6 Investigates: Preventing Another Tragedy (Who Failed Rylan & Cameron?)

The parents of a teen who died after walking away from the Tulsa Boys' Home said their son never should have been in the facility in the first place.

13-year old Rylan Harris was hit and killed on Highway 51 just before Christmas.

"We had him for 13 years and kept him safe. He was in DHS for 10 weeks, In the Boys' Home for eight and he was gone forever," Rylan's mother Kim Wakeman said.

His parents are preparing a legal battle and are out to try to prove that Oklahoma Department of Human Services and the Tulsa Boys’ Home are responsible for their son's death.

"One of the last conversations with him, he tried to apologize to me for being born a certain way and he knew that there was something wrong,” Rylan’s father, Ryan Harris, recalled. “He would ask, ‘why don't things just work right? Why can't I just come home?’”

"He said he wished he wasn't adopted, and I said, ‘what do you mean?’” remembered Wakeman. “He said, ‘I just wish that I was born to you and that I was done with all these problems because if you would've had me, I wouldn't have had all these problems.’"

Rylan was born on December 30th, 2006 to a drug-addicted mom. He was addicted to meth at birth. Doctors said the addiction caused brain damage and a life-long battle with psychological disorders.

"If you've ever seen a drug-addicted baby coming through withdrawals it will break your heart,” Wakeman said. “They don't want to be touched, they don't like light, they don't like sound. It's terrifying and sad at the same time."

Wakeman and Harris were just 26 and 25 years old and already had three kids, including Rylan's older sister. They weren't planning on a fourth child, but that all changed during their first court hearing when they found out Rylan's mother was pregnant again, and this time she was hooked on meth.

"Our worker looked at us and said, ‘she's not getting him and if you don't take him we're not going to let you keep the daughter either’ and so we had to make some tough decisions,” Wakeman said. “Because we knew that he was going to be born drug-addicted, we knew he was likely going to have some issues, didn't know what, but yeah, we quickly fell in love and it didn't take much.”

The couple fostered and then adopted Rylan and his sister.

Wakeman and Harris separated when Rylan was four years old. Both remarried and it took a collaboration of all four adults to care for Rylan over the years.

“If you've never dealt with a child that had Rylan's diagnoses you don't understand what a child like that is like,” said Wakeman. “It's not a discipline problem, which is what most people assume. It's not a discipline problem. He was sick, he was very sick."

Wakeman said Rylan was so sick, he was medicated at birth and in and out of every lockdown mental health facility in Oklahoma that would take him. She said some even refused to accept him after his first visit. Then, there was a scare that lead to a felony when Rylan attempted to kill his mom while she was driving.

"My daughter got sick at school, so it was a one-off scenario where I didn't have a choice but to drive with him in the car alone,” Wakeman said. “It was scary, but it wasn't something new for us. I mean we normally had a plan with how to deal with things, that was our life with Rylan."

Rylan was immediately placed in DHS custody and put in a lockdown mental health facility. After 30 days at Integris, Harris said Rylan was moved from DHS and into the care of the Tulsa Boys' Home.

"We openly begged for him not to be there - our cries for it were ignored,” Harris said. “We knew him better than anybody, we knew what they had and for every ounce of sweetness, they also had they had a sick little boy and he needed to be somewhere safe."

DHS has declined to speak about Rylan's case. Rylan was placed at the Tulsa Boys’ Home through a non-right to refuse contract in October.            

Mi'Shell Garrett, a former residential youth care professional at the Tulsa Boys' Home, has a master’s degree in social work. She reached out to the family attorney after a series of stories aired on News On 6 focusing on runaway deaths at the facility. Garrett believes DHS failed Rylan by placing him at the Tulsa Boys' Home.

"We were all kind of pulled into that meeting and told, ‘hey, we've never experienced a kid like this before,’” Garrett said. “It was all hands-on deck. We're going to do everything we can. And we all knew we weren't ready for this. None of us are qualified to take care of this child."

“We were all very uneasy about it, but DHS has the policy we can't deny a child,” Garrett added.

Garrett said that out of the 226 runaway reports last year, she was there for nearly 100 of them.

"It was scary, and you tell these kids who live on campus, ‘hey, you don't want the same thing that happened to Cameron to happen to you,’” Garrett said. “You hate using that as leverage but you're hoping that will make a difference, and unfortunately in Rylan's case it didn't.”

Rylan's parents have now hired an attorney and plan to sue DHS and the Tulsa Boys' Home.

“Something has to change,” Wakeman said. “The only way I know to make a change is to force them to make a change, plus we still don't have answers. The most answers we have came from you [News On 6’s Brian Dorman]. So, the only way to get the information or to get them to make a change, we felt, was to go forward with a lawsuit."

You can watch Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the original investigative series or watch the full 30-minute special here.