Agency outlines abuse response

By John Simerman and Bruce Gerstman
November 3, 2006

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

MARTINEZ - Six times from 2002 until last January, Contra Costa County child welfare workers fielded allegations of child abuse or neglect involving Raijon Daniels or his little sister.

Most of the reports took aim at his mother, Teresa Moses, for neglect or failure to protect him. One involved a stepfather, another a boyfriend.

In three of the cases, county officials say, social workers investigated, visited the family and found Moses was doing what she could to protect her son. She cooperated with police. She sought help. She said the right things.

 

Raijon never told caseworkers what police now suspect: that his mother abused him, locked him away and poured household chemicals on his penis so he would quit urinating on himself.

He died Friday after ingesting pine-scented household cleaner.

The county agency ruled as unfounded, or "evaluated out," each report that Moses abused or neglected her 8-year-old boy.

Nothing rose to the level of placing Raijon in foster care, so there was little more that Children and Family Services could do except refer Moses to nonprofit agencies for help, said Joe Valentine, director of the county's Employment and Human Services Department.

With the release Thursday of a two-page summary of the agency's contacts with the family, child welfare officials responded for the first time to virulent criticism that they failed to heed signs of trouble and save Raijon from a death that police suspect came at the hands of his mother.

"I don't want to give the impression in this particular case that everything was done perfectly. When this kind of tragedy occurs, it's easy to go back and say, maybe another phone call. Obviously, something broke down somewhere for this child to be dead," Valentine said.

Still, Valentine said he saw no clear errors, although an internal investigation is not complete. If community members noticed a problem with the family, he said, no one had alerted CFS since January, when the agency received its last allegation of abuse in the family.

"Our hope is that the whole community can see that it really takes everybody to reach out to these families," he said.

Valentine declined to discuss the case outside the contents of the brief report, which the Times obtained under the state Public Records Act.

Meanwhile, Moses, 23, made her first appearance in Contra Costa County Superior Court on Thursday. She stood behind her attorney and listened to Judge John Laettner read the felony charges of torture and child endangerment. The District Attorney's Office is waiting for toxicology test results before deciding whether to file murder charges against Moses.

Moses, her hair neatly tied back and wearing a green-and-yellow jumpsuit, stood straight and appeared calm, her hands clasped behind her. She did not enter a plea. Laettner set Nov. 17 for her to return to court to answer the charges. He set her bail at $1.15 million.

Outside court, her attorney, Demetrius Costy, called Moses a caring mother.

"My client is not a murderer," said Costy. "She is a beautiful, articulate single mother of two, one of which is extremely emotionally disturbed. She is extremely upset at the loss of her son."

Jessica Mitchell, who said she was Moses' best friend, showed snapshots of Moses and her son

"This is not who she is. She is a very good person. She was a great mom," Mitchell said.

Police arrested Moses on Friday after doctors at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Richmond reported Raijon's death. His body was covered in bruises, chemical burns, rope marks and bed sores.

The last CFS call, in January, came after a tussle between Moses and the father of Raijon's sister that left the girl with scratches. When the agency investigated, Raijon said his mother "takes good care of him and they do 'fun things together,'" according to their written summary.

A caseworker visited the home with a nonprofit social service provider. Then the county agency backed away, closed the case a month later and never contacted the family again.

"There was nothing so horrible here (in the file) about the mother, nothing that was so bad here," said agency spokeswoman Lynn Yaney, referring to the agency's contacts with the family. "We did what we were required to do under the law. We did what we could and a child ended up dying."

Debi Moss, a division manager with Contra Costa CFS, said the agency must close a case within 30 days of making a determination, and in cases like this one, "we don't have grounds to continue to have the family be in the child welfare system."

But one critic who viewed the summary called that "the worst of excuses," noting the history of runaways and allegations.

"You're talking about an agency that has incredible power," said William Grimm, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law who has studied child abuse fatality reports nationwide. "They're minimizing the power they have under the statute. That's just yet another excuse."

Grimm said caseworkers should have continued to call Moses to see if she was seeking help.

"That's great in hindsight, but once we close a case, we have to keep moving. We can't keep going back and calling people," Yaney said. "You can imagine the family doesn't want you knocking on the door again, bugging them."

Jill Duerr Berrick, a professor of social welfare at UC Berkeley said caseworkers face a tough challenge "to find ways to uncover these terribly ugly situations when they don't necessarily have a court mandate to move into the privacy of the family."

Reach John Simerman at 925-943-8072 or jsimerman@cctimes.com. Reach Bruce Gerstman at 925-943-8345 or bgerstman@cctimes.com.