Child Molester Hasn't Served Single Day Of 43-Year Prison Term

Aaron Mohanlal

For nearly two years, the South Florida middle school art teacher forced the boy to have sex in a classroom supply closet.
Sometimes, Aaron Mohanlal would call in sick to work, take the boy to his home for sex and drop the seventh-grader back off at school at the end of the day.
To keep the abuse secret, Mohanlal bought the 13-year-old a cell phone and created nicknames for their genitalia. When police arrested him, the teacher was caught on hidden video trying to destroy letters threatening the boy if he ever told.

Last summer, a Broward County jury convicted Mohanlal of 13 counts, including child abuse, molestation and lewd battery, and a judge sentenced him to 43 years.
But a year later, Mohanlal has yet to spend a day in prison.
"I can't understand why he isn't behind bars," said the victim, now 18. The network is not disclosing his name because it doesn't identify sexual assault victims.
"I want to move on with my life. I'm trying to graduate high school and forget about this," he said. "I try not to think about it, but it's hard, because all I can think about is, what if he's out there around other kids?"
Weeks after the trial, Broward Circuit Judge Marc Gold, who presided over the trial and sentenced Mohanlal, granted the teacher a rare bond that allows him to remain free while his case is tried on appeal, a process that could take years.
During the two months CNN has investigated this story, Mohanlal has been working a construction job in Broward County and spending time at a house in Sunrise, Florida, 15 miles from where the boy and his family live, according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

He resigned from his teaching job in 2005 after his arrest.
"The idea of that monster being that close to my family again is outrageous," said the boy's father, who is often so overwhelmed with rage and sadness that he drives to a park, leans against a tree and sobs.
"What did we go through a trial for?" he said.
A man who identified himself as Mohanlal hung up on a CNN reporter who called his home in Port St. Lucie, Florida, his address on record with the state's sex offender registry.
Mohanlal's appellate attorney, Tom Odom, refused to comment on the case beyond saying, "Everyone has a right to a first appeal."

Gold gave Mohanlal the right to live, work, travel and attend church in South Florida, according to numerous interviews and documents CNN has obtained. The judge ordered Mohanlal to wear a GPS device, register as a sex offender and surrender his passport.

 http://articles.cnn.com/2008-07-23/justice/sex.offender.teacher_1_aaron-mohanlal-bond-hearing-cnn-reporter?_s=PM%3ACRIME

David Wilkins DCF Secretary Grilled By Lawmakers

TALLAHASSEE (CBS4) – David Wilkins, the new head of DCF, found himself in front of a group of highly-skeptical state lawmakers who are growing tired of excuses coming from the agency.
Wilkins was in the middle of explaining an independent review of the Barahona case, when the committee chairwoman, Senator Ronda Storms, interrupted him.
“Mr. Secretary, I appreciate what you’re saying, but what I want to know is: how will this be different?” Senator Ronda Storms. “How many more investigations, how many more death reviews do we have to do?”
Wilkins acknowledged systemic failures, but also said that of the roughly 1,000 investigators, more than 56 percent have been on the job less than two years. According to the News Service of Florida, in the worst-performing DCF districts, the annual turnover rate is 64 percent.
 
He also cited that in South Florida, caseloads are 48 percent higher than the Child Welfare League standards for caseloads.

His testimony came at a time when Governor Rick Scott has put forth in his budget a plan to cut thousands of DCF employees and cut the agency funding to the core. It also comes just days before a blue ribbon panel is set to release its findings on what went wrong in the Barahona case.
Senator Storms said it wasn’t just caseworkers who should get thrown under the bus when DCF cases go horribly wrong.
“How about we start looking at the CBC’s (community based care organizations)? They need to get their fannies up here and explain,” Senator Storms said. “We are still having little broken bodies, and it’s not just because evil people will do evil things. It’s because people – competent, professional people who are paid to do their job – are not doing their jobs.”


(© 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The News Service Of Florida contributed to this report.)

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Deaths Of 8 Children Put Hillsborough Kids Inc. In Limbo

TAMPA — The homegrown, nonprofit agency charged with protecting 2,500 of Hillsborough County's most vulnerable children is at risk of losing its $65.5 million state contract because of eight dead kids.
They died in the last two years while under the supervision of Hillsborough Kids Inc.
The eight stood out in a Department of Children and Families study of child deaths statewide. Seven of the eight children were under supervision because of reports of abuse, neglect or abandonment. DCF said no other agency in Florida had so many deaths.

Mike Carroll

Two agencies — Big Bend Community-Based Care in Tallahassee and Our Kids Inc. in Miami-Dade — each reported five deaths. Just one case apiece involved children who had previously been abused or severely neglected.

"Any death of a child raises concern," said Mike Carroll, DCF's regional director. "When you have eight, especially under the circumstances that occurred here, that raises alarms."
He said the future of Hillsborough Kids was undecided, but "performance around child safety is a key success requirement for any vendor we contract with. If a vendor is unable to perform at a high level in the business of keeping kids safe, that puts its ongoing contract at risk."
Hillsborough Kids' response:

CEO Jeff Rainey

"Message received," said CEO Jeff Rainey.
The agency's contract runs out in June. DCF issued "Invitations to Negotiate" to both for-profit and nonprofit agencies. Among the expected competitors are agencies serving Pinellas, Pasco and South Florida counties.
Hillsborough Kids has been DCF's lead social service agency in the county since the state began outsourcing services to families and children in 2001. The giant office on Florida Avenue sits next door to DCF's Hillsborough headquarters.
The expiring contract would have gone out for bid regardless of performance, and a decision to renew isn't based on a single number. Rainey said the vast majority of protected children are living safely. In the past five years, 10,000 more have been kept out of the system through aid to families, and 2,000 others have been adopted. He also cites the agency's local roots, its 12-year Tampa history, and its warehouse of food, kitchenware and clothing that keeps the families it counsels going.
"We either bat a thousand, or we bat zero," Rainey said. "When a child dies, we bat zero."
In the last two years, tragedy has struck one child after another.

Among the most publicized: a 4-month-old boy who was beaten and thrown from a car on I-275 in 2009. The ex-boyfriend of the baby's teenage mother was charged with his murder. Another victim was a 5-month-old girl choked to death last year. Police charged her mother. Also last year, an 18-month-old toddler, once found sleeping next to a loaded gun during a drug raid, wandered into the path of car in an apartment parking lot and was killed.
This year, two more child deaths caused Hillsborough Kids to take action against two key subcontractors that perform home visits:
Mental Health Care Inc. was found at fault in its monitoring of Ezekiel Mathis, a 1-year-old killed last May. Three workers apparently were unaware that a boyfriend they found living in the home had been barred by a judge. Their e-mail inquiry to deputies wasn't opened until after the baby's death. The boyfriend is charged with his murder. After the tragedy, MHC removed the three workers from its Crisis Response Team.
Recently, MHC's $2.4 million contract was cut by $250,000. MHC also received only a six-month extension of its contract rather than full renewal. At the same time, Hillsborough Kids signed a yearlong, $689,000 contract with an agency similar to MHC.
Children's Home Society was cited for missing dangers 16-month-old Ronderique Anderson faced when he was taken from his mother and put in the care of his father. Investigators found caseworkers should have provided the mother with better services and more closely examined the criminal backgrounds of the father and his girlfriend. They also said the case supervisor did not provide sufficient oversight or instruction. His father is charged with beating the baby to death last February.
Children's Home Society, which is paid $5.1 million annually, was stripped of half its caseload.
David Bundy, CEO of Children's Home Society of Florida, said his agency agreed a smaller caseload was necessary to get a handle on problems.

David Bundy

DCF acknowledges that in the volatile business of protecting vulnerable children, some can die — even when everything possible is done to prevent it.
But the review of the eight deaths found that, in some cases, everything wasn't done.
The two most common shortcomings identified by DCF: failures of frontline workers in the most potentially dangerous homes to understand the family dynamics, and failures of their supervisors to give enough guidance.
DCF administrator Carroll says effective casework is based on common sense, intuition and experience as much as following check lists and completing questionnaires. Supervisors are key, especially when caseworkers are young,
In one federally required quality assurance check this year, Hillsborough Kids scored 25 percent for supervisory reviews of children's safety, permanency and well-being.
It scored 56 percent on how well supervisors followed up on guidance and direction.
The agency was criticized for considering the mother's needs in just seven of 11 sample cases and the father's needs in two of nine.
Other Hillsborough Kids subcontractors include Camelot Community Care, Gulf Coast Community Care, Devereux, and Youth and Family Alternatives.

Among the eight dead children, three fell under Camelot supervision, three under Children's Home Society and one each was managed by Devereux and Mental Health Care.
Rainey said the number of subcontractors has helped reduce caseloads. But Hillsborough Kids' strategic plan acknowledges the difficulties of managing so many subcontractors.
Hillsborough Kids has prohibited Mental Health Care from sending a case manager and therapist to a home at the same time, then counting their visit as two of the three required visits per week — something that happened in the Ezekiel Mathis death. Rainey said the joint visit was an isolated incident, not a regular practice.
The joint visits were done for safety, the agency replied in writing. "MHC still teams its staff when safety is a concern, and agrees with HKI to count this as one visit only."
In a review, Hillsborough Kids also criticized Children's Home Society for "a significant number of risk/safety issues" and performances "below expectations in qualitative guidance by supervisors."
The agency demanded future scores of at least 80 percent on quality assurance reviews.
It ordered Children's Home Society to submit a written plan for improvement.
"We agreed with the findings," said Bundy, the society's CEO. He said his agency is working with the universities of South Florida and Central Florida to catch red flags earlier. He said the agency found it wasn't making changes fast enough in Hillsborough and redesigned the program with major staff changes.
At Hillsborough Kids, Rainey said, his agency has reviewed 1,800 cases and introduced changes.
They include the pending creation of a special dependency court for the highest-risk cases. It will be presided over by Circuit Judge Katherine Essrig.

Judge Katherine Essrig

New software will flag families at high risk for abuse: those with teen mothers, day care problems, past domestic violence and parents who were abused as children. Most of the factors showed up in the eight deaths. The agency also has started a Family Finding program to identify biological or adoptive family members, teachers, coaches, and friends to form support teams for children.
Rainey said frontline workers will have to take an additional 16 hours of training to learn how to size up families and household environments.
He said supervisors, too, will get more training and will be equipped with devices that alert them to problems found during home visits.
DCF's Carroll said the changes are all good.
"But in the end, what we are looking for is improved performance."

Robin Rosenberg

Robin Rosenberg, deputy director of Florida's Children First, serves on the committee that will review bids when Hillsborough Kids seeks to renew its contract. She said she hasn't yet formed an opinion, but she said the number of deaths "is alarmingly high."
DCF, she notes, has shown before that it's not afraid to make big changes to give kids and families a better shot to survive and thrive.
"Safety is important, but it is not everything," she said. "We could lock kids in padded cells and they would be safe. We have to do a lot more to make sure they do well."
John Barry can be reached at jbarry@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3383.

[Last modified: Oct 09, 2011 11:38 AM]

http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/article1195717.ece

Best Interest Of the Child Or Their Wallets, You Decide

South Florida children's councils: They help kids, pay their officials big salaries

May 21, 2011|By Sally Kestin, Sun Sentinel

Property owners in South Florida are taxed millions of dollars each year to pay for programs to help children, but a chunk of that is spent not on kids, but on the bureaucracies created to aid them.
The Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County pays more than $1.3 million in salaries to its top 10 executives, with CEO Tana Ebbole making $220,000.

Salaries at the children's council in Broward are more modest — the CEO makes $142,000 — but employees are eligible for bonuses that so far this year have totaled $64,000.
In both counties, money that voters approved for children's services went toward construction of sprawling headquarters — a $17 million complex in Boynton Beach for the Palm Beach County council, and in Broward, an $8.4 million building in Lauderhill.
Some state lawmakers at this spring's legislative session criticized salaries and bonuses at child welfare agencies, and said they also were concerned about administrative spending at the children's services councils.

"People are making money off children,'' state Sen. Ronda Storms, a Valrico Republican and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs, told the Sun Sentinel. "They take these teddy bears and hold them up and say they're doing it for the children.''
Council representatives say the criticism is unwarranted. Administrative costs represent less than 10 percent of the total budget of $62 million in Broward and $112 million in Palm Beach County.
"I don't like paying taxes any more than the next guy,'' said Rod Macon, a retired FPL executive who is chairman of the council in Palm Beach County. "We work really hard to keep overhead down, to be as efficient as we can for the taxpayer.''
Eight counties in Florida have established children's councils with taxing authority to raise money for kids. The amount they collect is just a small portion of the average property owner's bill — $70 on a $200,000 homestead in Broward, and $113 in Palm Beach County — but adds up to millions.
The vast majority of the money goes toward paying for programs, such as preventing child abuse, improving the health of pregnant women and keeping delinquent kids out of trouble. But when it comes to other spending, some of it is far removed from kids, a Sun Sentinel review found.
The Palm Beach County council's budget this year includes $1 million for public affairs, $500,000 for consultants, $279,000 for travel and $154,000 for lobbyists.
Those expenses are necessary to get the council's message out, monitor the performance of agencies that receive its funds and lobby lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., to "ensure that Palm Beach County's children don't get short-changed,'' Ebbole said.

The council has cut travel by about $70,000 and has "been consciously working to decrease those kinds of costs,'' she said.
Of all the children's councils in Florida, Palm Beach County's pays its employees the most.
Ebbole's salary is $44,000 more than the next highest paid CEO, Modesto Abety of the Children's Trust in Miami-Dade, and puts her among the top-earning public employees in Florida. In state government, only two people are paid more, and the governor's job comes with a salary of just $130,000.
On top of Ebbole's paycheck, she gets a 2008 Mazda CX-7 that the council leases, $22,000 a year in deferred compensation and $6,500 toward a long-term-care insurance policy.
Besides Ebbole, 15 other employees at Palm Beach County' children's council are paid more than $100,000 a year. In Broward, only the CEO makes six figures, records show.
"I don't know why our salaries are higher, but I can tell you that every penny we pay that lady [Ebbole] is well worth it,'' said Palm Beach Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez, vice chairman of the council. "We probably have one of the best children's services councils in the whole state, and it's due to her efforts.''
Ebbole came to the council in 1989, three years after voters agreed to create the taxing district, and became CEO in 1994. She said her many years on the job have driven her salary up.

"I think that the longevity in terms of being in the position for this long, for this many years, certainly contributes to that,'' she said.
In Broward, CEO Cindy Arenberg Seltzer has been at the helm since the council was approved by voters in 2000. Her $142,000 salary includes a $7,800 car allowance.
"My salary is what it is because I said: 'stop,' '' said Seltzer, who has a law degree and a master's in public administration. "I'm certainly worth more, but we're dealing with public dollars.''
The 55 employees of the Broward council were eligible this year for bonuses, called performance pay, of up to 5 percent. Seltzer got the most, $5,000, and 20 other employees have received bonuses of $1,600 and up, records show.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-05-21/news/fl-children-service-tax-district-20110521_1_councils-salaries-kids

Dr. Sohail Punjwani Over Medicating Children In DCF Florida Foster Care Leads To Deaths

South Florida Family Sues Dr. Sohail Punjwani for Son's Death

A South Florida family has filed suit against a Fort Lauderdale doctor claiming he is responsible for their child's death and this is not the first time the doctor has been the center of controversy.

Dr. Sohail Punjwani who gave mind altering drugs to South Florida children could soon be going to court to defend his reasoning for prescribing the drugs. The mother of one of the boys spoke out about her son on Thursday.

"He was like a zombie, my son was like a zombie all the time," said Norma Tringali as she described the final days of her teen aged son Emilio Villamar.

Tringali told CBS4's Ted Scouten that her son was diagnosed as bi-polar and was treated by Dr. Sohail Punjwani. She claims her son was given a cocktail of drugs and that some that were not approved for children.

Villamar died of a heart attack at 16. Tringali said she was shocked when she heard the same doctor was treating 7-year old Gabriel Myers, who hanged himself April 16th in the bathroom of his Margate foster home.

Investigators are checking claims that he hanged himself, while also on a cocktail of drugs, some not approved for kids.

"When I learned that he was under the care of Dr. Punjwani, I say to myself, I will go forward and talk about it because maybe somebody else can learn from my tragedy," said Tringali, who actually filed the lawsuit four years ago.

Gabriel Myer's death spurred DCF Secretary George Sheldon to appoint a work group to study the agency's use of psychiatric drugs, and its compliance with a 2005 reform law on the use of such medications on children in state care.

Under the 2005 law, the Agency for Health Care Administration oversees a state program that monitors the prescribing of mental-health drugs to children under Medicaid, the state insurance program for the needy.

The program, called the Medicaid Drug Therapy Management Program, tracks the prescribing of mental-health drugs to children, and flags psychiatrists whose practices veer outside generally accepted protocols.

Among the practices that might draw attention: doctors with a high volume of prescriptions of mental-health drugs or potentially dangerous combinations of the medications. The program looks at the practices of about 17,000 doctors who prescribe medications to children on Medicaid, and about 300 to 450 end up red-flagged.

Dr. Sohail Punjwani, who was treating Gabriel and Emilio, had been red-flagged by the medication program every quarter that the list was kept, one of the administrators told CBS4 News partner The Miami Herald.

 http://westonlawyers.com/NewsInfo/SF-Family-Sues-Psychiatrist.html