Review delayed in Summer’s death
A planned June review of Summer Phelps’ death has been postponed after a Spokane County prosecutor accepted a delay he said was offered by state child welfare officials.
The change means it could be at least January – and likely much later – before any state or county agency investigates what happened to the 4-year-old Spokane girl allegedly tortured to death by her father and stepmother.
And it could be even longer than that before results of those investigations are available to the public – or to lawmakers who might initiate changes in the system that aims to protect children.
Chief Criminal Deputy Spokane Prosecutor Jack Driscoll said Tuesday that he asked for a delay in a state-required child fatality review last week after Children’s Administration officials asked his preference.
“It wasn’t me who initiated it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known any different.”
Spokane County Deputy Prosecutor Ed Hay said last month that prosecutors wouldn’t stand in the way of a child fatality review planned to convene in June.
But Driscoll reversed that decision, saying he wanted to avoid pretrial publicity and multiple interviews that could taint the testimony of potential witnesses.
“My hope is to try to shepherd this case through trial and not have a change of venue situation,” Driscoll said. “They asked what my druthers were. It’s up to them if they honor it.”
Kathy Spears, spokeswoman for the Children’s Administration and the state Department of Social and Health Services, said last week and again Monday that the prosecutor’s office had asked for the delay.
On Tuesday, Spears said it was common practice for the agency to inform law enforcement officials about upcoming fatality reviews and ask their preferences.
“We ask them, ‘Would you like us to hold off?’ We do it routinely,” Spears said, adding: “Our bottom line is we don’t want to jeopardize any criminal investigation.”
The delay effectively stalls investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Summer Phelps. Her father, Jonathan Lytle, 28, and stepmother, Adriana Lytle, 32, are jailed awaiting trial Jan. 28 on charges of homicide by abuse.
Police records showed the red-haired preschooler was severely beaten, bruised, bitten, tortured with a dog’s shock collar and smothered in urine-soaked clothing before she was taken to Deaconess Medical Center, where she died late March 10.
Emergency room and law enforcement personnel have said her injuries were among the worst examples of abuse they’ve encountered.
Now, it could be nearly a year after Summer’s death before the Children’s Administration convenes and reports on the fatality review.
That’s twice as long as the six-month deadline required by state regulations – and twice as long as the average child fatality review took in 2004, according to a Spokesman-Review analysis.
In a similar case, after a prosecutor requested a delay, it took nearly 18 months from the time 2 1/2-year-old Emerald Champagne-Loop died on the Fourth of July, 2003, in Bellingham until the review of her death by abuse was completed on Dec. 21, 2004, state records showed. The child was severely shaken and routinely abused. Brian K. Smith, a boyfriend of her nanny, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2004.
Deaths or near-deaths of children resulting from alleged child abuse or neglect are required to be reported within an hour of the incident, according to the manual for the state’s Administrative Incident Reporting System.
An internal review is required within 14 calendar days of the death, with a verbal debriefing of the incident within 45 days. The child fatality review is supposed to be completed within 180 days of the death, unless an extension is authorized.
No extension has been sought in Summer’s case, Spears, the agency spokeswoman, said Tuesday.
The report is made available to state legislators – and the public – only after the fatality review is completed. In some cases that can be up to two years after a child’s death, records showed.
The annual report on the 61 child fatality reviews conducted in 2005 is just now being finished for distribution this summer, said Brett Helling, the staff member in charge of producing the document. Reports on the 60 deaths that met criteria for review in 2006 are still being compiled.
The delay of the Children’s Administration review also means a delay in examining the First Steps program, which sent a public health nurse into the Lytle home on the day Summer died.
The nurse was there to provide care for Adriana Lytle and her 8-month-old son.
Agency administrators have said the nurse had no duty to ask about Summer. As it is, the father, told police he took the child on a car ride that day to avoid the nurse seeing Summer’s bruises and other injuries, court documents said.
Spokane County’s Child Death Review Committee won’t consider the case until after the legal issues have been resolved, said Cathy Fritz, the outgoing director. And the state fatality review delay could affect an independent review planned by the state Office of the Family and Children’s Ombudsman.
The agency’s director, Mary Meinig, is among advocates who worry that such delays dilute the momentum for action that follows egregious deaths such as Summer’s.
“People want to know what happened and what do we need to fix,” Meinig said.
But she and others also acknowledged that balancing the interests of prompt disclosure with the interests of justice is difficult.
“We want to do it timely – and we want to do it right,” Meinig said.
At least one Spokane advocate who works with child abuse victims said she’s willing to wait several months, even a year, for an investigation if it ultimately means justice for Summer.
Mary Ann Murphy, executive director of Partners with Families and Children, sat for a dozen years on death review teams in Spokane.
“It’s a long journey to learn from these practices to know what would protect the next child,” she said Tuesday.
“The community has to rise up and say, ‘What happened to Summer, it wasn’t right.’ And first and foremost we have to do that in a court of law.”