A Miami-Dade grand jury accused state child welfare administrators
Tuesday of “intentionally and deliberately” manipulating the
investigation of child deaths because of abuse and neglect — making it
appear that fewer children were dying across the state.
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| Nubia Barahona, 10, was found dead in the back of her adoptive father's pick-up truck
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/24/4199002/grand-jury-rips-floridas-dcf-for.html#storylink=cpy
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In a
30-page report that explores whether the Department of Children &
Families has improved since the shocking 2011 death of 10-year-old
Nubia Barahona,
grand jurors found much that pleased them. But they also scolded the
agency for what they described as a systematic attempt to conceal the
true number of children whose lives are cut short by abuse or neglect.
“I
thank the members of the grand jury for their comprehensive look at
Florida’s child welfare system,” said Mike Carroll,
the agency’s interim
secretary. “It is clear from their thoughtful recommendations that they
understand the challenges in the work we do, and it’s also clear they
recognize our commitment to continuing to improve so we can better
protect Florida’s children.”
The
grand jury presentment,
handed up to Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Gisela Cardonne Ely Tuesday
afternoon, comes on the heels of a series of stories in the Miami
Herald, called Innocents Lost. Details of the series are discussed in
the report. In particular, grand jurors confirmed the Herald’s findings
that DCF had revised its definition of “neglect,” resulting in an
artificial reduction in the number of children reported to have died the
past four years.
The report highlighted a several-paragraph
excerpt from the series that detailed the deaths of four children in
2011and 2013 that DCF declined to verify as resulting from neglect. In
one case, a 1-year-old boy drowned in a community pool during Memorial
Day weekend three years ago while his mother texted friends away from
the poolside. DCF said the mother wasn’t negligent because other adults
at the pool were likewise failing to supervise their small children.
SOME CHANGES
Every
person on the grand jury, the report said, “concluded that each of
these preventable deaths occurred due to the neglect of each child’s
parent(s),” the report said. “We are at an utter loss to understand how
those who labor in the field of child protection and child welfare could
intentionally and deliberately find that these deaths were
not verified as acts of neglect.”
Changes
in the way DCF investigates and discloses child death information,
grand jurors wrote, left a cloud hanging over the agency, even as
administrators tout reforms. “The public does not have confidence in the
accuracy of the number of child deaths reported,” the report said,
adding: “Aside from being misleading, reported reductions in the total
number of deaths may only be a consequence of changing the definitions
of abuse and neglect.”
At the center of the
unusual report —
grand juries seldom issue such presentments, opting instead to indict
alleged offenders without comment — is Nubia Barahona. The tow-headed
twin from West Miami was found soaked in toxic chemicals on Feb. 11,
2011, stuffed in a black garbage bag in the flatbed of her adoptive
father’s pest control truck. In the passenger seat in front of her,
Victor Barahona fought for his life after being doused in the same
chemical stew. He survived.
The twins’ adoptive parents, Jorge and
Carmen Barahona, remain in jail, awaiting trial on murder charges that
potentially carry the death penalty. On July 25, 2011, an earlier
Miami-Dade grand jury released a scathing report on DCF’s failure to
protect Nubia. “The testimony we heard will stay with us forever, as a
bad dream will sometimes stay, only this was not a dream but a reality
too painful to fathom,” grand jurors wrote then.
That report
criticized DCF for its “utter failure to have the full picture” of
parents accused of wrongdoing, and suggested the agency was beset by “a
persistent, insidious bias of trust. Here, these two factors combined to
exponentially raise the risk of disaster,” the report concluded.
“Murder was the result.”
In its report Tuesday, the new grand jury
concluded that DCF is implementing improvements at the the agency’s
abuse hotline, among child abuse investigators, and in the use of a tool
that helps investigators assess risk.
“There is a marked
difference between the practices and procedures child protective
investigators employed pre-Barahona and the manner in which they conduct
[child protective services] investigations now,” the report says.
Some
professionals in the child welfare system expressed skepticism that
much had changed, however, and suggested prosecutors might have focused
on witnesses sympathetic to DCF. Esther Jacobo, who is chief of staff
for State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, had been DCF’s interim
secretary until two months ago. She was among the grand jury’s
witnesses.
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Rosa Figarola, who presides
over child welfare cases, chairs the county’s Community Based Care
Alliance and has been a persistent agency critic, was not asked to
testify. “It is arrogant,” she said, “to have a grand jury investigation
and not bring in people whom they are concerned might disagree with
their point of view. You have to bring everyone involved to the table.”
Child
abuse investigations, and the court petitions that sometimes follow,
have “improved a little bit” since 2011, Figarola said. “But any attempt
to portray the problems that have plagued the child welfare system as
fixed should cause us all alarm and concern for the safety and welfare
of our children,” she added.
Another judge, Jeri B. Cohen, who
oversees the Miami Circuit’s child welfare drug court, said “any
self-congratulation is premature.” Though Cohen had testified before the
2011 Nubia grand jury, she was not invited back this year.
Cohen
said few of the initiatives grand jurors cited as improvements have been
fully implemented, many are applied inconsistently, and virtually all
are long overdue. “None of this stuff is working” yet, said Cohen, who
also is a member of the child welfare alliance. “The judges are
complaining like hell” that the system remains broken.
Though
grand jurors commended DCF on the progress made since 2011, they also
declared themselves “deeply troubled” by the Herald’s Innocents Lost
series, which contained details on the deaths of 477 children — mostly
infants, toddlers and children age 5 and below — whose parents had been
the subject of at least one report to the state’s abuse hotline within
the previous five years.
Gov. Rick Scott signed into law Monday an
overhaul of DCF designed to stanch such deaths and create better agency
oversight.
Grand jurors seemed particularly troubled by
“discrepancies” between the number of child deaths DCF reported to the
governor and Legislature, and the number identified by both the Herald
and an independent consultant. “In all instances,” the report said, “the
numbers given by the Herald, based on its review of DCF’s own records,
were higher. Reportedly, numbers tallied by an independent source were
also higher than those reported by DCF.”
Indeed, Nubia’s death
never entered into an official DCF tally until more than three years
after her killing created a firestorm statewide. Nubia’s death was
“verified” as resulting from abuse on April 22, 2014 — a week after the
first installment of Innocents Lost was published. Her formal death
review was dated six days later; it was six pages long.
DISCOVERY
As
recently as last month, the Herald discovered administrators in DCF’s
Southeast Region — which includes Broward and Palm Beach counties, and
which recorded the highest tally of child deaths in recent years — had
failed to file required “critical incident reports” for 30 child deaths
linked to abuse or neglect. At first, the agency attributed the withheld
reports to a “misunderstanding.”
But earlier this month, DCF’s
deputy secretary, Pete Digre, completed an internal investigation into
the missing records without generating a single record. Carroll, the
agency’s administrator, called the withheld reports “an attempt to
address insufficiencies in data security.” He denied agency heads were
seeking to conceal public records from the Herald.
On Tuesday,
state Sen. Eleanor Sobel, a Hollywood Democrat who helped draft the
legislation Scott signed the day before, called on the governor to
launch an independent investigation into what she has repeatedly called
“a cover-up.”
“It appears these were employees directing other
employees to conceal child death reports, not simply a system or
technical error,” Sobel wrote in a news release. “An independent
investigation by a non-DCF related entity is the best way to clear the
air and get an unobstructed view.”
“Sweeping child deaths under
the rug will only serve to perpetuate a culture of cover-up and
corruption; hiding the deaths should never be a solution.”
