The blue-eyed little boy lived in a small house with his schizophrenic mother, a one-legged old man and some 30 street cats. One night there was a gunshot. A policewoman came to the door.

She found the boy, 3, naked and bruised. He was playful but strange. When she asked him questions, he did not speak. He meowed. And growled. And crinkled his nose like a kitten.

The boy sometimes ate dried cat food from bowls on the floor, she learned later. For hours at a time, he played at the end of a child's harness while the grown-ups watched TV.

The boy "was being raised as one of 32 cats," his court- appointed advocate, Linda Binder, later told a judge.

His mother adamantly denied it.

In the secretive world of family court, the uncommon plight of the child shocked almost everyone who heard about it. That was four years ago -- when the state took custody. What has happened to the boy since is appallingly common.

His story is an allegory of Florida's child-welfare system. It is a system that too often fails the 8,000 neglected and abused children it is entrusted to protect.

Florida law itself often fails to balance the needs of children with the rights of mentally ill parents, children's advocates say.

In ruling recently that he could not sever the mother's rights to her son, Juvenile Judge Bruce Levy said, "It was the most agonizing decision I ever made. I sent one man to the electric chair. This was worse."

This account of the boy's odyssey through the child-welfare system is based on extensive interviews and documents that almost never become public: court records containing medical evaluations, reports of the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services and trial transcripts.

John Farie, HRS administrator for Dade and Monroe counties, said confidentiality laws prohibit him from commenting on the case.

The boy, identified here as J., the initial of his first name, was born in Miami on April 21, 1982. His mother -- a plain, stocky woman named Dinah -- said she did not remember the father's name.

She was 38 years old and came from Washington, where she worked on and off in clerical jobs. She began having mental problems in her 20s, once destroying furniture at her therapist's office. Psychiatrists at the Georgetown University hospital diagnosed her as paranoid schizophrenic.

To doctors, she portrayed her mother as "cold and unloving" and her father as "cruel . . . he roughed me up, touched me in the wrong places. He was sort of sadistic, liked to enrage me, make me cry."

HRS records for the first two years of J.'s life are sketchy. He was 4 months old when someone first reported that he was not being supervised adequately. Two more complaints followed when J. was 2. One alleged sexual abuse.

"There is no indication in the file that this case was investigated," an HRS report stated.

Mother and child shared a boxy house in Northwest Dade with a 79-year-old amputee and the cats. Dinah said she waited on the man and, in exchange, he paid for cat food.

One evening in June 1985, Metro Dade Police officer Maria Caro Ponte responded to a report of gunfire at the house.

The way Dinah told it, the old man wanted her to be his lover. She refused. In a rage, he pulled a gun and fired at her. He missed.

The boy ran outside and hid under the house. When he came back in, his mother put him in the bathtub. She left the room. The tub overflowed. She got angry and hit him with a metal-handled fly swatter, hard enough for the plastic end to break off.