Monday, October 20, 2014

Despite Reforms, Child Deaths Still Uncounted In Florida



Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3016499.html#storylink=cpy
In Lake County, a disfigured 2-month-old whose mother did not want him is left alone in a motel room for 90 minutes, and is later found smothered. His family had been the subject of 38 prior investigations by the state’s child welfare agency.
“It is a general consensus,” a report said, “that [the mother] was involved in the death of her child.”
In Santa Rosa County, child welfare authorities allow a “chronic and severe” drug addict to bring her newborn home, though her two older children had been removed from her care for their safety. Eighteen days later, the mother takes an unprescribed Lortab painkiller and places her baby next to her in bed. The child is found dead.
And in Polk County, a mother leaves two toddlers alone in a “kiddie pool” — and returns to find her 1-year-old daughter face-down in the water. Her 2-year-old son later discloses he pushed his sister down while she was crying. He now suffers nightmares.



Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3016499.html#storylink=cpy
The children, who all perished last year, are tragically bound by more than death: Even as the Florida Department of Children & Families has promised greater openness, the three fatalities, and dozens of others like them, have never been counted among the state’s victims of fatal abuse or neglect.
No state can protect every child who is born to troubled, violent or drug-addicted parents, and even youngsters for whom child protection administrators make all the right choices can sometimes fall victim to unforeseen circumstances. To ensure that state social service agencies learn from mistakes, the federal government requires that states count and investigate all child fatalities that result from abuse or neglect.
Regulators don’t, however, strenuously oversee how the counting and investigating occurs.
After the Miami Herald published a series examining the deaths of 477 children — and Florida’s failure to protect some of them from abusive or neglectful parents — the state promised a new era of openness and more rigor in the way it investigates child deaths.
But except for abiding by a new state law that required DCF to create a website listing all child fatalities, Florida has continued to undercount the number of children it fails.
“Nothing has changed,” said former Broward Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. James Harn, who supervised child abuse investigations before retiring when a new sheriff was elected last year. “Some day, somebody will say ‘let’s just stop the political wrangling.’ Here’s what you’ve got to do: Just tell the truth.”

For several years, BSO, which has investigated child deaths under contract with DCF, has recorded significantly more fatalities due to neglect or abuse than other counties, where DCF does its own investigations. One important reason for the disparity is that the sheriff’s office long has insisted that drownings and accidental suffocations — among the leading causes of child fatality — be counted, while DCF has, in recent years, declined to include the majority of those in its abuse and neglect tally.
As a result, said Harn, the statewide numbers “are cooked.”
“It’s not going to get fixed as long as they want to hide things,” Harn added.
A DCF spokeswoman in Tallahassee, Alexis Lambert, said the agency studies all child fatalities — not just the ones it verifies as resulting from abuse or neglect — to “improve and strengthen child welfare practice and services provided to vulnerable children and at-risk families statewide.”
She added: “The safety and well-being of Florida’s vulnerable children is DCF’s top priority. Understanding and assessing child fatalities is one way the department analyzes the issues facing families and develops strategies to meet the needs of struggling families and protect vulnerable children.”

Election issue

 Child deaths became an election issue in recent weeks as both Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, and his Democratic challenger, former Gov. Charlie Crist, traded accusations over whose administration better protected children. In two debates, Scott has stated that child fatalities have declined dramatically since he took office in 2011. In 2009, he said in the first debate, 97 children with a DCF history died. “Last year,” he added, “we were down to 36 deaths.” (The DCF child death website actually lists 45.) “That’s still way too many,” he said. “We don’t want to have one death. But it’s a dramatic improvement from when Charlie was there.”

Scott repeated the assertion in a news release and in the second debate last Wednesday.
A careful study of thousands of pages of state documents makes clear that the number Scott cited and the one on the DCF website are both distortions of reality. They are contorted by years-long delays in completing investigations — thus keeping deaths off the books — by a decision to narrow the definition of what constitutes neglect, and by a determination to “unverify” some child deaths that had previously been “verified” as abuse or neglect.
Said Pamela Graham, a Florida State University social work professor who served on a Department of Health statewide death review committee for five years: “Numbers lie if you aren’t counting them.”
For many years, state child protection systems have been evaluated in large part by a standard measure: “verified” child deaths “with priors” — that is, the number of youngsters whose families had prior contact with the state. That is the number that Gov. Scott says is declining. But the decline in deaths with priors can be traced to the factors cited above.
Drownings and accidental suffocations differ from, say, beating or shooting deaths in an important way: “There are human decisions in how you categorize them,” said Richard Gelles, who is dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. There is simply no wiggle room as to whether a beating is a child abuse death. In contrast, a drowning can be a neglect death, or, as many more of them are now called, merely tragic accidents.

‘Verified deaths’

Verified child deaths did spike during the Crist administration, whose term ended in January 2011. And the numbers on DCF’s newly minted website show that overall child deaths — whether from abuse or illness or something else — have receded somewhat. But the more striking decline has been in the percentage of child deaths that are “verified” as neglect or abuse.
In 2009, 43 percent, or 206, of DCF’s 474 reported child deaths were verified. The percentage dropped to 34 percent in 2010, 31 percent in 2011 and 2012, and then to 10 percent in 2013. So far this year, 13 percent of DCF’s 348 reported deaths have been verified, the records show.
Changes in the standard for verification of child deaths have led to some unusual variations. For instance, Broward County — where BSO investigates child deaths under contract, independent of DCF — tallied 21 “verified” child deaths from abuse or neglect in 2013 out of 30 total fatalities, or more than two-thirds. In Miami-Dade, as of Thursday night, DCF had not verified a single 2013 death as being from abuse or neglect out of the 39 overall fatalities for that county listed on the agency’s website.
On Thursday, the June 21, 2013, killing of Ezra Raphael remained unclassified, though the boyfriend of Ezra’s mother, Claude Alexis, is in jail awaiting trial on a murder charge. Alexis told North Miami Beach police he whipped the child with a belt for spilling bathwater. After the Herald asked about the 39 Miami cases Friday morning, Ezra’s case was switched that same day to “verified.”
The July 20, 2013, death of Jayden Villegas-Morales remains unverified, though his father, Angel Villegas, is charged with manslaughter. Of Jayden’s death, DCF says only that the “2-year-old child was found unresponsive by his father.”
Lambert, DCF’s spokeswoman, said 15 of the 39 Miami-Dade child fatalities from last year remain under investigation by the department.

Aftermath of reforms

Following the Herald’s series on child deaths, Innocents Lost, lawmakers passed a sweeping reform bill. One of its provisions required DCF to maintain the website with details on every child death that is reported. The website depicts a dramatic decline in the verification of deaths in categories that are susceptible to manipulation: the drownings and accidental smotherings. In 2009, before the new neglect guidelines took effect, 76 drownings were recorded. Of those, 58 — or 76 percent — were verified as resulting from neglect, and, among those, 26, or 45 percent, came from families with a prior agency history.
So far this year, DCF has tallied 66 drowning deaths. Only nine of the 66 cases were “verified” as resulting from neglect — or 13 percent — and only one of those nine involved a child whose family had any DCF involvement in the prior five years.
Over five years, then, the share of drowning deaths that were verified as neglect dropped from 76 percent to 13 percent. And in the category that is used to judge Florida’s child-protective efforts against other states — deaths with priors — only one of the 66 drownings from this year is on course to make the list.
The percentage of unsafe sleep deaths verified by DCF also declined, though far less sharply. In 2009, DCF reported 97 such fatalities; among them, 31, or 30 percent, were verified. Of those, 21, or 68 percent were children with a prior family history within the previous five years. In 2013, DCF reported 103 unsafe sleep deaths, and 26 of them, or 25 percent, were verified, DCF’s records show. Among the 26 that were verified, fewer than half involved children with a prior agency history.
Lambert said investigating drowning or unsafe sleep deaths is particularly challenging. “Deaths resulting from drowning and co-sleeping require the most extensive analysis and investigation as these deaths can sometimes be tragic accidents,” she said.
Gelles, the social work dean, said the total number of drowning and unsafe sleep deaths is generally not susceptible to manipulation — but the precipitous decline in cases that are verified suggests that those numbers are “fudged.”
“They are no less dead,” he added.
The death of Nyla Hardy was counted. And then it wasn’t.
Nyla was born on April 17, 2013, to 22-year-old Alysha Rivers and 24-year-old Kendrick Hardy, two longtime drug abusers. Rivers, according to state records, “admitted to smoking two blunts [of marijuana] a day, and the father admitted to smoking five blunts a day.” A former foster child herself, Rivers had lost custody of an older child in 2007 due to marijuana abuse.
Two months before Nyla was born, DCF received a report of physical abuse, burns and environmental hazards involving older siblings, including one who was previously removed but later reunited with the parents. The allegations were ruled unfounded, and the agency closed its case when the mother agreed to accept help from the state.
When Nyla was 3 weeks old, her parents smoked marijuana and then went to bed. Hardy had rolled over onto the newborn once before, the mother said, but the couple continued to co-sleep with the child anyway. That night, “the mother stated she placed the baby in the middle of the bed, with her arm around her,” a report said. When she woke up the next morning, Nyla “was all blue; she was cold and hard.” She also had suffered “multiple hemorrhages...two contusions,” and was drenched in her own blood — so much so, a report said, that the local medical examiner initially said the death most likely “will turn into a homicide.”
In the end, the cause of death was ruled undetermined. In November 2013, the Herald obtained records on 40 child death investigations DCF submitted to a consultant, Casey Family Programs, for the consultant to analyze. At the time, Nyla Hardy’s death had been “verified” as a neglect death. But months later, when a formal death review was attached to DCF’s fatality website, the classification had been switched to unverified. It now will never be counted among the 2013 neglect-related deaths.
Even as it deemed the case an unverified death, the final death review noted: “Due to the extensive use of drugs by the parents, a child died while in their care.”

‘Verified’ to ‘unverified’

Charlize Terrell’s name has vanished from the 2013 count, as well. Her death also was among the 40 cases reviewed last year by the consultant, and a five-page “casework analysis” provided to the Herald noted an investigation of her May 4, 2013, death was “closed” and “verified.” Charlize was born addicted to her mother’s opiate drugs, and spent several weeks in a hospital detoxifying from them.
Charlize died 10 weeks after birth. Both of her parents “admitted to being under the influence of methadone and alcohol the night Charlize died,” a report said. And though the details of her death remained undetermined, “investigators believe that the mother likely rolled over on top of the infant after falling asleep under the influence.”
In a final death review, the “verified” finding was changed to unverified. Charlize’s death will not be counted.
The “casework analysis” of the May 31, 2013, death of Brooklyn Stewart prepared for the DCF consultant concluded that the 1-year-old girl’s drowning “should be” verified, records obtained by the Herald showed. Brooklyn was the toddler left unsupervised in a kiddie pool with her slightly older brother. “Neighbors reported that the children were often seen outside unattended,” the initial review said. It added that Brooklyn’s mother offered differing accounts of the drowning.
Brooklyn’s parents had been the subject of 11 DCF complaints, the most recent four months before Brooklyn’s death.
A bruise on Brooklyn’s head supported her older brother’s claim that he had pushed her in the pool, the report said.
Despite what was written initially, DCF still closed the case as unverified, without offering any explanation in the formal death review for the switch. And despite the formal finding that abuse or neglect did not cause Brooklyn’s death, her siblings were removed from their parents’ care. Brooklyn’s death did not count.
In another of the Casey Family Programs reviews obtained by the Herald, an unnamed DCF administrator wrote that the March 17, 2013, drowning of a 1-year-old Polk County boy should be verified, as the agency had faulted the family for failing to supervise the toddler — a lapse that led to the boy’s death. Yet that case, too, was never counted.
An unnamed DCF administrator in another case reviewed by the consultant chided death investigators for failing to verify the Feb. 28, 2013, smothering death of a 4-month-old Manatee County girl. The infant’s mom had been the subject of four prior child abuse hotline reports from 2011 through 2013, including two reports of violence between the parents.
“The child’s father,” the administrator wrote, “admitted he had been educated on co-sleeping dangers by the paternal grandmother, who works with infants and children, yet despite this knowledge, he chose to place his infant daughter face down on a blanket in his bed.”
Still, Tampa Bay’s child death supervisor at the time, Lisa Rivera, suggested — in clear conflict with the administrator cited in the Casey Families report — that the father may not have been aware of the dangers of co-sleeping. Though the infant’s mother had been warned in a prior DCF probe, Rivera wrote, “the mother admitted that she later failed to share that information with him.”
Rivera now is the top child death administrator statewide. She wrote a recent email in which she asked that a death in Broward from unsafe sleeping be changed from verified. “Increased risk factors, yes,” Rivera wrote, “verifiable maltreatment, no.” It is unclear whether the death was later discarded from the state’s tally.
And in a particularly unusual case, the agency chose not to verify a suffocation death only because investigators were unsure which parent smothered the 35-day-old baby in bed with them. “Case is being closed with not-substantiated findings of death, due to not being able to determine which caregiver was responsible for the rollover onto the child,” the report said.
Lambert said the department has limited options when a medical examiner’s findings are undetermined and police conclude there is insufficient evidence to make an arrest. In such cases, Lambert said, “DCF also does not have enough evidence to verify. However, we do have authority to remove surviving siblings” when evidence suggests they remain in danger.
Graham, the FSU professor who spent five years on the Department of Health’s statewide fatality committee, which attempts to glean patterns from child deaths, said she was struck by how often the same agency missteps repeated themselves. “You see the same issues over and over and over — and they are all correctable,” Graham said.
“The thing that disturbs me the most is that the energy that is put toward keeping the [“verified abuse”] numbers at a minimum could be better spent looking at the real issues, and preventing future deaths,” Graham said. “To me, that is the biggest crime: We are spending so much energy not looking at cases to make ourselves look good. We should be figuring out how to do this better.”
Florida child deaths by year
2009
Total deaths: 474
Verified: 206
Percentage verified: 43
2010
Total deaths: 469
Verified: 164
Percentage verified: 35
2011
Total deaths: 428
Verified: 136
Percentage verified: 32
2012
Total deaths: 408
Verified: 129
Percentage varified: 32
2013
Total deaths: 432
Verified: 45
Percentage verified: 10
2014 to date
Total deaths: 358
Verified: 45
Percentage varified: 13
Source: DCF child death website

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3016499.html

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Scott claim of fewer child abuse deaths questioned

— Republican Gov. Rick Scott repeatedly tells voters that abused and neglected children are safer under his leadership than when his Democratic opponent Charlie Crist was governor, but an Associated Press examination of that claim shows that campaign claim may be an exaggeration.
Scott says deaths among children who have come to the Department of Children and Families' attention have plummeted from 97 in 2009 to 36 last year, but child welfare experts say any drop is attributed to the way DCF responds to abuse reports and changes to what is considered a death caused by neglect or abuse. The result artificially reduces the number of child deaths compared to Crist's 2007-11 term.

 "It's amazing how this works, isn't it? You just change how you do things and you can make it appear ... like things have improved," said Pam Graham, who was on the state's child abuse death review team until December and who is a professor at Florida State University's College of Social Work.
Three times during a debate last Friday, Scott said 97 children with a DCF history died of abuse in 2009. But the state's Child Abuse Death Review Team, which is independent of DCF and often highly critical of the agency, says only 69 children fell into that category that year. Scott's staff said the 97 figure came from a private company hired by DCF and the Scott administration that examined child deaths between 2007 and 2013. The administration says the company's analysis is based on updated data.
After the debate, Scott's campaign issued a release saying child abuse deaths have declined dramatically since he took office in 2011. But the governor and his team omitted a crucial point: Child welfare officials no longer count children who drown or infants and toddlers who die because a sleeping parent rolls onto them, saying there had to be a caregiver's willful act for the death to be considered abuse or neglect. The new standard meant many deaths weren't counted, even when there was evidence that parental drug use contributed.


The result made it appear there were fewer deaths. The change came under Crist but has affected the numbers since Scott took office.
The effect was immediate and the number of verified child abuse and neglect deaths dropped 30 percent under Crist, from 197 to 136 between 2009 and 2010, according to a tally by the state Department of Health. In the three years since Scott took office, the figures dropped to 130, 129 and 112, according to state data. This includes verified abuse and neglect deaths where the family had no history with DCF.
Crist said Scott's use of the death figures to score political points is "unconscionable."
"These children aren't political pawns to be played with," Crist said in a telephone interview. "I don't think anybody would expect anyone in political office to utilize the fate of children under the care of an agency for political gain."
Scott spokeswoman Jackie Schutz said the governor "has laid out a clear plan to protect Florida's children and keep our reforms at DCF moving forward," including additional supervision and risk detection methods. Amid growing scrutiny of DCF this year, Scott and the Republican-led Legislature overhauled the child welfare system, dedicating roughly $18.5 million to hire nearly 200 new investigators.


But it's difficult to say whether children have been safer under the Scott or Crist administration. DCF has had a troubled history for decades.
Graham believes it's misleading to say children are safer under Scott's leadership.
"When you look at the overall number of kids that die, it really hasn't gone down that much," she said.
Graham said DCF is screening out a higher percentage of calls to the state child abuse hotline under Scott, which means both fewer investigations and fewer deaths ultimately categorized as abuse.
Advocates are angry that child abuse deaths are being politicized, especially since several gruesome child deaths made national headlines on Scott's watch including a recent tragedy in Bell, Florida. Don Spirit fatally shot his six grandchildren and his daughter before killing himself. Records show DCF had been called 18 times to investigate the family over several years, both under Scott and Crist.
George Sheldon, who was Crist's DCF secretary, said he and his predecessor decided that more cases should be sent to the child death review team, including drowning and co-sleeping deaths. This year the Legislature mandated that the review team examine all suspicious deaths.
"To not see the broader picture is in essence just hiding the real problem, which is we could do more. If you're going to spend your time saying there were fewer deaths, then you're ignoring the bigger problem. New deaths are occurring," Graham said.

Read more at http://www.wral.com/scott-claim-of-fewer-child-abuse-deaths-questioned/14079721/#V3sRtmEhKDQIkSTv.99

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Child massacre the last straw, advocacy group says: State agency can't protect kids

Posted: October 12, 2014 - 11:38am
TALLAHASSEE | An advocacy group is calling for the Florida Department of Children and Families to relinquish its oversight of child-protective services to local law enforcement or other agencies following last month’s mass murder-suicide involving six children in Gilchrist County.
Roy Miller

Roy Miller, spokesman for the Children’s Lobby, said the murders amounted to the last straw in the department’s response to a series of child deaths going back many years.
“Why is DCF continuing to do the direct oversight of child-welfare services when they have a three-decade history of not doing it well?” he asked. “We need a new model.”
Miller’s group was responding to a department report on Don Spirit, the Gilchrist County man who murdered his daughter and six grandchildren before committing suicide on Sept. 18.
Citing media reports, the group said the Department of Children and Families was warned last year that “Spirit, a convicted felon with a history of discharging a gun that resulted in the death of a child, should have no contact with his grandchildren. More damning, some of the grandchildren themselves, as recently as last year, told DCF workers they feared their grandfather. Yet, they were living with him at the time of their horrific deaths and the household composition was known to DCF.”
The department concluded that the rampage could not have been foreseen, calling the tragedy “an extreme outlier” — but Miller strongly disagrees.


“Clearly what we are doing isn’t working,” he said.
According to the department, the family had been involved in 18 child-protective investigations since 2006, with Spirit involved in six of the investigations and alleged to be the perpetrator in three. Investigators confirmed that Spirit had physically abused his then-pregnant daughter, Sarah, who became one of his murder victims and was the mother of the six dead children.
The Children’s Lobby said DCF did not enforce its own safety plans or take action after a verified report that Spirit physically injured one of his granddaughters in 2013.
The murders in the small community of Bell drew national attention and scrutiny about DCF’s prior involvement with the family. Both the department and the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Office had visited the family’s home as recently as Sept. 2, but the preliminary report said a case note showed that the children were not “in imminent danger of illness or injury from abuse, neglect or abandonment.”
For nearly two years, Children and Families has been under fire for the most recent round of child deaths on its watch. Lawmakers responded with a sweeping reform measure and increased funding during the 2014 legislative session.

Although the department has been putting the reforms into place, the murders in Bell have brought a new hail of condemnation.
The Department of Children and Families released a preliminary report last week, saying it would increase staff training and take up other reforms in the wake of the murders. DCF did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about Miller’s calls for change.
“While DCF issues one more report stating they will use this tragedy to do better, six murdered children who relied on DCF to protect them don’t get a do-over,” Miller said. “This report is not at all different from any number of previous DCF reports about children the state failed to protect.”
Now, Miller said, the Children’s Lobby will join forces with others critics of Florida’s child-welfare system who believe DCF should transfer the oversight of its protective services to local law enforcement agencies or other community partners, such as local governments, who can do the job better.
Currently, six Florida sheriffs’ offices oversee child-protection services in their counties — Broward, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas and Seminole — rather than the Department of Children and Families having the responsibility.
Many children’s advocates believe the sheriffs do a better job.
“DCF cannot and should not perform protective investigations,” said Cindy Lederman, a dependency court judge in Miami-Dade County. “DCF has consistently proven itself incapable of conducting comprehensive investigations. We need trained law enforcement officers to take over.”
But some sheriffs have been wary of the responsibility, if only due to the cost.
http://mayportmirror.jacksonville.com/news/florida/2014-10-12/story/child-massacre-last-straw-advocacy-group-says-state-agency-cant

Editorial:DCF Interim Secretary Mike Carroll No accountability

Published: Wednesday, October 8, 2014 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, October 7, 2014 at 1:50 p.m.
State child-protection investigators can’t be expected to predict the future, but they should be able to protect children when there is a history of abuse and neglect.
On that count, they failed miserably in the case of a Bell man who last month shot to death his daughter and six grandchildren before killing himself.
Yet the Department of Children and Families’ interim chief showed a stunning lack of accountability last week in determining that nothing could have been done to prevent the tragedy.

DCF Interim Secretary Mike Carroll
DCF Interim Secretary Mike Carroll made the claim in a review of 18 cases of domestic violence, drug use, neglect and other mistreatment involving Don Spirit, 51, and his family members. On Sept. 18, Spirit killed his 28-year-old daughter, Sarah, and her six children, ages two months to 11 years old, before turning the gun on himself.
Carroll wrote in an executive summary of the report that there was “no evidence to suggest that anyone, at any time, could have known” that Spirit was capable of the massacre.
While no one might have predicted a massacre, there was clearly enough evidence to raise concerns about escalating violence that could lead to something even more terrible. Since 2006, DCF had been involved in numerous cases in which Don Spirit was alleged to have physically abused family members.
The report failed to mention several of those cases, including allegations of Spirit threatening to kill himself and his ex-wife. In 2013, Spirit was reported to have firearms in his home despite his status as a convicted felon.
The report did acknowledge that a DCF agent ignored a 2013 recommendation from a University of Florida Child Protection Team that Spirit have no unsupervised contact with his grandchildren. Carroll wrote that DCF agents might have gotten complacent after investigating eight years of similar cases.
Given DCF’s history, the excuse is particularly galling. The Miami Herald’s “Innocents Lost” series this year told the stories of hundreds of children that DCF was also charged with protecting but who ended up dead. They include the case of 4-year-old Kristina Hepp, who was beaten to death by her father in Gilchrist County in 2009.

Carroll has outlined a five-part plan to prevent future tragedies. It includes statewide training for child-abuse investigators and hiring more staff to complete case reviews that could spot future trouble.
DCF’s history means local officials and advocates for children must monitor the agency to ensure these and other reforms are implemented. They must also ensure that the lines of communication are open between agencies and law enforcement to ensure warning signs aren’t missed.
And while the DCF report on the Bell massacre didn’t attribute problems to the caseload of workers, the number of case workers and state funding for the agency deserves continued scrutiny.
DCF’s default position after a tragedy can’t be excuses and a lack of accountability. The agency will never be able to prevent every tragedy, but it must do a better job than it has been doing.