477 Child Deaths in the Past 6 Years in Florida

“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.

The result: Many more children died.

“They want to keep families together,” said James Harn, a 30-year law-enforcement officer who spent his last nine years supervising child-abuse investigators at the Broward Sheriff’s Office. “But at what cost?”

Prompted by a series of high-profile deaths, 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 Herald’s findings:

• The number of deaths with prior contacts totaled at least 477 — including 15 in Manatee County — far more than child-welfare administrators reported to the governor and Legislature. Lawmakers could have committed more money to address the problem had they known its full scope. Instead, they cut funding.

• The overwhelming majority of the children were 5 or younger, and slightly more than 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 breast-feeding 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.”

“Twenty-six times, DCF received calls about Kaleb Cronk’s family. The 27th was to report his death when the 1-year-old from Palatka was run over by a tricked-out red pickup truck as he crawled across a private road. Kaleb’s mother, Amy Sowell, had been arrested 18 times and had been the subject of repeated DCF reports of chronic drug abuse and inadequate supervision.”

477 child deaths: How Florida preserved families but lost kids[Bradenton Herald 3/16/14 by Carol Marbin Miller and Audra DS Burch]

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