The death of 17-month-old Vyctorya Sandoval on April 24-–very possibly at the hands of one or both of her parents—is made even more chilling when one understands that the little girl was returned to her parents in the fall of 2010 despite what appears to a string of red flags so blatant it is very difficult to understand how this decision could have been made by anyone who gave even half a damn..
LA Times reporter Garrett Therolf reports:
Healing bruises covered her body, according to a court document that children’s services officials filed. A rib was fractured. Blood tests suggested she died thirsty and hungry. For six hours, doctors tried to save her after she was rushed to an emergency room.
Therolf has acquired a letter from a woman named Linda Kontis, who is the co-founder of a foster family agency that contracted with LA County to provide care to the girl. Kontis had evidently written the letter to Judge Michael Nash, the presiding judge in Los Angeles Juvenile Court, expressing her “grave concern” about Tory Sandoval being returned home.
The implication in the letter and in Therolf’s story is that the Department of Children and Family Services now has a such a blindly strong prejudice toward keeping families together that it is endangering children’s lives—in some cases with deadly results.
However the details in the letter, if accurate, paint a picture more of reckless incompetence. One sees a bunch of adults who should have been safeguarding the well being of the pre-verbal toddler in their charge, who instead blithely sent her back to two obviously unstable parents with a documented history of abusive behavior, who had 8 other children removed from their care, and who had shown little or no evidence of an ability or willingness to change. Even worse, Tory was returned to her emotionally ill-equipped parents “with no post reunification oversight, nor was Family Reunification suggested.” Both are omissions that seem staggeringly irresponsible. (Family Reunification is the system of services that has been shown to help formerly troubled families stabilize.)
What causes such tragic missteps? If there is one thing we owe Vyctorya Sandoval, and the other children who have died when DCFS was supposedly monitoring their safety, is a rigorous and accurate systemic postmortem.
Of course, the accuracy of such an analysis is only as good as the information that underlies it and, with DCFS, because minor children are involved, much of that information is hidden. This means that an historically dysfunctional foster care system is still largely left to police itself.
That’s not good enough any more. Family courts must be opened to the public and press.
In fact, to me some of the saddest—and most telling— lines in Therolf’s story about Vyctorya Sandoval were the following:
[Tory Sandoval’s] hearing was closed to the public and the transcript is sealed, as is customary in juvenile cases. State legislation that would open such hearings has been placed on hold until next year, partly because of opposition from the union representing many county social workers.
CATCHING UP FOR THE WEEKEND….DON’T MISS FRANK STOLTZE’S STORY ON GERONIMO PRATT AND COINTELPRO
Here’s how it opens:
Geronimo Pratt, the former head of the of the Black Panthers’ Southland chapter, died Thursday. He was 63. Most people who knew Pratt’s name recall that he was the target of an FBI program during the early 1970s that landed him in prison for more than a quarter-century for a crime he did not commit.
The program was dubbed COINTELPRO — an acronym for an FBI counter intelligence program that secretly monitored African Americans, Latinos, socialists and any group with a remotely left-of-center political ideology in the 1960s and 1970s.
The program also often sought to “neutralize” those groups, in the words of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who also said he sometimes coordinated his activities with local law enforcement agencies like the LAPD and L.A. County District Attorneys office.
Stoltze also tells us that Johnny Cochran, who was Pratt’s court appointed attorney, said that the case was “…the most important case of my life and the day that Geronimo Pratt was released from custody was the most important and satisfying victory of my whole life.”
AND, AS GRADUATIONS TAKE PLACE ACROSS THE COUNTRY, AN UPDATE ON TWO ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT STUDENTS 5 YEARS LATER
Daniela Gerson has this interesting story for New York public radio about two illegal immigrant students she reported on five years ago when they graduated from college. Now, a half decade later, she checks in on them to see how they’ve fared.
What she found may surprise you.
Devastating story re the death of Vyctorya Sandoval. Eight siblings were previously removed from the home yet DCFS believed reunification was possible in an unfit home environment. The social worker should be fired.
This is another example of open courts to the public and press. Once again, the powerful social workers union lobbied the legislature to keep the records and courts closed.
How many more child deaths will it take before DCFS puts children first?
Not to say the union has no power or culpability here, but the main reason Feuer’s bill probably isn’t going to pass is because he couldn’t come to an agreement with California Youth Connection. The former foster youth that make up the CYC are against the bill because they are concerned about the privacy of foster youth. I happen to think they have this wrong, but it’s not an easy good guys v. bad guys thing.
FYI, I have heard this directly from Feuer, among others who are more peripherally involved.
It breaks one’s heart to see the picture of that precious little girl and to know that she was thrown to the wolves due to the gutless bastards in DCFS responsible for her ugly death. I have talked to people in both the DCFS and Probation Dept and in fact some are family members of mine. Although there are some fine caring people who work there, my understanding is that there is a culture of ass-kissers and clowns that reside there, whose main interest is the old PYOA bureaucratic morality, and whose driving force is to not make waves, don’t stick your neck out, career interests before clients, and whose major motivation is the Lexus or Beemer car payment and the mortgage on the house in Corona, little kids lives be damned.
What a shameful gutless existence!