman’s own mental health also came under scrutiny at
Children’s Hospital. In Justin’s discharge report, Stern noted that Chapman had
“unsupportable beliefs” that Justin could move objects using his mind and “possibly
alter the outcome of the future, including the future of the world associated
with World War III.”
Chapman said Justin does believe in telekinesis and is
concerned about the fate of the world.
Staff at Children’s found Justin to be “adjustment
disordered with mixed anxiety and depression.” But, upon discharge, Justin’s
mood was described as “cheerful and he was without apparent psychotic process.”
Doctors at Children’s said that Justin should be reunited
with his mother at some point if she is “assessed as mentally fit and
appropriately able to care for Justin.”
___________________________________________
mother and child
“There is clear evidence this
>> DO SOMETHING ABOUT AUTISM NOW << child did have gifts.
Chapman has provided every
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www.feat.org/FEATnews No Cost! -- Chapman attorney Paul Dugas,
in
___________________________________________ At the end of Justin’s
stay
at Children’s Hospital,
“I’d rather have him in foster care than going to public
school,” Chapman said. “He doesn’t belong there. They had no right to take
custody in the first place. It did more harm than good.”
She said Justin has regressed in foster care. “He’s not
questioning anything,” she said, adding that he doesn’t trust her because she
can’t act like herself. Officials in
One legal claim that Chapman has made—it’s one her
attorney, Paul Dugas, repeated in a December hearing—is that Justin holds a
voter registration card in New York and should be treated like an adult.
Chapman’s argument is that
Peter Quinn, an election commissioner in
Chapman says she has Justin’s voter registration card but
can’t find it.
Chapman’s parents, George and Jane Chapman, came to
“He’s been through a lot and I think it should be kept
private,” Jane Chapman said last month.
Byron Howell, deputy city and county attorney in
In the dependency and neglect summons, Justin’s father,
James Maurer, 33, is accused of abandoning his son. But Maurer says he pays
child support, even though he hasn’t seen his son in more than six years.
“She’s alienated Justin from me, so I haven’t really been able
to have contact with him,” Maurer said. “Social services told me she was using
Justin for her own need for recognition or popularity. She’s just very flagrant
and compulsive about things.”
Chapman said she voluntarily underwent one psychological
evaluation and that the court has ordered her to be tested further.
She also said she has returned to church and is taking
parenting classes. She said she recently began teaching gymnastics part time in
A candle with an angel on it sits on a mantel next to a
picture of her with Justin during a happier time.
“I can’t protect him and I don’t know what’s going
on,” she said.
Chapman does have her advocates, including Neal, director
of the Malone Family Foundation.
Neal has visited the Chapman home and said, “I never saw
anything that would fall under the rubric of abuse or neglect. I’ve seen her
discipline him. She gives him the standard timeout. He didn’t show any unusual
fear around her. I saw food in her home.
“It’s their first case,” Neal said of
Neal said the foundation hasn’t helped Chapman but that
she personally has offered financial and moral support. When asked whether
Malone, the cable magnate, has helped Chapman, Neal responded, “No comment.”
On Monday of this week, attorney Dugas said Chapman would
admit to the accusations in the dependency and neglect petition in hopes of
getting her son back sooner.
The admission, which Dugas said would be filed within a
week, would void a jury trial now set for March 18-20.
Chapman said her main goals are to regain custody and get
Justin the help he needs, such as returning to the Center for Inner Change and
the
“It will take a lot of time with just dealing with this
situation,” she said, a lot of nature walks, a lot of letting him be and
saying, ‘It’s OK to be who you are. You don’t have to be an average 8-year-old.
You don’t have to be a junior in college. You can do what you need to do.’ “
As of Monday, Chapman’s phone was disconnected, and Dugas
said she would no longer be talking to the media.
For now, at least, the questions about Justin remain. Is
he a genius, or a little boy who has been used as a pawn?
Words from the song Reflection from the movie Mulan that
he has used in his writings might begin to approach an answer:
“Look at me, you may think you see, who I really am. But
you’ll never know me. Every day is as if I play a part, now I see, if I wear a
mask, I can fool the world, but I cannot fool my heart.” Contact Julie Poppen
at (303) 892-5176 or poppenj@RockyMountainNews.com.
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