State review finds repeated failures in Cuyahoga County's handling of Aniya Day-Garrett abuse cases
Aniya Day-Garrett, shown here with her father Mickhal Garrett, died March 11. (Family photo)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- More than a year before her death, 4-year-old Aniya Day-Garrett told Cuyahoga County social workers that her mommy had hurt her, according to a scathing report released Thursday about the county's Children and Family Services agency.
But the social workers dismissed those statements, which the girl made while being treated for injuries in the hospital, and allowed the child to return to her home, investigators with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services reported.
Their report makes public the most detailed picture yet of the county's failings leading up to Aniya's death. They concluded that social workers failed to follow protocols, made few face-to-face contacts with the child, ignored two years' worth of injuries reported by Aniya's daycare provider, and didn't check whether the girl's mother attended parental counseling.
County case workers opened investigations into four reports of abuse against Aniya between February 2017 and her March 11 death from a stroke triggered by blunt force trauma to her head. Aniya's mother, Sierra Day, and Day's boyfriend, Deonte Lewis, are accused of killing the child and now awaiting trial on aggravated murder charges.
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services conducted a review of the county's handling of those investigations, and released their findings on Sept. 17 to County Executive Armond Budish and Children and Family Services.
After county workers received the first abuse complaint involving Aniya in February 2017, they asked Aniya at the hospital how she was injured. Aniya told them "Mommy did it," the report states. But social workers dismissed those statements "due to the target child's age and development" and said "she could not comprehend or be interviewed," the state report says.
That same month, case workers learned of a "nearly two-year backlog of documented injuries to the child" at her day care center, the report states without naming the daycare center.
Once Children and Family Services learned of those injuries, they didn't obtain those injury reports, didn't include details of the injuries in their file on Aniya, and didn't take the injuries into consideration when determining how to address Aniya's case, investigators found.
Case workers "failed to use this documented history of injuries/suspected abuse to arrive at a final case analysis. Instead, each assessment focused on the current reported incident," the report says.
While investigating the February complaint, staff never watched Day and Aniya interact. And the case was the first one assigned to a new case worker without a mentor to assist, the report says.
In a second abuse complaint in May 2017, case workers again asked Aniya how she suffered a head injury, and Aniya told them again that her mother did it. She also said her "daddy" did it, but workers did not follow up on those statements.
Day was unable to explain the injuries to case workers, and said Aniya had been left in the care of a friend that Day never named, the report states. Social workers responded by implementing a "verbal safety plan," which the state does not recognize as an appropriate response, the report says.
County workers received a third report of abuse against Aniya in September 2017, but did not investigate it because it did not meet their criteria for an investigation, the report says.
A fourth abuse allegation was made in December 2017. Case workers were required to initiate contact with the family within 24 hours, but did not do so until about 29 hours later, the report says.
When workers visited the home five days after the complaint was made, Day wouldn't let them inside and said Aniya was visiting family until the following week.
Someone called Children and Family Services on the day of that visit and said Day was "likely delaying contact with the target child to allow bruises time to heal," the report says. Case workers didn't see Aniya until seven days after that warning, the report says.
The agency accepted another abuse report in March, but failed to categorize it as an abuse or neglect complaint, the report says. The state said that categorization was improper and didn't require case workers to make face-to-face contact with the child.
On March 6 of this year, workers contacted Day and arranged a home visit for March 12. Aniya died March 11, one day before that scheduled visit.
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