Illinois Paper: Dozens of Infants Died Due to Errors

By: More than four dozen Illinois children died over a seven-year span after state child-welfare workers made mistakes or ignored their own rules, according to a four-month investigation by the Belleville News-Democrat.

The deaths of 53 children from September 1998 to January 2005 involved errors by state caseworkers, investigators, supervisors or contracted private workers - and their failure to properly gauge danger to the children, the newspaper said in a report published Sunday.

The newspaper said the deaths involved children being beaten, burned, smothered, shaken and starved.

In its investigation, the paper reviewed child death investigations, which are published one to three years later in inspector general's annual reports. They detail department worker errors but do not contain the names of victims, caseworkers or references to where and when a death occurred.

The News-Democrat compared these anonymous child death reports to news accounts, police and coroner's reports and other documents and, as a result, identified 41 of the 53 children who died and linked errors to actual cases.

In one case, the paper said, a child abuse investigator let a 4-month-old boy's mother smoke crack cocaine as long as she agreed to first drop the baby off next door, calling it a "child safety plan" that let the baby stay with the mother.

Employees with the Department of Children and Family Services and private agencies repeatedly got suspected abusers' names wrong when making criminal background checks, resulting in erroneous "clean" reports, the newspaper said.

The department was reviewing its investigations policy to improve oversight and accountability, spokesman Kendall Marlowe said Sunday. He said the agency investigated 510,000 child welfare cases between 1998 and 2005.

"No error that results in harm to a child is ever acceptable," he said. "And the department continually works to improve its ability to protect children in Illinois."

In the past four years, the department has also worked to lower the number of investigations each case worker must handle and has revised its training policy, he said.

DCFS records are not open to the public, preventing scrutiny that could hold the department more accountable and reduce errors, said Patrick Murphy, a Cook County domestic court judge. State child-protection workers who commit serious errors are sometimes disciplined, transferred or counseled, but seldom suspended and almost never fired, the newspaper said.

"In the private sector, if someone makes an egregious error, you could probably discharge them. In systems where you have a Civil Service setting and personnel rules ... you can't do that," said former DCFS director Jess McDonald.