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

Posted: October 12, 2014 - 11:38am

By Margie Menzel

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.

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20141008/OPINION01/141009708

Editorial: Nightmare Of A DCF

It has become like a nightmare. Imagine it: You lay flat, cheek pressed against the dusty edge of a cliff. Your outstretched hand grips that of a tiny child. Fingers clench hard and white. Then slip. The child falls. Sweat-drenched, you wake before the body shatters against the stone below.
Horrifying ends like this have become far more than dreams under the Florida Department of Children and Families. Losing hold of our most vulnerable has become a regularity. A failure to protect them is systemic. And the results are unthinkable.

Last week, we were forced to think about it. On Sept. 18, in Bell, Florida, a man named Don Charles Spirit shot his daughter and six grandchildren. The tiny Floridians ranged in age from 2 months to 11 years. Spirit turned the gun on himself as deputies arrived — the final act of a depraved and evil man.
But for the state, our greatest shame is that these children could have — and should have — been saved.
According to the Miami Herald, just two weeks prior to the massacre, the DCF “received a report ... that the children of Sarah Spirit, 28, were living with drug abusers... Spirit told the agency she had just been released from jail after violating probation .... At the time, she was living with her father, a 51-year-old man with a record of violence who had once gone to prison for fatally shooting his son in a hunting accident.”
In the records obtained from the DCF, the Herald found all the ingredients for this nightmare. This was not the first encounter the agency had with the monster. Don Spirit’s history with the DCF spanned years with “allegations that he physically abused both his children and grandchildren, as well as at least one report of domestic violence between him and his daughter.”
Furthermore, the records showed that Spirit had been arrested on a slew of charges including “battery, drug possession and depriving a child of food and shelter.” And in 2001 the man had accidentally shot and killed his 8-year-old son on a hunting trip, according to the Herald’s findings. In addition, the story noted that the mother’s history “included arrests for larceny, shoplifting and drug possession” and that the “two fathers of her six children both are incarcerated.”

The state knew all of this — had long known this. Yet these six children were still in the custody of monsters. That has not been an isolated failure with the DCF.
Last year, the Herald chronicled this sad pattern in a series called “Innocents Lost.” The newspaper demonstrated how, for years, our state has continually allowed children to remain in dangerous situations, even after the danger has been well-documented. Too often, it resulted in fatal consequences for the most vulnerable and innocent members of our society.
And now this. The Herald says the killings are “believed to be the largest loss of life in a single family with a child welfare history ever in Florida.” So the nightmare continues. The agency that exists to save is incapable of pulling these children up from the cliff.
Forget the election-year promises that, in Florida, “it’s working.” Gov. Scott must make fixing the DCF his first priority. Because if government’s foremost obligation to protect children’s right to life isn’t working, then nothing in Florida is.

http://www.pnj.com/story/opinion/2014/09/25/editorial-nightmare-dcf/16227011/

Nubia Barahona's adoptive sister files lawsuit against Florida's Department of Children and Families

Suit claims child suffered years of abuse

Katie LaGrone

12:08 PM, Sep 17, 2014

 

It was a Valentine's Day discovery that unearthed one of the worst cases of child abuse and neglect in recent Florida history.

Three years after the young body of 10-year-old Nubia Barahona was found stuffed in a garbage bag of her adoptive father's pickup truck, Nubia's adoptive sister is suing Florida's Department of Children and Families.  The sister is accusing the state agency of failing to protect her too.
“It’s about a systemic failure of DCF and its agencies to protect children that they're supposed to be protecting,” said attorney Todd Falzone, who’s representing the young girl.
In the lengthy 20-page lawsuit, Nubia's adoptive sister, identified as J.B., now 11-years-old, claims for years she also suffered from the abuse of living with Carmen and Jorge Barahona, the children's adoptive parents.
“Unfortunately there is unspeakable acts of abuse embarked on this child,” said Falzone.
The lawsuit claims Carmen and Jorge Barahona physically, sexually and emotionally abused J.B.  It also cites multiple times that DCF allegedly missed signs of abuse in the house where J.B. lived with Nubia and her twin brother, Victor.
“You name it.  It’s a horrible, disgusting set of facts,” said Falzone.
Between December 2004 and February 2011, when Nubia was killed and her twin brother, Victor, nearly lost his life, Falzone cites at least 12 times DCF failed to properly discover abuse and investigate reports of it.
The lawsuit claims DCF and three case workers are responsible for the damages, injury, pain and mental distress that J.B. continues to live with.

“The light needs to be shined on what goes on with these kids at this agency.  This is an agency that time and time again has failed the children of this state,” said Falzone.
This is the second lawsuit filed against the state in this case.  The other was filed on behalf of Nubia and her twin brother Victor.
Carmen and Jorge Barahona have pleaded not guilty to the charges they face.  If convicted, both could face the death penalty.  Both remain in jail awaiting trial.

http://www.wptv.com/news/state/nubia-barahonas-adoptive-sister-files-lawsuit-against-floridas-department-of-children-and-families

 

Florida Child Welfare Worker, 3 Others Charged In Girl’s Starvation Death

By Carol Marbin Miller

cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com

A Broward County grand jury has charged four women — one of them a child welfare caseworker — with ignoring the suffering of a severely disabled Lauderhill pre-teen who withered away and died while under the protection of the state.

Tamiyah Audain suffered from a devastating disease, as well as autism and an intellectual disability. After her mother died from the same disease, tuberous sclerosis, Tamiyah was sent by the state to live with a young cousin, though a more capable caregiver in Kentucky was eager to take custody. On Sept. 25, 2013, Tamiyah’s emaciated, bedsore-pocked body was found in her caregiver’s home. An autopsy concluded Tamiyah was ravaged by infection, and starved to death.
The 12-year-old’s cousin, Latoya Patterson, was charged in an indictment with felony murder, meaning the child died as a result of another felony, aggravated child abuse, said Ron Ishoy, a spokesman for Broward State Attorney Mike Satz. Patterson was arrested Tuesday, and booked into the Broward jail. The charge is punishable by a maximum of life in prison.
A caseworker who was responsible for ensuring Tamiyah’s welfare, Jabeth Moye, was indicted on charges of child neglect causing great bodily harm, a second-degree felony. Moye worked for a foster care agency under the umbrella of Broward’s privately run child welfare agency, ChildNet, which has a contract with the Department of Children & Families. Her charge carries a maximum sentence of 15 years imprisonment.
Also indicted Friday were two psychologists who were involved in Tamiyah’s care, Juliana Gerena and Helen Richardson, Ishoy said. The two women were charged with failing to report suspected child abuse or neglect to DCF’s abuse hotline, which is required under Florida law. The charge is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, Ishoy added.
Failing to report child abuse has been a crime in Florida since at least 1999, when the well-publicized death of 6-year-old Kayla McKean of Central Florida prompted lawmakers to crack down on professionals who fail to act when confronted with obvious signs of abuse. But it is exceedingly rare for professionals or lay people to be charged with the offense, both in Florida and elsewhere.
“It is very, very unusual,” said Richard Gelles, the former dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, and a child welfare professor. “The indictment of professionals for failure to report almost never occurs. I may have heard of it once before in 40 years.”
The charges, Gelles said, suggest that grand jurors were particularly moved, or angered, by the circumstances of Tamiyah’s death. “To say they were probably pretty damn fed up would be mild,” Gelles said. “I think they were disgusted.”
Moye’s indictment was handed up Friday, the same day that a Seminole County caseworker, Jonathan, Irizarry,

Jonathan, Irizarry

was charged by state police with falsifying records about visits to another child under the state’s care, 2-year-old Tariji Gordon. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Irizarry’s failure to monitor Tariji’s health and welfare might have led to her Feb. 6, 2014, death. Police say Tariji’s mother, Rachel Fryer, beat her to death.
Moye was fired by ChildNet on July 11, according to records obtained by the Miami Herald. A termination letter said only that “even with the support and coaching” of her supervisors, Moye’s work had not “improved enough to timely comply with the duties and responsibilities assigned in [her] job description.” Moye, the letter said, had failed to “adhere to our standards of excellence.”
A website operated by Gerena says that her practice, Gerena and Associates, offers mental health counseling and assessments under contract with several state agencies and their providers, including DCF, the Agency for Persons with Disabilities and ChildNet.
The stories of both Tamiyah and Tariji were featured in a Miami Herald series, Innocents Lost, that detailed the stories of 477 children from throughout Florida who died after DCF had made prior contact with the children’s families. The deaths — overwhelmingly involving infants, toddlers and other very young children — spiked around 2008 after DCF administrators embraced a rigid “family preservation” model while simultaneously reducing the supervision of troubled, drug-addicted and sometimes violent parents.
In particular danger, the newspaper reported, were children with complex medical needs and physical or intellectual disabilities. Children with physical impairments, a report said, are 17 times more likely to die from abuse or neglect in Florida than their typically developing peers. Among the Herald’s sample of 477 children, 85, or close to 20 percent, had suffered from some type of medical, physical or cognitive disability. Many, including Tamiyah, endured multiple impairments.
Ishoy said Tamiyah weighed only 56 pounds when Patterson, her caregiver, finally sought help. The girl’s body was marred by “extensive bed sores and bone-deep wounds” at death.
But even as Tamiyah shriveled away, records show, her ChildNet caseworker was recording regular visits to Patterson’s home, and reporting that Tamiyah was safe.
Patterson admitted to investigators that she had locked Tamiyah in her bedroom for hours, allowing the girl to emerge only at mealtime. Tamiyah also was being sedated with three separate tranquilizers to subdue her behavior — medication that left her so drowsy that, Moye wrote, the girl would slumber during the agency’s monthly visits.
During the state’s last visit with Tamiyah, a report said, the 12-year-old was “moaning” as she sat on the lap of her caregiver, and covered head-to-toe in clothing, possibly to cover the bedsores.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/26/4311195/florida-child-welfare-worker-3.html#storylink=cpy

FDLE: Child welfare worker falsified home visit records for Rachel Fryer's children

ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Fla —A child welfare worker who was responsible for checking on Rachel Fryer's children lied in his home visit reports, Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials said Friday.

Fryer is accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter, Tariji Gordon, and burying her in a shallow grave on Feb. 11.

Jonathan Irizarry, 27, of Altamonte Springs, was a case manager for the Children's Home Society of Central Florida, and was assigned to supervise Fryer's three children.
FDLE officials said Irizarry wrote that the children were free from bruises, but investigators said they found a photo on Fryer's phone that showed Tariji with a bruised and swollen eye and one arm in a sling.
Video: New video from Rachel Fryer hearing shows DCF's role in case
A postmortem examination on Tariji also showed multiple healing injuries including cuts, bruises, cigarette burns and bite marks, officials said.
"These charges should serve to remind those responsible for protecting our children of how important that duty is," said State Attorney Phil Archer, who will prosecute the case.
Irizarry was charged with two counts of falsifying an official record that contributes to the great bodily harm or death of an individual in the care and custody of a state agency.
Because great bodily harm resulted from the alleged falsification of home visit records, Irizarry could face 15 years in prison on each of two counts charged.
The Florida Department of Children and Families is the agency responsible for checking on children's welfare. DCF contracted Children's Home Society of Central Florida, who contracted Irizarry.

 http://www.wesh.com/news/fdle-dcf-contractor-falsified-home-visit-records-for-rachel-fryers-children/27683922#ixzz3BAnzHyFT

Key Lawmaker Calls For All Child Deaths To Be Reported

Friday, August 1, 11:04 AM EDT

By Dara Kam, The News Service of Florida

Senate sponsor of Florida’s sweeping new child-welfare law says she’ll be back next year with a bill to expand its reporting requirements. 

 

State. Sen. Eleanor Sobel

 

Sen. Eleanor Sobel, chairwoman of the Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee, said the new law doesn’t go far enough in requiring all children’s deaths to be reported.

The law (SB 1666), approved this spring by lawmakers, overhauled Florida’s troubled child-welfare system and went into effect July 1. Among its many provisions, the law requires the state Child Abuse Death Review Committee to “prepare an annual statistical report on the incidence and causes of death resulting from reported child abuse in the state during the prior calendar year.”

However, the number of deaths “from reported child abuse” is just a fraction of the total number of child deaths, and critics say that means crimes are slipping through the cracks.

“Even a car accident could be abuse and neglect, depending on the state of the driver,” Sobel, D-Hollywood, said Thursday.

During 2012, 2,111 children under the age of 18 died in Florida, according to the Child Abuse Death Review Committee’s 2013 annual report. Of those, 432 were reported to the state abuse hotline, which is housed at the Department of Children and Families.

Of those, the department verified 122 deaths as being related to child abuse or neglect.

Depending on DCF’s definitions for abuse and neglect, the hotline counselors screen cases in or out.

“You see variations year to year in how many abuse deaths are reported, depending on the criteria used by the hotline,” said Pam Graham, associate professor of social work at Florida State University.

Sobel said the department is screening out too many cases that, with additional scrutiny, could be determined to be child-abuse deaths.

“There’s been too much of a cover-up in this state,” she said. “The Department of Children and Families should be required to report what they find.”

Her criticisms echo a Miami-Dade grand jury report in June that blasted DCF for its reporting of child deaths, noting, for instance, that the department in 2010 changed its definition of “neglect” in a way that made it apply to fewer children.

“The public does not have confidence in the accuracy of the number of child deaths reported,” grand jurors concluded. “Reported reductions in the total number of deaths may only be a consequence of changing the definitions of abuse and neglect.”

One of the grand jury recommendations was that the department should revert to its pre-2010 definition of neglect and eliminate other inconsistencies in its reporting.

The training of those who classify the cases is crucial to whether or not they’re reported, said Maj. Connie Shingledecker of the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office.

For instance, the two biggest causes of child deaths in Florida are drowning and what are called “co-sleeping” deaths, in which babies suffocate while sleeping with adults.

Drowning and co-sleeping deaths are often accidental, but they can also be the result of impairment due to substance abuse by a parent — and Shingledecker said not all law-enforcement agencies are reporting them that way.

“They haven’t been trained to recognize the death is a result of neglect, so they don’t call it in,” she said.

http://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/showstory.php?Story_id=543560