How Could You? Hall of Shame- Delylah Tara and Shaun Tara cases-Child Deaths UPDATED

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Redding, California, Guardian and Kinship Aunt Tami Joy Huntsman,39, and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Gonzalo Curiel, “are behind bars and facing charges of felony child abuse, torture, and mayhem, after the gruesome discovery in Redding, California, on Monday night.[December 14, 2015]”

“A woman who was arrested after the bodies of a three-year-old girl and six-year-old boy were found shoved inside plastic tote containers hidden away in a storage locker said her career was: ‘Being The Best Mom I Can Be’.”

“Three-year-old Delylah Tara and six-year-old Shaun Tara, who were in the custody of the couple at the time, have been reported missing, but authorities will not say if they were the slain children.

Police were led to the remains after they discovered a ‘severely abused’ nine-year-old girl at an apartment owned by Huntsman. The youngster was taken into surgery suffering multiple injuries.

Sheriff Greg Hagwood said she weighed about 40 pounds, had broken bones in her shoulder, broken fingers, a dislocated jaw, and teeth that were missing or loose.

She reportedly had open sores and was infested with lice. Hagwood told the Plumas News: ‘This has shaken my staff to the core.

‘That little girl had been subjected to the most unspeakable measure of torture for an extended period of time. This is child abuse, the likes of which we haven’t experienced here

The couple are from Quincy, California, which is 140 miles away from the crime scene. It is believed Huntsman is related to the children, but is not their biological mother.

Friends said Huntsman was looking after them because their mother had died after being hit by a car, while their father had been given up custody.

Two older children – 12-year-old male and female twins – who were at the East Quincy residence where Huntsman and Curiel were staying with a friend, were immediately placed in foster care, the Plumas News reported.

Neither them or the nine-year-old girl had been enrolled in local schools. 

Elliott Robinson, director of social services for Monterey County, told KBSW that Huntsman and her family had been investigated for the last year, suspected of abusing their children.

Curiel and Huntsman remain jailed with bail set at $1 million each.

Prosecutors said on Tuesday that Curiel will be tried as an adult.

The identities of the children have not yet been released. Their cause of death is also not yet known. “

Pictured: The girl, three, and boy, six, found dead in a storage locker – as woman who says her job is ‘Being The Best Mom I Can Be’ and her teenage boyfriend are arrested

[Daily Mail 12/16/15 by Wills Robinson]

“The girl’s guardian, 39-year-old Tami Joy Huntsman, and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Gonzalo Curiel, both of Salinas, were arrested in Quincy on Friday evening, Dec. 11. They were apprehended after the injured girl was found in a locked vehicle near the corner of East Main and First streets.

After intensive questioning by law-enforcement officers, Curiel reportedly told officers where the two younger children (a 3-year-old girl and 6-year-old boy) were located.

The dead children were discovered when police broke the lock on a Redding storage unit Sunday evening.

“This has shaken my staff to the core,” Hagwood said. “That little girl had been subjected to the most unspeakable measure of torture for an extended period of time. This is child abuse, the likes of which we haven’t experienced here (in Plumas County).

Hagwood said the girl’s condition was extremely bad when she was found on the floorboard of a locked Toyota 4-Runner. He said she weighed about 40 pounds, had broken bones in her shoulder, broken fingers, a dislocated jaw, and teeth that were missing or loose. She reportedly had open sores and was infested with lice.

The girl was taken to PDH and then transferred by ambulance to UC Davis Medical Center where she underwent five hours of surgery on Sunday. Her condition was not available Tuesday,

Huntsman and Curiel reportedly moved from Salinas to East Quincy on Dec. 7. They were staying with a friend and neither the girl nor the twins were enrolled in school.

Huntsman is reportedly the biological mother of the twins. She is the 9-year-old girl’s aunt, but reportedly became her guardian after the girl’s mother died two years ago.

After contacting a Huntsman family member in Salinas, investigators were told two younger children were not accounted for. It was unclear if those children were related to Huntsman.

Investigators questioned Huntsman about the missing children, but she was not cooperative. They also questioned Curiel, who was being held at the Butte County Juvenile Detention Center.

That’s when Curiel reportedly pointed authorities toward the Redding storage unit.

Redding police went to the storage facility and cut the lock off the door of a unit Huntsman had been renting since Dec. 4.

Police found the two young bodies stuffed into plastic tote containers. The children’s identities and the cause of their deaths haven’t been reported.

Huntsman and Curiel are expected to face murder charges in Shasta County. They were arraigned on felony charges of torture, child abuse and mayhem in Plumas County Superior Court on Tuesday afternoon. They are being held on $1 million bail.

Although legally a minor, Curiel is being charged as an adult in Plumas County.

A felony torture conviction carries a possible sentence of life in prison.

Huntsman is reportedly the sister of Wayne Huntsman, the Santa Cruz man who was indicted for starting the massive King Fire in Eldorado County last year. Wayne Huntsman has a criminal history that reportedly includes a burglary in Plumas County.

The Plumas Crisis Intervention and Resource Center has established a fund for the 9-year-old girl. Click here for more details.“

Injured girl, dead children found after welfare search [Plumas News 12/24/15 by Dan McDonald]

“Monterey County prosecutors have filed murder, torture and child-abuse charges against a couple believed to have killed two young children in their care and left them stuffed in a plastic storage bin inside a Redding storage locker.

The criminal complaints name Tami Joy Huntsman, 39, and her companion, Gonzalo Curiel, 17, and make Huntsman eligible for the death penalty if the Monterey County district attorney chooses to pursue it. That decision will not be made until after a preliminary hearing.

Curiel will be tried as an adult but cannot face the death penalty because he is 17, District Attorney Dean Flippo announced Monday.

The two were arrested in Plumas County on Dec. 11 after a deputy called to do a welfare check found an emaciated and beaten 9-year-old girl inside a Toyota SUV parked on Main Street in Quincy.

Both were charged with torture and child abuse, and Huntsman’s 12-year-old twins, who were with the couple, were placed into foster care. Subsequent investigation led to detectives being told there still were two other children missing, and they returned to question the suspects Dec. 13. Information obtained from the suspects led to the storage locker.

Redding police were dispatched to the storage park. They discovered the bodies of the children that night in a unit that a worker at the facility said was rented by Huntsman on Dec. 4.

Murder, torture, child-abuse charges filed against couple in Redding storage locker case
 [Sacramento Bee 12/21/15 by Sam Stanton]

“A Monterey County Superior Court judge denied releasing search warrants to the media that would shed more light on a Salinas child abuse investigation.

On Dec. 13, Salinas police broke down the front door at 501 Fremont Street to check on 3-year-old Delylah Tara and 6-year-old Shaun Tara. No one was home and the apartment was in disarray.
Homicide detectives said they believe Delylah and Shaun were slain in Salinas on Nov. 27 or Nov. 28 before Huntsman and Curiel put their bodies in plastic storage containers, drove 300 miles to Redding, Calif., and hid the bodies in a storage locker.

Search warrants are usually released to the media and public within 10 days of a request.

Judge Albert Maldonado wrote, “Making all of the documents related to this search warrant open to the public within 10 days could jeopardize the lives and well-being of witnesses who have cooperated with the police in providing information about a duel homicide which occurred between Nov. 27, 2015 and Nov. 28, 2015 in the City of Salinas.”

Huntsman, 39, and Curiel, 17, are charged with murder, torture, and child abuse. Curiel was charged as an adult.

The judge’s order also hints that the arrests of Huntsman and Curiel may not be the last in this case.

“The facts presented in support of this sealing order indicate that this warrant is likely to be the first of one or more additional search warrants. Making the information public makes it more likely that the suspects or their associates will flee or attempt to destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses,” Maldonado wrote.

The warrants could be unsealed after 90 days unless the court grants an extension.

As of Thursday, the Salinas Police Officers Association Victims Fund had raised $8,000 to help the surviving 9-year-old victim and pay for funerals for Delylah and Shaun.”

Huntsman-Curiel search warrants sealed by Monterey County court order [KSBW 12/24/15]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update:“As the state continues its investigation into the deaths of two children in Salinas,  Monterey County Department of Social Services announced some changes. The announcement was made during a Health and Human Services Committee meeting on Thursday, the first since 3-year-old Delylah Tara and 6-year-old Shaun Tara were found dead in a Redding storage facility in December.

Authorities said the children were killed at the hands of their caretaker, Tami Huntsman, and her companion, Gonzalo Curiel. The Department of Social Services had the family on its radar. It is protocol for the state to conduct its own investigation after a child in the system dies.

Elliott Robinson, the director of Social Services, said he’s open to any changes that will help protect children in the future.

“We always embrace the opportunity to make sure our efforts to protect children are as strong as possible,” Robinson said. “So, we’re looking forward to the state review, and we’ll work hard to implement and monitor whatever their recommendations are.”

Investigators were in Monterey County earlier this month, looking at how the county deals with child welfare referrals and investigations.

In the meantime, the department is implementing changes of its own. While trained social workers already answer the Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline, starting next week a supervisor with experience in the unit will be brought back to provide more support and training.

“We thought it was a very good idea to bring in a very experienced supervisor who had several years supervising that unit to give us the assurance that we want as a department and as a community that front end of our system, which is the first place where many children and families come into contact with Child Protective Services is as strong as we can make it,” Robinson said.

Next Tuesday the department will ask the Board of Supervisors to consider hiring more staff, specifically an additional social work supervisor, six more social workers and a social services aide.

County Supervisor Fernando Armenta, who is also on the committee, said he has a lot of questions. He will have to wait to get the answers once the state’s report is released next month.

“With county counsel’s permission and in a confidential setting, to ask the director of Social Services, ‘If anything went wrong, how much of that can you tell me? If anything, which I don’t know, was there a lack of supervision? Was there a lack of oversight? And if there is, to what extent was it there? And even if you would’ve had all those social workers in the world, and you were overstaffed, which I don’t know, could something like this still have occurred?’” Armenta said.

Robinson said the state has conducted a review in Monterey County only one other time. Years ago a child died in foster care. Since then, the department made changes. Specifically, the number of children, whether biological, adopted or fostered, who can be in one family at one time.

ORIGINAL POST:

Changes are ahead for the Monterey County Department of Social Services.

On Thursday, the department’s director briefed the Health and Human Services Committee about steps his department is taking in light of recent events, specifically the deaths of two children in Salinas. Delylah and Shaun Tara were under the care of Tami Huntsman when they were killed. Huntsman is charged in their deaths.

Director Elliott Robinson says his department working to strengthen the department’s Child Abuse and Neglect Hotlines by assigning a supervisor to provide additional support and training to existing staff. He is also planning to hire more staff with money from the state.

Robinson is also awaiting a review from the California Department of Social Services, which focused on the Tara case. The results of that review are expected next month.”

Monterey County Social Services makes changes after child abuse deaths [KION 1/22/16 by Marianna Hicks]

“A Northern California couple has pleaded not guilty to killing two young children and abusing a third in the woman’s care.

Tami Huntsman and her 17-year-old boyfriend Gonzalo Curiel are accused of abusing to death 6-year-old Shaun Tara and 3-year-old Delylah Tara, whose bodies were found in a Redding storage unit last month, and the severe abuse of a 9-year-old girl. All three of the children were in Huntsman’s custody.

The pair is also charged with abusing a 9-year-old girl, who was found starving and with broken bones in the back of an SUV parked in Quincy, California.

The three victims were siblings and in the custody of 39-year-old Huntsman. The three victims lived with Huntsman and Curiel in Salinas.

Investigators believe the children were killed in Salinas due to sustained physical abuse and neglect.

Salinas police chief Kelly McMillin said last month that two dozen investigators were still trying to piece together the tangled and horrific series of events that led to the deaths.

‘In my 32-year career, this is the most egregious child abuse homicide case I’ve ever seen,’ McMillin said.

Woman, 39, and her boyfriend, 17, plead not guilty to killing two kids and putting them in storage

[Daily Mail 1/27/16 by Alexandra Klausner]

Update 2:“The tragic deaths of Shaun and Delylah Tara, whose bodies were found last December in a Northern California storage locker, again have thrust the state’s Child Protective Services departments into a harsh spotlight, raising questions about whether the agencies can truly protect the state’s most vulnerable children.

Despite high-profile child abuse and neglect cases, including many in the Bay Area, authorities have been slow to make substantive changes to the often underfunded and undermanned agencies, experts said.

In the horrific case of Shaun, 6, Delylah, 3, and their 9-year-old half sister, 135 pages of Monterey CPS documents obtained by this newspaper — and the state’s highly critical review of the case — found that social workers called repeatedly to the home in 2015 violated five state regulations and ignored best practices intended to keep children safe.

But that branch of CPS is not alone. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that in about 12 percent of all 2014 child fatalities involving abuse and neglect, the families had prior contact with CPS. During that year, 3.2 million children were the subject of at least one CPS report and 1,546 kids died from maltreatment, 70 percent of those under the age of 3. Of those fatalities, 131 were in California.

Bill Grimm, senior attorney with Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law, said CPS agencies throughout the state make the same mistakes over and over. He recommended a legislative oversight hearing to improve the quality of investigations.

“The state gathers data about how quickly the agency responds to a report of suspected abuse, but this is a very poor measure,” said Grimm, who has researched similar fatal abuse cases. “It tells us nothing about the quality of the investigation. Until adequate criteria are adopted and applied to assessing the quality of investigations, these tragedies will not end.”

On Feb. 28, 2-year-old foster child Kelly Nguyen died in Santa Clara County two months after social workers placed the girl, who suffered from a chromosomal birth defect, with her biological father in a transitional home for recovering drug addicts following his release from jail. While not being treated as a homicide, that case has raised questions about the South Bay agency tasked with overseeing vulnerable children.

In 2008, 15-year-old Jazzmin Davis, of Antioch, died after years of abuse by her caretaker aunt. San Francisco social workers violated state regulations in overseeing the foster child, such as failing to check in with her doctors and other “collateral contacts.” Her twin brother received a $4 million settlement from the city and $750,000 from the Antioch Unified School District.

Jazzmin’s death did prompt some local changes: The school district implemented new procedures to monitor student attendance, and the San Francisco Human Services Agency, which oversees foster care social workers, said it increased caseworker supervision and stopped exempting some homes from monthly visits.

The attorney for Jazzmin’s brother said that because of confidentiality laws, these cases often go unheard, and that slows any reforms. In 2007, a new state law made CPS reports public for children killed in cases of suspected abuse or neglect, which has shined a light on concerns but also leaves the nonfatal cases largely a mystery.

“It’s almost set up for a cover-up,” said El Cerrito attorney Darren Kessler, who has litigated CPS cases for 25 years. “Anything done to keep it under wraps is done.”

Jazzmin, who was beaten with a padlock attached to a belt, a broken closet rod, carpet tack strips and a clothes iron in her aunt’s Antioch home, was failed by a chain of weak links in the protective system, Kessler said.

The same year, Contra Costa health officials paid $300,000 to the biological parents of a girl who died in foster care. Deonna Green was nearly 3 years old, yet weighed only 19 pounds, when she died in 2006. She was being fed baking soda by her guardian. The agency announced reforms, including new health clinics for foster children and a computer tracking system for those kids in the county health system.

Those types of changes — which are usually in reaction to well-publicized tragedies — are often piecemeal and patched together by individual agencies rather than broad reforms that might help children throughout the state and country.

But last month, a federal commission charged with developing a national strategy to eliminate child abuse released the results of a two-year probe that delved into case studies, examined what went wrong and what can be done to stop vulnerable children from falling through the cracks. The National Strategy to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities commission estimated that between four and eight children will die every day from abuse and neglect unless major reforms are made. The commission criticized the lack of communication among various agencies, and issued several recommendations for agencies and states to follow to save children’s lives, among them:

• Conduct a five-year review of past abuse and neglect fatalities to identify family and systemic circumstances.
• Review policies on screening reports of abuse and neglect to ensure those most at risk — under ages 1 and 3 — are prioritized for service.
• Identify ways to share information among CPS and law enforcement and other critical agencies.
• Enact federal legislation designating professionals who will be identified as mandated reporters of abuse or neglect.

  In the case of Shaun and Delylah, social workers spent most of their time trying to keep the children under the care of their guardian, Tami Huntsman, rather than taking them into protective custody or placing them with other relatives. The paper trail shows multiple failures to fully investigate serious accusations of abuse, including a screener who failed to start an investigation in October after receiving a report of the kids being zip-tied to a bed.

  By mid-December, the children were dead, stuffed in plastic bins in a Redding storage unit, and their half sister was found in Plumas County, severely beaten and starving.

  Huntsman and her then-17-year-old boyfriend, Gonzalo Curiel, have since been charged with murder, torture and great bodily harm and are awaiting trial in Monterey County.

  The director of Monterey County’s Department of Social Services defended his agency’s handling of the case, saying a social worker cannot pull a child into protective custody unless there are “exigent circumstances,” meaning the child is in immediate danger of bodily harm and there is no time to secure a warrant.

  “Despite the tragic outcome, those kind of … circumstances did not seem to exist during the investigations,” Director Elliott Robinson said in an email to this newspaper. “We are continuing to assess how these children’s cases were handled. We always look for ways to improve, especially when cases end up in tragic circumstances like these.”

  The department is hiring six more social workers, transferring an experienced supervisor to its intake unit, and has reached an agreement with the Superior Court to start a warrant process for investigations and protective custody.

  At the time of the children’s’ deaths, Monterey County had 58 social workers and about $14.9 million in funding spread over various programs. Based on complicated state funding, Robinson said they struggle to keep social worker caseloads at a reasonable level.”Am I underfunded? Yeah,” he said. “We’re close to crossing the bridge where I start screaming, ‘What are you guys doing to me?’ ”

  Contact Matthias Gafni at 925-952-5026. Follow him at Twitter.com/mgafni.

   When a social worker received a mandated abuse report that included allegations Shaun and Delylah were zip-tied to a bed, she sent police to conduct a welfare check. They knocked and when no one answered, they left. No further investigation was done, and Shaun and Delylah were dead a month later.
  The social worker, after receiving a referral of an endangered child, was required to launch an emergency protocol or in-person investigation within 10 days. The department said the report “was reportedly mistaken as a duplicate to a previously investigated referral.”
• Shaun told a social worker his siblings were being beaten with a belt, but the social worker had been only probing a report of neglect. The new allegation should have been added to the investigation and the social worker failed to properly investigate the belt abuse, such as interviewing the accused, a teenage boy in the house.
• The oldest sister was given to Tami Huntsman by the girl’s stepfather, who was not her biological father, and Monterey social workers should have further investigated whether the girl belonged in Huntsman’s custody.
• Two referrals for the children were open longer than 100 days and remained open at the time of the children’s deaths. Those types of investigations should terminate within 30 days of the in-person visits “to ensure that investigations of child abuse and neglect, and needed services, are provided timely,” the state said.
• On multiple instances, the social worker failed to conduct body checks on all the children to check for evidence of physical abuse after the referral mentioned allegations of belt striking and children being tied up, particularly since the “family was evasive.””

State officials blast Monterey County CPS handling of abuse case leading to two child deaths [East Bay Times 4/1/16 by Matthias Gafni]