INNOCENTS LOST PRESERVING FAMILIES BUT LOSING CHILDREN
After Florida cut down on protections for children in troubled homes, deaths soared. The children died in ways cruel, outlandish, predictable and preventable.
BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER AND AUDRA D.S. BURCH
CMARBIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
PUBLISHED MARCH 16, 2014
Fraternal twins Tariji and Tavont’ae Gordon were born together but died two years, eight months and 24 days apart. One was buried in a potter’s field; the other was disposed of in a shallow grave covered by earth, plywood and a sheet of tin.
Tavont'ae Gordon
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Tavont’ae, the first to die, suffocated at 2 months of age while sleeping on a couch with his mother, Rachel Fryer, who later tested positive for cocaine. Child welfare authorities took Tariji from Fryer and put her in foster care. Then they gave her back, convinced Fryer had tamed her drug habit and neglectful ways. Three months later, Tariji was killed by a blow to the head.
Fryer stuffed Tariji’s body into a leopard-print suitcase, caught a ride and buried her 50 miles from her Sanford home. The girl’s pink-and-white shoe, an unintended grave marker atop freshly turned dirt, was the only hint of her life and death. She would have turned 3 this month.
The twins joined a sad procession of children who died, often violently, after the Florida Department of Children & Families had been warned, often repeatedly, that they or their siblings could be in danger.
FROM THE EDITOR
They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.
The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents.
“It’s the system that’s broken. When numbers take over instead of outcomes for people, you are doomed to failure,” said James Harn, a 30-year law enforcement officer who spent his last nine years as a commander supervising child abuse investigators at the Broward Sheriff’s Office before leaving a year ago. “They want to keep families together, but at what cost?”
Prompted by a series of high-profile deaths — cases that have brought scorn and periodic leadership changes to DCF — a Miami Herald investigative team dug through six years of DCF deaths “verified” by the state as abuse or neglect, starting with Jan. 1, 2008. The Herald focused on those deaths in which the family had at least one encounter with child welfare over the previous five years.
Among the newspaper’s findings:
• The number of deaths with prior contacts totaled at least 477, far more than child welfare administrators reported to the governor and the Legislature. The agency under-reported by as many as 39 children in a given year. Lawmakers could have committed more money to address the problem, had they known its full scope. Instead, they cut funding.
Young and especially vulnerable
More than half of the child deaths examined by the Herald involved children younger than 2.
MIAMI HERALD REPORTING
• The overwhelming majority of the children were 5 or younger, and slightly over 70 percent were 2 or younger — in many instances, too young to walk, talk, cry out for help, run away or defend themselves.
• Drugs or alcohol were linked to 323 of the deaths, and yet the state cut dollars for drug treatment. Children snatched their parents’ pain pills off nightstands, gobbled them and died. They were smothered by moms who passed out while breastfeeding under the influence. One Hillsborough County couple concealed a loaded semiautomatic handgun under their sleeping baby’s pillow during a drug raid. Ulysses Franklin, 6 months old at the time of the raid, survived, was removed by the state and returned only to be crushed by a car months later while left unattended in a parking lot.
• Rather than go to court to force parents to get treatment or counseling, the state often relied on “safety plans” — written promises by parents to sin no more. Many of the pledges carried no meaningful oversight. Children died — more than 80 of them — after their parents signed one or, in some cases, multiple safety plans.
• Parents were given repeated chances to shape up, and failed, and failed and failed again, and still kept their children. In at least 34 cases, children died after DCF had logged 10 or more reports to the agency’s abuse and neglect hotline. Six families had been the subject of at least 20 reports.
“I don’t think we are broken; I think we are challenged,” interim DCF Secretary Esther Jacobo said in a two-hour interview. “If what exists in our community is not adequate to keep a child safe in the home, the only answer is to remove that child from the home. Maybe we got it backwards, in that we tried to reduce out-of-home care before having those safety services that are needed. But I firmly believe if you have those safety services, you should be striving to fix a family. That is our mandate.”
Jacobo said the agency is improving its child welfare computer system to ensure staffers don’t close investigations without first determining that needed services are in place, revamping its process for studying and reporting on child deaths, and experimenting with other child protection methods, such as having investigators work in pairs on high-risk cases.
Two weeks after Jacobo spelled out her reforms in an interview, the latest DCF scandal erupted: It involved Tariji Gordon, Death No. 477.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/static/media/projects/2014/innocents-lost/stories/overview/index.html#storylink=cpy
= new reply since forum marked as read
As a former investigator of child abuse in upstate New York, I've witnessed the abuse that children have endured after being returned to a home.
They're also casualties of people who think that bearing children is a "right" that anyone should have.
After all...it's none of their business how many kids someone wants to have...or whether someone is even fit to be a parent.
"People have RIGHTS!!!"
I say bullshit to that. People's rights to procreate shouldn't trump the rights of a kid to live a life without being tortured or murdered by its own parents.