Death Prompts Changes in Social Services

Becoming a foster parent is a long and involved process that provides a service our society desperately needs in this day and age of increased state involvement in the care of children. The number of children in foster care and other sponsored care facilities increases exponentially each year as more children are removed from homes where abuse and neglect have been found. The process to become a foster parent in the state of Connecticut requires all families to go through a process that includes hours of training, background checks, and government fingerprinting. But what happens when an employee of the Department of Children and Families decides to become a foster parent? At times the answer to that question is death.

Earlier this year 7-month-old Michael Brown Jr. was placed into foster care in Hartford, Connecticut. After living with foster parent Suzanne Listro for only a week, baby Michael was transported by Life Star helicopter to Hartford Hospital where he was pronounced dead. Listro, a child services consultant who had been working for DCF since 1993, had already adopted a 3-year-old boy and decided to become a foster parent. While Listro had gone through the same background checks as would a typical potential foster parent, the investigation into Brown's death found that Listro had been investigated twice previously on reports of abusing her own adopted son. Neither of these reports were substantiated so neither were noted in her file and her foster care license was approved.

On May 19, 2007 Listro says she was playing with the baby and her 3-year-old in her bedroom when she got up to shut off the TV. It was then she says, that she heard a thump and turned to see that Michael had rolled off the bed and onto the floor. Listro claims that the baby stopped crying and went limp, and though she tried to resuscitate the infant, the 911 transcript lists the child as unresponsive and Michael was pronounced dead at the hospital. The state's Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver II listed the death as a homicide, stating that the blunt force trauma which caused Michael's death was inconsistent with Listro's account of the events. Listro was charged with manslaughter (defined as the unlawful killing of one person by another without advanced planning) and was held in lieu of a $1 million bail. She was later released on bond after she plead not guilty to the manslaughter charge and the added charge of risk of injury to a child. Suzanne Listro was fired from DCF along with the investigator who originally looked into the 2006 and 2007 abuse allegations.

It seems that suggestions for reform at the Connecticut Department of Family and Children have been swirling through the agency since 1995 when three children in state care died in a space of a month due to department negligence. Baby Emily Hernandez was one of the three children who died in 1995 after being fatally abused by her family. Those three cases led to the suggestion of reform but it seems little changed and in 1997 DCF found itself investigating the death of Raegan McBride who had been in the care of a state licensed foster parent who was later charged with murder. Not long after, another child, Rayquan Rogers was beaten to death by his mother's boyfriend, another case where DCF involvement failed to prevent a child's death.

In 1998, Governor John G. Rowland fired a supervisor and transferred five managers within the agency after a 6-year-old New Haven boy, David Ryan Keeley died while in the custody of his aunt and uncle. In a police report that was faxed to DCF, the child had told police that "sometimes when I'm bad, Auntie throws me to the ground and they hit me hard". Even after receiving a copy of this report, DCF declined to take action. The child's bruised and battered body was finally removed from the home and it was found that the state had received multiple complaints of abuse that the agency did not feel warranted removal.

Governor Rowland stated that DCF ignored multiple warning signs and did not protect Ryan Keeley. The agency didn't intervene and failed to ask the right questions that could have possibly prevented the child's death. Rowland announced numerous administrative changes that included more thorough background checks on potential guardians and that he would aid in speeding up other improvements that DCF had been planning for some time.

Unfortunately, according to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says that many of the suggested reforms have been either disregarded or rejected. He feels that DCF has simply ignored the need to implement these reforms and is has led to these long-standing problems that have resulted in the deaths of multiple children. Chronic mismanagement has been cited quite often and lawmakers have called for a change in leadership within the agency.

After Listro was arraigned, Michael Brown Jr.'s father, Michael Brown Sr., hired a lawyer to attempt to answer the many questions that arose after his son's death. Brown Sr. claims that his son was taken into custody while under the care of a babysitter, not his parents. An investigation performed by DCF supposedly found Brown and the child's mother, Angelica Burgos, to be fit parents, though DCF declined to substantiate that statement. Brown hopes that by hiring a lawyer he can find out not only why his son was placed into custody to begin with and then how it happened that he was placed with a murderer. He would also like to know why he and Burgos weren't informed of Listro's history of complaints, subsequent arrest, or the pending shakeups at DCF. Instead they had to learn the details from the news media, another instance of the agency's disregard for the entire situation.

In 2005 alone, child protective agencies across the nation investigated 3.6 million cases of reported child abuse complaints which resulted in 899,000 substantiated cases of abuse. In the state of Connecticut at one time there were 28 employees licensed as foster parents and 15 more going through the process in a department comprised of 3,400 workers. Have any of the reforms suggested by DCF Commissioner Susan I. Hamilton after Michael Brown Jr.'s death come into being? How can an agency that was created to protect the welfare of children claim that they are doing their job when one of their own was responsible for the death of a child through abuse? It will remain to be seen if lawmakers can push the agency to make the appropriate reforms but until the communication and support within the agency improves, it seems that the mission of protecting the state's children may not be adequately met.