In as many as 60 cases, Los Angeles County officials failed to follow the law that requires them to make public child fatalities resulting from abuse or neglect, a county attorney said Tuesday.

The vast majority of cases of child deaths handled by the Department of Children and Family Services should be classified as resulting from abuse and neglect, but dozens are not, and staffers within the department often disagree in their assessment, according to a report by the county’s Office of Independent Review.

State Senate Bill 39 provides for the release of information within five days when the death of child “is reasonably suspected to be the result of abuse or neglect.” Otherwise, information is withheld as confidential.

Mike Gennaco, chief attorney for the county’s Office of Independent Review, told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday there is an “apparent disconnect” within the Department of Children and Family Services that has led to “inconsistent conclusions” concerning the causes of such deaths.

Department Director Trish Ploehn said the contradictory outcomes were due to a lack of communication between two groups of staffers charged with differing priorities. She said it was not intentional.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky suggested last week that the classification of cases was being manipulated to limit public access to information and undercount child deaths on the department’s watch.

But Ploehn said risk management staffers were focused on the narrow legal issue of direct causality, which led to fewer classifications as SB 39 cases.

Social workers handling cases in the field are instead focused on protecting the siblings of the victims from abuse, Ploehn said. An SB 39 classification is required to effectively argue for custody of those siblings in family court.

Ploehn said the department planned to go back and reconcile the differences in classification between internal department documents and documents filed in family court, a recommendation of the Office of Independent Review’s report.
“I actually agree with [the OIR report] 100 percent,” Ploehn said.

Supervisor Don Knabe tried to bolster Ploehn’s assertion that there was no intent to hide information or mislead the public.

“There is this notion that is being perpetrated by the media that the county has been non-responsive” to demands for information,” Knabe said. “In your review, did you find any reason to believe that there has been reluctance on the part of the county to release information on child welfare cases within the guidelines of the law?” he asked Gennaco.

“I found no intent not to release information should have been released,” Gennaco said.

Yaroslavsky asked Gennaco to qualify his response.

“I don’t think that you have all the information that you’re going to have going forward,” the supervisor said. “There are some reasons to believe that this is not just an accidental disconnect [where] the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.”

It seems likely that most of the cases at issue will ultimately be deemed to be SB 39 cases, based on Gennaco’s comments. Unless several years had passed between an act of abuse and the child’s death and the death itself was obviously accidental, like a “child was struck by lightning,” the attorney seemed to say the death would be deemed to be the result of the earlier abuse.

Supervisor Gloria Molina said that many abused children are later returned to their parents. She said a child who was abused at age 3 or 6 and is “now 17 and killed by a gang member” would be the sort of apparently rare case that would not be deemed to be an SB 39 case and subject to public disclosure.

Supervisor Don Knabe disagreed with the plan to reconsider past cases.

“I do not agree that we need to go back and revisit all of these cases,” Knabe said, adding it would be unfair to drag families through that process.

Also at issue are blanket holds placed on information by law enforcement officers.

The Office of Independent Review report said the practice led to the “virtual paralysis of the statute’s intent.” In the report, Gennaco recommended that the Department of Children and Family Services personnel and law enforcement work together to “develop a more tailored and precise approach” to withholding information that is relevant to criminal investigations.

Board members expressed concern over discussing the issue without disclosing something that should be kept private.

“It will be so much easier if you can have this conversation in closed session rather than in public,” County Counsel Andrea Ordin said.

One of her concerns seemed to be a pending lawsuit against the county in the case of Jorge Tarin, though she took care not to name names.

Jorge, 11, hanged himself just hours after a social worker visited his home to interview the boy and assess his threats of suicide.

Jorge’s death was not classified as the result of abuse or neglect, according to Yaroslavsky, although the Los Angeles Times reported that the boy had previously been removed from his mother’s custody, and his stepfather was legally barred from the home based on a history of drug abuse and domestic violence.

Jorge told a school counselor that his mother beat him with a hanger and a shoe while his stepfather held him down, the newspaper reported, citing a reference to county records.

The Times has published a series of investigative reports on deaths, like Jorge’s, linked to the Department of Children and Family Services and made a number of requests for additional information to the county.

It seems likely that more information will be forthcoming if prior cases are reclassified.

However, the question of how many cases are involved became less clear as the day went on.

During his presentation, Gennaco seemed to indicate that the 60 cases subject to review were in addition to 38 child fatalities publicly reported by the department. Later in the day, county officials said the 38 reported cases might overlap with the 60 under review, but could not provide a reliable estimate of the overall pool of cases subject to reclassification.

Based on a late-breaking proposal by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the board directed the Department of Children and Family Services, together with county investigators, counsel and executive office staffers, to return to the board within 30 days with a plan for implementing the recommendations and a process for managing disclosure of information.