Infant’s injuries renew debate on DHS role
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090726/NEWS10/907260331/-1/SPORTS09
By LEE ROOD • lrood@dmreg.com • July 26, 2009
As Ethan Neiderbach fights for his life, a debate is being revived over what his injuries should mean.
For people like Nicole Garbis Nolan, the Des Moines infant’s severe head trauma and fractured ribs represent new evidence that Iowa’s revamped system for protecting kids is failing. Rather than quickly removing children at risk of abuse, reforms have emphasized leaving more of them in their homes while working with their parents.
For Richard Wexler, the fact that authorities could have prevented the child’s near-fatal abuse does not necessarily mean more children should be removed.
Yet Garbis Nolan, a Des Moines lawyer charged with protecting children, and Wexler, a national advocate who fights to keep distressed families together, agree on one thing: Without more independent oversight and transparency, no one can know for sure whether the failure to protect one child – or several – signals simple errors in judgment or a more systemic breakdown.
“You don’t want to generalize from the horror stories,” said Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “The only answer is absolute transparency.”
An unresponsive Ethan Neiderbach was taken to Iowa Methodist Medical Center on July 8, less than a month after he was taken to an emergency room with a broken arm. As has been the case with a handful of other severe abuse cases in recent years, red flags already had been raised with the DHS: Hospital workers made a child-abuse report after Ethan was born May 27 with marijuana in his system.
Ethan’s parents, Jonas Neiderbach and Jherica Richardson, both 20, have since been charged with felony child endangerment. A child-abuse assessment is being completed.
But under state and federal law, nearly all of the details about how professionals intervened in Ethan’s young life – and at least eight other similar cases in 2007 and 2008 that resulted in death – remain confidential:
- Juvenile courtrooms, where many key decisions are made, can be kept open to reporters and the public under Iowa law. The legal threshold for closing child-in-need-of-assistance hearings is whether possible damage to a child outweighs the public’s interest. Yet some judges opt to close the hearings simply if anyone involved objects.
- Iowa lawmakers passed a law a few years ago allowing child-abuse assessments to be made public in the event of fatal or near-fatal abuse. But the legislation also allows for county attorneys to object to the release of those records – and they uniformly do.
“Whenever we have requested it, prosecutors say, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” said Roger Munns, spokesman for the Iowa Department of Human Services.
Lawyers in the child-welfare system say it’s unclear why prosecutors favor such secrecy: Abusers and their lawyers, as well as prosecutors, receive copies of the reports.
- At the same time, thousands of confidential cases of alleged abuse of children are now being funneled to private-sector social workers for investigation. Under the 2004 redesign of Iowa’s child-welfare system, suspicious injuries and parental drug use are not necessarily made known to judges and court-appointed lawyers.
Prosecutors review cases only after social workers decide that formal court intervention is needed.
Since the reforms, the number of families who had children removed during a child-abuse investigation has dropped 24 percent – to 1,447 this year from 1,995 in 2005, new figures released by the DHS show.
Wexler and Garbis Nolan are troubled that no one independent of the DHS is monitoring the cases handled outside the court. Both also believe parents are being denied their right to due process in the revamped, more informal system.
Only a small number of Iowa children are seriously injured or killed each year after coming to the attention of child-welfare workers.
But many people with a stake in the performance of Iowa’s child-welfare system – lawyers, state officials, judges and advocates – believe the public’s right to scrutinize these rare but serious cases trumps any right to privacy.
“It’s critically important,” said Constance Cohen, a Polk County juvenile judge. “We need to know that all children are receiving the protection they are entitled to under the law.”
Just how much transparency and oversight are needed continues to be a source of intense debate nationally.
Cohen said the Neiderbach case, which she was not involved in, appeared to have red flags from what she has read in media accounts. Yet, she added, people involved in child protection need to have “facts to take action, not just a gut feeling.”
Improved safety claims up for debate in Iowa
To those who question whether the Neiderbach case represents a symptom of larger problems, Julie Allison, the DHS bureau chief of protective services, responds: “There can be no doubt that Iowa’s redesigned child welfare system has been a success.”
In a letter to the Des Moines Sunday Register, she described a number of system changes as significant and beneficial: improved intake of abuse reports, more focus on outcomes for children and families, better protection of the most at-risk children, more face-to-face visits, and more hands-on meetings with families.
Those “family team meetings plus the constant monitoring has helped families understand their obligations and to ‘buy in’ to their responsibilities,” Allison said.
DHS-compiled statistics on child safety indicate a slight improvement in the five years since the “Better Results for Kids” changes were phased in. They show a 1.6-percentage-point downturn in children who have suffered new abuse after some sort of DHS intervention.
In the last quarter measured by the DHS in 2009, the percentage of cases in which new abuse was reported six months after intervention was 8.4 percent. In 2004, before the redesign was complete, it was 10 percent.
Allison is pleased with that important statistic, calling the number “extremely difficult” to move. But the change, which has fluctuated since the redesign, is too small to convince skeptics interested in stronger trend lines.
In addition, attorneys like Garbis Nolan say too little is known about the thousands of cases now being handled outside the purview of judges and court-appointed guardians. In the new system, the state rewards private contractors financially if children are kept out of foster care and safely returned to families. At the same time, the attorney says, she and others have learned too late that children have remained in homes with known sex abusers or meth users, or of serious incidents of suspected abuse.
That’s because the DHS first opted to do “safety planning” with the families – as they did in the Neiderbach case – instead of removing children, as they might have in years past. Informal diversion, she said, “can work for speeding tickets and bar fights, but not when you are talking about children’s lives.”
Wexler points out that there were plenty of horror stories in the old system, too, and he says there is no proof children were safer when more children were being removed. A wide body of research, meanwhile, shows children can suffer greatly when stripped of family and placed in foster homes.
It’s too soon to say whether children are truly safer in Iowa’s new system, but fewer children are entering foster care, Wexler said.
Statistics released Friday by the DHS show a 24 percent drop in foster care and out-of-home placements from 2004 to 2008.
His concern about Iowa is that the state continues to have one of the highest rates of removal in the country. States count removals differently, but Wexler’s tally – based on an open-records request for the most recent federal data available – puts Iowa’s rate of removal over the course of a year at sixth in the nation.
At least two other states, Illinois and Alabama, have significantly lower rates of removal as well as independent monitoring of cases, he points out.
“If you can get the same level of safety while exposing fewer children to the enormous inherent harm of foster care, that is an improvement,” he said.
Questions remain about DHS role in latest case
Each year in the past 12 years, anywhere from three to 14 Iowa children under the age of 17 have been homicide victims, according to Iowa’s Child Death Review Team. The number has varied from year to year, though with a small average annual decrease since 2000.
Only a handful of the homicide victims had any sort of recent interaction with the DHS, agency records show. And yet people involved in the child-welfare system say that it’s imperative those cases be examined and that the public knows what happened in each situation.
“You learn from the bad and severe cases,” Garbis Nolan said.
Steve Scott, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, and several others interviewed for this article say one crucial question that deserves answering in the Neiderbach case is how the physician who first examined the baby’s broken arm decided abuse wasn’t a likely cause.
“That was kind of a linchpin,” he said. “Because if police and social workers don’t have that kind of medical information, there’s little either of them can do. If we find out there was a more firm medical opinion, I would be incredibly distressed.”
Also unknown is what influence, if any, the baby’s grandparents played in decisions allowing Ethan to remain in his parents’ care.
Of concern is whether Jon Neiderbach’s job as a financial analyst at the DHS and his status as a former Des Moines school board member influenced how the case was handled.
Iowa Ombudsman Bill Angrick said his office has made preliminary inquiries with the DHS to see how it plans to handle its internal investigation of the case.
Angrick said the agency’s response will help him decide whether a review is warranted by his office.
“We’ve wanted more than just information about death and near-death cases,” he said. “We wanted evaluations and information to be made available on how DHS was interceding and interacting with the public. If what we’re doing is looking at the tragic cases only, that will be skewed.”
State action too late for other victims of homicide
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090726/NEWS/907260333/-1/SPORTS09
By LEE ROOD • lrood@dmreg.com • July 26, 2009
In only one instance last year did the family of a child who was killed – Antwuan Williams Jr. of Waterloo – have an open child-abuse case pending with the Iowa Department of Human Services.
Roger Munns, a spokesman for the agency, said there were four other abuse fatalities in which the DHS had a tangential connection, “such as assessments on siblings that were either not confirmed or that were confirmed but closed years ago.”
In 2007, families had prior involvement in the child-welfare system in three fatal abuse cases, but those cases involved different children, different perpetrators or both.
The number has been higher: A Des Moines Register investigation in 2000 found that at least nine children had died or were seriously injured over a year’s time after being the subject of prior abuse investigations involving state social workers, medical professionals and others in the child-welfare system. The Legislature later mandated an overhaul of the system.
Little has been reported about the few cases that have happened since the overhaul, largely because records are confidential.
Several county attorneys have declined to release information about deaths and injuries while criminal cases are still pending.
The Register has probed some of the deaths. They include:
Antwuan Williams Jr.: The 8-month-old was unresponsive when medics arrived at his Waterloo home in 2008. A Register investigation showed child-welfare officials had recommended that the parents lose their legal rights to parent – but then changed their minds.
That recommendation came after Antwuan’s parents were deemed responsible in a DHS report for abuse of Antwuan’s sister, Ziarah, who suffered four to six fractures in the fall of 2006, when she was 3 months old.
A juvenile judge later said the couple were “skillful enough to divert attention from themselves, cast potential blame on others and re-injure their children.”
Evelyn Miller: A child-abuse report written about the 5-year-old in April 2005 shows a social worker believed the girl’s family was “functioning well.” Three months later, Evelyn was dead.
Social workers were accused of not digging deep enough into signs the girl was at risk.
Claims over the years that she had been neglected, exposed to drugs and spanked until she was bruised were designated “not confirmed.”
Then in July 2005, Evelyn was taken from her family’s apartment in Floyd County, murdered and dumped in a river. No one has been arrested.
Casey Frederiksen, who was the live-in boyfriend of Evelyn Miller’s mother, pleaded guilty of possessing computer images of children and adults having sex.
Jetseta Gage: Roger Bentley, who was investigated previously by the state for child abuse, kidnapped Jetseta, 10, from her Cedar Rapids house in March 2005. He raped her, bound her feet, tied a plastic bag over her head, and hid her body in a cabinet.
His brother James also molested Jetseta before her death and molested a 1-year-old girl.
Roger Bentley was convicted of molesting a 7-year-old girl in 1994. He served just over two years in prison for the crime.
Camden O’Connor: The 5-month-old died April 17, 2003, after his father left him alone on a leather couch.
Dr. Francis Garrity, deputy state medical examiner, blamed no one. But a state child-protection investigator concluded Camden’s death could have been prevented.
Investigator Kimberly Barnett said human-services workers wanted to remove the baby but were prevented from doing so by a Polk County juvenile prosecutor, who was working with the family through a new mediation project aimed at keeping the child at home.
Three state workers – an investigator, the family’s social worker and a supervisor – had asked the prosecutor to remove the child from O’Connor’s home. The decision never went before a judge.
Like Ethan Neiderbach, Camden first came to the state’s attention after he was born with traces of THC, the active chemical in marijuana, in his system.
