4 DHS WORKERS OUSTED IN FALLOUT FROM DANIEAL KELLY CASE

http://www.kyw1060.com/pages/3117385.php??

by KYW’s Mike Dunnsee related story). Four DHS workers involved in the death of 14-year old Danieal Kelley  are now being shown the door. The four employees — Shawn Davis, Ingrid Hawk, Martha Poller, and Valerie Mond — had been named but not indicted the Danieal Kelly grand jury report.   Now DHS Commissioner Anne Marie Ambrose says all four will be gone.   Poller was allowed to retire, Mond allowed to resign while Hawk and Davis are being fired.   DHS spokeswoman Alicia Taylor says Ambrose felt the actions of the four were unconscionable: “Given their egregious disregard for their professional responsibilities, and the role that it played in Danieal Kelly’s death, she felt that she had no other choice but to rule the way she did.” Now, Taylor says, the department hopes to move on, though never forget: “Danieal Kelly will always be remembered in the department.  Because of her death, there’s been a major reform effort underway at DHS.” Nine others face charges in Kelly’s death, including two DHS workers and the girl’s parents (

MAN CHARGED WITH BEATING DISABLED FOSTER CHILD

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-fosterchildkilled,0,4306108.story

Associated Press

8:20 AM CDT, May 15, 2009

CRETE, Ill. – A south suburban Chicago man has been charged with tying up and beating a mentally disabled foster child who later died.

The Will County state’s attorney’s office says Fred D. Johnson II of Crete was arrested early Thursday on charges of aggravated battery of a child and unlawful restraint. Officials allege he tied 12-year-old Kevin Johnson to a bed frame with straps.

Prosecutors say 43-year-old Fred Johnson caused Kevin’s death by striking him on the head and body.

They say Kevin Johnson and eight other minors he was related to were living with Fred Johnson. The others have been removed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

Johnson is also charged with failing to seek medical attention for one of Kevin’s siblings.

——

Information from: Southtown Star, http://www.southtownstar.com

HEARING PUT OFF FOR AUNT IN QUADRIPLEGIC GIRL’S DEATH

Shylae’s birth mom turns on sister

 

by Shannon Murphy | The Flint Journal and Ed White | The Associated Press

Thursday May 07, 2009, 9:23 AM

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2009/05/shylaes_birth_mom_turns_on_sis.html

 

 FLINT, Michigan –

Rachel Thomas screamed as three sheriff’s deputies led her down a hall and out of the building after a court clerk told her to stop talking in the courtroom.

The outburst came about 10 minutes before Thomas’ sister, Lorrie M. Thomas, was denied bond on charges of second-degree murder and child abuse in the death of 9-year-old Shylae Thomas.

Officials allege Lorrie Thomas, 39, killed Shylae by not feeding her, then stashed the girl’s body in a Vienna Township storage unit until police found her April 22.

Rachel Thomas told The Journal last week that she didn’t believe her sister had hurt Shylae and said she recently tried to get arrested so she could talk to her sister in jail.

On Wednesday, however, it was clear that her feelings had changed.

“My sister … starved my baby to death,” Rachel Thomas said while standing and glaring at someone in the courtroom gallery.

She settled down after a warning from a court officer, but three Genesee County sheriff’s deputies soon entered and removed her. Flint District Judge Tracy Collier-Nix was not on the bench.

In a brief hearing after Thomas’ ejection, Collier-Nix adjourned a preliminary examination for Lorrie Thomas until June 3.

Her attorney and prosecutors said they needed more time in the case, citing a large number of documents involved.

Thomas’ attorney, Mark Clement, asked for a lower bond, saying his client does not pose a threat to the public.

“Her children are in assorted foster care homes around the state, and she would not leave without her children,” Clement said about worries that she poses a flight risk.

But Assistant Prosecutor Marcie Mabry said Thomas repeatedly lied about Shylae’s whereabouts and told child protective service workers and the child’s school that she was moving out of state.

“Very little consideration was given to Shylae in life or death,” Mabry said. “I find it ironic that she’s using concern for her children now (to reduce bond).”

Outside court, Clement said it’s “absolutely untrue” that Thomas starved Shylae to death. Thomas adopted the girl in 2003, two years after Rachel Thomas lost her parental rights.

“She couldn’t see. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t feed herself,” Clement said of Shylae and her condition as a quadriplegic. “The state of Michigan placed a difficult-to-care-for-child. Nobody followed up.

“She received no training,” the lawyer said of Thomas.

 

Thursday, May 7, 2009

 

 

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090507/METRO/905070366/1409/METRO/Hearing-put-off-for-aunt-in-quadriplegic-girl-s-death

The Detroit NewsFlint — A preliminary exam for the Flint woman accused of killing her quadriplegic niece and stashing her body in a storage bin has been moved to June 3.

On Wednesday, 68th District Court Judge Tracy Collier-Nix postponed the hearing after the Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office and defense attorney Mark Clement jointly sought a postponement.

Lorrie Thomas, 40, has been arraigned on multiple charges, including second-degree murder and child abuse. Thomas remains at the county jail.

The biological mother of a quadriplegic girl was ejected from a Flint courtroom Wednesday afternoon after loudly declaring her sister had “starved my baby to death.”

RE: DANIEAL KELLY- “SAVING THEIR HIDES BECAME IMPORTANT TO THEM IN A WAY THAT SAVING DANIEAL NEVER HAD”

This is an older story that I saved to my computer on Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 4:06:50 PM.  I thought I would post it due the the charges that have been pressed in the Danieal Kelly case, because I don’t think people realize the extreme failures of this department. 

Danieal’s death was a result of the complete and utter failure of the people in place to protect her.  Their laziness, incompetence, criminal negligence and straight up lack of caring is the reason she is dead!!!!  The only person that these social workers cared about was themselves, as shown by their behavior after her death!!!!  I still believe the charges against these “serial killers”, (for wouldn’t that be the term used for anyone other then a CPS worker who was responsible for the deaths of this many children? )…are not enough.

Bear in mind, these are just the case we hear about!!!!

 

Ronnie Polaneczky: What does it take to get fired at DHS?

 

By Ronnie Polaneczky

Philadelphia Daily News

Daily News Columnist

MAYBE, WHEN IT comes to firing employees, the Department of Human Services had a “three-dead-kids-you’re-out” policy.

Why else has social worker Dana Poindexter continued to draw a paycheck from DHS, despite the department’s knowledge that his inaction was a glaring factor in two cases where children died?

What were they waiting for – a third little one to perish?

By now, we all know about one of the tortured souls whose demise happened on the watch of Poindexter, a 17-year DHS veteran. The district attorney’s grand-jury report, released last week, details Poindexter’s sustained failure to protect 14-year-old Danieal Kelly from her parents, who it says starved and neglected her to death.

Poindexter alone didn’t doom Danieal, whose cerebral palsy made her all the more vulnerable to abuse. The grand jury alleges that others at DHS and its contracted agency, Multi-Ethnic Behavioral Health, so neglected Danieal that criminal charges are justified.

But Poindexter’s recklessness was so well known to higher-ups, it begs the question: What does it take to get fired at DHS?

Poindexter’s personnel records, revealed in the grand jury report, showed that just prior to being assigned the Kelly case, he never bothered to follow through on the assessment of another at-risk family. Three months later, a three-week-old baby born to a 14-year-old girl in that household had died.

As a result, DHS suspended Poindexter for 10 days for placing children at risk.

Alba Martinez, former DHS commissioner, wrote to Poindexter that the case “tragically illustrates how important our prompt and responsive involvement is to our City’s children . . . As I previously advised you, continued failure to provide timely services or otherwise follow departmental policy or supervisory instruction will result in additional discipline up to and including termination of your employment.”

Mind you, this wasn’t a case where a child died despite a noble DHS worker’s best efforts; Poindexter barely twitched a muscle on behalf of children he was supposed to protect.

He was suspended twice more, and his personnel file notes how a supervisor excoriated him for continuing “to fail to close and/or transfer cases in a timely manner and this puts children at risk . . . This failure to move your cases deprives children and families of the services that they desperately need.”

I’ve reviewed the DHS cumbersome employee-termination procedures, and they’re eye-numbing. Some at DHS will say that the process is so ponderous, it’s impossible to fire an employee.

It’s not impossible. It’s just not easy.

Had the culture at DHS been one that truly placed the safety of children above the sanctity of employment, Danieal Kelly might’ve gotten free of her vile parents. Instead, Poindexter remained her reckless point man until her death in August 2006.

Astonishingly, that still wasn’t enough for DHS to show him the door. He wasn’t even suspended – with pay – until last week’s grand-jury report brought the outrageousness of his ongoing employment to public attention.

That’s why it’s hard to believe that “the DHS of 2008 is not the DHS of 2006,” as an emotional Mayor Nutter ( love the name) said during a press conference yesterday announcing the suspensions of seven more DHS employees connected to the Kelly case.

That it took a grand-jury report to bring about even that half-assed a result is indicative of just how much the DHS of August 2008 is still too much like the DHS of August 2006.

The revamped policies, the new procedures, the renewed commitment to accountability won’t mean a blessed thing if DHS doesn’t figure out how to swiftly terminate employees whose only commitment is to their paychecks.

The grand-jury report showed how focused the normally lazy, lying DHS and Multi-Ethnic employees could become, once they thought their livelihoods were at stake. They wanted their jobs enough to forge documents, or to lie under oath about all they did and didn’t do, know and didn’t know.

Saving their hides became important to them in a way that saving Danieal never had.

Might any of them have done more to protect her had there been a policy at DHS of firing people for incompetence?

In other words, real, job-ending consequences.

The kind of consequences that good DHS employees will never know.

That middling ones need to know about so they’ll up their game.

And that bad ones must suffer so that innocents like Danieal Kelly will never suffer so horribly again. *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky

SOCIAL WORKER PLEADS NOT GUILTY IN DANIEAL KELLY CASE

 

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20090507_Social_worker_pleads_not_guilty_in_Danieal_Kelly_case.html

By MICHAEL HINKELMAN

Philadelphia Daily News

hinkelm@phillynews.com 215-854-2656

Posted on Thu, May. 7, 2009

A social worker for a now-defunct private nonprofit agency that was supposed to be looking out for Danieal Kelly – the 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was starved to death in 2006 – pleaded not guilty in federal magistrate court yesterday to fraud and conspiracy charges.

Julius Juma Murray, 51, formerly of Upper Darby, had been assigned to the Kelly case, but prosecutors said that he and others helped create false records for Kelly’s file to make it appear that the agency provided services to her and made visits to her home.

Murray worked for MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, Inc., which was paid more than $3.7 million by the city between July 2000 and December 2006 to provide in-home social services to needy and at-risk children.

Authorities said that MultiEthnic was a “money for nothing” enterprise.

Eight of the agency’s employees were charged by a federal grand jury on May 1 with wire fraud, health-care fraud and conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation.

A ninth employee, Patricia Burch, was charged only with lying to a federal grand jury.

Burch was arraigned before a federal magistrate yesterday, pleaded not guilty and was released on $25,000 unsecured bail.

Three others, including MultiEthnic Behavioral co-founder Mickal Kamuvaka, previously pleaded not guilty to the charges and were released on $25,000 unsecured bail with electronic monitoring.

Murray and Kamuvaka also have been charged by a Philadelphia grand jury with involuntary manslaughter and related offenses in connection with Kelly’s death. No trial date has been set on the state charges.

Murray, a native and citizen of Sierra Leone, is in federal custody. He was arrested last August for making a false statement to federal immigration authorities when he applied to become a U.S. citizen in July 2007. (He has pleaded not guilty in this case.)

In his application, Murray denied that he had ever lied in applying for permission to enter the U.S. Murray said under oath in his citizenship interview that his citizenship application was true and correct.

Murray first entered the U.S. in 1992 on a nonimmigrant-visitor visa and later requested asylum. The request was denied in 1996 and he agreed to leave the U.S. in January 1997, when authorities began deportation proceedings.

He returned to the U.S. in April of that year and said on a visa application that he had not previously visited or lived in the U.S., and denied ever applying for a visa. *

NEW JERSEY CHILD DEAD WHILE UNDER DYFS SUPERVISION

State: Family of slain boy was being investigated

http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/678/2009/may/01/state-family-of-slain-boy-was-being-investigated.html

The Associated Press

A two-year-old was beaten to death while child welfare officials in New Jersey investigated his mother’s boyfriend for child abuse.

Caden Rivera died on April 22 from blunt-force trauma to his abdomen.

Damien Rodriguez is held without bail in Cape May County, charged with aggravated manslaughter.

Officials at the state’s Children and Families Department say they received a complaint in March that Rodriguez was abusing the boy. The investigation was ongoing.

Authorities say they also received complaints about the boy’s mother.

In 2003, New Jersey’s child welfare agency dealt with deaths and mistreatment of children in the its care.

Since then, advocates have praised the agency for reforms.

___

Information from: The Press of Atlantic City, www.pressofatlanticcity.com

 

Cape May disabled toddler dies while under DYFS supervision

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/cape_may_disabled_toddler_supe.html

by Susan K. Livio/Statehouse Bureau

Thursday April 30, 2009, 9

A 2-year-old disabled boy who had been supervised by New Jersey’s child welfare system has died, allegedly at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend, the second such incident in less than a month, state Department of Children and Families officials said today.

State officials confirmed this week that the agency had been investigating the family of a Cape May County toddler with cerebral palsy who died April 22.

The disclosure came just days after a federal monitor issued a report crediting the department with making improvements to expand, better train and supervise its child welfare caseworkers.

A spokeswoman for Children and Families Commissioner Kimberly Ricketts called the child’s death “a tragedy that we all feel very deeply,” but said it should not give the public reason to doubt the department is far better since it has been under the supervision of a federal court monitor.

“The monitor’s report does accurately present the marked improvements and changes in the state’s child welfare system, which is very different from what it was just a few years ago,” said the spokeswoman, Mary Helen Cervantes.

Cervantes said the department has opened an internal investigation into how the agency handled the case involving Caden Rivera, a 25-month-old boy from Woodbine, Cape May County. The toddler, born with cerebral palsy, died from blunt force trauma to the abdomen, just a month after his alleged killer had been accused of physically abusing the boy, according to a report obtained by The Star-Ledger.

The state Division of Youth and Family Services was investigating alleged abuse by Damian Garcia-Rodriguez, 31, of Wildwood, when Caden died last week, according to police and DYFS records.

Garcia-Rodriguez, the boyfriend of Caden’s mother, faces second-degree manslaughter and child endangerment charges and is being held without bail, Cape May County Chief of Detectives James E. Rybicki said today.

Caden’s death follows the March 31 death of 9-year-old Jamarr Cruz of Camden, whom DYFS began supervising in December 2007 after Vincent Williams, his mother’s live-in boyfriend, pleaded guilty to using excessive force to discipline the child.

DYFS closed the case in November 2008 after the child’s mother and Williams completed family counseling classes and Williams finished an anger management course. Camden County Prosecutor’s Office charged Williams, 26, with the boy’s death.

Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of the Association for Children of New Jersey, said she hoped that in the Cape May County case, investigators would have considered the child’s disability and young age when it evaluated whether he was safe.

“These two cases raise concerns about what is the standard the division is using to determine whether cases should be opened and closed,” Zalkind said.

Citing state statistics, Zalkind said there has been a 28 percent drop in the number of children DYFS is supervising.

“A drop in caseload can be good, but there should be some examination about how these decisions are made,” she said.

According to the DYFS record on the Caden Rivera case, his mother, identified in published reports as Jennifer Bowen, had a long history with DYFS, which found she had been negligent twice with her other children, in 2000 and 2003. Her three other children have been living with relatives since 2000.

Four children have died from abuse and neglect this year, including Caden and Jamarr, Cervantes confirmed. Of the other two, one was the subject of an open DYFS case; the other had no DYFS history. The department could not supply more details on the other two cases tonight.