The tortured lives and horrendous deaths of two Denver children in the last year represent an intolerable failure.
There are social service reviews underway and that is a good thing. But regardless of the outcome, society cannot accept what happened to these children.
How does a 7-year-old boy starve to death even as people at his school raise concerns about him? How does a 23-month-old, a victim of suspected sexual abuse, end up back in a house with the man suspected of abusing her?
It’s sickening and tragic. Denverites should not accept a “fell through the cracks” explanation for the deaths of Chandler Grafner and Neveah Gallegos.
We expect child welfare agencies to be held accountable for their actions, or lack thereof. Certainly, these people have some of the most difficult jobs on the planet, but we must be able to trust both their policies and performance.
As a society and a culture, we have to value and protect children, particularly those who are in the most vulnerable situations. It’s clear that warning signs went unheeded in the cases of the Gallegos and Grafner children.
It’s incomprehensible that Denver’s Department of Human Services would have left Neveah with a mother who was living with a sex offender, yet refused to believe her child had been molested. This, after the mother brought the child to the emergency room bleeding with internal injuries consistent with having been assaulted.
We don’t know what Human Services did to follow up, but less than six months later the case was closed. Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman told The Post that the boyfriend who had been suspected of molesting the girl was living in the home. Last month, her body was found in a ravine.
In the Grafner case, the child had been starved, beaten and kept in a closet. He died a month after Human Services workers failed to follow up on a complaint from his school that he had been missing from classes for more than a month.
In response to the deaths, Human Services manager Roxane White has asked for an external review of the agency’s policy and practices. White did the right thing in asking for such an investigation, and we look forward to hearing its findings. But this much is already certain: We cannot accept these cases as unfortunate inevitabilities and we must find ways to do better by our children.
