Mayor Michael Hancock said Thursday he’s forming a quick-response team to study and perhaps make changes to Denver’s child-welfare system in the wake of the death Wednesday of a 23-month-old boy.
Hancock said he met with the Department of Human Services and other child-welfare officials Thursday, not long after the arrest of two people in connection to the death of Javion Johnson. Javion was with serious injuries by a private vehicle about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday and later pronounced dead. The department had been in contact with the family of the toddler.
Candice Lampley, 29, and DeLonta Crank, 36, are suspected of child abuse resulting in serious bodily injury. City records show both are being held at Denver’s downtown jail without bail.
In his Thursday meeting, Hancock said there was “a very candid discussion” on the city’s child-welfare system and what might be done to better protect “its most vulnerable children.”
While Hancock did not divulge some of the ideas that were exchanged, he said the formation of the response team, which will include representatives from his office, along with Denver police, Human Services and other “peak performance” professionals, will act quickly in the wake of a case that the mayor said “shook me to my core.”
“We’re going to do this quick — I don’t want it to languish, and I don’t want a 200-page report,” Hancock said.
The mayor recently formed a that wracked the city in the spring.
On Thursday, police did not say how Lampley and Crank were connected to each other or how they were connected to Johnson, but relatives have said Crank was Lampley’s boyfriend and the child was Lampley’s son.
Police did not describe Javion’s injuries, saying Thursday that further details likely will come from the coroner’s office or the district attorney.
Colorado Bureau of Investigation records show Crank has been arrested roughly a dozen times in the past eight years, including in Denver on suspicion of child abuse in November 2007.
In the child abuse case, Crank allegedly hit his girlfriend in the head with a pair of scissors and punched her in the stomach in front of her 1-year-old son, Denver police wrote in a statement of probable cause.
In the statement, police said the toddler “observed everything.”
Police indicated their charges in the latest case could change based on an autopsy on Javion.
“We did find during the course of this investigation there were injuries to the child,” Christine Downs, a police spokeswoman, said at a Thursday morning news conference. “We’re not sure those caused the death.”
