FRANKFORT, Ky. — Beaten regularly with a belt, pushed into cold showers, forced to drink garlic water and made to sit at a kitchen table for 12 to 13 hours a day writing sentences as supposed home schooling, the young girl from Southeastern Kentucky was nearly dead when she was admitted to a hospital last year.
“Basically, her body was shutting down,” said Brenda Bremenkamp, an analyst who summarizes cases for Kentucky’s 20-member Child Fatality and Near Fatality External Review Panel. “She was close to death.”
Panel members, used to hearing heinous accounts of child abuse, appeared especially shocked at the plight of the girl, 9, who arrived at the hospital catatonic, covered with bruises and with open sores on her buttocks. They seemed equally shocked that the case appeared to have fallen off the radar of the child protection system.
“It feels like absolutely everything in this case that could go wrong did go wrong,” said panel member Sherry Currens, executive director of the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “This was just evil. I don’t see how it kept falling through the cracks.”
The case was one of about 20 reviewed Nov. 21 at a meeting of the oversight panel, which is charged under state law with identifying breakdowns in the state child protection system and recommending improvements.
Plowing through details of some of Kentucky’s worst child abuse and neglect cases — those which result in the death or the near-death of a child — panel members look for common causes, missed opportunities to intervene and ways to improve Kentucky’s complex system of child protection that involves the courts, police, state social service workers, school officials, volunteers and others.
The panel, which holds public meetings, has brought added scrutiny to some cases that otherwise get little attention in the largely confidential world of child abuse and neglect investigations. It was created four years ago following a series of Courier-Journal stories about a lack of oversight involving child abuse deaths.
Recently, the panel brought more scrutiny to a case in which a 16-year-old disabled boy suffered two fractured femurs during a supposedly safe restraint by a staff member at a Jefferson County public school. Deemed a near-fatality because of the severity of the boy’s injuries, the case remained unexplained after inconclusive investigations by police and state social service officials.
But after reviewing the facts of the case, the panel in July deemed previous explanations implausible and concluded that physical abuse was the cause. Louisville police and social service investigators have since reopened investigations into the November 2014 incident.
The case of the 9-year-old girl had a positive outcome. Removed from her abusive home, she recovered and is thriving in foster care. The responsible adults — her father and a live-in girlfriend — are in prison following child abuse convictions, panel members learned.
But many other cases have worse outcomes. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2015 — the most recent year with complete numbers — 21 Kentucky children died from causes that included beatings or blunt force trauma, head injuries, drug overdoses, suffocation, medical neglect and accidents with an impaired adult at fault.
Another 53 children nearly died from abuse or neglect during that period, some permanently impaired by brain damage or other problems.
Hardin Family Court Judge Brent Hall, who joined the panel when it was formed in 2012 and whose term is ending, said while the panel has become better organized, its mission hasn’t changed.
“It’s important we set the bar that no child dies,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ll ever get there but that is the hope.”
The panel has expanded its work, hired analysts to help the unpaid panel members from across Kentucky and has met 10 times this year — more than twice as often as the four meetings required by law — to review as many cases as possible for an annual report in December.
“We’re growing,” said Roger Crittenden, a retired Franklin Circuit Court judge who serves as chairman of the panel that includes social service officials, police, prosecutors, child abuse experts, medical specialists and others involved in the system that serves as the state’s child protection network. “I think we’re more focused now. It has been a real learning process.”
Starting from scratch in 2012, the panel had to establish procedures including a system for reviewing the often-voluminous state records from a single investigation of a child abuse or neglect case by social service workers with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Members also consider records from family court or criminal proceedings against abusive adults and have become more experienced about dissecting how the system broke down.
After the first two years with no funding, the panel got about $400,000 a year from the state, which allowed it to hire analysts to review cases and present summaries to the members who still have access to the records and can review them individually.
That has allowed the panel to work faster and review more cases.
Dr. Melissa Currie, a forensic pediatrician with the University of Louisville, said the panel has become better at delving into details of what happened before the death or near-death of a child, rather than just the event itself.
“I think we’re getting better at focusing on what happened beforehand,” she said, adding that helps the panel identify ways to prevent a similar occurrence or find common themes. One common event that surprised even Currie, though she sees it regularly through her work as a forensic pediatrician, was the frequency of “co-sleeping” deaths where an infant dies while sleeping with an adult, usually through suffocation.
“Even though I knew sleep-related deaths were a huge issue, I’m still not sure I understood the magnitude of that problem,” Currie said.
Among the panel’s recommendations in its 2014 annual report was that the state conduct an extensive public education campaign to alert new parents to the danger of sleeping with an infant. State public health officials, joined by several hospital groups, launched a “Safe Sleep Kentucky Campaign” last year to encourage parents to place a baby on the back, alone in a crib with no clutter such as blankets, pillows or stuffed animals.
But Currie said the panel still finds a disturbing number of cases of infant death or injury from sleeping with an adult impaired by drugs or alcohol.
“There’s so much overlap with substance abuse and sleep-related deaths,” Currie said.
The panel plans to release an annual report in December that will include new recommendations for better protecting children.
Contact reporter Deborah Yetter at (502) 582-4228 or at [email protected].
