Texas keeps child abuse and neglect deaths out of sight, bringing light proves complex and costly

From Texas Public Radio:

This story is part of When Home is the Danger, a multi-part series on how Texas is leaving children in dangerous homes and families without ongoing support or monitoring.

On June 12, 2016, three-month old Leanne Fuentes was found dead after co-sleeping with her mother who later tested positive for cocaine.

Child Protective Services was investigating her mother for the third time when the Houston girl died. The woman was most recently investigated when, less than 90 days prior, someone called the state to report her mother trying to sell the child at the motel where she was living, according to state documents.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services — which oversees CPS — would later conclude the department violated its own standards five ways in the case, including not initiating contact quickly enough, downgrading the seriousness of the investigation, failing to make contact or follow up, and failing to follow protocol on requesting assistance from other parts of the department.

DFPS reviewed its investigation and work with the family, noted its failures, made recommendations for improvement and published the report on its website — where it still sits archived today.

This was the last death that one of these reports was produced for and made public — nearly a decade ago.

For most if not all families who were involved with DFPS and then suffered the tragic loss of a child through abuse and neglect, little if any information is given about what role the state’s action or inaction played, or who the alleged perpetrator was.

“And without this information being made public, it really protects the perpetrator, and it protects the government agency,” said Laura Prather, a partner at Haynes and Boone who litigates open records and government accountability issues.

It is just one of the many ways the department’s acts go largely unpublicized. The department often is shielded from public scrutiny in individual case investigations by open records exemptions, inadequate records collection and outdated computer systems that often lead to prohibitively high costs.

To the public, the state’s involvement with its most vulnerable Texans often remains an impenetrable black box.

“I think there’s a huge threat,” Prather said.

The threat, Prather said, is that people are less likely to trust opaque institutions. And she questioned how DFPS can be accountable over its actions in individual cases, if the public is blocked from understanding those failures.

But finally, the threat is to families who are just trying to understand what went wrong.

“There’s the inability for family and friends to gain any sort of closure if they don’t have information about what happened,” she said.

Gaining closure

Susie Wilson still remembers when police showed up on her doorstep in the middle of an August night in 2022 to tell her something had happened to her granddaughter.

“Oh my god, they killed my baby,” she remembered saying.

Her 9-year-old granddaughter HardiQuinn Hill had been found dead, emaciated and beaten. Her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend will spend the rest of their lives in prison as a result.

The 69-year-old woman was one of a handful of people who called the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services over her concerns for HardiQuinn’s safety, but she has still never gotten an explanation of the state’s behavior in the case.

For Eddie Williams, father of deceased 3-year-old A’Lona Williams, the department failed to inform him that his estranged wife and her boyfriend were even being investigated for abusing the girl. Williams learned about several of the abuse allegations made prior to his 3-year-old granddaughter’s death from a TPR reporter, years after her death.

“How? It wasn’t a freak accident, something fell from the Empire State Building. It wasn’t adding up to me, and I just couldn’t understand that,” he said.

But answers are not forthcoming from the department, who he said never reached out to explain itself, nor sent him any information about the death.

When the department was approached about why it no longer released evaluations of its failures in specific cases, a representative was matter-of-fact about it: they changed their policy, and they don’t have to.

“The Child Fatality Reviews we did years ago were not required and were discontinued,” said Marissa Gonzales, DFPS media relations director.

Instead of these fatality reviews — audits that include analysis of department actions and inactions in its investigations and how it can improve — the department must release a fatality report about abuse and neglect deaths. These short reports include basic details about the child, about previous investigations into the family and some of the services the department provided, along with a narrative.

The more robust fatality review audits have now been deemed confidential, as TPR discovered when it tried to request them last summer.

But even documents DFPS makes public are only provided upon request — and are often plagued by agency foot-dragging.

When TPR submitted its request for five years’ worth of public Child Fatality Release reports — or roughly 1,000 reports that had already been created — the state delayed production three times for various and at times vague reasons, noting records may be kept in many different places.

Ultimately it took a letter from TPR’s lawyers at the SMU Dedman School of Law First Amendment Clinic to obtain the fatality documents six months later. The Texas Public Information Act (TPIA) requires the department to release them in 10 days.

There are numerous reasons why the results of abuse and neglect investigations are made opaque to the public. These administrative investigations offer limited due process to families.

Abuse and neglect determinations are based on “a preponderance of the evidence,” meaning it was more likely than not that something did or did not occur. The federal government mandates privacy in abuse and neglect investigations also as part of federal law to access federal dollars.

“Which is why it’s sort of opaque and hard to penetrate and understand what’s actually going on in individual cases,” said Frank Vandervort, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law working in child protection.

But when a child dies, it isn’t clear privacy is needed. Federal guidance on the issue is slim and states often use that to their advantage.

“In my experience, the agency uses these confidentiality rules basically to hide poor practice and sort of protect itself from criticism and that kind of thing,” he said.

Vandervort argues the public and state legislators have a right to this information. They need to understand how those states use public dollars to investigate child welfare cases, especially when the abuse or neglect results in a death.

The TPIA, for all its benefits to the public, gives wide latitude to DFPS when it comes to child abuse and neglect investigations — exempting much of these records from disclosure even if a fatality occurs. In fact, the state fatality report document is the only one that the TPIA seems to allow to be made public. Law enforcement in the state often cite the exemption — Family Code section 261.201(a) — when denying requestors documents around a family where a fatality took place.

“We need to change it. We need to close it,” Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, said of the loophole. “We need to close it.”

Any changes to the law and the department’s processes would require legislative action.

The clearest comparison of the public documents gap for child abuse and neglect-related investigations in public records law fights is that of the “Dead Suspects’ Loophole.”

This loophole allowed police to withhold records when a suspect died in custody because the suspect had never been convicted. It misused language attempting to give people additional privacy to protect police from scrutiny. The law was changed to improve access to records in 2023.

But the chief difference between that legislative fight and any possible one over abuse and neglect exemptions is the possibility of family testimony. Each legislative session, when public information advocates like Prather went to committees to argue the merits of eliminating the Dead Suspects Loophole, they had a deep slate of family members demanding action in order to find out what happened to their loved one and how the state behaved. That may not be the case with abuse and neglect.

More than 90% of abuse and neglect fatality cases involve a family member as the perpetrator, often a parent or a parent’s significant other.

“If it is a family member that is the perpetrator, there is no voice for that child,” Prather said. “There’s no one that’s going to come forward to tell those stories, and then that means there really is a far smaller likelihood that there will be any change made.”

Incomplete and at times misleading public information

Information presented to the public from DFPS through its fatality reports is often incomplete, incomprehensible and, at times, incorrect.

When 3-year-old Ronni Salazar died, the public fatality report stated the girl and six of her siblings had been removed from their mother, Kassandra Lopez. But it doesn’t appear any removal proceedings occurred. Ronni and her brother had been “dumped” with strangers her mother met at a restaurant, according to a state investigator.

In fact, a DFPS investigator who requested a removal for the girl was rebuffed by the Bexar County District Attorney’s office. Salazar later died from blunt force trauma while being cared for by these strangers.

When 7-month-old Julian Macias passed away from methamphetamine exposure in Bexar County, DFPS’s fatality report made no mention of his mother’s extensive history with the department.

According to Bexar County Children’s Court documents obtained by TPR, Macias’ mother had been an alleged perpetrator of abuse and neglect no less than six times in a DFPS investigation.

She was accused of negligent supervision over her ongoing use of drugs many times in prior years. Three of Julian’s siblings were removed in 2013. Another was removed in 2017 for allegations around drugs and later returned.

The documents obtained by TPR, which refer to Julian as J.B., also list a long criminal history for his mother, who was arrested for smuggling persons in 2021 and possession of a controlled substance in April of 2022. Julian was born with drugs in his system, said the documents.

Despite these many interactions with DFPS, a reader of the official fatality report would think there was no history, that the death was unforeseeable, and that the state could not have provided services or oversight to prevent it.

“That is a huge problem from a societal perspective,” said Prather of the lack of context about Julian’s mother. ”The other problem is if the government agency that’s tasked with investigating these situations is not correctly following up on this history of problems of abuse and neglect. That too needs to be made public so that changes can be made to fix that problem.”

In addition to the many misspelled names throughout the 1,200 fatality reports given to TPR by the department, the state made other errors as well, at times misstating where children reside when they died.

Wyatt Pickett was listed as living in Calhoun County when he died from blunt force trauma. The two-year old actually lived in Victoria County before moving with his father to Matagorda County, where he perished.

The state also sometimes fails to give the scope of the interventions it employs to keep children safe. TPR found — based on the state’s reports — that more than two dozen children died while on Safety Plans, which are voluntary agreements signed by DFPS and parents that dictate how a family will keep a child safe between 2018 and 2023. DFPS said it found the number was instead 19.

The discrepancy between these numbers may stem from the gaps in what DFPS provides to the public.

TPR’s analysis counted any child who was listed as “Safe with a plan” in the current or previous investigation if the investigation was not explicitly closed or the child’s safety reassessed. TPR also counted those that referenced a broken safety plan in a fatality investigation narrative and one where multiple elements of a safety plan were described as in place at the time of death.

The cost of analysis

Prohibitively high costs due to inadequate computer systems and poor record keeping hinder other public records requests with the state.

DFPS gets voluminous requests for data that it produces, and the department publishes large stores of data through reports as well as its databook. It also provides many data points to the federal government, while other states do not.

But in the course of reporting this series, TPR’s requests have been met with cost estimates ranging from several hundred dollars to more than $200,000, largely due to labor costs that imply shortcomings in DFPS’ managed IT system called Information Management Protecting Adults and Children in Texas, or IMPACT.

IMPACT has been criticized widely for its inability to work with other systems, was called out by a federal judge over its faults and was called “outdated” by state auditors a decade ago. The state spent more than $28 million attempting to update it in 2014.

TPR made several requests to provide a better and more detailed analysis of the state’s plummeting removal rates and the impacts of 2021’s House Bill 567, one of the most substantial legislative reforms in a decade to state power within the homes of those accused of abuse and neglect.

The law — aimed at lowering unnecessary removals — made all removals more difficult, according to current and former DFPS investigators.

The state has yet to analyze the impact of the law.

TPR’s requests aimed at evaluating its impact were met with stunning costs.

DFPS sent an estimate of at least $225,000 for one TPR request that included:

• The total number of requests [for removal] that were denied for the past five years.

• The total number of children included in removal requests who subsequently died in the past five years.

• The names of the children who died after a removal request was denied in the past five years.

• The total number of removals requested to county district attorneys for the same period.

The state said the data would take 12,500 employee hours to produce, requiring individual reviews of 50,000 cases from the past five years. That is roughly 18 months of one person’s work, if they never slept.

“That sounds highly suspicious. It sounds like there’s likely a spreadsheet somewhere where at least some of that information is included,” Prather said.

When the request was amended and reduced to just over 1,000 cases, the cost still exceeded $4,600. The data proved too costly and had been too narrowed to provide comprehensive results.

In another attempt to provide the public with a more detailed and nuanced view of the state’s changes to the law, TPR requested two years’ worth of redacted emergency removal affidavits — documents filed by attorneys to remove a child from a home.

TPR requested the documents because an October 2022 survey of child welfare judges showed two-thirds of judges believed abuse and neglect cases were growing “more severe” before they reached a courtroom after the law changed.

After months of review, the state presented TPR with a cost estimate of more than $30,000.

Unfortunately for the public, that proved too high a cost.

This series was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.

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