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 the body when the little boy ran into a wall when attempting to flee. His two sisters offered “confusing and contradictory” accounts and were clearly scared of their father. One of the girls said that she would not tell what happened if she had to go back to her father. Pettus Sr. was charged with cruelty to children pending the results of an autopsy.
The media soon learned that Pettus Sr. was known to DC’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA). In May 2022 he was charged with assault after a woman told police he hit her in the face and threatened her with a gun. CFSA removed DeAndre Jr. and his two sisters from the home. Nine months later the criminal charges were dropped for unknown reasons. The children were soon returned, and all three children were returned to their father shortly thereafter. But the media accounts do not explain how the agency assessed Pettus before the children were returned, how long the agency supervised the family afterwards, whether the caseworkers missed any “red flags” pointing to Pettus’ capacity for violence, and whether any concerned adults called the hotline to report possible abuse of little DeAndre. The witness mentioned that she saw the father punch his son “on prior occasions,” and it is important to know whether she reported the abuse. Or were there any reports from his school? Of course, these facts are critical to assessing whether reforms are needed to ensure that other children are protected.
Because it understood the need for this kind of information, Congress added a new section (Section 106(b)(2)(B)(x)) to the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) in 1996 that requires all states to provide assurances to the federal Department of Health and Human Services that they have provisions for disclosing findings and information regarding child fatalities and near fatalities from maltreatment. In accordance with that law, most states added provisions to their statutes to provide for these disclosures. For its part, the District of Columbia Council passed legislation incorporating this requirement in DC Code. The law requires that “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a disclosing official shall upon written request by any person, and may upon his or her own initiative, disclose to the public the findings and information related to a child fatality or near fatality,” with certain exceptions.
I recently learned how important the exceptions were in shielding important information from release. In 2023, I requested the required information and findings regarding the fatalities due to maltreatment that occurred between 2019 and 2021 in families that had contact with the agency in the five years prior to the incident. It took months of meetings and emails to receive the minimal information that I finally presented in my report, We are not here to save children: deaths from abuse or neglect after contact with the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency, 2019-2021. When I received the information, it became clear that the agency interpreted the law in a way that severely restricted the information provided.
For the purposes of disclosure, DC Code defines a child fatality as “(A) The death of a child as a result of child abuse, neglect, or maltreatment, as certified by a physician, or the Chief Medical Examiner of the jurisdiction in which the child died or where the autopsy was performed; or (B) The death of a child where the Chief Medical Examiner cannot rule out child abuse, neglect, or maltreatment as contributing to the cause of death.” The Deputy General Counsel tasked with responding to my request explained that she released information on the cases where a medical examiner or physician ruled the manner of death to be homicide (therefore a child maltreatment death) or “undetermined” (connoting that the CME “cannot rule out child maltreatment as the manner of death.) CFSA did not release any information on cases where the manner of death was labeled as accidental, even though many accidental deaths, such as bathtub drownings, unsafe sleep deaths, or car accidents in which the driver was impaired by drugs or alcohol, are ultimately ruled as neglect. The case of seven-week-old Kyon Jones, whose mother told police that she threw his body in a dumpster after she rolled over him while high on PCP, was not included because the body was never found and therefore there was no autopsy!
When it did provide summaries, CFSA elected to provide highly redacted versions of the case summaries that were prepared for its internal fatality committee, with most of the content blacked out. (See Supplemental File below.) In letters accompanying the case information, the agency listed the statutory basis for all the redactions, but all the letters list the same five provisions, CFSA’s interpretation of some of these provisions is questionable. The most troublesome loophole was “personal or private information unrelated to the child fatality.” It appears that CFSA’s legal team blacked out almost all information about parents’ history of criminal activity, substance abuse, mental illness, and domestic violence as “unrelated to the child fatality.” It is hard to imagine how these factors would be irrelevant to most of the fatalities described in this report.
In its definition of the information to be released about a child fatalities or near fatalities, DC Code § 4–1303.31(5)(B)(iii) requires that the agency release a description of the conduct of the most recent investigation or assessment” only, rather than all investigations or assessments regarding the family in question. It appears that the agency interpreted “the most recent investigation” as the fatality investigation itself. Therefore, all information on previous investigations was redacted,
DC Code requires that in the written summary of each fatality the name of the child and the name of the parent or person responsible for the child must be included. Nevertheless, CFSA redacted all the children’s and the parents’ names, citing as a justification the provision stating that the disclosure requirements “do not apply when disclosure would [e[ndanger the life, physical safety, or physical or emotional well-being” of the victim, a sibling, or another child in the household. When asked how CFSA could interpret this provision so as in every case to violate the clear intent of the Council that the names be released in every fatality, the Deputy General Counsel replied in an email that the information “was withheld based the [sic] clinician recommendation regarding each child fatality due to the impact that such disclosures would have on the siblings of the subject child or a child who has shared the same household.”
As a result of all these omissions, I received very little information for most cases aside from a list of the previous allegations including only the date of the report, the allegation category, and the disposition; an account of in-home and foster care case activities for the families that had such cases, and an account of the investigation of the fatality itself. The information about the parents was heavily redacted, and almost the entire family history of interaction with CFSA was usually blacked out, except the investigation of the fatality itself and the accounts of in-home cases involving the family. These omissions made it impossible to fully assess whether CFSA overlooked red flags or missed opportunities to protect the children who ultimately died. In fact, what is truly needed is release of the full case file in cases where the agency had previous contact with a child who later died or nearly died, as described in a previous Lives Cut Short post about the death of Gavin Peterson in Utah.
The public could request CFSA’s findings and information regarding its interactions with DeAndre Pettus Sr. and his children. But in light of my experience, I know that the information released (if any) would not be sufficient to thoroughly assess the agency’s performance. Some states would be more transparent, but the District of Columbia is not unique in imposing many barriers to the release of information about child maltreatment fatalities and near fatalities, as described in a recent report from Lives Cut Short. While they are justified as needed to protect innocent children and family members, these restrictions on information releases seem to protect state and local officials above all.