Shirley Rhodus, the child protective services administrator for El Paso County, says that in general, the decision to investigate is a judgment call. Social workers must weigh a child's safety against the intrusiveness of the government intervening in a family's life. "There's no formula that says 'If this, then that,'" she says. "There's no way we can add all these things up and know that it results in a [particular] response."
She also says that there's often no way to predict when a child's situation will turn fatal. "Hindsight is really 20/20," she says. "Cases that we describe as generalized neglect or not a good home life, we might get one hundred of those and only one will result in a child being injured or dying."
Mark Manger
Shari Shink of the Rocky Mountain Children's Law Center.
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In August 2009, one month before her thirteenth birthday, Ashaquae was found bleeding on a urine-soaked mattress in the small bedroom she shared with her developmentally delayed aunt. Her father and stepmother waited six hours before seeking medical attention because they were worried they'd get in trouble for locking Ashaquae in her room, where she'd gone to sleep the night before with a bloody nose. The coroner found that she'd choked to death.
The state Department of Human Services, which issues fatality reports on every child who dies after having been involved in the child-welfare system, found that El Paso County erred several times in handling Ashaquae's case. The department criticized the county for not responding quickly enough to reports of abuse over the years and not following up in instances where Ashaquae's parents were uncooperative. It also questioned why referrals in 2006 and 2007 were screened out when they reported a similar pattern of abuse and why a subsequent report alleging the same pattern was not reassigned when the original caseworker left the agency.
The state required El Paso County to take several corrective actions. It mandated that supervisors go over certain rules with their caseworkers and meet monthly with them to review their entire caseload, a practice Rhodus says most supervisors were already doing. The county also implemented reforms on its own, she says, including adopting a group triage model to review child-abuse referrals and hiring two field investigators to gather background documents on individual cases so caseworkers are free to interview children and parents.
The Colorado Springs police have an open investigation into Ashaquae's death, says spokesman Sergeant Steve Noblitt. But Rhodus argues that even if Colorado switched to a state-run child-welfare system, it wouldn't prevent child deaths like Ashaquae's — a stance the El Paso County commissioners officially endorsed with a vote earlier this month. "We really believe that at a local level, we are more responsive to our community," Rhodus says. "It just seems like there will be more layers of bureaucracy in a statewide system."
Layers that some say could catch kids who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
