On January 17, 2020, eight-year-old Thomas Valva died of hypothermia in the freezing garage at the home of his father and his father’s live-in fiancée. It soon came out that school staff had made multiple calls to the  state child abuse hotline during the 16 months before Thomas’ death, describing how he and his brother were starved, beaten and forced to sleep in a garage and urinate upon themselves. Almost ...

On October 6, 2024, police found five-year-old DeAndre Pettus nude and unconscious in a squalid, trash-filled apartment in the Northwest section of the District of Columbia. Paramedics tried to revive him before he was declared dead at the scene. There were bruises and abrasions on his body. A witness reported that the boy’s father, also named DeAndre Pettus, admitted that he had been punching his son at full force in ...

On October 10, the Utah Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) finally released a statement summarizing its involvement with Gavin Peterson, who died on July 9, 2024 at the age of 12.  Gavin’s father, stepmother, and older brother are awaiting trial on reckless child abuse homicide, among other charges.  The much-awaited “CAPTA statement” from DCFS (named for the federal law requiring that states have a policy to disclose “information ...

The Kansas State Child Death Review Board (SCDRB) has issued its 2024 Annual Report.  The report examines the circumstances surrounding the deaths of all Kansans aged birth to 17 years old, as well as non-resident children, who died in Kansas in 2022. The inclusion of all 2022 child fatalities, as well as use of data from the previous four years to allow for more granular analyses, make this report exemplary ...

At least 1,800 children die from abuse and neglect every year, and the total is probably considerably greater. Between a third and a half of these deaths may involve families that were already known to Child Protective Services through previous reports of maltreatment. In addition, an unknown number of children are severely injured due to maltreatment every year. Legislators, advocates, and the public need timely information about the circumstances leading ...

Jahmeik Modlin was found in a skeletal condition in a Harlem apartment stocked with food. He died the next day, and his three older siblings were hospitalized with severe malnutrition. The family had been on the radar of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) since 2019, before Jahmeik was born. But the agency closed its last case with the family in 2022 after determining that the children were safe, a ...

The CDC calls the infant mortality rate — which measures how often children die before their first birthday — “an important marker of the overall health of a society.” So when the rate increased in 2022 for the first time in 20 years, national media and the public took note. Increases in child and adolescent deaths due to drug use, suicide and gun violence have also received significant attention and ...