Neglecting the Neglect of Danieal Kelly

31 July 2008 – Philadelphia Nine people have been charged in the 2006 starvation death of Danieal Kelly, a 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. Danieal weighed 42 pounds (46 in some reports) when she succumbed to starvation. She last more than 50% of her body weight before dying. While her mother was charged with murder and her father was charged with child endangerment, seven other people were charges in this case.

These accomplices included two Department of Human Services child protection workers who were charged with failing to protect the child who was officially under their protection, and two social workers working for a private agency contracted to oversee Danieal’s care. The DHS workers were cahrged with child endangerment and one was charged with lying to the grand jury. The private agency workers were charged with involuntary manslaughter and one was charged with falsifying records. The remaining arrests were friends of Danieal’s mother who were charged with giving false information to obstruct the investigation. It is unusual for child protection workers to be held criminally responsible for the abuse, neglect, or even the death of a child, but in this case the evidence of failure and cover-up appears to be overwhelming. Obviously, all who have been charged will have the opportunity to defend their alleged actions and inactions at trial.

According to  Philly.com

Warrants were issued for all nine defendants Thursday. Andrea Kelly, the mother of Danieal (pronounced “Danielle”), was charged with murder, and father Daniel Kelly, who did not live with the family, was charged with child endangerment.

A 258-page grand jury report recommending the charges said not only that Andrea Kelly refused to get her daughter food, water and medical treatment, but that she repeatedly prevented one of her other children from calling an ambulance “for his obviously dying sister.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer published a chronology of Dieneal Kelly’s life and death.

 District Attorney Lynne Abraham was quoted saying:

Danieal did not fall through the cracks, It was a failure of institutional inclination. Saving Danieal was just too much trouble.

Excerpts from the 258-page grand Jury Report include:

Despicable as the parents were, they were not that remarkable: there are people like that in the world. That is why DHS and the private company hired by DHS . . . exist. Yet these agencies, whose sole function is to be protecting children from such parents, passed up almost every opportunity, over a period of years, to save Danieal.

In the final weeks of her life, Danieal’s brother – himself only a child – kept telling his mother that something was wrong, but she dismissed him. Shortly before his sister died, he begged his mother to call an ambulance. She refused. Only the next day, with flies buzzing all over her body, was 911 contacted.

During this investigation we found a tall, filthy cardboard box in [DHS social worker Dana] Poindexter’s cubicle, big enough to hold a file cabinet. The box was filled to the top with random case files, food wrappers, and unopened business envelopes (some with four-year-old postmarks). At the bottom of the pile was Danieal’s file.

At least one [DHS] administrator herself back-dated reports about Danieal, some by more than a year, with false dates and determinations to make it look like they had been properly completed. She said this was a common practice at DHS.

On the afternoon and evening of Danieal’s death, [part-owner/director of MultiEthnic Behavior Health Mickal] Kamuvaka convened what in essence was a forgery fest in her office. She directed [employees] to concoct almost a year’s worth of false progress reports, to substitute for all the work that had never actually been done.

The Grand Jury finds the evidence that the mistreatment suffered by Danieal – the malnutrition, the bed sores, the lack of stimulation, and the dehydration and heat stress – caused her death. The photographs taken of Danieal, first as the healthy and high-spirited child enrolled in Arizona, later as a skeletal corpse in a Philadelphia morgue, do not lie . . . Danieal was a victim of homicide.

For additional excerpts, see The Philadelphia Inquirer

See also: More thoughts: Danieal Kelly (Posted 5 August 2008)

Tags: Cerebral Palsy, Danieal Kelly, Homicide