John Hill: The State Keeps Bleeding Money For Failing To Protect Vulnerable Children

If the Legislature can’t be persuaded to demand accountability from the child welfare bureaucracy for the sake of — you know — the welfare of children, maybe they could do it on behalf of taxpayers.

Because the lawsuits, settlements and verdicts against the Department of Human Services for botching their life-and-death job just keep piling up.

The latest: $600,000 to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging the state negligently placed a teenage girl in a Kailua-Kona home where she was sexually assaulted.

Negligent, in the sense that a state social worker placed the girl in that foster home even after the girl’s older sister allegedly warned that she had been sexually assaulted and harassed by a man living there.

By my count, the department in charge of protecting children has shelled out $3.6 million in three settlements and a judgment in the past year, though I might have missed some.

Then there are the pending lawsuits likely to garner even bigger awards, though they will in no way compensate for what happened to the children.

They include Ariel Sellers, a 6-year-old Waimanalo girl allegedly starved and tortured to death by the couple who first “fostered” and then adopted her.

And Geanna Bradley, a 10-year-old Wahiawa girl who perished in sickeningly similar circumstances, allegedly at the hands of her foster parents turned legal guardians.

Money should not be the impetus for reforming this crucial system. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

Each of these cases, with awards that go far beyond “going-away money,” reveal major failings in the state’s operations. Unfortunately – at least in terms of increasing the public’s understanding of what went wrong – they often settle before going to trial. So some questions are never answered.

That’s why the Legislature should haul the key players into a public hearing and dissect the failures in detail.

But even when they settle, these cases do a public service by prying some information from a department with a habit of using confidentiality as an excuse to never explain its deeds and misdeeds.

At least taxpayers get something for their money.

So what did we learn in the case of Joy Graves v. Hawaii et. already?

The central allegation has to do with the social worker, Kerry Perez, who placed the victim known as TG in the Kailua-Kona home of Gloria Holmes.

At a 2017 meeting at a Starbucks in Waimea, Perez discussed TG’s next foster placement with the girl, then 13, and her older sister, TR, who had also lived in the Holmes residence. TR reported that Tye Puaoi-Marcellino, an adult man who frequently visited and sometimes stayed there, was constantly trying to have sex with her and had assaulted her.

“Don’t tell her that,” social worker Perez said, according to the lawsuit. “Otherwise she won’t go there.”

TG did go there, and was allegedly sexually abused by Puaoi-Marcellino, as well as Holmes’ adult son, Wayne. Perez denied that the conversation ever took place. Gloria Holmes, Wayne Holmes and Puaoi-Marcellino could not be reached for comment.

The failures in this case went far beyond that. They involved both the state and Catholic Charities Hawaii, the contractor it hires to vet possible foster homes, according to an expert witness hired by the plaintiffs. Catholic Charities, which also settled for $90,000, did not respond to a request for comment.

Neither Catholic Charities nor the state ever probed whether Puaoi-Marcellino and Wayne Holmes were living there, and could offer no evidence that they interviewed foster children to find out, according to the expert report by Nicol Stolar-Peterson. This, even though caseworker Perez frequently saw Puaoi-Marcellino in the home.

The state requires criminal background checks of all residents of a foster home.

“There is no evidence that the minors’ case workers asked the girls if they were safe and what access these men had to them which is below the standard of care,” Stolar-Peterson wrote.

TR, the older sister also in foster care, told a state social worker that her boyfriend had recently choked her and that the two assaulted each other while he was drinking a bottle of vodka, according to the expert report.

But this unnamed state worker, a mandated reporter of child abuse by law, never made a report.

The state has a policy of social workers meeting with foster children in person at least once a month.

But the expert report documents many months when no one visited TG

“Had TG been with ‘face to face’ as required, and been encouraged to share any secrets or coercion by any adults, she would have disclosed the abuse,” the report states.

In the process of discovery, the plaintiffs found out about an earlier report, in 2015, from an unknown person warning that young children were being abused in the Holmes household.

The plaintiffs had asked the state for any complaints in the past 15 years, but got nothing. They only found out about the 2015 report by subpoenaing the Hawaii Police Department.

The person had called a national hotline for missing or exploited children to report seeing redness and irritation in a 5-year-old’s vaginal area. The person claimed to have heard Holmes call a girl “a little fat bitch” and to have seen a man pick up a boy by his pants.

Holmes has never been charged with any crime related to these incidents, and in truth there’s nothing in the public record to prove they occurred.

But after the incident came to light, the plaintiffs deposed Wendy Robinson, a DHS supervisor, about how the department handled the serious allegations. They also brought in expert witness Stolar-Peterson to do a supplemental report about the testimony.

After the hotline call came in, DHS told the Hawaii Police Department that “checks were conducted” at the Holmes residence and that “no allegations were confirmed.”

But in her deposition, Robinson could offer no proof that there even was an investigation.

“When asked about documentation or evidence of this incident being investigated or looked into, Ms. Robinson stated that she did a search in the database and ‘did not find anything,’” according to the expert report. “She then followed up her statement, ‘I did not do a thorough search.’”

If not for the keiki, then at least for the kala.

A lawyer asked, “If there is currently no written documents indicating that a formal state of Hawaii investigation was conducted … is it fair to say that no investigation was actually conducted?”

“Correct,” Robinson replied.

It’s hard to say how many of these failures can be attributed to incompetence and bad management versus simply not having the resources to do the job.

But it certainly wouldn’t hurt for DHS to have an extra several million dollars to hire social workers and reduce workloads, a constant problem. (I asked DHS what share of these awards are paid by taxpayers, how much is covered by insurance, and whether insurance premiums go up after claims, but got no answer.)

It’s incredible to me that lawmakers have never held hearings on these high-profile abuse cases. It’s called oversight, and it’s one of the primary functions of a legislative body, in some ways more important than the new laws they pass every year. But maybe the payouts will eventually get their attention.

If not for the keiki, then at least for the kala.