Children at risk: City’s child fatality reviews don’t prevent future deaths as intended
The DC Line conducted a six-month investigation, funded by SpotlightDC: Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism, in pursuit of the answer to that question. This is part of that investigation.
GABRIEL Eason’s name appeared in broadcast media and newspapers for a few weeks following his death in April 2020 and once again after the November arrests of his mother, Ta’Jeanna Eason, and her boyfriend, Antonio Dale Turner, for homicide. The 2-year-old, who was beaten and tortured in the final months of his life, subsequently fell into a hole deeper than any grave. His story and that of his two brothers — also punched and pounded with adult fists — quickly faded from the public’s consciousness. Say their names and puzzled looks appear on more than a few faces.
A similar reaction comes with the mention of Makenzie Anderson. She was only 11 months old on Feb. 6, 2020, when her mother abused her in a hotel that doubled as a temporary DC government shelter for homeless families. She died from blunt force trauma to the head.
No one even knows the whereabouts of 2-month-old Kyon Jones, let alone his name. His mother, Ladonia Boggs, told officers of DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in May 2021 that she went to sleep with him one night and the next morning he was dead. She wrapped him in a blanket and threw him in the trash.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for DC refused to prosecute Boggs for murder. She was charged only with “tampering with physical evidence,” as if Kyon were some piece of paper or file, instead of a human being.
When a child is murdered, people often want to believe the death will force societal change. They want government officials and agencies to rally to ensure no other child will experience a similar demise.
That’s the thinking that led to the creation three decades ago of DC’s Child Fatality Review Committee — which is under the medical examiner’s purview — as well as the subsequent establishment of the DC Child and Family Services Agency’s Internal Child Fatality Review Committee. The two panels are among nearly a dozen entities that make up the District’s child welfare system, with the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) as its linchpin. Yet that infrastructure, built over time, has proved incapable of fulfilling its directive to assess child fatalities and reduce preventable deaths.
This is one finding from a six-month investigation by The DC Line — which included an extensive examination of government documents, court cases, and internal and external reports along with dozens of interviews with DC officials, a whistleblower, child welfare experts, lawyers and advocates. It found DC’s child welfare system, which is responsible for preventing, investigating, evaluating and forcing consequences for infant and child deaths, is inadequate at best and allows homicides to proceed without public scrutiny at worst. The DC Line’s probe further found:
Delays in evaluating and reporting infant and child deaths keep information and details out of public view for years; some reports never become public.
Though the District has two separate review committees — one of which has a subcommittee to evaluate infant deaths — reports are often inconsistent, inconclusive and delayed.
Because of the systemic delays as well as undetermined and sometimes questionable causes of death, caregivers and parents sometimes go unpunished for what might have been murder.
“Children who are murdered by caregivers get lost” in the Child Fatality Review Committee’s process, said Stephanie McClellan, deputy director of the DC KinCare Alliance, a nonprofit organization created to support relatives who care for children outside of the traditional foster care system. “There is no way to tell how many children die each year in DC … because there is no current reporting of that information.”
A spokesperson for DC Health, Robert Mayfield, said in an email to The DC Line that the department does not publish an annual list of infants, children and youth who have died in the city. He said the agency instead has “an agreement” with CFRC, “which does publish a report.”
However, the review committee does not publish any listing with the name, age, and cause of death of each child who dies in the city — or even a complete list that omits certain information about the victims.
The structure of the current review system dates back to 1992 when a federal lawsuit helped drive reforms to DC’s child welfare system. While the Child Fatality Review Committee was initially created by mayoral order, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan later demanded its permanent establishment, among various other changes, as part of the class-action lawsuit initially known as LaShawn A. v. Marion Barry Jr.; the class included approximately 2,500 children caught in the city’s child welfare system.
Two years later, frustrated and still unimpressed with the pace of change in the District, the plaintiffs’ attorneys asked Hogan to place CFSA in receivership. He did.
In 2001, then-DC Mayor Anthony Williams sought to regain control of it and five other agencies under court receivership. Working with the DC Council, Williams reconstituted the Child Fatality Review Committee under local law and elevated CFSA to a cabinet-level agency.
He may have rescued the agency from complete court control. But 20 years later, it’s clear that the goal of preventing future deaths of children, particularly abuse or neglect homicides, has been thwarted. Critics also point to the lack of full reviews of every child fatality in the city and the use of privacy concerns to withhold information.
DC Auditor Kathy Patterson, a former Ward 3 DC Council member, was involved in the drafting and passage of the original law. In a recent interview, she recalled the 2000 murder of 23-month-old Brianna Blackmond by her mother’s roommate as an additional impetus for the legislation formalizing the CFRC. “The goal, then, was enhanced accountability when children are in the care of, or known to, the DC government — in part prompted by [that] case,” she said.
In 2017, the auditor’s office released the report “Critical Work of the Child Fatality Review Committee Should Build on Recent Reforms,” which analyzed the committee’s findings from 2008 to 2015 and raised serious questions about CFRC and its review methods. While Patterson’s report mentioned that the number of city-reported deaths of infants, children and youth dropped significantly during those years — from a high of 182 in 2008 to 124 in 2015 — she was critical of various aspects of the process, including that notwithstanding the large number of government agencies on the committee, their responses to recommendations often were “pro-forma” and did not reflect a “genuine commitment to change policies and procedures.”
Patterson, who worked at the American Public Welfare Association prior to joining the council, said in the report that inclusion of multiple deaths from previous years made it difficult to analyze trends. That was a key function expected to help prevent future fatalities.
Further, the number of reviews conducted by CFRC had dropped dramatically — from 122 in 2010 to 35 in 2015, according to the auditor’s report. That remains a problem today.
Complicating the issues surrounding DC’s fatality reviews is determining what constitutes an accidental death. Experts interviewed for this series assert that changes are urgently needed that would factor in the behaviors of parents and others — including possible neglect — that may have contributed to the child’s death. Even if the redefined cause did not result in more prosecutions by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, they say, it would provide a more transparent view of what is happening to DC children.
Additionally, advocates have demanded that all information about children who were murdered be made available to the public. There is no reason for such secrecy, they say, and the information may save the lives of others, including the dead child’s siblings. For instance, it could serve as an early warning signal if ordinary disciplinary action has tipped over into the realm of abuse or maltreatment.
IN THE BEGINNING
Operating as a division of the DC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), the Child Fatality Review Committee is the central entity that tracks the deaths of infants, children and youth in the District. It’s statutorily mandated to “identify and characterize the scope and nature of child deaths,” particularly any that are “violent, accidental, unexpected or unexplained.”
By law, the committee must review all deaths of children who were residents of DC, with particular attention to children whose families were “known to the juvenile justice or intellectual disability or developmental disabilities systems” (either at the time of their death or within the two years prior) or were “known to the child welfare system in DC” (at the time of their death or within the four years prior). Additionally, the committee may review the death of a nonresident that occurs in the city if it is deemed accidental or unexpected. The law requires CFRC to prepare statistical reviews as well as to conduct “multidisciplinary, multi-agency review of all individual fatalities within 6 months after the final determination of the cause and manner of death and prioritize fatalities where child abuse, neglect, or another form of child maltreatment is the cause of death or a contributing factor.” The DC Council added the six-month deadline and included maltreatment as a consideration in determining cause of death in an amendment this year.
The fatality review committee must also “examine past events and circumstances surrounding child deaths in the District by reviewing the records, files and other pertinent documents of public and private agencies responsible for serving families and children, investigating deaths, or treating children.” Under DC law, the committee’s stated purpose is to reduce the number of preventable child fatalities and improve their quality of life.
Recent changes to the law mean that two DC Council members — Ward 6’s Charles Allen, as chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, and Ward 1’s Brianne Nadeau, as chair of the Committee on Human Services, sit on the committee as of Oct. 1, 2021.
Other committee members include the directors or representatives from government agencies and government contractors, as well as “community representatives,” who are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the DC Council. As of 2019, the committee’s government members included the MPD, CFSA, Department of Human Services, Department of Behavioral Health, DC Health Department, Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, Office of the State Superintendent of Education, Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, DC Office of the Attorney General, DC Superior Court’s Family Court Operations Division and Department of Health Care Finance. Several of these same entities are also on the subcommittee known as the Infant Mortality Review Team.
Separately, CFSA established its own Internal Child Fatality Review Committee in the early 2000s; its members are agency personnel, the medical examiner and representatives of the Healthy Families/Thriving Communities Collaborative and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, which served as the court-appointed monitor in the LaShawn A. lawsuit until a settlement agreement was reached in June. CFSA’s internal committee reviews the circumstances surrounding the death of any infant, child or youth who had been involved with the agency within five years of their death.
While it may appear that the city is being thorough, the two committees don’t complement each other; they duplicate each other, including their weaknesses. They have both offered only a sampling of the deaths and not a review of every child fatality in the city. They have been late in providing their annual reports. Neither offers recommendations that could ultimately reduce the number of homicides. Officials, meanwhile, stress obstacles to more expansive reporting, such as the time it takes to gather the information to review the circumstances of a child’s death. Advocates and child welfare experts aren’t convinced, saying resources would be better used by creating a more integrated and comprehensive system that provides greater details about each of the child fatalities, including specific information about their home environments, parental histories and interactions with government agencies.
Both fatality review committees began under the promise of prevention and accountability. They have become, however, little more than bureaucratic get-togethers, issuing reports filled with statistical analyses, hand-wringing and toothless recommendations — based on deaths that, in most cases, occurred years earlier. They epitomize the failures of the DC child welfare system.
Agency directors and government officials may praise the city’s work creating what they call a “system of care” and a “system for prevention.” The evidence, however, points to a system that lacks the capacity to proactively prevent harm to children — a view shared by critics with expertise in the subject. Even after being alerted to dangers and risks, DC’s child welfare system managers and staffers have often failed to make the tough decisions necessary to shield children, including removing them from homes where their parents lack the skills or ability to care for them — in many cases because the parents suffer from substance abuse or mental health disorders, and sometimes from both.
As for the medical examiner’s and CFSA’s fatality units, neither effectively reviews the deaths or homicides of children during the year in which they occur, as noted in the auditor’s 2017 report. The former is years behind in its assessments. The latter has at times skewed the number of child deaths that occur in DC by burying those that happened years earlier but weren’t previously acknowledged, a review of government documents shows. Given that the chief mission of the review committees is to prevent future deaths or murders, the growing number of fatalities and the fact that many of them are similar to those that occurred in previous years represent failure on two counts.
The Child Fatality Review Committee didn’t publicly release its 2019 report until March 2021. The panel reviewed 51 deaths of infants, children and youth. Not one of those deaths occurred in 2019. They happened in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Children who were murdered in 2019 and 2020, whether by gun violence or at the hands of their mothers, fathers, parental paramours or relatives, have yet to receive attention in a publicly available report from the CFRC, as of this writing. Most of those children were Black or brown.
There is also no reporting on near fatalities like D.J., a 5-year-old girl whose brutal beating by her father landed her in a permanent vegetative state, and L.D., a 2-year-old girl whose father broke her left and right jaws requiring emergency surgery. Because the two children are alive, there is no mandate that any reviews be conducted about the circumstances surrounding the extreme abuse they suffered.
Equally disturbing is this: In 2019, in a departure from past practice, CFSA decided not to provide detailed information on the deaths of 20 children because they occurred prior to 2019. Their erasure appeared in a footnote in the agency’s internal fatality report.
Child welfare expert Marie Cohen found the shift unconscionable. “For every dead child, several more may be suffering from abuse and neglect that will poison their future,” she said.
“Leaving out more than half of the children whose deaths were reviewed in 2019 just because they died in previous years is an unnecessary loss of information that could be crucial in saving lives in the future,” added Cohen, a former CFSA social worker and a current community member of the chief medical examiner’s Child Fatality Review Committee. She is also the author of the Child Welfare Monitor DC blog, which examines local and national government policies and practices.
CFSA did not publish its internal 2020 fatalities review until late October 2021; even then, it buried the report on its website, without the legally required notice of its availability to the public. The agency’s team reviewed 42 deaths; 27 of those actually occurred in 2020, while the other 15 were from 2018 (nine) and 2019 (six). Information is provided in some depth on 40 deaths of infants, children and youth in the District: Nine were from natural causes, five were deemed accidental, 20 were gun-related homicides, and three were abuse or neglect homicides. One was classified as undetermined, and another — which occurred outside the District — was listed as unknown; there is no explanation of what happened in the other two cases.
Almost all of the children and their families had at least some contact with CFSA, including nine who were involved “with the District’s child welfare system at the time of the decedent’s death.” Two families had open Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations; one family had an open in-home foster care case and an open investigation; five families had open traditional foster care cases; and one had an open foster care case and CPS investigation.
Of the 40 fatalities, as many as 17 had CFSA involvement within 12 months of the death: 11 of those had at least one investigation opened, two families had a new or reopened foster care case, and four had an open CPS investigation and a foster care case, according to the agency’s report.
Additionally, virtually all of the families were mentioned in calls to the District’s 24-hour Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline that had been screened out. At least 38 of the 40 children whose deaths were reviewed in 2020 were the subject of screened-out calls within five years of the fatality — 10 families had one screened-out referral, seven had two, five had three, and 16 had four or more. There is no explanation provided for why that happened. It’s reasonable to wonder whether those children might be alive had those calls not been dismissed.
In advocating for more transparency in the overall fatality review process, whether at the OCME or the CFSA, Cohen said, “I think it should be ombudsperson, or a lot of states have child advocates. It should be one of those people. Illinois has an inspector general for child and family services. It needs to be an independent agency.” Such an office would review the deaths to answer a key question: “What was done wrong?”
DC KinCare Alliance’s McClellan echoed the call for transparency and accountability, saying both considerations outweigh privacy concerns: “That’s what they hide behind. The kid is already dead. If I’m a dead kid, the best thing you can do is tell everyone what happened to me.”
In the original law creating the Child Fatality Review Committee, a public hearing focused specifically on the annual report was required. Patterson said the council has defaulted on demanding adherence to that provision. Surprisingly, two sections that had mandated greater public disclosure were repealed in the 2022 Budget Support Act.
Council member Allen, as chair of the public safety committee, initiated those changes, among others, to CFRC as well as the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner earlier this year. In an email to The DC Line, he argued that his amendments mandate more thorough reviews for all child fatalities, bolster public access to findings and recommendations and expand what he called the current “skeletal” reviews. He did not, however, repeal confidentiality now provided for “an alleged or suspected perpetrator of abuse or neglect upon the child,” which was among the changes sought by many advocates.
Christian Greene, a former CFSA employee, told The DC Line she learned during her tenure as ombudsperson from 2015 through 2017 that the agency wanted to withhold certain information about child fatalities from the citywide CFRC. The result would have been, she said in an interview earlier this year, “a summary of a summary of a summary.”
Greene was fired after demanding the agency comply with legal mandates to notify children of their rights and to issue certain reports publicly. A judge ruled against her resulting 2018 whistleblower lawsuit; Greene’s appeal in the DC Court of Appeals is pending.
While the community’s goal for the fatality reviews might be to hold abusers, neglecters and even government officials accountable, Greene said the statute doesn’t mandate that type of scrutiny. Instead, she said, the “language in the legislation and the purpose of CFRC is to [conduct a nonjudgmental] look at the case superficially and say, ‘What could we have done differently?’ or ‘What themes are we seeing to prevent a future death?’ They’re not looking at holding anyone accountable with a family. It is purely what recommendations can we make so that another child doesn’t die.”
Judith Meltzer, president of the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the former LaShawn A. court monitor, has tracked the District’s child welfare reforms for more than two decades. She offered that some states have been rewriting their laws to help ensure accountability. “So, if a child dies, you’re essentially able to release more information,” she said of these model laws.
“The [CFRC] was an absolute disaster and a mess for the first 15 or 20 years that I was doing this work,” Meltzer said. In contrast, she added, its “infant mortality subcommittee, which doesn’t just look at child abuse and neglect death [but instead] at all infant deaths, [is] very functional. They make good recommendations. They actually got some traction on them.”
As for the CFRC itself, Meltzer said procedural barriers hinder its potential effectiveness, although she has seen improvement. “Sometimes there’s a police investigation and the police won’t release information. Secondly, sometimes it takes a long time for the medical examiner to release a report about whether the death is from natural causes, homicide, or undetermined. Then, the process has been slowed.
“So, there’s been a backlog of cases. Sometimes they’re reviewing cases that are old. However, the review process itself of the cases, internally and in the citywide committee, has gotten stronger,” Meltzer continued, asserting that the task at hand is inherently “a little more complicated than any of us would think.”
It’s difficult to hold anyone accountable or even to know with certainty that reviews were conducted competently or with fidelity since CFRC destroys records after it publishes its annual report — a practice called for in the original statute. Toya Byrd, a spokesperson for the medical examiner, could not provide details on how promptly the records are destroyed, but she confirmed the practice, offering that “a lot of the records are not ours,” including medical records and other documents from private sources.
HOW COMPLICATED IS THE REVIEW PROCESS?
To compile the case files that are presented for review to the citywide CFRC, the staff of the medical examiner’s child fatality review unit selects a sampling from the list provided by DC Health of child deaths that have occurred in the city. Supplemented by autopsies and full access to other public and private records, those files include relevant information like the child’s age, the cause of death, the status of the family — income, parental health, relationship of parents — and any interaction the family may have had with DC agencies, particularly CFSA. Names are not used. Each child is simply referred to as “decedent,” and the resulting reports rely heavily on statistics — an approach that for many comes across as inhumane.
If a 5-year-old child died, “at some point we need to contact other states to see if there was any interaction with hospitals, with child welfare systems in other states to try to put that picture together. That retrospective review is time-consuming,” explained Dr. Francisco J. Diaz, who became the city’s medical examiner in January 2021 after serving as deputy ME since 2017.
“We have a few children that died with asthma. … Is asthma a death sentence?” asked Diaz. “If you have a 10- or 11-year-old that’s been suffering from asthma, let’s say, six or seven years, the length of the medical records, the different hospitals and urgent care centers that that family visited, all that will be reviewed.”
Additionally, “In every instance there is an infant death, we do what is called a scene reenactment,” he noted.
That kind of rigorous review, Diaz said, accounts for holdups that have resulted in CFRC still looking at case files from 2015 without yet examining in many cases what happened to children who died in 2021, 2020 or even 2019.
Developing the files may take a long time, but staff presentations and accompanying discussions by committee members often do not last any longer than “an hour or 45 minutes” per case, said Cohen, who added, “There’s just not enough time.” Nonetheless, she praised the work of the ME’s fatality unit, adding that it would be impossible for committee members to read entire case files.
“But there are many times when I’ll read what the staff wrote and I’ll say, ‘Wait a second, I don’t get this.’ It’ll be unclear,” added Cohen.
When there are questions, the staffer or agency representative in attendance may respond. “They’re supposed to bring their own records, too. So that if there are questions, they can look it up right then,” Cohen explained during one of a series of interviews.
“It’s really short. There’s just not enough time. And that’s one reason I don’t think Child Fatality Review can really do what needs to be done,” said Cohen.
After a discussion of a case, presented mostly in summary by the medical examiner’s review staff, the committee members “come up with findings,” Cohen said. “A finding might be that there [aren’t] enough mental health services for moms in the District.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Wright praised the fatality review process as designed. A former CFRC co-chair, she said the “benefit and the beauty” is having all the people in one room. “We sit down and work as a team.
“That group is one of the most important things for me personally, in my career, because you get information and insight about how to change things. Keep in mind, it’s always developing,” continued Wright, who for the past 20 years has prosecuted most of the abuse and neglect cases in the District. She has been handling those related to the murders of Gabriel Eason, Makenzie Anderson, Kyon Jones and others.
Wright said she does see at least incremental improvement because of the CFRC’s work.
“We’re making a little difference. You can’t change everything overnight and certainly these are, you know, systemic, big issues that have been around for a long time, but things are getting better,” added Wright.
DC KinCare Alliance’s McClellan doesn’t necessarily see it that way. Essentially, she said, the process is mostly a “hodgepodge. There is no one place to look to see what’s going on.”
The greatest complication in the fatality review process may be how the deaths are classified. By statute, “we have to classify the manner of death,” Diaz explained in describing his role as chief medical examiner. Among the options are natural death; suicide; homicide; and accidental death, which could be caused by a variety of things, including an automobile crash or an unintended drug overdose.
“Sometimes we’re not able to determine and therefore the manner of death is ‘undetermined,’” said Diaz. “That means that we don’t have all the elements [and] we’re not comfortable in calling it an accident, but we don’t have the certitude that it’s a homicide.”
A child’s death is classified as a homicide when it is “a result of the actions of others,” he continued, adding that the review in such a case would examine the interactions between the child and the family. For instance, “Was the child taken to hospitals or urgent care centers in the previous years or months?”
Sometimes, children become the victims of abuse because someone “snapped,” said Diaz. That’s not always the case, however. “In a significant proportion, they are victims of chronic abuse and neglect … and the final constellation of injuries is an event, but that event is preceded by multiple smaller events.”
The CFRC’s 2019 report covers 51 fatalities that occurred from 2015 through 2018. Those do not include all the deaths in that period, however. The committee “does not conduct surveillance of all child deaths,” explained the ME’s spokesperson. “Cases are prepared for review once the deaths have been certified and all of the agency information has been received for review.”
Of the deaths that were reviewed by the CFRC in the 2019 report, 28 were from natural causes; five were classified as homicides; nine were undetermined; and the other nine were deemed accidents.
Diaz said no medical examiner classification is ever really final: “If more information arises even with the passing of time, the manner of death could be revised and amended.” He didn’t discuss how that would be affected by the destruction of records once CFRC’s report is complete.
Knowing how and why people die can help with developing public health policies, Diaz explained. For example, during his tenure as a medical examiner in Wayne County, Michigan, he and his staff prepared a study related to an “unsafe sleeping environment.” Infants were dying because they were placed in bed with adults who sometimes rolled over them or pushed them between the bed and the wall. A public education campaign as well as the distribution of cribs helped decrease those deaths in the county.
The District also has an “unsafe sleep environment” problem, said Diaz. “It is not only [when there are] three, four, five or six people sleeping in a bed. Sometimes it’s the environment itself where children are found in compromising positions, which will prevent them from properly breathing.
“We see infants or children that [have] been found wedged between the wall and the bed. Or in some instances where the infant is placed in a car seat that is doubling up as a bed.” They’re also placing a lot of blankets on the car seat, which can compromise the child’s breathing, he said.
Compounding that issue, said Diaz, is the fact that people who are “supposed to be taking care of those children, unfortunately, are under the influence of substances.”
Almost invariably, DC officials classify deaths resulting from unsafe environments as accidents. Should they instead be considered homicide by neglect, especially when the adults involved were under the influence of drugs or alcohol? That question is asked by many local child welfare advocates.
CFSA’s 2020 Internal Child Fatality Report stated that 16 children ages 2 and younger who had some contact with the agency died that year — a substantial increase over the seven during 2019. Of the 16, five involved unsafe sleep environments; CFSA did not provide specific details, however.
“What we don’t know are the facts surrounding the unsafe sleep,” DC KinCare Alliance’s McClellan said of what actually happened in these five fatalities. “We need to have more detailed reporting.”
Consider the case of Ladonia Boggs as reason for concern about the use of “unsafe sleep environment” as an accidental cause of death: Early in May 2021, according to court documents, she was having arguments with her boyfriend — the father of her 2-month-old son, Kyon. At one point she called him on the telephone, asserting, in colorful language, that she regretted having the baby.
When Boggs was pregnant, she used PCP, a mind-altering drug that can lead to hallucinations. In 2020, CFSA received notifications that 271 infants were born in DC with some type of drug in their system, including cocaine, THC (the compound that gives marijuana its high) and phencyclidine (commonly known as PCP).
Boggs continued to use PCP after the birth of her child. Her description of the problems Kyon exhibited — including digestive issues and excessive crying — suggests he may have been a drug-addicted infant. Boggs had other children, but apparently wanted and needed help with Kyon. On May 4, she told her boyfriend to come get the child, according to court documents.
He never came to collect the child. Instead, on May 5, she called to tell him that the child would be gone for a long time. She said a staffer at the Child Protective Services division of CFSA took Kyon.
The next day, the child’s father called his case worker at the National Center for Children and Families, who later told him that Kyon had not been removed from Boggs’ Benning Road NE apartment. At some point, the case worker called the CFSA hotline, reporting a missing child and a mother with a history of PCP use, according to court documents.
That prompted an MPD officer to conduct a “welfare check” that day. Boggs told him no young children lived there. He left.
A CFSA social worker arrived on May 7. Boggs offered the same story about the child being removed. The social worker knew better. The police returned.
Finally, over the course of several days of interviews, Boggs revealed that she had gone to sleep with the infant in the same bed. When she woke up the next morning, the child was dead.
She never called an ambulance or the police. Instead, she wrapped Kyon in a blanket and dumped him in a nearby trash can. Then, she removed all of his clothing and any other trace of him from the apartment. Boggs admitted that a day or two before the child’s death, she had smoked PCP.