When a Colorado child who is known to county social service agencies dies, that death may be excluded from state fatality reports in two ways.
In some cases, state officials decide that the county has responded appropriately to abuse complaints and no further review or report is needed. Other deaths deemed natural or accidental are excluded automatically.
In Adams County alone, at least 18 children who died since 1995 after child protection agencies received calls about their caretakers were not mentioned in state fatality reviews. An agency employee concerned about the adequacy of state investigations provided their names to The Denver Post.
The state Department of Human Services responded that it is reviewing one of those deaths – a death that came after 20 reports concerning children connected to one household.
That victim was Virgil Wagner, 7, who had been reunited with a father previously imprisoned for criminally negligent homicide. Virgil drowned in a pond last May while unsupervised. His father, William Fred Wagner, now faces charges of running a large methamphetamine lab in the home where Virgil lived.
State human services officials said three other deaths were suspicious enough that Adams County should have reported them to the state.
The remaining 14 cases were handled properly and did not need fatality reviews, according to the state, because the children died of natural causes or their deaths raised no issues about prior government involvement.
One of those 14 was Alicia Casias, a 1-month-old shaken to death in 2001, two years after her sister Alexandria died.
State human services officials said no fatality report was done on Alicia because the county had provided appropriate services to her family and there were no prior child abuse complaints about her.
The county had opened a case when Alexandria was 25 days old because her face was swollen and bruised, according to a form filed with the state. But a court closed it against the county’s recommendation, the form says. Alexandria died six days later “of signs of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).”
In several other deaths that the state did not review, autopsy reports show the causes as undetermined or as SIDS – a sometimes mistaken diagnosis in child abuse cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
One of them was the second child death in the same family. That girl’s death, attributed to SIDS, was preceded by child abuse reports in Jefferson County. After her death, a sibling was placed in foster care, sources said.
Another death in an open child protection case, that of a 16-month-old boy, was classified in the autopsy report as “blunt trauma to the head” but deemed “non-suspicious” by the state because he reportedly fell off a counter.
Nancy Hammer, a former Adams County child abuse supervisor who reviewed the autopsy reports for The Post, questioned the state’s claim that these deaths did not warrant further review.
“If there have been (child abuse) reports, founded or unfounded, on anyone in the family, it should be reviewed … as a learning tool for social services,” she said.
Jane Beveridge, state manager of child and family services, said her department has to decide “what you can do and do well” with available resources.
