For the last five years, nurses, doctors, relatives and caseworkers were in and out of Jaylen Brown’s life, trusted with caring for the severely disabled 13-year-old boy.
He suffered a gruesome death anyway, neglected and malnourished.
His flesh riddled with deep bedsores, Jaylen’s condition shocked doctors who work with abused children and raised questions about the effectiveness of the agencies that were charged with protecting the boy. He died May 15.
“It’s just a horrible set of circumstances when all these adults didn’t pay attention, obviously, to what this child really needed,” said Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris.
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which provided services to the family for three years, and the private health agency that sent nurses to care for Jaylen for four years at home did not take proper care of him, Harris said.
“Between the two nurses and DCFS, a billion-dollar agency, that is a two-system failure,” he said.
Authorities charged three people with neglect, his mother and the two nurses.
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A review of state records by the Tribune revealed the extent of the neglect.
When the boy with cerebral palsy, mental retardation and severe scoliosis was brought to a hospital March 17, he had ulcers on his shoulder, ear, legs and hand. The ulcer on his lower back was a crater, seeping pus. A black, crusted patch dotted his tongue. His fingernails had grown long and dirty. His skin was flaky, and his hair was matted.
“The level of neglect is some of the most severe we have seen,” a University of Chicago doctor noted.
Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for DCFS, said the agency provided help for the problems it was aware of when it handled Jaylen’s case.
“At the time that we closed this case, all services were in place and the child was thriving. We rely on mandated reporters to fulfill their duty under the law to report abuse when they see it,” Marlowe said. “We are very disappointed that the public guardian would use this kind of tragedy to make opportunistic and inflammatory statements.”
Jaylen’s mother, Kesheia Phillips, 29, and the nurses face criminal charges. On Monday, Phillips and nurse Morris Lee Brinkley, 73, pleaded not guilty to felony neglect of a person with a disability and failure to report a neglected child, said Cook County state’s attorney’s spokesman Andy Conklin. Loren Brown, 49, a nurse not related to Jaylen, was arraigned Tuesday on the same charges.
The state’s attorney’s office previously said it would review the charges to decide whether they should be more severe because Jaylen’s death has been ruled a homicide, but no new charges had been filed as of Wednesday.
DCFS steps in
In 2003, officials at La Rabida Children’s Hospital complained to DCFS about Jaylen’s “poor care and weight loss,” records show.
That led the agency to step in and provide support services to the family from 2003 to 2006, records show. The agency ended its involvement with the family in 2006, but it could have had an opportunity to check on Jaylen’s care again if it had received a complaint to its hot line, Marlowe said.
“We did not receive any reports of abuse or neglect on this case subsequent to the closing of the case” by DCFS, he said.
A hospital official had referred Jaylen for federal nursing services, said Annie Thompson, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. Phillips got two home-care nurses from Maxim Healthcare Services, an accredited national health-care provider with state contracts, through the program.
In 2004, the nurses from Maxim began caring for Jaylen seven days a week, 12 hours a day.
Each month, a supervisor from Maxim would check Jaylen’s health, records and medication, said Cynthia Scales, his grandmother.
The mother did not consistently keep medical appointments for her son in 2004 and 2005, according to records of interviews with a social worker at La Rabida. When the boy was hospitalized, the mother visited infrequently and left him in the hospital beyond his discharge date, records show.
Jaylen was hospitalized in February 2006, then checked by doctors the following December.
The mother failed to show up for an appointment in January 2007 and again the next month, when the boy had an appointment to get a wheelchair, records show. Again in June and July, the mother failed to show up for appointments, records show.
A nurse brought Jaylen for an appointment in August, but his mother failed to bring him back in October, according to records.
‘Extremely … disturbing’
In March, Jaylen’s mother brought him to La Rabida with troubled breathing, an increased heart rate and a fever, records show.
The boy was sent to Comer Children’s Hospital for severe neglect and malnutrition. He had lost 20 pounds in two years, records show.
His mother initially told doctors that she fed her son after the nurses left at night, according to records. Then she said he was fed only by the nurses.
“This is extremely inconsistent and disturbing,” a doctor noted.
The mother said she had not bathed her son in more than a year or seen him without clothes on. The nurse had shown her a bedsore in recent weeks but called La Rabida and was instructed to patch it with gauze, records show. The mother said she did not look at it herself, records show.
Jaylen did not have a wheelchair or braces, which his doctor called “basic care for a child with cerebral palsy.”
The mother told workers she did her best to feed her son at night and check on him. She placed “blame on the nurses to alert her when and if something was medically wrong,” records show.
Jaylen’s nurses, Brinkley and Brown, said the boy’s mother was responsible for his final feeding, but they would find the same bag of formula full the next morning. When Brinkley asked the boy’s mother about it, she would say the boy had a “rough night” that made the mother busy with turning and suctioning him, records show.
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“On a number of occasions, minor would be laying in a pool of feces and urine” when Brinkley would come to work, she said.
Brinkley said she relayed her concerns to her supervisor, who visited Jaylen in June.
Brown said “she made several appointments” for Jaylen to see a doctor, but his mother “failed” to take him.
Brown said she “did have concerns regarding the mother’s care for the minor … and voiced them to her supervisor.”
The nurses’ supervisor said she had not been aware of any concerns with the boy’s care or the mother. The supervisor said she had never received any complaints about the nurses, who have been fired.
Stuart Soberman, general counsel for Maxim, said the company is cooperating with the investigation and cannot comment on the case.
Despite being mandated by law, neither nurse voiced complaints to the DCFS hot line.
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