Neglect and dependency court cases skyrocketed in Denver after the apparent starvation death of a 7-year-old boy, prompting a juvenile court judge to say that human services officials scrambled after the death to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Two months after Chandler Grafner’s death, the cases filed dropped back into the average range, state and Denver Department of Human Services statistics show.
Chandler’s death “scared them, frankly, and they said we better involve the court,” said Denver Juvenile Court Judge Dana Wakefield, who retired at the end of August.
The court’s presiding judge, Karen Ashby, said she has seen the increase but doesn’t know why it happened.
“If, in fact, there was a change driven by a fatality, for one thing it’s maybe a good thing that they’re adjusting and responding to that,” she said. “If they’re making it look like they weren’t slacking, that would be a concern. I don’t think that’s what is happening.”
Barbara Shaklee, assistant director of the human services section at the Denver city attorney’s office, said there was no policy change that increased the cases filed, but the media attention around Chandler’s death likely prompted more people to report abuse and neglect.
Chandler died May 6 in Denver, and his guardians are facing murder trials, charged with starving him to death. Denver human services officials had investigated an abuse complaint from the school involving Chandler in January but said it was “unfounded.”
Denver human services officials did not respond to a second referral from the school in April. School officials were concerned that Chandler had been absent from kindergarten for a month.
May filings doubled
In the 10 months prior to Chandler’s death, Denver human services workers filed an average of 36 dependency and neglect cases each month, according to state and local records. In those cases, officials sought either to remove a child from a home or otherwise involve a court to supervise a child’s care after an abuse allegation.
Then Chandler died, and in May, Denver human services workers filed 79 cases in juvenile court seeking to take away a child from his or her parents or to put the family on a corrective plan, records show. In June, Denver officials filed 56 cases.
Before Chandler’s death, the largest number of cases filed in a month in five years was 55 in March 2004.
“It’s inaccurate to say we decided to be more careful for two months and then became less careful,” Shaklee said. “We’ve seen it before; as these issues are in the media, there are more calls and more filings.”
But Denver’s rate of increase in filings far exceeded the bump they received in complaints from the public. Calls to an abuse hotline in the county increased from 841 in January 2007 to 1,035 in the month before Chandler’s death and then went to 1,153 in May, dropping back down to 903 in August.
And the media attention Chandler’s death received affected only Denver case filings in such a dramatic way.
Comparing the month before and after Chandler’s death, 13 of the state’s 22 judicial districts reported increases in the number of dependency cases their social workers filed. But just five of those, including Denver, had increases of more than 10 percent.
Only Boulder, where the number of cases filed shot from nine to 18, could approach Denver’s more than 100 percent increase.
And, in Boulder, such fluctuations are more common, as the county’s workers filed a high of 19 cases and a low of nine during the period, July 2006 to August 2007.
Ongoing dispute
Shaklee said she could not explain why other metro counties had not seen the same increases following the coverage of the deaths of Chandler and another girl in Weld County in March.
Wakefield, who served 27 years on the juvenile bench, said there has been an ongoing dispute between human services and the judges over whether cases should be handled on a voluntary basis or whether the families should be brought to court.
He believes the department decided to bring more court cases after Chandler’s death both to protect the children – and to protect the agency from criticism.
“If it’s voluntary, they sit down with the family and say we won’t file a case on you if you just cooperate,” he said. “If they file a case, what’s offered is up to the judge. We like to think we’re watchdogs.”
Although cases must be viewed on an individual basis, Wakefield believes human services officials do not bring the cases to court often enough.
Shaklee said her agency has made two policy changes since Chandler’s death: A representative of human services will now respond to all school referrals, and the department will communicate better with other county social service providers.
Linda Weinerman, deputy director of the state’s Office of the Child’s Representative, which represents the view of children in these cases, said there are a lot of checks and balances in the system, but human services officials should re-evaluate when there is a major failure like a child’s death.
“They should look at what could be done differently instead of circling the wagons,” she said.
Staff writer Arthur Kane can be reached at 303-954-1244 or akane@denverpost.com.
