Families across the country are reacting to the news that Lola Griffith, a 27 year old mother, killed herself and may have killed her son, 5-year-old son Helious, in a murder suicide in Banner Desert Children’s Hospital on Saturday. For family and friends of parents of ill children, who have become targets of the Arizona Department of Child Safety, the news that a mother had finally “reached her breaking point” was expected.
For what seems like an eternity, the broken Arizona Department of Child Safety has placed parents of sick children in its crosshairs.
After DCS notified Lola that she “had to sign over legal custody to them or they would take the child,” her father Richard told ABC15, she felt like a “glorified babysitter.”
According to ABC15, “Helious Griffith faced many challenges in his short life. Helious Griffith faced many challenges in his short life. He had cerebral palsy, a spinal cord injury and severe anxiety.”
ABC15 reports that it “was when the mother brought him to a hospital for mouth sores a few years back that DCS first got involved, according to the grandparents. Earlier this week, Helious was taken back to the hospital with a fever. The child had been in the hospital for about a week.”
The popular group, A Miracle For Two Sisters, posted on its Facebook page when the news broke about Lola and Helious: “It’s no wonder that parents become so distraught when they do the best for their children by seeking medical care and DCS steps in with threats of taking their children from them. We’ve been notified from several parents in AZ who have also had DCS step in when at a children’s hospital in AZ but have wished to remain out of the public’s eye.”
In October, the Arizona Auditor General’s Office issued a damaging report on the Arizona Department of Child Safety that reveals what too many parents have known; children are ripped away from their families by inexperienced and overworked caseworkers. The audit found that the Department’s “child safety and risk assessment tool does not sufficiently guide caseworkers in making child safety decisions.”
Perhaps the most damaging finding is the determination that the Department “has inadequately implemented critical components of its child safety and risk assessment process.”
In other words, lack of guidance and insufficient training, which has also limited caseworkers’ ability to conduct child safety and risk assessments, has created the situation no one wants to talk about although it has touched many lives across the state. Parents and their children, from across the economic spectrum, have been terrorized by inexperienced caseworkers, whose actions defy rhyme and reason.
The auditors found: “In Arizona, child removals have been increasing.”
The report focused on the Arizona Department of Child Safety’s child safety and risk assessment practices, including its approach for determining whether to remove a child from their home. According to the auditors, the Department uses three common factors to assess child safety. The Department uses multiple factors in its assessment process and relies on caseworker judgment to assess risk.
“The Department’s child safety and risk assessment tool does not sufficiently guide caseworkers in making child safety decisions,” writes the auditors. “Insufficient training has also limited caseworkers’ ability to conduct child safety and risk assessments.”
Auditors found, that although “caseworkers and supervisors should come to these meetings with open minds, some indicated that they come with their decision already made regarding the child – removal decision and may not adequately engage with families during the meeting.”
Auditors concluded that the “Department needs to modify or replace its child safety and risk assessment tool, provide adequate training for caseworkers and supervisors, and improve safety planning.”