We must learn from child’s death

It’s been nearly 18 years since Darren Creekmore kicked his 3-year-old son Eli to death for crying too much. The Snohomish County case enraged all of Washington and prompted revisions in the way the state Department of Social and Health Services reached custody decisions in child-abuse cases.

It would be nice if those revisions had succeeded. They seemed to, for a while. Child-abuse deaths were on the decline in 1990 when Darrell Williams beat his 2-week-old son, Andrew, to death in Spokane.

Like Eli, Andrew had previously come to the attention of DSHS caseworkers because of suspicious injuries suffered in the home. Like Eli, he was returned there anyway. And like Eli Creekmore’s, Andrew Williams’ death touched off a round of intra-agency soul-searching.

Now, it’s happening again, this time over the death last fall of Rafael Gomez, a 2-year-old from Ephrata.

The facts are unnervingly reminiscent of the Creekmore and Williams cases. “Raffy” was born with cocaine and methamphetamine in his bloodstream. He bounced in and out of protective custody and foster placements and endured a chilling pattern of burns, bruises, broken bones and at least two skull fractures. The state kept sending him back to his biological family, in whose custody the injuries had occurred.

A treating physician once wrote that he had no doubt Raffy was being abused. A foster parent who wanted to adopt the boy pleaded at one point that officials not return him to the biological family.

In September he was dead of blunt force trauma to his head. His mother has been charged with manslaughter.

This time the DSHS review was done by a 13-member team of child-welfare experts. Last week they reported that, among other things, the child-welfare system reflects a bias for returning a youngster to his natural family. The child’s safety has become secondary to that objective.

In fact – as the Creekmore, Williams, Gomez and numerous other cases demonstrate, to society’s collective grief – the natural family is sometimes the worst place to leave a child. The impulse to do so is not unique to DSHS caseworkers, despite mountains of evidence pointing to its tragic consequences. So, with the complicity of courts, some health-care workers and others in the system, the agency pursues strategies to reunite abused children with the natural parents who have victimized them.

Based on the outside report, DSHS is developing yet another plan to revise the way it assesses child-abuse cases, shares information and reaches decisions meant to protect children.

If something positive can be salvaged from Rafael Gomez’s death, maybe it will be that we as a society came to our senses and began focusing on the safety of kids rather than the pride of their parents.

If, four or five or 10 years from now, no one is pointing back at the Gomez case as an unlearned lesson, that will be a mark of success.