Tuesday, January 11, 2011

DHS' contact with B'ville family relevant to foster-care lawsuit, plaintiffs say

By DAVID HARPER World Staff Writer
Published: 1/11/2011 11:07 PM
Last Modified: 1/11/2011 11:07 PM

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit seeking changes in Oklahoma’s foster-care system claim that depositions about the November death of a 10-day-old Bartlesville baby would be relevant to the case, despite defense arguments to the contrary.

Lawyers for Department of Human Services officials named in the suit acknowledged in a Dec. 21 filing that the death of Maggie May Trammel was “tragic” but asked the court not to allow the depositions because the baby was never in DHS custody.

The baby was found dead in a washing machine at her home Nov. 4. Her mother, Lyndsey Dawn Fiddler, is charged in Washington County with felony child neglect.

The information sought through the depositions “is likely to shed light on whether DHS is using its new assessment practice to manipulate the size of the class (of plaintiffs) by improperly keeping children out of state custody who need the state’s protection,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote in a filing submitted Friday.

The Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth said in a report Nov. 30 that DHS had received six complaints since March 2009 about Fiddler’s care of two other children in the home. In October 2009, DHS documented “high red flags” regarding drug use by Fiddler and other adults in the home.

But the children were not removed from the home.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys claimed in a Friday filing that since the lawsuit was filed in 2008, DHS has radically changed its practice in response to reports that children are being abused or neglected.

They allege that “DHS has substantially curtailed its practice of conducting investigations in response to such reports in favor of a new approach of performing ‘assessments’ that rarely result in children being taken into state custody.”  FULL STORY

This mess just gets bigger all the time. 

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