Illinois’ child welfare agency failed to produce critical reports after
child deaths
[March 25, 2025]
By
Peter Nickeas, Illinois Answers Project
The state agency responsible for keeping Illinois’ most vulnerable
children safe has failed to produce legally required public reports
after examining what went wrong in hundreds of cases of child deaths and
thousands of serious injuries, the Illinois Answers Project reports.
More than 1,200 deaths and more than 3,000 other cases of serious injury
have met the criteria for incident-specific reports since July 2018,
according to data DCFS provided under an open records request. The
case-specific reports are required when a child dies by suspected abuse
or neglect, or dies or suffers a serious injury when they are in the
state’s care.
The failure spurred blistering criticism from child welfare advocates
and prompted the Cook County public guardian to call for an
investigation.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who sponsored the legislation requiring
the reports in the late 1990s when he was a state lawmaker, called the
failure “reckless.”
“To know that they aren’t even issuing the reports … is stunning,
stunning. Just so reckless. So irresponsible,” Dart said.
“You know what, we’re all busy. So don’t give me your story. … I can’t
conceive of any scenario where this isn’t at the front of people’s
lists, you know, we have a child in our care that died. What happened?”
The reports are required by the state’s Abused and Neglected Child
Reporting Act, providing the framework for the system of investigating
abuse and neglect of children. The portion of the law regarding the
reports went into effect in 1997. State lawmakers added language to
strengthen the public disclosure of the reports in 2008.
“There shall be a presumption that the best interest of the public will
be served by public disclosure of certain information concerning the
circumstances of the investigations of the death,” according to the law,
which later states the agency “shall” release the reports to the public
with some permitted redactions.
DCFS said in a statement that other reports that the agency prepares
satisfy legal requirements but declined to answer additional questions
from Illinois Answers or to comment on the call for investigations.
Heather Tarczan, a spokeswoman for DCFS, declined to answer most
questions about the death-and-injury reports. It’s not clear when the
agency last completed one of the legally required incident-specific
reports. An open records request for the agency’s most recent report —
whenever it was completed — was denied, with DCFS saying no reports
exist. The agency fought in instances for months on releasing any
records or acknowledging that the reports don’t exist.
DCFS says it does conduct reviews when deaths or serious injuries
happen. But there’s little recourse for the public to learn the results,
since state law forbids the release of most child welfare records to
protect the privacy of children and families who are investigated or who
get help from the state. The reports that DCFS has failed to produce are
meant to give public officials insight into what may have gone wrong.
Tarczan said other forms of review by DCFS — by the agency’s inspector
general, by child death review teams and by the agency’s crisis
intervention team — satisfy reporting requirements under the state law.
But those reviews are subject to different rules, with some having a
narrower focus or not considered public records. The inspector general
reports, for instance, capture fewer deaths and don’t include
information about hundreds more serious injuries each year. The crisis
intervention team reports aren’t public.
And the most recent child death review team annual report covered deaths
that occurred five years ago. New reports haven’t been published in
years. Tarczan declined to say why, but said the agency had been
operating with the “understanding” that these satisfy the
death-and-injury reporting required in the law.
Tarczan would not say how the agency came to that understanding.
The Cook County public guardian, Charles Golbert, who is responsible for
representing 6,000 children in abuse and neglect cases in juvenile
court, has asked the state’s auditor general and DCFS’ inspector general
to investigate the agency’s failure to comply with the law.
“These reports, which are required by law, are critical to protect
children, and to prevent deaths and serious injuries to children in DCFS
care or who are reported to DCFS as abused or neglected,” Golbert wrote
in his request for review.
Dart said he sponsored legislation requiring the reports because of “one
horrific DCFS case after another,” and cited the death of 3-year-old
Joseph Wallace as one that still stands out more than 30 years later.
Joseph’s mother hanged her son with an electrical cord, his mouth
stuffed with a sock and taped shut. The boy had been put into foster
care just after he was born and returned to his mother only months
before his death, despite warnings she was dangerous. The case became a
catalyst for reform.
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Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart sponsored the legislation requiring the
DCFS reports when he was a state lawmaker in the late 1990s. He
calls the failure to produce the reports “stunning.” (Credit: Victor
Hilitski)
Dart said as a young legislator he’d been “jerked around” by DCFS for so
long that he anticipated resistance to the law and wrote it in a way
where they “could not not do it.”
“You have to do it and you need to move expeditiously. Because I mean
what if you find out like a vendor or something that was working with
that child is the problem? … What, you’re gonna, what, let 10 more kids
be subjected to the vendor in the meantime just because, you know, we
didn’t get around to it yet? No, we need to move rather quickly on this
stuff.”
When DCFS is involved with the families
The reports are supposed to include general information about the death,
consider the previous five years of social services that may have been
provided to the child’s family, and then make policy recommendations
where appropriate. In September, Illinois Answers sought these records
from two murders in central Illinois where DCFS investigated the
victims’ families before their deaths.
In one 2022 case, 8-year-old Navin Jones died after paramedics found him
in a bathtub in his home, the shape of his bones visible through his
skin, his body cut and bruised. He weighed 30 pounds — a typical weight
for a 3-year-old boy. Police officers found a note on Navin’s door,
forbidding his older brother to give him food.
A DCFS investigator had visited the family about a month earlier and
found the boy emaciated with discolored skin but didn’t seek medical
care for the boy. His father was charged with murder. In court testimony
the DCFS investigator said she didn’t believe she could have the child
taken to the hospital.
In another case about 22 miles away in 2019, three toddlers and two
adults died in a midnight mobile home fire whose origin remains in
dispute. A 9-year-old boy, whose care had been the subject of DCFS
investigations since the day of his birth, was charged with murder in
their deaths. The boy and his mother, who survived the fire, were
related to the five victims.
That criminal trial is ongoing and raised questions of whether DCFS did
enough to help the 9-year-old in the years before the fire. He’d been
accused of starting other fires, and his parents had been investigated
for physically abusing him, neglecting him and failing to take him to
school.
In both cases, DCFS had been involved in the lives of the children since
their births. In both cases, the agency said the death reports weren’t
public before acknowledging to the Illinois attorney general’s office
that DCFS “had not been creating such reports so there were no reports
to disclose.”
For months after that, the agency would not say whether it had produced
the death or serious injury reports in other high-profile cases — and
only did so after intervention by the attorney general’s office in early
February.
In the case of a boy whose death led to criminal charges against an
investigator, in another case where a 7-year-old drowned in the pool of
a Springfield aldermanic candidate, and in a case where 10 children died
in a house fire in Chicago, DCFS would not say whether it had produced
the lawfully required reports.
The law also requires the agency to produce cumulative reports based on
the incidents, so that legislators and other experts can use the
information to better care for children. The incident-specific reports
are supposed to be shared with legislators and the governor’s office
when they’re done.
Though DCFS has given legislators quarterly reports listing the dates
and locations of deaths and serious injuries, they appear to have never
complied with the legal requirement to include “findings and
recommendations” in those reports. The law says they’re to be based off
of the incident-specific reports that were never done.
Golbert wrote to the agency’s inspector general that “if DCFS is not
consistently completing these reports about individual children, the
required cumulative reports … will be incomplete and erroneous.”
DCFS was audited for compliance soon after the law was passed and
notified it was failing to meet the requirements.
The state’s auditor general, which checks state agencies for their
compliance with laws related to their work, hasn’t tested DCFS on this
section of the law since 1999.
Contributing: Meredith Newman
This
article first appeared on
Illinois Answers Project and is republished here under a Creative
Commons license.
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