The brutal death of a child the state was supposed to protect
When active state supervision of Rashid Bryant ended about two months before his death, abuse at the hands of his parents started again
Christopher Bryant and Jabora Deris used black garbage bags, tinfoil, cardboard boxes and even a small mattress to shield the windows of their Opalocka home from the sunlight — and the unwelcome eyes of neighbors.
Records from police, the Medical Examiner’s Office and state child welfare authorities give a pretty good indication why: According to those records, their 22-month-old son, Rashid, was being savagely beaten, perhaps over a period of months, in a filthy, fetid home. And his older siblings were allegedly ordered to join in the abuse.
Rashid’s slender, 28pound body yielded to the blows on Nov. 6, 2020. The Medical Examiner’s Office determined he died of “acute and chronic” abuse. A child welfare agency document referenced 12 separate fractures.
Deaths of innocent children are all too common in Florida, even in homes like that of Rashid Bryant, who had been under the active supervision of the state Department of Children and Families for all but the last two months of his life.
Deris and Bryant aren’t the only ones who hid from the sunshine in the arc of Rashid’s brief existence. In recent years, DCF has routinely withheld details of child deaths by saying they have yet to make a determination whether the child died as the result of neglect or abuse. No determination of abuse means no duty to disclose.
Rashid’s death provides the latest example. But in this case, DCF went to new extremes, fighting the Miami Herald and other news outlets for more than a year in court to keep the facts under wraps — until a judge this month rebuked the agency, saying it was an obvious case of deadly abuse and
DCF knew it.
Release the records — now — Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Barbara Areces ordered.
What follows is a story of cruelty and lax bureaucratic oversight that DCF fought for more than a year to keep hidden.
HAVING FLASHBACKS
When the records finally started to emerge, they included a report to DCF’s child abuse hotline — the 26th involving the family, received 10 months after Rashid died — with perhaps the most chilling allegation: One of Rashid’s brothers disclosed that the toddler’s older siblings, too, had been forced to beat their little brother.
The report said Rashid’s brother was “having flashbacks of the events leading to Rashid’s death.”
“Rashid was crying all the time, and the father would always beat him,” the report said. “The children were being told to hit Rashid. [The boy] did not know what to do because he would get hit otherwise.”
“I would always tell them, something bad was going to happen,” the brother said in the report of his parents.
Bryant, 36, and Deris, 32, were charged with child neglect with great bodily harm after Rashid’s death. The charges have since been elevated to manslaughter and aggravated child abuse.
Rashid’s story — like those of many children whose journeys end at the county morgue — unfolds in a series of official documents. The most voluminous, and telling, of the records belong to DCF, a chronically troubled agency with a history of failing the children it was created to protect.
On March 1, Judge Areces
ordered DCF to hand over its records to the Miami Herald and other news organizations that
had joined a Herald lawsuit seeking to enforce the state’s public records law.
Seeking to promote transparency, lawmakers required DCF to release all its records when it is determined that parental abuse or neglect resulted in death. In Rashid’s case, DCF administrators refused, insisting for more than a year that they were still investigating what caused Rashid to die. Areces, who reviewed DCF’s records, ruled that was untrue, and that DCF had internally confirmed in writing less than a week after Rashid’s death that the death stemmed from abuse.
“The records should have been released a long time ago,” she said, following a nearly four-hour hearing.
The records raise serious questions about how and why Florida child welfare administrators, and a different judge, Michelle Alvarez Barakat, left what was then eight young children in the home of a mother and a father who had demonstrated little ability to safely parent, showed contempt toward the child welfare workers seeking to help them and protect their kids — and then walked away, leaving the family to fend for itself.
One possible answer may lie in a section of the records DCF still has not released: They show agency administrators looked into a discrepancy between photos of Rashid entered into an internal casework system and the GPS tracking stamps embedded with the pictures. The discrepancy raises the possibility that a caseworker did not visit the family when she said she did.
On one occasion, an agency email says, the family’s caseworker cut and pasted notes from a prior home visit to document the results of a later visit.
The caseworker was placed on an involuntary leave of absence, without pay, a week after Rashid died, “pending [the] outcome of [a] DCF investigation.” She was fired on Dec. 2, 2020. Her termination papers said only that “a recent review of [her] files resulted in findings of inadequate case oversight.”
Only five months earlier, the caseworker had been praised in an employee review for working “to get the Deris kids reunified with their parents,” according to the worker’s personnel file, obtained by the Herald from Children’s Home Society, the private child welfare agency that employed the worker.
DCF has yet to provide the Herald any records pertaining to its investigation into the caseworker’s actions, which the Herald requested nearly two weeks ago.
Rashid would not be the first child who suffered
amid allegations that a caseworker falsified records to document home visits that did not take place. In a notorious case, Rilya Wilson, a Miami foster child, vanished in December 2000 — she has long been presumed to be deceased — even as her caseworker recorded nonexistent visits to the home of Rilya’s caregiver.
In 2013, a Miami judge sentenced the caregiver, Geralyn Graham, to 55 years imprisonment on kidnapping and child abuse convictions. Jurors were deadlocked on a separate first-degree murder charge, and neither Rilya — who was 4 when she disappeared — nor her remains were ever found.
Like their substantial history with DCF, both Deris and Bryant had lengthy arrest records, though neither parent had ever gone to prison. Florida Department of Law Enforcement records show Deris had been arrested 26 times prior to Rashid’s death, including several battery charges, aggravated battery, burglary, car theft, armed robbery, kidnapping, armed carjacking and assault with a deadly weapon.
Bryant’s history is less extensive. He had been arrested 14 times, including charges of fraud, dealing in stolen property, cocaine possession, robbery, domestic violence, grand theft, burglary and child abuse.
Jabora Deris’ DCF history began in June 2004, when she tested positive for marijuana at the birth of her second child. Among school-age children, the National Institutes of Health reported, marijuana use during pregnancy is linked to gaps in problem-solving skills, memory loss and a decreased attention span.
A second report, in December 2006, alleged that Deris’ home was “filthy,” and that a relative who sometimes watched the children was smoking crack. In 2010, Deris tested positive for marijuana again at the birth of her third child.
The next year, DCF received a report that two small children were playing outside with no supervision.
For the third time, in 2012, Deris tested positive for marijuana at the birth of a child, her fourth. As had happened repeatedly in the past, the family was referred to a private agency for services.
Two reports were filed with DCF’s hotline in
April 2013: an allegation that Bryant punched Deris in the stomach while she was pregnant, and a report that he was running away from police while holding his small son, and then “threw” the child into his car. DCF asked a judge to order the couple to accept DCF supervision; then, three months later, Deris tested positive again for marijuana at the birth of her fifth child, who also had marijuana in her body.
In February 2015, DCF was told Bryant had punched his oldest son and then thrown him into a fence. The following
July, DCF was told Bryant was smoking marijuana while driving the same son to school. Another report, the next month, alleged Deris, the children’s aunt and the oldest son beat up a neighbor. The two adults were arrested.
ROACHES, AND NO WATER
In yet another report that year, DCF was told “there was no water in the home, the home had roaches everywhere, the children were not going to school, nor bathing nor eating. The mother and father smoke marijuana with crack, and they were selling the food stamps,” the report added.
The year 2016 produced three more hotline complaints. March: The children still weren’t going to school. And when police checked on their welfare, the officer found the home “uninhabitable for children. The home smelled of feces, and the children were sleeping on the floor.” July: The kids had “a contagious skin infection that was open, red and raw.” November: The children were not being fed, and “they looked skinny with their eyes sunken in.”
The November report added the following allegation: The children
“were observed eating from the ground and drinking from the neighbor’s outside pipes and ... they were always home alone.” The 2016 reports ended with DCF taking no actions to aid or protect the children.
Two years later, in 2018, DCF received more than a half-dozen calls about Deris and Bryant’s children, resulting in two investigations. An August 2018 report alleged the children — there were now eight of them — were “always” left alone with a 15-year-old in charge. The 2-year-old was “outside alone and naked.” DCF offered no services.
Six hotline reports were received in October and November that year. They alleged that Deris was smoking marijuana with her two oldest children, that most of the kids were not in school, that the home smelled bad and had no running water, that the kids were “hungry and losing weight.” One report said Bryant and Deris “were found living in a car” but they denied that, insisting the family was residing in motels. They could provide no documentation to substantiate that, however.
During the last two weeks of November 2018, all eight of Bryant and Deris’ children were taken into state care. Rashid, their ninth, was born the next month, on Dec. 13. Two days later, DCF sheltered him, as well.
The court petition seeking custody of Rashid was a recitation of the allegations forwarded a month earlier to justify the removal of his siblings. It appears the family had been evicted from their home — part of a pattern that had repeated itself, records show — and Deris had been ordered to stay away from the next-door neighbor.
DCF’s investigation of the 2018 reports revealed a home in chaos: The family’s water service had been shut off. Deris said she hadn’t paid rent in two months. Bryant was in jail.
Bryant’s own mother told an investigator “that the parents are on drugs and are not taking care of the children,” adding that the older kids weren’t attending school.
When his grandmother encouraged him to speak, a 6-year-old reported that his mother “has no money and no food. ... He stated that his mother uses drugs. ... His mother gives him whoopings with her hands. His mother hits him in the stomach and legs.”
As the investigation was underway, Deris was arrested by the Miami Police Department on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, charges that were later dropped.
And although Deris acknowledged she used marijuana, “she adamantly denied that she smoked in front of her kids.”
Bryant and Deris blamed their predicament on their neighbors, who, Deris said, would “sit out all day and harass them.”
When interviewed by an investigator, a neighbor — who was drinking vodka at
the time — acknowledged not getting along with the couple, saying the “family terrorizes the neighborhood” and steals their water.
Deris and Bryant agreed to perform a series of tasks in an effort to regain custody of their children, including individual and family therapy and parenting classes. The couple also agreed to find jobs and provide “stable housing” for their kids.
The plan relied heavily on the vigilance of the children’s paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, who were to visit the home regularly, look for signs of drug abuse and child neglect, and report their suspicions to either the case manager or police.
Rashid was placed in a Florida City foster home, while seven siblings went to live with their paternal grandmother. For the next 14 months, Deris and Bryant made half-hearted attempts to cooperate with caseworkers and service providers, whose job was to improve their parenting skills enough to return their children safely.
The judge’s order made contingency plans for the possibility that one or both parents became “aggressive or inappropriate” during supervised visits with their children: “Visitation specialist will end the visit. The children will be removed from the visitation room and the [parent] will be escorted out of the building.”
RECORD OF A SHORT LIFE
Most of Rashid’s life, and that of his parents, was documented by caseworkers, who made monthly visits with him and his siblings. Included in the notations:
Dec. 18, 2018: “Parents have refused to cooperate with the department.”
Jan. 22, 2019: Rashid’s parents return him from visits with clothes, but some “appear to be girls’ like clothing.”
March 14, 2019: Deris declined to visit with her children. “She was upset the judge denied reunification.”
March 19, 2019: “The parents called the paternal grandmother yelling and screaming, and parents are disrespectful and confrontational.” The grandmother “is stressed, has no help [and] has high blood pressure.”
April 12, 2019: The family’s case manager tells Deris that she and Bryant would “need to demonstrate a change and meet the conditions” of their plans before getting their children back, and the reunification would occur incrementally. “Mother stated that she would have to file a lawsuit if that were the case.”
June 11, 2019: Bryant misses an appointment for a mental health assessmen, and offers no reason. “Case manager informed the parents that in order to be in compliance they have to start attending their sessions regularly.”
July 10, 2019: “Mr. Bryant hopes that this process will soon be over so that he and his family could move on from this bad dream.”
Aug. 13, 2019: “Mother failed to attend multiple sessions with the therapist. Several attempts were made to contact her with no response.”
Sept. 23, 2019: The family had been evicted again and was living at the Clarion Inn near the airport.
Oct. 6, 2019: Bryant had gotten into a fight with another parent at the group home where his oldest son was living.
Deris was not attending her drug treatment program or individual therapy. “The parents were also unemployed and didn’t have stable housing.”
Oct. 12, 2019: “The mother has been a noshow with her case plan since Sept. 13, 2019. ...
The parents do not have stable housing.”
Oct. 25, 2019: At a hearing before Barakat, the judge learns the parents have moved without telling anyone, and Deris still isn’t making progress on her case plan. DCF’s lawyer “proposed findings of non-compliance to both parents.” A notation adds: “The judge stated that a lack of progress is not positive.”
Dec. 30, 2019: “Case manager advised Ms.
Deris that this would be the third time that she was referred for services [and told her] that she should try to partake in her case plan this time as the agency would like to continue with the goal of reunification.”
By the beginning of 2020, Deris and Bryant were in “partial compliance” with the agreements they signed in order to regain custody of their children. Bryant was ordered to participate in individual therapy, a report said. A therapist made eight attempts to “engage” with Bryant between Dec. 2, 2019, and Jan. 23, 2020. When that failed, Barakat “struck” therapy from the father’s case plan.
The couple wanted their children back. And despite their inability to complete their plans, child welfare administrators supported a staggered reunification, starting only with the oldest son, then 14.
On Feb. 28, 2020, Barakat agreed with the idea of reunifying the family — and quickly. Neither the tape nor a transcript of that proceeding is available, though there are summaries, gleaned by DCF administrators from casework and legal notations.
Bryant’s attorney insisted the children had been removed because the family was homeless — a contention at odds with the laundry list of allegations then leveled against Bryant and Deris. The lawyer noted that the family once again had a place to live, and “the kids want to be with the parents.”
A DCF review of the casework leading up to Rashid’s death said that, while both Deris and Bryant completed their parenting classes and mental health evaluations, they “either sporadically participated in service provision or did not participate in the services at all.” Requirements for return of the children “had, in fact, not been met.”
Children’s Home Society, the DCF subcontractor, supported a staggered reunification anyway, beginning only with the couple’s oldest son. Judge Barakat went one step further: She ordered that Rashid and three siblings be returned immediately, and the four remaining children two months later.
Paraphrasing the judge, a case note says: “Concerning to break up kids that have been together; best interest is for kids to be with their parents.
“Judge tells the parents that they cannot go back to their old habits,” the note adds.
CHILDREN NOS. 10, 11
DCF’s review of Rashid’s death reveals that the reunifications occurred during a “critical juncture in the family’s dynamics.” Deris was pregnant with her 10th child, though she “denied being pregnant both to the case manager as well as in open court.” (She gave birth to an 11th child during her time in jail, awaiting trial in the death of her ninth, Rashid.) The 10th child, born March 20, 2020, was “deemed to be safe in the home” and joined her siblings there, including Rashid, who was returned to his parents on Feb. 28.
Like the judge earlier, the family’s caseworker wagged her finger at the parents as encouragement to do better. She had a “strong conversation” with Deris about her dishonesty,” telling the mother “how important and critical it is for her to be truthful and straightforward,” a DCF chronology says.
Records of the next — the last — nine months of Rashid’s life suggest honesty was among the least of the family’s problems.
The family’s caseworker continued to report visits to the Bryant and Deris home. Though the parents acknowledged being “overwhelmed” by a house with nine children — the eldest child, a girl, was by then living elsewhere — the notations describe a family adjusting to a routine. The home “was observed to be clean and tidy,” an April 17, 2020, note said. One child had just finished mowing the lawn. Rashid was walking by then.
In a June 6, 2020, notation, the family’s caseworker said Deris understood she had to change her lifestyle, permanently, and that the family’s therapists and other providers helped greatly. “She reports that looking at her children she feels that she can never go back to mistreating them,” the note said.
On Oct. 23, 2020, with all child welfare authorities in agreement, Barakat terminated supervision for the couple’s remaining four children. All legal matters were closed; the caseworker ceased all visits to the home. As a practical matter, the Deris and Bryant family was on its own.
“Judge congratulates the parents on their amazing work,” the DCF file recounted.
Closing out the family’s second dependency case left nine children in what had long been an unstable home with zero oversight.
Photos provided by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s
Office following Rashid’s death offer a visual clue to what followed.
Holes and pockmarks scarred the walls. Garbage littered the floors. Mold bloomed on a shower and bathtub. Clothes and possessions were stored in garbage bags. A garbage bag functioned as a door. Clothes were strewn everywhere: on the floor, thrown in the closets, on tables and countertops. Some of the mattresses didn’t have sheets. The ceiling appeared to be leaking.
Though there were two children in the house younger than 2, the home clearly was not babyproofed, and the pictures do not include a crib.
What appeared to be blood or human waste stained a blanket, a mattress and parts of the floor.
As to what occurred inside the house, the records released by DCF offer clues to that, as well.
One of Rashid’s siblings told police he witnessed his father — who is listed as six-feet-two — hit Rashid with a belt.
Detectives seized Deris’ phone shortly after Rashid died. In a May 22, 2020, text to her sister, Deris said she “beat Rashid’s a-s.” That was six days before she texted another aunt a picture of Rashid’s right leg, badly swollen. Deris told an aunt Rashid hurt his leg when a sibling removed him from a playpen and dropped him.
On June 12, 2020, when Deris brought her son to the hospital, she told a doctor the leg “got caught in the framework of a crib,” the autopsy report said. Even three weeks after his leg was injured, it remained painful and badly swollen.
The boy’s autopsy report written months later, which recounted the events surrounding Rashid’s broken leg, said a doctor offered Deris the choice of x-raying her son’s leg, or “supportive care.” She chose the latter.
The records suggest Deris, and Bryant, were not the only ones abusing the toddler.
Nearly a year after Rashid died, one of his brothers began to “feel comfortable” enough outside of the family’s house of horrors to disclose what had occurred there. The child said in the hotline report that conditions in the home began to deteriorate after the family was brought back together: “It was difficult to readjust,” the boy said, “because everyone was fighting.”
‘TARGET CHILD’
In a Sept. 30, 2021, report to DCF’s hotline, he said that in the toddler’s final months Rashid became a human punching bag.
In psychological terms, authorities might describe Rashid as a “target child.” Less clinically, it appears the parents had turned severe child abuse into a family affair: His brother told an investigator their father “would hit Rashid, and make the other children hit him, too.”
“The other children were responsible for the care of Rashid,” the DCF report said. “The children would try to feed Rashid,
and he would just cry.” In his final weeks “his skin was “about to fall off” and his stomach was “sunken in,” the boy said. His siblings sneaked him food when the grownups weren’t watching, and blankets.
The children, he said, could “hear Rashid crying a lot.” The youngster’s screams would just elicit more beatings.
Bryant and Deris
“would make the children hold Rashid’s head under water,” the child added, according to the report.
During Rashid’s final days, the brother said, Bryant made him hold the toddler, who was foaming from his mouth. “Rashid had a large knot on his forehead,” the report quoted the boy as saying.
Rashid’s brother told authorities he, too, was abused. A relative who had moved into the cluttered home “would whip [the boy] with belts and tie a rope around his penis while they were in the shower,” the report said.
It is unclear to what extent DCF investigated the brother’s disclosures. Despite Areces’ order that DCF hand over all records relating to Rashid and his death, DCF’s deputy general counsel, John Jackson, refused to release what is apparently a separate tranche of records relating to Rashid’s torture, as described by his brother.
On the last day of Rashid’s life, Nov. 6, 2020, his mother said, she discovered the boy at 10:28 a.m., with foam seeping from his nose and mouth. His lips were blue and his “jaw was clenched,” the autopsy report said. Instead of seeking emergency aid, Deris called an aunt, saying Rashid was “experiencing a medical episode,” the autopsy report said.
Deris called for an ambulance almost 90 minutes later and didn’t begin CPR until 11:51, after the 911 operator told her to, the autopsy said. He was pronounced dead at 12:41 p.m.
The autopsy of Rashid’s body noted four separate skull fractures, as well as healing fractures of Rashid’s leg and a rib. The autopsy also found extensive bleeding and swelling around the boy’s brain.
The medical examiner reported the cause of Rashid’s death as “complications of acute and chronic blunt force injuries.” Contributing causes, the report said, were “parental neglect” and “withholding appropriate medical care.” Rashid’s death, the examiner concluded, was a homicide.
And yet for more than 15 months afterward, the Department of Children
and Families would spend taxpayer money fighting a public records lawsuit, insisting that no determination had been made that the toddler had died of abuse — despite the arrest of both parents. As a result, the records of DCF’s handling of the case remained behind an impenetrable wall — hiding not just the extent of the abuse Rashid endured but DCF’s inability to protect the child.
Until May 1, 2022, when a judge said enough.
Photos taken by the family’s caseworker, provided to the Herald under the judge’s order, suggest there were happier times, before the misery began: Rashid as a newborn, his eyes closed and puffy; Rashid in a playpen, a pacifier in his mouth; Rashid in a walker, wearing a bib that says “Please pass me to grandma”; Rashid smiling broadly, with no teeth; Rashid clutching an order of fast-food French fries; Rashid giving a thumbs up to the camera.
Rashid is not visible in the final picture taken of him; He’s covered by a white blanket on a hospital stretcher at Jackson North, his 38-inch body dwarfed by the metal bed.
Carol Marbin Miller: 305-206-2886, MarbinMiller