Florida child welfare agency said the kids were doing fine. Actually, they were dead
On April 13, 2022, at exactly 6:09 p.m., a child welfare investigator assigned to the case of Miami mother Odette Joassaint entered a benignsounding note into the Florida Department of Children and Families’ computer system.
“She reports that everything is fine.”
The “she” referred to Joassaint, 41, a mother of three who had been entangled with the department for years due to persistent reports of domestic violence and poor parenting.
Of Joassaint’s 3-year-old son, Jeffry, the investigator offered this reassuring image: “He likes to play, laugh, and grab things.” Referring to Jeffry’s older sister, 6-year-old Laura, the narrative read: “She is a quiet child [who] is wellbehaved.”
Actually, as of the day before, Joassaint had been in the Miami-Dade County Jail and Laura and Jeffry were in the morgue. Police had arrived at the mother’s home on Northeast 75th Street to find the children hogtied and strangled. Their mother told officers the children were better off that way.
Case files are a critical element of child protection, the record that demonstrates troubled families are being supervised and children are being overseen by an objective outsider. The retroactive entry the day after the children’s deaths — one of several — raises questions about an agency whose investigators have been known to record visits that never occurred. Such fakery has led to deadly outcomes.
The visit with Joassaint’s two younger children, which reportedly occurred on April 2, was at the home of Laura and Jeffry’s father, 45-year-old Frantzy Belval, who had consistently cooperated with investigators and had sought custody of his children — an effort DCF failed to support.
In contrast, Joassaint was in the habit of shooing investigators away, often refusing to open her door. The department would shrug off such behavior, then repeatedly concluded the children were in no danger.
Child protection experts say that the practice of waiting days, or weeks, to document events invites confusion — if not fraud.
“It’s never acceptable to wait that long,” said Beth Barrett, a child welfare administrator who was the CEO of Wesley House Family Services, a Florida Keys service provider, and the former director of Child Welfare Projects for the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of South Florida’s Florida Mental Health Institute.
“You should be entering those things within 48 hours, at the latest, of when something was observed, or something was done, or some activity or home visit,” Barrett said. “Anything after that and [DCF’s] own quality assurance system should have picked it up.”
‘COVERING THEIR BUTTS’
Notations that are entered weeks late, Barrett said, raise the possibility that they were included in the case file because investigators or caseworkers are “covering their own butts.”
Barrett added: “There is no excuse for not entering these notations in a timely fashion.”
When asked by a reporter, repeatedly, about the unusual notations in the Florida Safe Families Network, the agency’s computer system, a DCF spokeswoman did not respond.
Irregularities have long been a problem within DCF’s mammoth computer system — and they often come to light only when a child or vulnerable adult dies from abuse or neglect, rendering the state’s records public.
In December 2020, a caseworker with the privately run Children’s Home Society was fired after administrators discovered a discrepancy between photos of a toddler under DCF supervision, Rashid Bryant, entered into an internal casework system and the GPS tracking stamps embedded with the pictures.
DCF has refused since then to discuss the irregularities, or to release any records of its investigation into the caseworker.
Since 2013, the first year for which such cases are available, DCF has reported scores of investigations by its Inspector General’s office into allegations that an investigator or caseworker falsified records. However, the office reports only two closed falsification investigations since 2016, one closed in October 2018, and the other in March 2021.
Florida lawmakers made it a crime to falsify information in a child welfare record following the disappearance — and presumed death — of 5-year-old Rilya Wilson. Placed in the care of a family friend, Geralyn Graham, Rilya had been missing for about 15 months before DCF administrators noticed she was gone.
Though Rilya’s body has never been found, Graham was indicted for her killing in March 2005. In January 2013, a Miami-Dade jury convicted Graham of kidnapping and child abuse — charges that arose out of, among other things, evidence that Graham had kept the little girl locked in a dog cage. The jury deadlocked on a separate murder charge, and Graham was never retried on that count.
Graham has a current release date of 2049, when she would be 103.
PERP WALK
Jim Sewell, a retired Florida Department of Law Enforcement administrator, recalls the first time his agency pressed charges under the law that made it a crime to falsify Florida child protection records.
It was 2002, and Sewell was the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s regional director in Tampa Bay. The Lakeland Police Department had just charged a couple with killing 2-year-old Alfredo Montez, the little boy for whom they were supposed to be caring. FDLE then charged an investigator with cooking up records to show she had done her job and observed the toddler.
Sewell insisted his agents escort the investigator before a phalanx of reporters to her booking. It’s a ritual known as a “perp walk,” and it’s usually reserved for accused killers.
“We were extremely public” about the arrest, Sewell says. “It was covered nationwide.”
Waiting weeks to enter information in the system isn’t the same as fabricating information. But Sewell said that, too, is a bad practice: “You lose all sense of urgency in the information,” added Sewell, a former DCF consultant who had served in task forces that studied the controversial deaths of two Florida children.
“It’s dangerous,” Sewell said of entering information weeks after it is gathered. “You can’t maintain a level of truth unless you do it in contemporary fashion.”
He added: “If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.”