You gotta be kidding me. If multiple members of your family have turned you in to DSS for living with a registered sex offender, doing coke with him in front of your child and physically abusing that child, you can blow off the entire DSS investigation and escape scrutiny by going to the …. beach????
Yup. And DSS will think nothing of it. And no one will be fired, even if the child in question dies of abuse.
Turns out members of two-year-old Addison Lanham’s desperate family who contacted DSS multiple times were right. She was in dire trouble. She died of a sepsis infection, an untreated broken leg, MRSA and the accumulation of long-time abuse. DSS now claims that they missed this because they couldn’t find Lanham because she went to the beach. Oh, they looked for her, but relatives phones were disconnected and all so … what could they do? This is from the Charlotte Observer:
The report recounts repeated attempts to contact Lanham by phone and by visiting the hotel over the next few weeks. A social worker contacted friends and relatives, the report says, but several numbers had been disconnected and workers were told Lanham had not been seen or heard from … Gaston County police have said Lanham and Wells knew Addison was hurt but didn’t seek medical care because they thought Lanham would lose custody of her daughter …Moon said DSS officials might have taken more steps to locate Lanham, such as informing law enforcement, if they had reason to believe Addison was in danger. But an initial visit with Lanham revealed no red flags, he said.
In other words, they didn’t try too hard. They couldn’t be troubled to call police to request that they help look for Shanna Lanham or report Addison Lanham missing.Addison Lanham, 2, and her mom, who was sentenced to prison for over a decade in her death. DSS didn’t follow up on abuse charges because Lanham ignored her appointment with them and instead went to the beachAnd you’ve got to wonder if the DSS story above about them trying to find her at all is even true. The public will never know, because DSS is allowed to keep these files sealed, away from the prying eyes of everyone but those inside the DSS system. The DSS account above came from the four-page summary DSS chose to release. In other words, the truth is whatever DSS says it is.
As I explained before, (and here) a child fatality review team already automatically reviews these cases in North Carolina every time a child dies of abuse, but that’s a joke. The problem is that the way the state legislature set that up, the team always mostly consists of members from the same county DSS agencies that failed the child and the local community child protection team. They don’t even bring in folks from a different county. In other words, they are part of the same bureaucracy being investigated.
And no one is held responsible when a child ultimately dies from abuse:
Such reviews are conducted to make beneficial changes, not penalize anyone for mistakes, according to DHHS spokeswoman Lori Walston.
“It’s more of a lessons learned situation,” she said.
Even the family of Jason Wells, the sex offender boyfriend, was so desperate to get Addison, 2, away from Shanna, who had already had a previous child taken from her by DSS, and Wells, that they tried contacting Shanna Lanham’s probation officer to try to get the child taken away from the duo.
He ignored the situation too. But unlike at DSS, that had consequences:
A Gaston County probation officer resigned Wednesday afternoon, exactly one month after Department of Corrections officials began investigating whether he ignored pleas for help from the relatives of a 2-year-old child who died in a motel room.
Probation Officer Carlton Whit Ogg tendered his resignation before DOC investigators could hand down any punishment.
Kim Wells, Jason Wells’ cousin, provided Eyewitness News on July 31 with a Facebook email exchange between herself and Officer Ogg.
She told Eyewitness News she called Ogg several times but her messages weren’t returned, so she found him on Facebook. She wrote things including “I don’t know if that baby is eating;” “Shanna is strung out on crack and Xanax;” “Addison her daughter doesn’t have any clothes;” and “Please help Addison.”
Just watch. The local and state DSS system will be allowed to close the file on this one just as they did the Zahra Baker case without a truly independent review of these cases, others like them, or the system. For reasons that aren’t clear, the legislature and the governor are studiously ignoring this situation.
There must be an independent investigation of the state’s DSS system, how well it follows its own operational rules and how well those rules work. It must be conducted by uninterested parties from out of state and it must start with the Zahra Baker case and cover this case, every child fatality going back a decade plus a random selection of regular cases to see how well these cases are being handled. As I’ve noted before, a similar investigation of the state’s parole and probation system found that cases were mismanaged 80 percent of the time and people were being murdered by defendants whose cases were deliberately not followed up on by officers.
Please, someone, act.
