Lawsuits: Arizona Department of Child Safety UPDATED
“According to the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in Pima County Superior Court against the Department of Child Safety and a pair of adoption agencies (Christian Family Care and St. Nicholas of Myra), the girl was taken from her biological mother in April 2013 “based on a fear of potential harm.”
The girl was removed following a fight between her parents, who struggled with cocaine addictions. The girl’s father is a registered sex offender stemming from a 1999 crime involving an adult victim.
Cue the lawsuit: “Defendants took Jane Doe from her home where she had not been abused and placed her in homes where criminals ran pornographic rings, sexually abused children entrusted to their care, including Jane Doe.”Mom spoke up, DCS said she was lying
In June 2013, the girl, then 2, was placed in the Sierra Vista home of a foster couple who “had a pattern and practice of abusing their foster children, including but not limited to using the minor children entrusted in their care in a pornographic pedophile ring,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit says that DCS received multiple complaints about the foster home, including from one of the children consigned to living there, but didn’t take action.
The biological mother repeatedly complained that her daughter suffered multiple urinary-tract infections, had become scared of men and was afraid to return to the home after visits, the lawsuit says, and DCS took quick and decisive action.
The agency accused the mom of lying and began working to terminate her rights to her child, the lawsuit says.
Meanwhile, in January 2015, a year and a half after the girl was placed with the foster family, her foster father,David Frodsham , showed up at a state office to collect his foster care check while drunk. The girl and another child were in the car at the time he registered a .28 blood-alcohol level.
DCS immediately removed the children but never investigated the allegations of sexual assault, the lawsuit says.
Who is DCS using as foster parents?
So it must have been quite the shock when Frodsham was later arrested and accused of sexual misconduct with a minor.
“Law enforcement’s investigation revealed a video made by David Frodsham of a 3- or 4-year-old girl being penetrated by an adult male and screaming for her mommy,” the lawsuit says.
Sorry to put in that little detail, but it’s important to know what we’re talking about here. What kind of people DCS was (is?) using as foster parents.
Frodsham pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual conduct and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
“David was part of a pornography ring involving numerous children in his pornography and the procurement of sex for the ring,” the lawsuit says.
Several additional cases “involving this pedophile ring operated by David Frodsham” are expected to be filed, the lawsuit says.
Then, a second family scalded the girl
But back to the little girl. After removing her in January 2015 from “a den of physical and sexual abuse and violence,” she was placed with Samantha and Justin Osteraas , who adopted her later that year after the mother’s parental rights were severed. (The state attributed the child’s temper tantrums, self-urination and crying not to the Frodshams but to her mother.)
Never mind, apparently, family members’ warnings to the adoption agency, Christian Family Care, that Samantha Osteraas was mentally unstable and had long been abusive toward her husband.
Warnings that went unheeded until December, when Pima County Sheriff’s deputies were called to the couple’s Tucson home.
The girl had been submerged in a tub of scalding water.
“When police arrived, there was blood on the floor and pieces of Jane Doe’s skin was falling off of her body,” the lawsuit says. “There were bruises to her neck and arm(s) along with other signs of trauma.
The child suffered burns over 80 percent of her body. Her organs were failing. Her toes had to be amputated. She’ll spend much of her life undergoing surgeries to replace 80 percent of the skin on her body.
This poor girl is scarred for life.
Doctors believe, based on the severity of her injuries, that she was in agony for hours before anyone called for help.
Samantha, who faces two counts of child abuse, claimed she didn’t realize the water was that hot. According to sheriff’s investigators, there were signs that the child was held under the water, which was nearly 130 degrees.
Can you imagine?
Me neither.
I wonder if DCS officials can imagine.
Clearly they couldn’t, or they wouldn’t have left her to suffer not one but two nightmares in her short life.
DCS officials have some major explaining to do – not to mention agency soul searching.
Someone, please, answer these questions
I’d start with this:
1. Why didn’t caseworkers take the mother’s warnings seriously? Why assume the mother was lying when there never was evidence that she had abused her child?
2. Why didn’t they heed other relatives’ warnings about the second foster/adoptive family seriously? Or were those warnings never relayed from the adoption agencies? And if that’s the case, is the state still contracting with those agencies?
3. What more is this agency going to do to ensure the foster families they are entrusting with vulnerable children are safe havens rather than horror shows?
What can they say today that will ensure us that there aren’t others like this little girl, brutalized not by her parents but, through its astonishing negligence, by the state of Arizona?”
Roberts: One Arizona foster child’s DCS nightmare
[AZ Central 7/7/17 by Laurie Roberts]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: Another lawsuit on behalf of John Doe.
“A former foster child who spent 12 years in the home of a man convicted of child sex crimes has filed a $15 million claim against two state agencies, saying they failed to protect him from years of physical and sexual abuse.
The claim, filed Wednesday by Tucson attorney Lynne Cadigan on behalf of “John Doe,” names as defendants the Arizona Departments of Child Safety and Economic Security, the directors of both agencies and several employees. DCS, when it was known as Child Protective Services, was once an agency under DES control.
The claim by “John Doe,” who recently turned 18, details more than a decade of abuse that highlights the state’s “failed child protection practices and policies,” according to the document.
Darren DaRonco, a DCS spokesman, said it’s the agency’s policy not to comment on pending litigation.
John Doe went to live with foster parents David Frodsham and his wife at their Sierra Vista home in 2004 and remained in their care until 2016, when federal agents arrested Frodsham for “operating a pornographic pedophile ring based in the home,” said the claim, which is a precursor to a lawsuit.
In December 2016, Frodsham was sentenced to 17 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of child sexual abuse and pornography. John Doe was identified as one of the victims in the federal case.
“David Frodsham utilized the State of Arizona and the foster care system to funnel innocent, vulnerable children into his home, so he could run a pedophile ring,” the claim said.
Frodsham physically and sexually abused John Doe “countless times” and also acted as the young man’s pimp, prostituting John Doe to other men in exchange for money. The claim said Frodsham often participated in the sexual encounters as well and “helped enable a network of pedophiles in the Sierra Vista area” who repeatedly abused John Doe.
In addition to physical abuse by Frodsham, John Doe also endured beatings and neglect by Frodsham’s wife, the claim said.
“(Frodsham’s wife) knew the sexual abuse was occurring, at times walking into the room as it was happening, yet took no steps to stop it,” the claim said. The claim said Frodsham’s wife routinely beat John Doe.
She refused to buy clothes for John Doe or feed him, screaming at him every time he would complain or try to protect himself, according to the claim.
The Frodshams forced John Doe to live outside the house most of the time, and when they left for work, they’d lock him out of the house. He was left with a bike to travel to a convenience store in case he needed to use the restroom, the claim said.
The neglect and abuse was documented by DCS, but still continued, the claim said.
“The foster and other children … were forced to eat hot sauce as punishment, handcuffed to the bed all night, locked outside the home and locked in closets,” the claim said. “John Doe and the other boys were beaten with fists, brooms, belts and other objects to the extent that medical care was frequently required.”
In an internal DCS document obtained by the Star, one caseworker noted in March 2007 that the Frodshams admitted to handcuffing John Doe one night, after he had gotten out of his room.
“The Frodshams did not hide the fact that they used the handcuffs and notified the agency immediately,” the progress report said, adding that the only “corrective action” to be taken against the Frodshams would be a review of policies and a “stern warning that this is inappropriate behavior and against policy.”
The progress notes document other instances of abuse, with witnesses reporting seeing Frodsham’s wife slapping her foster children in the face and forcing them to go to bed without dinner.
DCS had access to more than 38 police reports from the Frodsham house, dated between 2002 and 2016 — all prior to Frodsham’s arrest for child abuse.
“The state should have reviewed these as part of their licensing of the foster/adoptive parent program,” the claim says. “John Doe complained to (DCS) over 16 times and nothing was done.”
DCS also documented at least 10 abuse and neglect complaints against the Frodshams between 2002 and 2015.
“Children in abusive homes rarely can report the abuse, as if they do they are beaten again,” the claim said. “This is exactly what happened to John Doe.”
DCS should have intervened because John Doe was “completely vulnerable” to the Frodshams and helpless against their abuse, according to the claim.
In addition to police reports and DCS documents, there was also information that showed that Frodsham was an unsuitable foster and adoptive parent, the claim said.
Frodsham briefly worked with the Department of Defense in Afghanistan, but was kicked out and relieved from duty due to sexual harassment and a military assessment that shows he had an “unalterable personality disorder,” according to the claim.
If John Doe had been the biological child of the Frodshams, the state would have removed him from the home based on the allegations of neglect and abuse, according to the claim.
“Instead, the state left John Doe in the foster/adoptive home, and the Frodshams received a monthly stipend from the state to abuse him,” the claim said.
The claim provides a list of 10 ways in which DCS and its employees failed to prevent John Doe’s abuse, which includes gross negligence and deliberate indifference by failing to investigate the claims of abuse and neglect in the Frodsham home.
“There were numerous deliberate and negligent failings in the state in this case, as despite constant DCS presence and reports and complaints, the Frodshams were allowed to traffic their children for sex and pornography, abuse and beat the children in horrific ways, and yet blame it all on the children,” the claim said.
John Doe has both physical and emotional scars from his years of abuse and will continue to suffer “permanent and devastating” emotional damage, the claim said.
In addition to the $15 million the claim is seeking, John Doe also wants to change the way DCS operates and send a message to the state to protect children in its care, according to the claim.
”The Department of Child Safety must be held accountable for the abuse this child has suffered,” Cadigan told the Star. “How could such horrific abuse occur on their watch?”
The state entrusted vulnerable children into Frodsham’s care and paid him “substantial taxpayer funds” while he trafficked those foster children into his pedophile ring, Cadigan said.
”This case is one of the worst cases of neglect and torture I have seen in my 35 years of experience,” Cadigan said. “The suffering this child has endured is unimaginable.””
Ex-foster child of convicted pedophile files $15M claim against Arizona DCS
[Tulsa 2/4/18 by Caitlin Schmidt]
Update 2:“David Frodsham was a top civilian commander at a U.S. air base in Afghanistan when he “jokingly” asked an IT technician for access to YouPorn, the video-sharing pornographic website.
During his time in the war zone, Frodsham told one woman that he hired her because he “wanted to be surrounded by pretty women,” and routinely called others “honey,” “babe,” and “cougar” before he was ordered home after the military verified multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
“I would not recommend placing him back into a position of authority but rather pursuing disciplinary actions at his home station,” wrote one commanding officer when recommending that the Army order Frodsham to leave his post at Bagram Airfield and return to Fort Huachuca, a major Army installation in Arizona, according to a U.S. Army investigative file obtained by The Associated Press.
But when Frodsham returned to his home station in fall 2015, he rejoined the Network Enterprise Technology Command, the Army’s information technology service provider, where he had served as director of personnel for a global command of 15,000 soldiers and civilians, according to his Army resume.
By spring of the following year, he was arrested in Arizona for leading a child sex abuse ring that included an Army sergeant who was posting child pornography to the internet. Among the victims was one of Frodsham’s adopted sons.
Frodsham pleaded guilty to sex abuse charges in 2016 and is serving a 17-year sentence. But records reviewed by the AP show that the U.S. Army and the state of Arizona missed or ignored multiple red flags over more than a decade, which allowed Frodsham to allegedly abuse his adopted son and other children for years, all the while putting national security at risk.
The state permitted Frodsham and his wife, Barbara, to foster, adopt and retain custody of their many children despite nearly 20 complaints, and attempted complaints, of abuse, neglect, maltreatment and licensing violations. Meanwhile, the Army gave Frodsham security clearances and sensitive jobs at a time when his illicit sexual practices made him vulnerable to blackmail.
“He would have been an obvious target of foreign intelligence services because of his role and his location,” said Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director of counterintelligence for the FBI. “Fort Huachuca is one of the more sensitive installations in the continental United States. People with security issues should not be there.” In addition to NETCOM, where Frodsham worked, Fort Huachuca is home to the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, according to its website.
Public relations officials at Fort Huachuca confirmed that Frodsham was a program manager for NETCOM before he was arrested on child sex abuse charges. They declined to say whether Frodsham was disciplined after returning from Afghanistan, or whether the Army ever considered him a security risk.
Frodsham, former Sgt. Randall Bischak and a third man not associated with the Army are all serving prison terms for the roles they played in the child sex abuse ring. But the investigation is continuing because Sierra Vista police believe additional men took part.
Now, the criminal investigation is spilling over into civil court, where two of Frodsham’s adopted sons have filed separate lawsuits against the state for licensing David and Barbara Frodsham as foster parents in a home where they say they were physically and sexually abused throughout their lives.
A third adopted son is expected to file suit Tuesday in Arizona state court in Cochise County, said attorney Lynne Cadigan, who represents all three. In the latest complaint, 19-year-old Trever Frodsham says case workers missed or overlooked numerous signs that David and Barbara Frodsham were unfit parents. These included a 2002 sex abuse complaint filed with local police by one of the Frodshams’ biological daughters against an older biological brother, and the fact that David and Barbara Frodsham were themselves victims of child sex abuse.
Trever’s allegations echo those featured in an earlier lawsuit filed by his older biological brother, Ryan Frodsham, and one filed by Neal Taylor, both of whom were also adopted into the Frodsham household.
In an interview with the AP, Ryan Frodsham said his adoptive father began sexually abusing him when he was 9 or 10 years old and the abuse continued into his teens, when David Frodsham began offering his son’s sexual services to other men. “Makes me throw up thinking about it,” Ryan said.
In his lawsuit, Ryan Frodsham said the state was informed that David and Barbara Frodsham were physically abusing their children “by slapping them in the face, pinching them, hitting them with a wooden spoon, putting hot sauce in their mouths, pulling them by the hair, bending their fingers back to inflict pain, forcing them to hold cans with their arms extended for long periods time,” and refusing to let them use the bathroom unless the door remained open.
In his AP interview, Ryan said Barbara never sexually abused him but walked into the room where David was abusing him at least twice.
“She knew what was going on,” he said.
The two lawsuits already filed by the adopted sons and related legal filings also say investigators with the Department of Child Safety and case workers with Catholic Community Services, which subcontracts foster and adoption work from the state, failed to effectively follow up on 19 complaints and attempted complaints regarding the Frodsham home spanning more than a decade.
The complaints began in 2002, when the Frodshams applied for their foster care license, and continued until 2015, when David Frodsham was charged with disorderly conduct and driving drunk with children in his car, prompting the state to suspend their license indefinitely and remove all foster children from their home, although the charges were later dismissed.
Five months later, the Army deployed Frodsham to Afghanistan, where he was ordered back to Arizona after only four months of service.
REPORTS FELL ON DEAF EARS
The lawsuits say the Frodshams’ adopted children attempted to report their own physical and sexual abuse without success.
For instance, Neal Taylor’s lawsuit says he attempted to report that David Frodsham was sexually abusing him in two phone calls to his case manager, both of which he placed from school.
The first time, the case manager reported the call to Neal’s adoptive mother, who “interrogated” him and “proceeded to punish” him, according to his lawsuit. The second time, the case manager refused to meet with him unless he disclosed the reason for his call over the phone, because he would have had to drive 90 minutes from Tucson to Sierra Vista for a private meeting.
Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit and the related legal filings say he reported repeated alleged physical abuse by Barbara Frodsham to Sierra Vista police when he was 12 years old after running away from home. Police photographed several bruises, returned him to Barbara Frodsham, and reported the incident to the state Department of Child Safety. Despite the photographs and a police report, a case worker who met with Ryan five weeks later found his allegations “unsubstantiated.”
Arizona Department of Child Safety spokesman Darren DaRonco declined to answer specific questions about the lawsuits. He instead sent an email outlining the state’s procedures for screening prospective foster and adoptive parents. “Despite all of these safeguards, people are sometimes able to avoid detection,” DaRonco said, “especially if a person has no prior criminal or child abuse history.”
Yet David and Barbara Frodsham have both said they were abused as minors.
In their written application to become foster parents, Barbara Frodsham indicated that neither she nor her husband had been sexually victimized. But in recent pretrial testimony for Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit, she said she would have revealed her abuse if she had been asked by a state investigator as part of the licensing process.
David Frodsham, for his part, told a probation official after his guilty plea that he had been abused as a teenager.
Many child welfare experts believe people with a history of child sexual abuse are more likely to abuse children in their own households and should be questioned to ensure they’ve overcome their trauma before being allowed to provide foster care.
Arizona’s child welfare case workers “did not know how to interview and, therefore, they didn’t get candid answers from the Frodshams,” said Kathleen Faller, an expert witness retained in Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit. In pretrial testimony, Faller also said the state should not have granted the Frodshams’ foster care license.
Barbara Frodsham, who divorced David following his guilty plea, did not return multiple telephone calls from the AP, and did not respond to detailed questions left on her voice mail. At the time of her husband’s sentencing, she was working at Fort Huachuca as a personnel specialist, according to law enforcement records. A spokeswoman at Fort Huachuca said she still holds the position.
Attorneys for the state and the other defendants are seeking to have the cases dismissed, based in part on state law that grants immunity to state employees for mistakes or misjudgments committed in the course of their work. The law does not provide immunity for “gross negligence,” which the Frodsham brothers and Neal Taylor are alleging.
The state also says all the complaints about the Frodsham children and the Frodsham home were properly handled.
CHILD SEX ABUSE RING
The Frodsham case started as child sex abuse investigations often do: with an undercover Homeland Security agent lurking in a chat room favored by child pornographers. The Philadelphia-based agent, using the Kik messaging app, ran into someone calling himself “Pup Brass” who was posting videos and photos labeled “pedopicsandvidd.”
Kik offers users a degree of anonymity but it stores IP addresses, which help identify a device’s connection to the internet and can help identify the device’s owner. According to a Sierra Vista police probable cause statement, federal and local law enforcement agents using the IP address and other information — some gleaned from social media accounts — soon determined that “Pup Brass” was Sgt. Randall Bischak.
When they raided his home, seizing computers, cell phones, tablets and CDs holding child pornography, Bischak confessed that he’d been having sex with a 59-year-old man he called “Dave” and his teenage son. In at least one instance Bischak had secretly recorded the sex on video. He also told investigators that he and Frodsham discussed having sex with small children and that Frodsham had supplied him with at least one of the “little ones.”
Thomas Ransford, who specializes in child sex abuse cases for the Sierra Vista police, was no stranger to Frodsham. In the mid-2000s, he served as a military police officer at Fort Huachuca when Frodsham was director of Training, Plans, Mobilization and Security. “So, I knew him. I was familiar with him, attended meetings with him,” Ransford recalled. He also knew that Frodsham’s foster kids were always in trouble.
When Ransford first questioned Frodsham he denied everything. “He was pompous, like he was the smartest guy in the room,” Ransford recalled. Then Ransford played the video Bischak had secretly taken of himself having three-way sex with Frodsham and his adopted son, Ryan, and Frodsham began to acknowledge his crimes.
Ryan Frodsham also initially denied his father had abused him. “Ryan appeared very defensive of his father and did not want to implicate him in any misconduct,” Ransford wrote in a probable cause statement.
But when Ransford showed him a compromising photograph seized from Bischak’s cell phone, Ryan began to open up. Over the course of several months, Ransford said, Ryan identified others he said were part of his father’s child sex abuse ring, fueling the continuing investigation.
“There’s others we’re aware of,” Ransford said. “It’s open.””
“In 2014, an analysis produced for the state Legislature showed that the increase in workloads in Arizona during the decade that ended in 2012 was greater than in any other state but one. It also showed that the response time for abuse and neglect complaints ballooned from 63 hours to nearly 250 hours, between 2009 and 2012.
In its defense against Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit, the state is trying to exclude any mention of the department’s troubled past. “There is no evidence that the types of problems that led to the dissolution of CPS has any relation to or impact on his case,” the state said in a pretrial motion.
But David and Barbara Frodsham were licensed as foster parents in 2002, at the dawn of what was perhaps the department’s most troubled period, and formally adopted the three men going to court about a decade later, shortly before the system collapsed. “The jury is entitled to the full picture,” lawyers for Ryan Frodsham said.
In his AP interview, Ryan Frodsham said he filed his lawsuit for one reason: “I want the state to admit what it did was wrong.”
Civilian Army Leader Led Child Porn Ring, Risked U.S. Security
[Huffington Post 3/29/22 by Michael Rezendes/AP]
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