of Social Services should have dispatched a caseworker to investigate a
17-year-old girl who had a history of child abuse and had just delivered
twins, city and state officials said yesterday.
But the inquiry from Johns Hopkins Hospital prompted no immediate response
from the state agency. That enabled the girl, a runaway from foster care, to
take her babies home to an abandoned basement without electricity or toilets,
where the infants died a month later, their skulls and ribs cracked.
“In an ideal world, we’d go out there and make sure she had what she needs
to take care of her children,” said Sue Fitzsimmons, spokeswoman for the
department. “If she’s a runaway foster child, we’d want her to have a safe
place to live and a safe place to put her baby.”
The young mother, Sierra Swann, was known to hospital officials as a drug
abuser who lacked a support network and had had a previous child taken away
because of neglect, records show.
After being told by the state agency that there were no “active”
allegations of child abuse pending against Swann, the hospital released the
twin girls with their mother.
Swann and the infants’ father, Nathaniel Broadway, 24, were charged with
first-degree murder last week in the deaths of the babies, Emunnea and Emonney
Broadway.
The department has no plans to investigate or punish the worker who took
the call from Hopkins, in part because it has no record of who it was,
Fitzsimmons said.
The department’s performance in the case prompted a testy exchange
yesterday between Mayor Martin O’Malley and Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who
have been engaged in a legal battle for months over who should lead the
Baltimore Department of Social Services. The agency is part of the state
government, but its director is supposed to be appointed jointly by the mayor
and governor, and to serve in the mayor’s Cabinet.
O’Malley sued the governor Nov. 24 over Ehrlich’s choice as interim
director, Floyd Blair. O’Malley said Blair should be removed because he lacks
required management experience and the approval of the mayor.
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“We owe it to the most vulnerable families and children to do a search by
people with backgrounds in social work to find the best candidate we can to
lead the Department of Social Services,” O’Malley said yesterday. “And I
indicated to [state Secretary of Human Resources Christopher J. McCabe] that
if we compromised the best leadership of this agency, that neither of us could
look ourselves in the mirror if a tragedy happened and children slip through
the cracks.”
Communication between Blair and the O’Malley administration has broken down
so completely that Blair and McCabe, his boss, did not respond to the city
health commissioner’s report to them in January on child abuse.
Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the city health commissioner, said recommendations
in the report could help prevent children’s deaths. They include a call to
“design measures to protect future children” of a parent convicted of abuse
and to station caseworkers in hospitals 24 hours a day.
Ehrlich said he has asked McCabe to prepare a full report on the twins’
case.
“I wish there was less finger-pointing when a child dies,” Ehrlich said.
“Children are dead. It’s not the time for politics. The focus needs to be on
what happened in this case.”
McCabe said yesterday that he is considering Beilenson’s report and
contended that Blair has gotten off to a good start planning improvements in
his first eight months.
The changes include expanding night and weekend coverage of Child
Protective Services by asking more workers to adjust their schedules. Blair
has hired 35 more foster care workers and is moving a protective-services
intake center next to the juvenile courts.
“We are trying to do everything we can to improve our system,” said McCabe.
“This case demonstrates to me how interactive all the parts of the system are,
and if there is a breakdown in communication by any of the parties, a child
could be severely harmed.”
McCabe declined to say where he thinks communications might have broken
down in the Swann case, but he implied that the young runaway’s friends and
neighbors could have helped the state intervene if they had reported that she
was living in a basement with no electricity or plumbing.
“If we had this information that this young woman was living in this
basement, we could have taken all sorts of actions,” McCabe said.
Beilenson said yesterday that if the child protective system had been
functioning optimally, the hospital’s call should have triggered a visit from
a state social worker, who might have learned before Swann left Hopkins that
she was a runaway foster child living in a basement unfit for babies.
With that information, the state could have monitored the children closely
or asked the courts to put them in foster care, Beilenson said. The twins’
elder sister had been removed from Swann because of abuse.
Beilenson said he does not understand why the social-services worker told
the hospital that Swann had no active child-abuse cases pending against her
but did not look more closely at computerized records and see that she was the
subject of an outstanding warrant as a runway foster child and that a previous
child had been taken away because of abuse.
Such information is available to social-services workers through the
state’s computer system, but hospital workers, police, prosecutors and the
public do not have access.
The clerical worker who answered the call from the hospital about Swann
might not have understood all of the computer codes, said Norris West, a
spokesman for the state Department of Human Resources.
“They dropped the ball,” said Jim McComb, chairman of the Coalition to
Protect Maryland’s Children.
Hospital officials said yesterday that they have the legal authority to
hold newborn children they consider to be in danger of abuse by their parents.
They said a preliminary review shows that Hopkins employees followed all
required screening procedures before discharging the infants.
“There are a whole lot of drug-abusing mothers who are discharged with
their children from hospitals in this city,” said Meg Garrett, senior counsel
to Hopkins Hospital.
Sun staff writers Michael Dresser and Laura Vozzella contributed to this
article.