Colton Turner’s family says they want new law AUSTIN (KXAN) — On Tuesday for more than eight hours, state lawmakers met at the Capitol, heard and discussed ways to cut down the number of abuse and neglect cases that lead to child deaths in the state. During public comments, they also heard from Colton Turner’s great aunt, who said she wants to change policy. “We told them we did not know Megan’s location, but that Colton was in serious, serious danger.” said Raquel Helfrich, whose 2-year-old great nephew’s body was found in a shallow grave in Southeast Austin. Helfrich’s niece, Megan Work, is Colton’s mother. She remains in jail on charges of tampering with evidence along with her boyfriend, Micahael Turner who is in jail too. Their first court date is October 30th. “When I found out it only took the police two days to locate him, Colton, once they were notified, I didn’t understand why it took CPS all these months,” said Helfrich who said she and her husband contacted Child Protective Services in May after they received pictures of Colton with bruises on his body. Helfrich said she believes her niece knew CPS was looking for her from a prior open investigation and was constantly on the move so they couldn’t find her. She said she couldn’t file a missing child report since she was not the legal guardian of the two-year-old. Colton’s great aunt said she feared that he might die, but is now directing her pain to try and change the way the state handles cases. Helfrich said ‘Colton’s Law’ would act as a safety net for kids who can’t be located after or during a CPS investigation. “What I wanted to do was help push for a law that’s put into place so that if there’s an un traceable child, rather than have everybody refer you to CPS for case workers to look for a missing child, it would automatically push to a state law enforcement agency to locate that child.” The Department of Family Protective Services states on its website that if there’s not enough information to find a child or their family, it goes unassigned. It’s not yet known if Colton’s case was labeled “unassigned” but in the coming weeks new details will shed light on how the state agency handled the open investigation and what happened the months leading up to the 2-year-olds death. “There’s no worse day for a commissioner when you find out about a child death in an open case,” said Department of Family Protective Services Commissioner John Specia who admits there were problems with the way the state handled Colton Turner. “We will look at this case, we will learn from this case we will go forward, we made mistakes and we will be open about the mistakes we made,” said Specia who said they’re coordinating with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office on when to release those documents. “If something good has to come out of this, this has to change,” said Helfrich. “This needs to be a wake up call for the system.” State Rep. Cindy Burkett, R-Sunnyvale passed along condolences to Helfrich on behalf of Rep. Dawna Dukes, D-Austin, and the committee. Rep. Tony Dale, R-Cedar Park also said he plans on meeting with Colton’s family to hear more about their ideas on what needs to change. “As a parent myself it tugs at your heart strings when you hear these kinds of stories,” said Rep. Dale to reporters in regards to not only Colton Turners case, but other abuse and neglect incidents that happen in his district around the state. “We’ve determined through an outside consultant, that case workers only spend about 29 percent of their time with families and children. That’s not enough time, clearly.” DFPS said in 2013 CPS completed 160,240 cases of child abuse and or neglect. There were 804 child fatalities state wide in 2013. That number included kids in CPS, child care facilities and adoptions. The state said 156 of those deaths were the direct result of either abuse and or neglect. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services found neglect led to 59 percent of the cases where a child died because of an unsafe sleep environment, a drowning or some sort of medical neglect. In contrast, 41 percent of cases were tied to abuse. That includes stabbing, suffocation and blunt force trauma. Three months ago, CPS approved several changes to better manage the foster system. They include conducting extra interviews with a foster parent’s friends and family and a review of the household finances. Those changes went into effect on September first. The committee also listened to national leaders who said there’s still a lot of data missing that would help contribute to strategies that would help curb child abuse and neglect deaths. “Everybody is accountable, everybody is responsible, but we’re going to do as a federal commission is try to pull it all together in terms of what needs to happen in practice, what needs to happen in policy, what changes need to happen on a regulatory and in our fiscal environment if we’re going to stop these tragedies from occurring,” said Susan Dreyfus, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Alliance for Children and Families. She is also a member of the Federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities. “When you really get underneath these child deaths and you really look at them, it’s multidisciplinary. There’s no one agency that’s singularly responsible, and if we’re really going to get underneath this, there’s a role that we all play and part of that is the data sharing that will have to go on between agencies, child welfare, the medical community, education community, law enforcement partnership is key in this,” said Dreyfus.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 03:29:16 +0000
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