The horrific life and death of little Danieal Kelly

Every once in a while, I run across a child abuse/neglect case which makes me so angry that it takes me a little while before I can calm down enough to write about it.

I ran across such a report last week. I was, however, pleased to see that the Grand Jury recommended, in a 250-page report, that extremely serious criminal charges – including charges directly related to the death of the child – be brought not only against the parents and their friends who blatantly lied about whether this child was being cared for, but also against multiple people employed by DHS and an agency engaged by DHS.

The charges recommended include:

Andrea Kelly (mother): Murder, Involuntary Manslaughter, Endangering the Welfare of a Child

Daniel Kelly (father): Endangering the welfare of children

Julius Murray (social worker with MultiEthnic Behavioral Services): Manslaughter, Endangering the Welfare of Children, Recklessly Endangerment, Forgery, Tampering With Records, Conspiracy, Tampering with or Fabricating Physical Evidence, Tampering With Public Records, Criminal Conspiracy

Mickal Kamuvaka (owner of MultiEthnic Behavioral Services): Involuntary Manslaughter, Endangering the Welfare of a Child, Reckless Endangerment, Perjury, Forgery, Tampering With Records, Conspiracy, Tampering with or Fabricating Physical Evidence, Tampering With Public Records, Criminal Conspiracy

Dana Poindexter (DHS social worker): Endangering the Welfare of Child, Reckless Endangerment, Perjury

Laura Sommerer (DHS social worker): Endangering the Welfare of a Child, Reckless Endangerment

Andrea Miles (friend of mother): Perjury

Marie Moses (friend of mother): Perjury

Diamond Brantley (friend of mother): Perjury

The 250-page Grand Jury report, for those of you interested in reading it, has been saved to this blog here. It includes not only the results of the Grand Jury’s investigation and its recommendations, but photos showing just how horribly neglected that poor little girl had been before she died. A photo of Danieal’s bedsore-ridden, maggot infested back, also showing how thin she was due to protracted and intentional starvation, is on page 23. I have not produced that photo on this blog, because it was taken postmortem and is far too disturbing for the average person. View that photo at your own risk.

What follows is a synopsis of the book-length Grand Jury report.

Little Danieal (pronounced Danielle) Kelly was only 13 years old when she died. Born three months prematurely, weighing just a little over a pound, Danieal suffered from cerebral palsy. As such, she depended completely upon others to provide for her needs.

Danieal died weighing only 42 pounds, and covered in horrific maggot-filled bedsores, at least one of which went all the way to the bone. The medical examiner said this child’s body was so filled with infection that her tissues had liquefied and her bones had softened. She had lain in the same position on the bed for so long that, when she was removed, the bed had the permanent indentation of her small young body. She had been intentionally starved by her own mother, and left alone in a dark room, it is believed for years, before her mother finally decided to starve her to death. She had no stimulation. She had no medical care. She did not go to school. She just lay in that bed, unable to do anything, and she had been so horribly neglected that she was unable to even communicate. There was no one to care for her, and no one who could have saved her cared whether she lived or died.

Danieal was shifted from person to person over her short life, and it appears that the only person who ever actually took care of her was one of her father’s girlfriends. For the time in which that particular woman was involved in her life, Danieal was clean, she was cared for, she received appropriate medical care, an education, and all other things that disabled children need. According to her teachers, she thrived under that woman’s care.

The same cannot be said for anyone else in Danieal’s life. Her father didn’t want to be bothered with her, and neither did her mother. In fact, her mother was embarrassed and ashamed of her, and didn’t even want to touch her.

Unlike with many cases of extreme neglect, a number of people over the years had reported that little Danieal was being horribly neglected, but nothing was ever done. A case file was opened at DHS, but for years no action was taken on it despite the fact that the neglect calls kept coming in. At least one person was so disturbed by the neglect and the fact that DHS was doing nothing that she eventually called her State Representative, also to no avail. The reports were taken, but none of the social workers assigned to her case even bothered to look at the child. Instead, they would show up from time to time to only get her mother to sign postdated reports, so they wouldn’t have to come back, then they left.

Danieal wasn’t the only child to die under their watch either. Multiple children had died because Pennsylvania DHS (with a budget in the millions), and MultiEthnic Behavioral Services, the agency engaged by DHS (which was being paid millions), not only failed but absolutely refused to do their jobs. DHS assigned MultiEthnic to visit with the Kelly family twice a week to ensure Danieal had what she needed. They never even looked at Danieal once – if they had, they would have realized that she was living in conditions which would have been considered extreme abuse even if it were done to an animal – but they sure were quick to falsify records and make it look like the child had been visited regularly, and had been fine when they were there. DHS was supposed to check in with the family once a month and do a home visit every three months, but they never even bothered to look at Danieal, and it is believed that they rarely if ever called or visited since their records were also falsified after Danieal’s death.

In fact, it appears that the only person at MultiEthnic Behavioral Health who even tried to help Danieal was an unpaid college intern. However, even his attempts to help her were hampered by the lack of real information regarding her situation, though he would have had the information if DHS had investigated the many complaints, and if MultiEthnic had actually been visiting the family. For example, he was under the impression that Danieal wasn’t in school or seeing a local doctor because the family was new to the area. In fact, they had been there for years. He was told that Danieal was unable to talk, when in fact she could talk when she was in school. As a result of the lies told to the one person who took a personal interest, it was unknown to that person that Danieal was in severe danger. By the time his internship was over he had arranged for a doctor visit as well as for school enrollment. What he didn’t know was that Danieal’s mother had refused for years to provide Danieal with either, and when the intern finished his internship, he had no way of knowing that Danieal’s mother had absolutely no intention of following through with either. In fact, Danieal would not see a a doctor until after she was dead.

When the mother repeatedly failed to contact the school as arranged by the MultiEthnic intern, despite their repeated contacts with her, school representatives went to the home. They found Danieal in an extremely hot room – no windows open, no fan, covered to her chin with blankets – and the room was completely dark. Danieal did not respond to any of them when they spoke to her. The mother told them that Danieal had been out in her stroller all day, and had been put to bed because she was so tired. Still, the school representatives were alarmed at the state in which they found this child, which was an obvious sign that she had decompensated severely since even children with cerebral palsy don’t just lie around like a vegetable. The mother claimed she didn’t know if Danieal had ever even seen a doctor, and told them that she had only recently gotten custody, which was a lie. The school representatives were so disturbed that they contacted multiple people in the child welfare system, trying to get help for Danieal, but all of them just blew the school representatives off. The DHS case worker told the school representatives that the mother – who was at that point pregnant with her tenth child – was just overwhelmed, and that they were looking for a larger home for her and her nine children. That was a lie, too.

The mother repeatedly canceled appointments for Danieal to be tested by the school, which was necessary prior to enrollment due to the extent of her disability, until eventually the school went to the home to test her there. They found that she was nonverbal, had no muscle development, and that her only means of communication was to cry intensely. Again, though it was stiflingly hot, Danieal was dressed in a coat and scarf, undoubtedly to hide her true physical condition. Again, social workers were contacted by the school. Again, the school was ignored. Eventually an appointment was made to set Danieal up with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) but that meeting was to take place three days after Danieal died, so Danieal never got to go to school.

The last time Danieal’s feeble and disabled grandmother saw Danieal alive, it was at a birthday party for one of Danieal’s sisters. Danieal’s mother never gave her a birthday party, as I’m sure you’ve ascertained by now. While everyone else was outside having a barbeque, Danieal was again found inside a stiflingly hot, completely dark room. Her grandmother was horrified by how thin the child had become, and demanded that the mother take her to the hospital. The mother insisted nothing was wrong, and that Danieal was eating and drinking normally.

The grandmother did not call DHS, because she was aware of how many people had called repeatedly, and nothing had ever been done. She knew that Danieal had a social worker, but she didn’t know that the social worker had never even seen Danieal. Danieal’s mother told her that Danieal had seen a doctor who said she was fine, but that was a lie. The grandmother did mention to those people who had previously contacted DHS that she was afraid Danieal would die. They urged her to call DHS, but she did not because she feared angering her daughter.

The last time a DHS social worker visited Danieal’s home, she was frustrated to find that the mother had indeed not taken Danieal to the doctor, nor had Danieal been enrolled in school. Despite a file folder filled with complaints from concerned citizens, despite that she knew that Danieal’s mother had a years-long record of severely neglecting her daughter and that the child was severely disabled, she didn’t even bother to look in on the child, and certainly didn’t try to talk to her. She didn’t even bother to follow up with the mother to make sure the doctor appointment was rescheduled, and that alone could have saved this child’s life.

The social worker from MultiEthnic was supposed to see Danieal twice a week but never once noticed her severe deterioration or her obviously critical medical condition. In fact, the Grand Jury suggests that social worker also likely never saw Danieal even once in the years that he was being paid to ensure her health and safety.

The Grand Jury found that little Danieal’s final days were spent alone in darkness. She was never taken outside, and she was not fed. Yet, there were other adults visiting Danieal’s mother, who saw the conditions and saw that the child was not being fed, was being kept in an incredibly hot dark room with covers on all the time. Yet not even one of them reported this to police, DHS, or anyone else. Instead, when subpoenaed before the Grannd Jury, they tried to minimize the mother’s actions by saying the child was fine when they saw her. Danieal was not fine when they saw her, though. She was dying, and her condition should have been obvious to anyone.

Some of these people, however, asked Danieal’s mother why she never took Danieal outside. Her lame excuse was that she had once taken Danieal to the park, but that people stared at her. It was the opinion of those witnesses that Danieal’s mother was “embarrassed of her child”.

In fact, during the last few weeks of Danieal’s life, it appears that only her two older brothers cared what happened to her. One brother, who no longer lived at home, came by one day and got into a very big fight with his mother over Danieal’s condition. He also pulled his younger brother aside and gave him money, instructing him to make sure Danieal was fed and given something to drink every day.

Clearly, the brothers knew their mother was starving Danieal to death. Yet since no one had listened to any of the adults who had brought this situation to their attention, they certainly weren’t going to take the word of children.

Three of the mother’s friends testified that, the day before Danieal died, she looked fine, and that her mother had bathed her that day and that Danieal’s back looked like anyone else’s back. The truth was that Danieal’s entire back was a giant open bedsore, with maggots in it. The smell alone should have alerted anyone to the fact that the child was critically ill, even if no one actually saw her. The Grand Jury has recommended that those friends all be charged with perjury, since it was an obvious lie.

As if all of this isn’t bad enough, Danieal’s mother didn’t even bother to call an ambulance until she knew for a fact that Danieal was dead. Her son Daniel told her that Danieal didn’t look right, and that her eyes were rolled up in her head, she wasn’t moving, and that there were flies in and around her mouth. He told his mother that they had to call the police, and she refused and forbade him to do so either. He told her that she had to call an ambulance; again, she refused, again she forbade him to do so. Instead, the mother ordered pizza, and everyone ate except Danieal. That wasn’t at all unusual, since Andrea Kelly had intentionally starved Danieal to death.

In fact, the mother still didn’t call an ambulance until the next day, and even then only after she called a friend to the house, to make sure Danieal was actually dead. Clearly, she took no chances that Danieal would live. She murdered Danieal, slowly and methodically.

When paramedics arrived, Danieal was quite obviously dead, and had been for some time since rigor mortis had set in. Paramedics said that blood was coming from her mouth and nose, her eyes were swollen, and she had a bedsore on her clavicle which was “black and fuzzy”, no doubt molded. There was fecal matter all over the bed, and the child had a bedsore so deep that it exposed her femur bone; her back was completely covered in deep bedsores, which were filled with maggots. The paramedic told the Grand Jury that Danieal was so obviously starved that she looked like she was from a third world country.

The medical examiner’s office was called, and they testified that when they removed the child’s body, it left a permanent indentation in the mattress in the shape of Danieal’s body, from where she had been lying in the same position for so long. The medical examiner’s office also testified that there were hard stools on the floor around the bed, which seemed to them as if the child had been defecating in the bed and someone had just simply swatted the stools onto the floor. She also said the child’s body had already started to decompose, so she had been dead for a while.

DHS was called, and their investigator testified that the stench in the house was so bad that he literally had to cover his nose and mouth. In addition to the stench and filth in the house, which was everywhere, he testified that the stove didn’t work, and that there was no food in the house. He said it was the worst conditions he had ever seen, and that it had obviously been that way for a long time.

Yet remember, MultiEthnic Behavioral Services was being paid to visit that home twice a week for years, to ensure that the children – especially Danieal – were cared for, and safe.

The medical examiner testified that when he opened the body bag, black insects flew out of it. Little Danieal’s muscles were so contracted, from having not been moved in years, that it was difficult for him to determine her height. He eventually decided the 13-year-old was only 3′6″ tall, and that she weighed only 42 pounds. Based upon the level of decomposition, he estimated that she had been dead for at least 12 to 24 hours prior to paramedics being called. The doctor also testified regarding the extensive bedsores on this poor child’s body. From the Grand Jury report:

So she had this one on her collar bone, on the front right side of her collar bone. Then she had what I described as five bedsores involving the left side of her back, the sacrum or small of the back region, over the hip in the back on both sides. The largest of which was about three inches in size. . . . The smallest was two inches, and the one that was over her sacrum or small of her back is the one that involved the sacrum or that part of the spine sitting between the pelvis, so that had gone into bone, and that bone itself has become soft because of the infection.

Dr. Lieberman said it would have taken “weeks” for Danieal to develop bedsores:

We’re looking at a minimum, absolute minimum, of two weeks for a bedsore to develop, and it could be a bit longer depending on whether you’re moving the person, changing the position they’re in. So if you have somebody that can’t move for themselves, and you just leave them lying on their back for more than two weeks, you’re going to have a bedsore there. But if a person is turned from one side to another side and kept off that one area and the pressure is changed constantly from one location to another, even sitting a child up and putting the pressures on the buttock and back of thighs would then take the pressure off the back of the child.

Dr. Lieberman said that there would be an odor associated with the bedsores, and that if the bacteria causing the bedsores was present in feces or stool, “it’s going to have a very horrible, sickening smell to it. It should be readily apparent to anybody.”

He further testified that Danieal’s chest muscles were “sticky”, due to lack of fluid in her body, and that she was severely malnourished. He compared her condition to that of victims of the Nazi concentration camps.

He determined that she had been murdered.

Another doctor, a specialist in cerebral palsy with decades of experience, testified that there was nothing about Danieal’s cerebral palsy which caused an early death, because cerebral palsy is a condition, not a disease. He also testified that he had never seen bedsores as bad as the ones on little Danieal’s body. In fact, he said that in all his years of experience, he had never seen child who had been neglected to that degree. From the Grand Jury report:

The actual cause of death could have been infection of the pressure sores; it could have been the consequences of malnutrition. And I suspect, again, it could be a combination of the two. When you’re severely malnourished, your immune system doesn’t work very well, and you’re very likely to not be able to fight off an infection. And when you have a sore down to your bone, you basically have open, gaping wounds like this, there are bacteria on the skin that ordinarily our skin protects us from getting inside the body. She did not have that protection. So I would imagine it was a combination of severe malnutrition and infection.

The Grand Jury stated unequically that the photos do not lie. They compared photos of Danieal as a thriving child, despite her cerebral palsy, while in the care of her father’s girlfriend, against photos of her skeletal condition covered in open sores all over her body when she died. They determined her cause of death to be homicide, and noted that any one of a dozen people could have kept this child alive if they had only tried.

The Grand Jury said that Andrea Kelly killed her daughter Danieal, by refusing her care, and by driving away those who would help care for her. They noted that she hid Danieal away from prying eyes, so the extent of her neglect would not be known. When people would state concern about Danieal, she lied to them and said Danieal was seeing a doctor, that she was eating and drinking, and that she was lying in that filthy bed (she hid the filth and the true condition of the child with blankets even when the temperature outside the non-air conditioned home was in the 90s) only because she had been exercised and gotten fresh air, and was tired. While Danieal was dying, alone in that dark room, she fed her other children, she entertained friends, and she even attended classes. She actively prevented her son from calling an ambulance when it was clear even to a child that she was at death’s door, if not perhaps already dead. The Grand Jury determined that Andrea Kelly not only allowed Danieal to die, she wanted Danieal to die.

They noted the years of reports, documenting the fact that Andrea Kelly had consistently refused to keep her daughter clean and nourished, she refused to enroll her in school, and she refused to take her to a doctor. Instead, she locked Danieal away in a dark room, by herself, and left her there for years without sufficient food or water. They further noted testimony, which they found credible, that Andrea so hated even touching her daughter that she refused her water so she would urinate less. After Andrea Kelly moved her children to their final home, so she would not be subject to anyone’s watchful eye, Danieal lost half of her total body weight. As long as others had been involved in Danieal’s care, even minimally, she did not receive any exercise, she did not see a doctor, she did not go to school, but at least she weighed about 100 pounds so she wasn’t being actively starved to death. Left to her own devices, the mother ensured Danieal would die by not feeding her. Danieal’s sister Shakira told the Grand Jury that she had never, in her entire life, ever seen Danieal outside. They noted that Andrea Kelly had intentionally hidden Danieal’s true physical condition from the school employees who finally came to do the IEP testing, after Andrea repeatedly refused to keep appointments, by dressing her in a heavy jacket and scarf.

Danieal was not the only child Andrea Kelly refused to feed, either. Danieal’s brother Daniel testified

My mom used to treat me and my sister Danieal different from the others. She knew what she was doing. She never gave me money or take me to get a haircut. I had to get my money on my own by hustling drugs on the street. . . . She would say she didn’t have any money to get haircuts and sneakers. She would buy pizza and stuff and when I would come in it would be all gone and then I’d have to go on the street and make some money for me and my sister. When I would come home, my mom would tell me Danieal already ate.

It was also noted by the Grand Jury that Andrea Kelly was perfectly able to take care of things when it benefited her. For example, she had no problem keeping the appointments and completing the paperwork necessary to get Danieal’s SSI check assigned to her, which of course stands in stark contrast to her refusal to do anything at all to benefit her disabled daughter, who was literally unable to do anything on her own.

The Grand Jury also noted that Danieal’s father held a great deal of blame in her death. He had taken Danieal and Daniel when Andrea’s own mother begged him to do so as a result of gross neglect. He left the children in the care of his girlfriend, who did a wonderful job caring for Danieal according to her teachers at that time. As long as the girlfriend was caring for her – which is estimated at five years – Danieal received medical care and physical therapy, she was always clean and dressed nicely, and was always healthy other than her underlying cerebral palsy condition. According to Danieal’s old teacher, Danieal flourished under the care of that girlfriend.

However, when the father and that girlfriend broke up, Danieal never again saw a doctor, and never again received any education. He left the children in the care of an elderly relative, who did the best she could, and at one point he was leaving them in the care of roommates, without even checking to make sure the roommates would be home. Still, reports were made to authorities that he was leaving the two young children alone for hours and hours on end. Eventually, because Danieal and Daniel were a burden on his skirt-chasing lifestyle, he abandoned them back to their mother, who he knew would not care for them.

Not surprisingly, when he testified before the Grand Jury, he blamed Danieal’s death on the mother, Andrea Kelly. The Grand Jury saw right through it, though, and pointed out that the neglect Danieal suffered at the hands of her mother was in fact not that dissimilar from the neglect she had suffered at the hands of her father. Though he knew that Danieal was being severely neglected by her mother, since he had been told that repeatedly by someone close to the situation – who was one of the many people who had made numerous complaints of severe child neglect – he never did anything to try to help her. In fact, Danieal’s father didn’t even care enough to check on her at all, and in the last two years of Danieal’s life, her father never even so much as asked about her, much less asked to see her. Instead, he tried to tell the Grand Jury that his son Daniel should have told him and didn’t. The Grand Jury, no fools, pointed out that it was “low” to blame a child for his own parental neglect, and that it was also “absurd”, given that he knew full well that Andrea didn’t care for Danieal, since it was the reason he had taken custody at an earlier date, at the urging of Andrea’s own mother. The Grand Jury summed up the father’s responsibility in Danieal’s death as follows:

Daniel Kelly was well aware what deserting his daughter meant to her safety and welfare. He just did not care.

The Grand Jury also took the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services to task for their involvement in Danieal’s death, noting that the agency receives hundreds of millions of dollars each year to make sure that children like Danieal receive the care they need, and that they are not being abused or neglected. They noted that 500 employees are assigned to children, but even then they are only the overseers and decision makers, since care of those children is instead contracted out to private companies such as MultiEthnic Behavioral Services. They also noted that the social worker responsible for Danieal, contrary to general public perception, was hardly overworked since she only oversaw 18 cases and did not provide direct services to any of them. Likewise, the supervisors and administrators who oversaw the social workers only supervised five employees each. All DHS had to do in order to save Danieal was to go to that house when they received the child abuse/neglect reports, and see the little girl for themselves. Yet for three long years, and through two social workers, no one could be bothered.

The Grand Jury noted that there were 11 formal neglect complains related to the Kelly children, from various people who had noted what was going on, and it was known that the family included a child with cerebral palsy who was not in school, and was not receiving any medical care whatsoever. Yet in three years of oversight, her social worker didn’t even manage to get Danieal in school, much less to a doctor. The Grand Jury noted several specific DHS employees who, had they done even the most basic aspects of their jobs, would have saved Danieal’s life. The first social worker assigned to Danieal, Dan Poindexter, never did one piece of paperwork on the case, and never once did any type of investigation whatsoever despite the repeated reports of severe neglect. In fact, when subsequent complaints came in, his handling of her case so was bad that it was unclear whether any prior reports had ever even been made. Even when he received reports that Danieal was extremely ill, was not in school, and was heard screaming, he ignored it.

Eventually an emergency report came in which was taken seriously by another social worker. However, once she found out that Dan Poindexter was Danieal’s social worker, under agency regulations she was required to turn the case over to him. Again, he did absolutely nothing. In fact, after Danieal’s death, four years of files were found in a filthy file cabinet-sized box, and he had not even so much as opened the mail associated with those files, much less done anything with the files themselves. Danieal’s file was at the very bottom. In fact, it was later determined that under Poindexter’s watch, not even one of Andrea Kelly’s children had been enrolled in school. The Grand Jury determined that Poindexter “did not lift a finger” to help any of the children in the Kelly household, despite the repeated emergency reports, and despite having been repeatedly confronted by other social workers about the case.

In fact, two of the people who had called to report Danieal’s neglect were told by Poindexter that it was “none of their business”. When another tried to talk to him face to face about it, he put his hand in their face to silence them, and refused to speak to them. In his testimony before the Grand Jury, Poindexter tried to claim that Danieal never having seen a doctor was “neither here nor there”. He also testified that Danieal was not entitled to educational services. In the end, the Grand Jury noted that several other children had died under Dana Poindexter’s watch, and described his work habits as “slovenly, neglectful, and dangerously reckless”. And though he was repeatedly suspended, he was never terminated, and case files which were supposed to be closed within 60 days and presented to a supervisor, remained open years later, with no investigation having been done at all. In the end, the Grand Jury determined that not only Dana Poindexter, but Poindexter’s superiors as well, had responsibility in the death of Danieal Kelly. They also noted that his direct supervisor Janice Walker, who also did not do even the basics of her job, had actually been promoted, and that even though she knew that Poindexter did not even try to do his job, she repeatedly gave him “satisfactory” or “superior” evaluations.

The Grand Jury found that DHS falsified and forged official DHS records, to cover up for the fact that no one there had done their job, and as a result a child was dead. In fact, they did this only after Danieal’s death, and the responsibility for this has been placed upon DHS administrator Martha Poller, who supervised Poindexter’s supervisor and was at one time Poindexter’s direct supervisor (meaning she had been promoted as well). She went back and closed all of his cases as unsubstantiated, with dates on the last possible day when that could have been done, when in Danieal’s case they clearly were not unsubstantiated since the child was not in school, and was not seeing a doctor. The complaints should have been substantiated with extreme ease, if even one of the social workers involved had done their job, and all it would have taken was a couple of phone calls.

Yet, if not for her attempt to falsify records so she and others would not be held responsible in the death of Danieal Kelly, she could simply have directed services, since cases are automatically available for services if not found substantiated on the 60th day. The Grand Jury expressed disgust when it mentioned that DHS had started a new team to internally review child deaths, and that none other than Poller had been named to oversee fatality reviews.

Another DHS worker whose inaction was discussed by the Grand Jury report was Laura Sommerer. She got the case after it was wrested from Poindexter by an outraged intake worker. When Danieal died, Sommerer had had the case for almost a year, and had done absolutely nothing to help Danieal. Despite having been informed that Danieal was not in school, was receiving no assistance for her cerebral palsy, was not seeing a doctor, and was sitting in a stroller, urinating and defecating on herself and screaming day after day, Sommerer shockingly saw no cause for concern. In fact, when she finally visited the home, she didn’t even ask about Danieal, she didn’t see Danieal, and her notes say absolutely nothing about Danieal. Her job was to oversee MultiEthnic’s care of the family, yet she didn’t even know that they weren’t visiting the family at all, much less not twice per week according to the family assistance plan, and she didn’t know that Danieal was still not in school and still not receiving medical care. Yet she was also to maintain monthly contact with the family, and to do a home visit every three months.

Sommerer had not even read the family’s long DHS record, which went back to 1997. Had she done so, she would have known that the family had failed and refused – for eight years – to get the children in school and to get them medical care. In fact, the entire time Sommerer had the case, no one had even tried to schedule a doctor’s appointment for Danieal, which required nothing but a single telephone call. She visited the home once, and didn’t even look at Danieal. Had she done so, she would have realized that the child was dying. In fact, Sommerer didn’t even bother to report that social services contractor MultEthnic had completely failed to do anything to help this family, until after Danieal was dead. She also did not file her mandatory reports with her supervisor. Had she done so, it would have been obvious that MultiEthnic had done absolutely nothing, and hadn’t even turned in the reports required for DHS. She tried to lie to the Grand Jury about when she had done a report, by saying she did it in June, when in fact she didn’t do it at all until after Danieal died.

Had Sommerer even so much as peeked in on Danieal during her last visit, she would have seen a child who was starved to the pointing of being skeletal, and who needed to be removed from the home immediately, to save her life. Instead, that was apparently too much to ask, and as a result the Grand Jury stated that “The consequences of her failure were deadly”.

The Grand Jury stated that Sommerer’s indifference to Danieal’s needs were more than matched by the indifference of her supervisors. In fact, neither of Sommerer’s supervisors had even so much as read the DHS file on the Kelly family, until after Danieal died. From the Grand Jury’s report:

Indeed, DHS workers acted as if Danieal deserved fewer services – schooling, for example – because of her disability, rather than more services. Because Danieal was confined to a wheelchair and could not describe her pain, or hunger, or other needs, she was easy to ignore. She did not cause trouble or end up in juvenile court. She was not truant, because no one enrolled her in school. Those responsible for checking on her safety seemed to think she must be fine as long as she was alive – even if she was sitting alone in a stroller in a dark room all day, wasting away.

Yet anyone charged with protecting Danieal from harm had to know that failure to provide her needed services was inflicting great harm. Social work supervisors paid professional salaries by the City of Philadelphia had to know that a disabled child without medical care, physical therapy, exercise, and schooling will quickly deteriorate, losing mobility and essentials skills that were difficult to gain in the first place. They had to know that these children need stimulation and that they can learn if placed in appropriate school settings. And they should believe that a disabled child is still a human being who can be happy and deserves to grow up and enjoy life just like anyone else.

How long Danieal had been without medical attention made her case urgent. In addition, reading the file would have alerted the supervisors and their social worker that Andrea Kelly was not as compliant as she might appear. The file revealed that the mother had, in fact, avoided taking Danieal to a doctor for years by making excuses and lying to social workers (including Catherine Mondi back in 2004). She lied in particular about how long she had been caring for the girl. The Kelly file should have come to Sommerer from her supervisors with a red flag saying: “first priority – get Danieal to a doctor.” A careful reading of Trina Jenkins’s summary alone should have alerted the supervisors to the severity and urgency of the case.

In fact, the supervisors’ memo to Sommerer did not even mention Danieal at all, although a simple reading of the file would have shown a severely disabled child who had not seen a doctor in years. Furthermore, it incorrectly stated that the children had been enrolled in school, when they had still not been enrolled. There was thus only an inaccurate implication that, as one of the Kelly children, Danieal was in school. Three days before Danieal died, her supervisor gave her an “outstanding” review, noting a “100% visitation and family services plan completion”. Yet, as the Grand Jury correctly notes, her attendance means nothing when she had overlooked the fact that a disabled child was literally being starved to death while she was monitoring the home, and she didn’t even notice it. As the Grand Jury also correctly notes, “In the end, her life did not depend on these DHS employees taking heroic action to save her. It depended on them merely to do their jobs.” Yet not even one DHS employee was held responsible after the internal DHS investigation, for their failures which resulted in Danieal’s death.

The Grand Jury was so thorough in its investigation of this child’s death that it even subpoenaed the former DHS Executive Director, and exposed longterm fraud on behalf of both MultiEthnic, as well as the Director’s “audit” which “positively gushed” about the company even knowing that they had not been making home visits, and that they had repeatedly lied to DHS, and submitted fraudulent paperwork “on a massive scale” , that is, when they bothered to file the required paperwork at all.

In fact, MultiEthnic submitted fraudulent paperwork with regard to their handling of Danieal’s case as well. The Grand Jury found that they reports they received were fraudulent and that, after the unpaid intern left the position, the family was no longer monitored at all. The surviving Kelly children do not recall any visits after that point by anyone with MultiEthnic, though they do recall seeing Ms. Sommerer once or perhaps twice. The fact of the matter is that MultiEthnic was having Andrea Kelly sign post-dated reports, which she was more than happy to do, since it freed her to neglect and starve her severely disabled daughter to death without any concern of social service workers interfering. MultiEthnic falsified not only the encounter forms, but also the progress reports, which were written only after Danieal died.

In fact, had MultiEthnic done its job, they would have realized that Danieal missed an appointment with a cerebral palsy clinic – an appointment which would, without any doubt whatsoever, have saved her life. Instead, the Grand Jury found that the “notes” allegedly made by MultiEthnic contained no names, no significant dates, and only comments which were nonsensical in light of the true situation. For example, at one point it noted that “the house seemed small for eight people”, when MultiEthnic had allegedly been visiting the family for a very long time, and was allegedly trying to get them alternative housing (which never materialized, nor did any notes suggesting they even tried to do so ever materialize).

As would be expected when two agencies are making up reports of things which never happened, and done to cover themselves only after Danieal died, there were innumerable contradictions. In fact, MultiEthnic claimed to have visited the home just 11 days before Danieal died, yet a healthy child (as they claimed) would not have withered away to only 42 pounds and left behind only an emaciated, bedsore-ridden corpse in so short a period of time. Not only did Danieal’s brother Daniel say that Danieal had not moved for two to three weeks prior to her death, had she waved to the MultiEthnic worker as he claimed, he would have noticed that her arm and hand were skeletal, withered away to nothing. At another point, a MultiEthnic worker claimed he was unable to visit because no one was home. Yet Danieal had not been outside in months if not years, and never left her bed. If there was no answer, he should immediately have called DHS, but he did not. MultiEthnic also claimed that Danieal missed an appointment with a cerebral palsy clinic which would undoubtedly have saved her life because her DHS worker, Ms. Sommerer, was supposed to transport her and never showed up. However, it was MultiEthnic’s job to resolve transportation issues, so instead it was Danieal’s MultiEthnic worker who never showed up.

The Grand Jury summed up the responsibility of MultiEthnic’s Director in the death of Danieal’s death as follows:

Even Kamuvaka’s skewed view of the role of her agency and her responsibility for the welfare of children entrusted to it cannot explain the “Findings” in Kamuvaka’s “Child Death Internal Review Report,” which purports to investigate Danieal’s death. Following a “History” that was largely fiction, Kamuvaka wrote, among other things: that the “findings of the internal review seem to suggest that home visits were done appropriately, according to DHS performance standards;” that “the important issues of medical appointments, house search, truancy (on the part of one child only), as well as Parenting education were addressed;” and that “at no point was it evident that any of the children were in danger of abuse and/or neglect, to two consecutive SCOH workers.” Finally she recommended that “severe special needs children be placed in special care facilities.”

Kamuvaka was complicit in Murray’s neglect of his duty to protect Danieal when she chose to tolerate his obvious failure to visit the Kelly household and to perform services as required under MultiEthnic’s contract with DHS. After Danieal’s death, Kamuvaka compounded this complicity by orchestrating an attempted cover-up of MultiEthnic’s malfeasance – a cover-up that included falsifying documents, lying to DHS, and giving false testimony under oath before the Grand Jury.

By claiming in her fraudulent Internal Review report that the issues of medical appointments (none occurred), house search (aborted by Alan Speed after a single phone call), truancy (handled by a court), and parenting classes (one class in ten months) had all been “addressed,” Kamuvaka demonstrated that she did not take seriously her responsibility to deliver real services to the children that MultiEthnic supposedly “served.” In the face of horrendous photographs of a little girl starved, her insistence that it was never evident to Murray that a child was in danger is incredible and outrageous. And her cruel suggestion that special-needs children should automatically be taken out of their homes when SCOH is put into a household confirms why Dr. Kamuvaka’s agency should never have been hired to provide services to children in need.

Kamuvaka wanted to run an agency that got paid not to perform contracted services and not to protect children it was charged to protect. She wanted to run an agency that could neglect neglected children without anyone knowing. She certainly did not want to serve children like Danieal, whose very life depended on the services MultiEthnic was supposed to provide.

For the past several years, Kamuvaka has been employed by a local university, teaching others how to do social work.

The Grand Jury has recommended criminal charges against almost all of the social workers involved in Danieal’s care, either for neglect or for perjury after they obviously lied under oath, and noted with dismay that they are still employed by DHS, and some of them have even been promoted, despite the fact that they not only failed to save Danieal, they completely failed to do their job at all, and as a result multiple children have died under their watch. It appears that the only person who even tried to do their job was the unpaid graduate student intern, who did his internship at MultiEthnic while working a full-time job during the day and raising a family. Still, he was inexperienced and, by his own admission, did not know how to do many things that a Family Caseworker needs to do. MultiEthnic, rather than assigning him to an experienced social worker, instead dumped their most challenging case – that of the Kelly family – on a young man who was ill prepared to handle it. When his internship was over, MultiEthnic had no assigned social worker for the Kelly family for at least six weeks, possibly longer. That alone speaks to the level of criminal neglect by MultiEthnic, as well as the level of criminal neglect by DHS social workers and supervisors who were supposed to be overseeing the family’s services. In the end, even the intern was determined to be involved in the falsifying of reports during the six weeks after he left, but the Grand Jury determined that no charges should be brought against him due to his cooperation with their investigation.

In fact, MultiEthnic was regularly falsifying reports, and not just in this one case. The Director of MultiEthnic actually hired someone to write progress reports, to make up for the fact that they had never been written. In one case, a progress report noted no problems with regard to a teenager they were supposed to be monitoring, when in fact that teenager was wanted for first-degree murder and had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list during the time in which there were allegedly no causes for concern. When preparing backdated progress reports on the Kelly family after Danieal’s death, the Director knew she was committing a crime. From the Grand Jury report:

Kamuvaka clearly knew that what she was doing was a crime. She instructed Ms. Jackson to initial the notes and said that it was for “forensics.” Ms. Jackson quoted her boss: “I don’t want them to test the notes for the ink to see if they been written earlier.”

The Grand Jury makes recommendations for fixing the system, but I doubt the system will ever be fixed. Good social workers are driven out, and the useless ones take their place. The only way to fix a system that broken is to dismantle it and start completely from scratch.

Let’s just hope that the people who stood by and did nothing, while Andrea Kelly neglected her disabled daughter to the point of a torturous death, are indeed found guilty, and that they are imprisoned for a very, very long time.

As for Andrea Kelly … there is a death penalty in the state of Pennsylvania for first-degree murder. Unfortunately, the Constitution prevents the state of Pennsylvania from doing to Andrea what she did to Danieal, since it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment. However, simply giving her a lethal injection just does not seem punishment enough. For that reason, I suggest she be given life without parole, and that she be placed with the most violent female inmates they can find, and make sure they are very well aware of what she did to a child who was completely and totally helpless. Maybe then, there will be justice.