Lawsuit claims officials failed to protect Summer Phelps
Girl’s mother, estate listed as plaintiffs
On the eve of a high-profile trial involving the torture death of 4-year-old Summer Phelps, the child’s biological mother has sued state officials for failing to protect her daughter.
The lawsuit may later name Jonathan Lytle, Summer’s 30-year-old father, whose trial on charges of homicide by abuse starts Monday in Spokane County Superior Court. Adriana Lytle, Summer’s 24-year-old stepmother, has pleaded guilty to homicide by abuse and will be sentenced after her husband’s trial.
The child died at a Spokane hospital in March 2007 from injuries that attending doctors described as “vicious child abuse.” She had been burned, bitten and beaten and drowned in a bathtub where she had been forced for hours to wash urine-soaked clothing, according to court documents.
Elizabeth Phelps, Summer’s mother, and Spokane attorney Genevieve Mann, appointed as the personal representative of Summer Phelps’ estate, are the plaintiffs in the complaint filed Tuesday. It seeks unspecified damages to be determined at trial.
The defendants include Washington state’s Division of Child and Family Services, including Child Protective Services and the First Steps program.
The lawsuit was filed by Seattle law firm Ressler & Tesh. Allen Ressler and Timothy R. Tesh are also representing the estates of several Eastern Washington children who died in state foster care, including 7-year-old Tyler DeLeon and Robley “Bobby” Carr Jr., 15.
“Summer was not in foster care,” Tesh said. “She was with her biological father. But in her case, we are alleging the failure of other state oversights.”
CPS received at least seven complaints of abuse involving Summer Phelps from 2002 to 2006, which the agency marked “information only” and didn’t investigate, according to the lawsuit.
In addition, the First Steps program was assigned to oversee the care of the infant son of Jonathan and Adriana Lytle in Spokane.
But when First Steps social workers asked CPS about Summer, who was also living in the Lytles’ apartment in September 2006, they were told “there was no CPS referral history” on the child, the complaint says. Six months later, Summer was dead.
Thomas Shapley, communications director for the Department of Social and Health Services, said he hadn’t seen the Phelps lawsuit and couldn’t comment on it.
The state Children’s Administration hasn’t completed its mandatory child fatality review on Summer’s death because it could have “tainted” Lytle’s trial, Shapley said.