ALBANY COUNTY — Five-year-old Kenneth White was murdered almost a year ago, just a few weeks before he and his family were scheduled to receive presents, food, and clothing from the Albany County Sheriff’s Hilltown Christmas program.

This year, and every year going forward, the 5K run and walk, known as Run 4 the Hill, which serves as a fundraiser for that Christmas program, will be dedicated to Kenneth’s memory, Sheriff Craig D. Apple announced.

Assemblywoman Pat Fahy is also marking the one-year anniversary of Kenneth’s death, wishing a bill she is co-sponsoring would pass by that date. The law would make it easier for police investigating a report of a missing child to access records from Child Protective Services.

The 5K race will be held this year on Nov. 7, and will start and finish at Cornell Cooperative Extension on Martin Road in Voorheesville. “It’s a beautiful course, but it’s hilly,” said race organizer Sharon Boehlke, who is donating her company’s services managing, timing, and scoring the race. 

Last year, said sheriff’s office Patrol Clerk Kathaleen Taylor, the Hilltown Christmas program had 143 families — including 232 children — signed up. Taylor told The Enterprise that Kenneth White and his two sisters — his twin, Christine, and Cheyanne, who is a year younger —  had been receiving services through the program.

Kenneth, a kindergartner at Berne-Knox-Westerlo, was originally reported kidnapped on Dec. 18, 2014 by his cousin Tiffany VanAlstyne, then 19. VanAlstyne initially called 911 with a story about masked intruders bursting into the trailer where they lived, taking Kenneth by force. After police found Kenneth’s body in a snowbank across the street, VanAlstyne was charged with murder.

The murder was “quite devastating” for everyone at the sheriff’s office, Taylor said. “We knew the family, and it was just a couple of weeks and he would have been at our party.” 

The race sign-up form that Boehlke created online says that participating in the race will “help assure that Kenneth’s short life will bring much needed reform to the system that betrayed him and his siblings.” 

She told The Enterprise that the reason for dedicating the race to his memory was to bring attention to those systemic failures. “If your fight is to change the system, you need to keep it at the forefront,” she said. 

The Enterprise asked Apple if he believed, as Boehlke said, that systemic failures had contributed to Kenneth White’s death. 

Apple said that he believed that they had. He said that Kenneth White’s guardians — his aunt, Brenda VanAlstyne, then 42, and his cousin, Tiffany VanAlstyne — had been ordered by a court a year before the murder to undergo mental health counseling, and that they had never gone to counseling, and that their failure to comply with the court’s mandate had never been noted by any government or social service agency.

“They [the VanAlstynes] never once, in one year,” he said, “went to any of the counseling, and nobody apparently picked up on that.” 

Efforts to reach Brenda VanAlstyne for this article were unsuccessful. 

Apple also said, “I firmly believe that the abuse did not start that day, with this incident; I think that that was something that had been going on for quite some time, and I do have evidence to support that.” 

He added that there were other adults living in the home who should have noticed and reported the alleged abuse.   

“I think, you’re living in a mobile home that’s not all that big. I find it hard to believe that nobody knew what was going on in that mobile home — as far as the adults — and the abuse that these children were undergoing. I think it’s a deplorable failure of the system — and I’m not absolving myself either — it’s the government’s failure on this whole Kenneth White case.” 

The others living in the trailer, besides the three White siblings and besides Brenda and Tiffany VanAlstyne, were Brandon Rios, then 18, taken in by Brenda VanAlstyne years ago, and Kenneth VanAlstyne, the brother of Brenda VanAlstyne’s stepfather.

In Albany Family Court this spring, Dr. Casey S. Everett, who had evaluated Brenda VanAlstyne in March, testified that she had had a romantic relationship with Kenneth VanAlstyne, who, Everett said, she described as emotionally abusive to people around him and threatening her with sexual and physical abuse.

This week, Apple focused mainly on the lack of follow-up and oversight to ensure that the court-mandated counseling was actually undergone. “I don’t know who would have had to follow up that mandate, to make sure that they got the mental health counseling,” Apple said, “but obviously somebody didn’t. And they go a whole year, and nobody picked up on that, I think is sad.”

Bill pending  

Apple was initially frustrated with difficulties police had in getting information from Child Protective Services about family members. “That has changed with a law being modified,” he said. 

The law he is referring to is in fact still a bill — it has passed both the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate, but bipartisan sponsors Patricia Fahy (Democrat, Assembly, 109th District) and George A. Amedore Jr. (Republican, Senate, 46th District) are currently working with the governor’s office and the state Office of Children and Family Services to hammer out changes to the wording of the bill, Fahy told The Enterprise. 

Fahy said that the modified bill would need to be passed once more, when lawmakers return in early January. 

She explained that the bill clarifies some of the original law’s wording, to make it easier for “very strictly approved law enforcement officers” to gain immediate access to records held by Child Protective Services, in cases of suspected missing children. “When you have a missing child,” she said, “time is of the essence.” 

Fahy is very sensitive to the issue of confidentiality, she said, and the bill would not allow a private individual to make a missing-child claim and then gain access to sensitive records. She noted that she understands the concerns that some have expressed, about law enforcement gaining access to even unsubstantiated claims that may be included within records, but emphasized that access would be limited to “appropriate, authorized” law enforcement agencies and emergency situations. 

Fahy explained that she first spoke with Apple before the holidays last year, and began working on the bill at that time. 

Fahy said that, when the sheriff’s office began investigating Tiffany VanAlstyne’s claims of a kidnapping, “many [of Kenneth White’s] family members began pointing fingers at one another.” Law enforcement immediately knew, she said, “that the family was well known, that there would be records to help the investigation, help them sort through this. In hindsight, of course, they solved the case, and solved it rather rapidly. But minutes matter in an emergency.” 

She also noted, “We’re 30 minutes from the state line,” and had it been a real kidnapping, and the child were transported across state lines, it could have “complicated matters all the more.” 

According to Fahy, Apple tried, immediately after receiving the kidnapping report, to access records held by Montgomery County, where Kenneth’s parents resided, and Albany County Child Protective Services, as well as by New York State. 

“In all three places,” she said, “they were rejected from getting information about the family and about the people living in the home — about the parents and about the guardians, the aunt. And part of that is, I think, that the counties all erred on the side of confidentiality with regard to Child Protective Services records.” 

The problem with the existing law, Fahy said, is that the regulations pertaining to police access to county records were, “in a way, in two different places.” Her bill would “clean up the law and clarify the language,” to ensure immediate access for entities such as a district attorney, state police, or the sheriff’s department, within the strict parameters of the investigation of a suspected missing child. 

The assemblywoman thinks that she and the governor’s office and the Office of Children and Family Services have come to an agreement now on the language. She expects the modified bill to have “strong bipartisan support” when it comes up for a vote once again in January. 

Fahy’s only regret? She would have liked to have seen this bill passed, she said, by the time of the first anniversary of Kenneth White’s death.