The killing of Justeen Younger went unnoticed by the state agency that tracks and reports fatal child abuse cases.
At 15 months, Justeen had learned to climb on a kitchen chair when she was hungry and stand by the refrigerator when she was thirsty. Everything she loved, she called “Elmo.”
But she was helpless in the hands of her mother’s 40-year-old boyfriend, who shook her angrily as she cried and vomited on him, then pushed her face into a sofa and held her there 10 to 15 minutes until she stopped breathing.
Clark Brady, the man who killed Justeen, is serving 30 years in prison for that crime. Yet the state Department of Human Services, which keeps a database of child abuse cases and reports fatalities annually to the federal government, does not list Justeen as a victim.
Nor is her 1997 death a single oversight. The Denver Post found that at least 10 other children are not in state child fatality records even though their killers were sentenced to prison or a mental institution or face charges for killing a child.
Leslie Vilar, Justeen’s mother, said she does not understand how Colorado could have overlooked her daughter’s death. She wants her included among the victims.
“She was murdered,” Vilar said. “That’s child abuse.”
In recent years, Colorado has had one of the nation’s highest reported child abuse death rates. Department of Human Services officials attribute that ranking partly to inferior reporting by other states. But they acknowledge that Colorado also misses fatal cases sometimes, a fact that underscores the unreliability of child abuse death statistics.
In Colorado and other states, “there are clearly some gaps” in reporting child abuse deaths, said Jane Beveridge, state manager of child and family services.
“We have, I think, one of the better” systems, she said. “Is it perfect? No.”
The missing victims include Armando Villalobos, a 3-year-old deliberately drowned in a bathtub after a cocktail of medicines failed to kill him. His mother was sentenced to 48 years in prison.
The Department of Human Services also overlooked the death of Cheryl Lynn Chapel, 2, who was beaten to death by her mother’s boyfriend, William Giles. Other missing cases include two newborns killed by their mothers, two children suffocated by a depressed mother, and a boy who died after his mother stopped treating his diabetes.
Asked to explain the gaps, human services officials concluded that in most cases, law enforcement agencies did not report the death to a county child protection agency, or the county did not relay that information to the state. In two cases, the state missed information reported by counties.
In other cases, department officials have made questionable decisions to exclude children from their list of fatal abuse victims.
Kayanna Pierce, for one, had skull fractures, a lacerated liver and bruises on many parts of her body when she died at 14 months. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy said whoever killed her would have had to swing her by her feet and crash her head into a stationary object to cause such trauma.
Kayanna’s death followed four reports in five months of suspicious injuries on her body, including serious burns on her feet, face and one hand, and bruises on her leg and “all over her head,” according to a state child fatality review.
Her case became one of four that prompted the Department of Human Services to overhaul its child protection system in 1999. In a landmark report, the department criticized two counties for failing to protect her.
Yet Colorado does not count Kayanna as a child who died of abuse. Susan Ludwig, a human services official, said Delta County decided not to list abuse as the cause, and the state did not overrule the county.
In a murder trial, Kayanna’s alleged killer was acquitted. The question in the trial was who had killed Kayanna, not whether she was fatally abused.
Justeen Younger’s abuse death was one that state officials acknowledge missing despite information reported by the county.
The last time she saw her daughter, Leslie Vilar noticed a bruise on her left cheek, the thin rope from the autopsy sewn across her chest, the nail torn away from a finger on her right hand, “which made me think that she had put up quite a fight,” she said.
She dressed her daughter’s body in a white satin gown.
“I closed my eyes and imagined her running through a field of flowers into the arms of Jesus,” she said. “Time went by so quickly. There just wasn’t enough time to spend with her.”
