Two toddlers have been shot to death and a third young child has been hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. A wife and a husband, the parents of the children, are dead too, both shot. The Sacramento County coroner has concluded that the killings were a classic murder-suicide. An out-of-work father allegedly killed his wife and children and then himself.
Those details are tragic. But what sets this sad incident apart is that once again, Sacramento County Child Protective Services is in the middle of the tragedy.
More than a week before the killings, sheriff's deputies removed a teenager from the home after the girl's teachers reported that they suspected abuse. The next day, CPS asked the Sheriff's Department to check on the other children in the home. A deputy found no evidence of imminent danger, and the children were left in the care of their parents. Then on Monday, nine days after the deputy's visit, two adults and two children were found dead in the home and a third child seriously wounded.
Questions abound. Answers do not. CPS officials refuse to answer most questions. They say state laws require them to protect the privacy of the children. That assertion is dubious.
Most of the questions being posed have nothing to do with the children but with the agency charged with protecting them. The most obvious: Why didn't CPS remove the younger children after they removed the older child? After all, the teenage girl taken into protective custody had made serious allegations against her stepfather.
While CPS did ask sheriff's deputies to conduct a welfare check on the family home the day after the teenager was removed from the custody of her mother and stepfather, apparently no one from CPS accompanied the deputy on that visit. Why not? Nine days after the deputy reported no signs of imminent danger in the home, the killings took place. In those nine days, there is no indication that anyone from CPS visited the home. Did they? If not, why not? Are social workers at the agency so overwhelmed that there was no one available to visit, or is that standard procedure in such cases?
It's hard to see how answers to these questions and many more violate the privacy of the surviving children in this tragedy. However, the answers may very well expose shortcomings and/or outright incompetence or malfeasance at CPS.
No one underestimates the difficulty of what CPS workers do nor how hard it is to know what goes on inside a family. It's impossible to predict when a parent or stepparent will go berserk and kill their own children. And yes, the agency is regularly criticized, often unfairly, when it removes children from their homes and again, when it fails to remove them. That's unavoidable. It's the burden a governmental body charged with protecting children must assume.
But the difficulty of its mission does not shield the agency from accountability. As a first step in that accountability, CPS needs to tell the public what its procedures are, whether they were followed in this case and what changes need to be made to make tragedies like this less likely to occur in the future.
About Comments
Reader comments on Sacbee.com are the opinions of the writer, not The Sacramento Bee. If you see an objectionable comment, click the "report abuse" button below it. We will delete comments containing inappropriate links, obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks. Flagrant or repeat violators will be banned. See more about comments here.