Foster home had red flags

Police visits didn't disqualify residence ahead of child's death

ROBERT T. GARRETT

The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Two private foster-care contractors approved a DeSoto couple as foster parents last year, unaware that police had been dispatched to their home about a dozen times to investigate disturbances, The Dallas Morning News has learned.

Six-year-old foster child Katherine Frances was fatally body-slammed onto a bedroom floor at the home last month, DeSoto police said.

 Katherine Frances The state does not require placement agencies to ask about past police visits, and the agencies apparently did not do so. However, the state does require criminal background checks on residents 14 years and older.

In addition, state officials said Tuesday that they had found significant problems in the way background checks were conducted by one of the contractors involved in the case, Therapeutic Family Life. About one-third of the insufficient reviews involved Dallas-area homes.

A lawyer for the company said it would challenge some of the findings.

Police arrested foster mother Joyce Luvern Burks, 41, on Jan. 12 on a charge of injury to a child, alleging that she waited several hours after Katherine was injured to take her to a hospital. Earlier treatment might have saved her life, police said.

Last month, police arrested Ms. Burks' 14-year-old biological son, who has a different last name, on suspicion of murder. He is alleged to have gotten angry that Katherine had wet her bed and then assaulted her.

DeSoto police dispatch records obtained by The News under open-records laws show repeated altercations in the past two years involving an older biological son, now 17, described in the records as mentally ill.

Officers were called to the DeSoto home 10 times between May 2005 and last June, mostly after callers reported major disturbances involving the older son.

On July 31, the now-defunct Mesa Family Services of Harker Heights, Texas, approved Ms. Burks and her husband as foster parents. Later that day, Child Protective Services placed Katherine and her three siblings in the home. They had been removed from their family's home in Plano hours earlier after allegations of neglect by their mother.

Police dispatch records show four more disturbances at the home between Sept. 6 and Nov. 8, again involving the older son. On Sept. 18, an officer pepper-sprayed and arrested him. Ms. Burks said he had been "threatening to hit her," the reports say.

DeSoto police Capt. Ron Smith said he was limited in what he could say about the older son's arrest record. Neither of Ms. Burks' sons is being named by the newspaper because the 14-year-old is a minor and the older son was a minor when most of the events described in police dispatch records occurred.

Placed by Mesa

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said Ms. Burks and her husband were reapproved as foster parents by Austin-based Therapeutic Family Life in early November, when Therapeutic assumed care of about 250 foster children formerly placed by Mesa.

Since August 2005, three foster children have died in homes recruited by Mesa.

While the state requires an extensive "home study" before a couple is approved to be foster parents, Mr. Crimmins said, neither Mesa nor Therapeutic's study of the DeSoto couple "would have included questions about prior police calls or police activity."

Joyce Luvern Burks is accused of waiting several hours before taking her 6-year-old foster child to the hospital after she was body-slammed at her DeSoto home last month. Earlier treatment might have saved the child, police said. "That's not something that would have been asked," he said.

Meanwhile, the state has found major problems with Therapeutic's background checks of foster homes, officials said Tuesday. On at least five occasions, the contractor's employees "cut and pasted" information on one foster family into home studies about others, rather than writing fresh assessments of homes. They also failed to do required criminal background checks on families recruited by Mesa.

In two separate actions last week, the state notified Therapeutic that it will evaluate whether to revoke its license as a recruiter and trainer of foster families, though "initial findings indicate a failure" to comply with its state contract.

Therapeutic was cited for 143 deficiencies. They involved homes that Therapeutic picked up from Mesa and those that it recruited on its own.

Eleven of the deficiencies were for inadequate background checks, and five were for failure to provide enough financial or other information about families before they adopt children in the state's care.

Therapeutic, a nonprofit agency, is one of the largest child-placement agencies in the state.

Therapeutic's Arlington office was accused of failing to promptly report a critical injury to a child. The injury was not described, and Mr. Crimmins could not provide more details.

The Arlington branch also was cited for corporal punishment; improper physical restraint of a foster child; failure to report abusive activity among children in a home and another, unspecified "serious incident" in a home; and placing foster children with a family before a home study had been completed.

The company's Addison office was accused of failing to report improper discipline of a foster child, apparently administered by another child in a foster home last month.

The state asked Therapeutic, which took over about 125 of Mesa's foster homes last fall, to submit two plans to fix the problems and to require four hours of "behavior intervention training" for each family originally recruited by Mesa. Therapeutic has to make an unannounced inspection of each Mesa-recruited home each month.

Looking to appeal

Eli Bell, a lawyer for Therapeutic, said it would submit the corrective action plans and make the required visits but would challenge the 143 deficiencies.

"We're going to certainly cooperate and respond positively and do everything that we can to assure them that the homes are safe," Mr. Bell said. "But on the other hand, we are going ... to appeal the citations to be sure that they're grounded in fact and properly issued."

The actions followed a state sweep through former Mesa homes, which resulted in 15 children being moved to other homes. Last week, the department ordered Therapeutic to place no more children in 12 Mesa-recruited homes.

After Katherine's death on Dec. 5, the state suspended new placements of children with Therapeutic. The suspension continues, Mr. Crimmins said.

"No additional children will be placed in any [Therapeutic] home, former Mesa or not, until we are confident that those children can be placed safely," he said.

The rigor of home studies by foster care contractors has been under scrutiny since The News reported on the Labor Day death of 16-month-old Christian Nieto, who was in a Corsicana foster home.

Dodging creditors

Records of civil court cases, which Texas doesn't require foster agencies to check, indicate Beverly Latimer, Christian's foster mother, was dodging numerous creditors in recent years. She has been charged with capital murder in the toddler's death.

Earlier this month, the newspaper reported that Ms. Burks and her husband each filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy since June 2005. Mr. Crimmins said the state doesn't require its child-placing contractors to obtain tax returns of prospective foster parents, though they are supposed to be solvent.

Mr. Bell said the contractor also did not know of the many visits by police to the DeSoto home.

Therapeutic "did not have that information," Mr. Bell said.

Though the company "knew about the other biological child" in the DeSoto home, Mr. Bell said: "The documents that I have seen show he was not living in the home at the time it was verified" by Therapeutic.

"I think he was in jail," Mr. Bell said.