Officer Recants Seeing Jacks Daughter Healthy
The four daughters of Banita Jacks: N'Kiah, left, Aja, Brittany and Tatianna. They had been dead for at least seven months when their bodies were found. (Wjla (Channel 7))
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203315.html
By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 23, 2009
A D.C. police sergeant who visited Banita Jacks’s Southeast Washington home to check on her children told a Superior Court judge Wednesday that he never saw the oldest daughter, Brittany, even though he wrote in a report and told a federal prosecutor that he had seen the teen and that she looked healthy.
The officer’s testimony revealed details about how the city’s police department, one of five District agencies that had contact with Jacks’s four daughters, failed to follow up and possibly save the girls’ lives.
During the sixth day of Jacks’s murder trial, Sgt. James Lafranchise testified that he visited her rowhouse April 30, 2007, after a social worker from Brittany’s high school repeatedly called police when the teen failed to show up at school for weeks.
Lafranchise did not file a report of that visit until Jan. 9, 2008, the day Jacks was arrested and the decomposing bodies of her four daughters, 5, 6, 11, and 16, were discovered. Prosecutors said the girls had been dead at least seven months. In that report, Lafranchise wrote that he did not see Brittany.
But in a follow-up report Jan. 13, Lafranchise wrote that he “thought” he had seen Brittany with her three younger sisters during the visit. At the time, Lafranchise said the sisters appeared “clean and well fed, healthy and playful.”
Within days of filing his report, Lafranchise was interviewed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines as she began gathering information on the case. He told her that he had seen Brittany and that she seemed well.
But during questioning from prosecutors and Jacks’s defense attorneys Wednesday, Lafranchise said he had never seen Brittany or asked about her during the visit.
Jacks’s attorney, Peter Krauthamer, asked him whether he lied in the report. Lafranchise said it was “inaccurate” and blamed the inconsistency on stress.
“I was messed up,” testified Lafranchise, who is assigned to the 7th District. He later said that writing in his report that he saw Brittany was “wishful thinking.”
Lafranchise never explained, nor was asked in court, why he waited seven months to file his report, which he said he wrote from “memory.”
After 21 years as a D.C. police officer and several years in homicide, Lafranchise testified, he got “burned out” with the gruesome scenes and requested to be transferred to regular street patrol, which is where he was working when he visited Jacks’s house.
During his April visit, Lafranchise said, he interviewed Jacks in her front yard. One of Jacks’s youngest daughters yelled out to the officer, “Please don’t take my mommy away.” He said Jacks told him that she was home-schooling the children and that she had pulled them out of District charter schools because they were being taught about sex and homosexuality.
Lafranchise said that when he arrived at the house, he didn’t know how many children lived there. He said he was never told to look for a teenager and did not ask about Brittany.
The officer visited Jacks’s house at the request of Brittany’s social worker, Kathy Lopes, who at the time worked at Booker T. Washington Public Charter School, which Brittany attended. Lafranchise said that he spoke with Lopes on his cellphone while he was at the house but that Lopes never mentioned Brittany or a teenager.
“My assumption was I was there to check on the children,” he said.
In her first public comments about the Jacks case, Lopes told D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg how she had repeatedly called District social service agencies and police and urged them to visit the Jacks house and check on the children.
Lopes, a police officer and another school official visited the Jacks house late in the morning April 27, 2007, to check on Brittany. When the three arrived, Jacks refused to allow them inside and would speak to them only through the slightly opened front door.
Lopes described her meeting with Jacks as “hostile.” Lopes said that she asked Jacks whether Brittany was home and that Jacks responded yes. But Lopes said that when she asked to see Brittany, Jacks said no.
From the witness stand, Lopes glanced several times at Jacks, who was sitting next to her attorneys. Jacks, 35, rolled her eyes away.
During the visit, which lasted about five minutes, Lopes said, she saw the two youngest girls playing in the living room. Lopes said she was “immediately concerned” when she saw the girls because their hair wasn’t combed and they looked unkempt. When Lopes asked why the younger girls weren’t in school, she said Jacks responded, “None of your business.”
When Lopes returned to her office that Friday afternoon, she called the District’s Child and Family Services Agency. She then made repeated calls to the agency’s hotline the following Monday to see whether the Jacks case had been assigned. Lopes asked to speak to a social worker and the worker’s supervisor. “I really wanted someone to go out to the home,” she said.
Recordings of Lopes’s repeated calls were made public weeks after Jacks’s arrest. D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) later fired six social workers for failing to follow up on the Jacks case.
Lopes also called the District’s non-emergency 311 number to get a police officer to visit the house. Lafranchise was dispatched.
On May 10, Lopes wrote to the youth social service division of D.C. Superior Court. In the letter, Lopes wrote that she feared Brittany was “being held hostage” at the house. After Jacks was arrested, court officials acknowledged receiving the letter and said social workers never followed up on Lopes’s concerns.
“I was extremely concerned. I just wanted a police officer to go out and check on the children,” said Lopes, now with the District’s Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education.
Prosecutors are expected to call their final witnesses Thursday before the defense begins calling its witnesses.
Sergeant Probed Over Incorrect Jacks Report Account of 2007 Home Visit Changed
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/07/06/ST2009070603102.html?sid=ST2009070603102
By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 24, 2009
A D.C. police spokeswoman said Thursday that the department is conducting an internal investigation of a sergeant who acknowledged filing an inaccurate report about his 2007 visit to the home of Banita Jacks, the Southeast Washington woman on trial on murder charges in the deaths of her four daughters.
On April 30, 2007 — seven months before the girls’ decomposing bodies were found in Jacks’s home — Sgt. James Lafranchise visited the residence to check on the welfare of the oldest daughter, Brittany, after a social worker said she had missed weeks of school.
Lafranchise did not file reports about the visit until January 2008, after 16-year-old Brittany and her sisters, ages 5, 6 and 11, had been found dead. In a Jan. 9 report, the officer wrote that he had not seen Brittany during his visit. In a follow-up report filed Jan. 13, he amended his account, saying he “thought” he had seen Brittany and her sisters.
Department spokeswoman Traci Hughes said yesterday that Lafranchise did nothing improper by not filing the reports until long after the visit. At the time of the April 2007 visit, Hughes said in a statement, “there was no requirement to file an incident report when responding to a call to check on the welfare of a resident.”
After the bodies were found, Hughes said, the department issued a rule “directing members to file an incident report when checking on the welfare of a resident.” She said Lafranchise wrote the two reports after authorities asked him to provide a written recollection of the visit as part of the death investigation.
Interviewed by a prosecutor during the homicide investigation, Lafranchise said that he had seen Brittany that day in April 2007 and that she seemed well.
However, when he testified Wednesday in Jacks’s trial in D.C. Superior Court, Lafranchise acknowledged that he had not seen Brittany. He said his earlier accounts of having seen the girl were “inaccurate” and resulted from “wishful thinking.”
He said he was “burned out” after more than two decades of police work and blamed his inconsistent statements on stress.
“The department was made aware of the discrepancy in [Lafranchise's] accounts when he testified,” Hughes said. “Now that the discrepancies have come to light,” the department “is conducting an internal investigation,” she said.
