Molestation Allegation by Girl, 11, Left Unchecked for More Than Year

County child protection officers failed for more than a year to investigate a report that an 11-year-old Long Beach girl was allegedly being sexually molested by her grandfather, police records show.

During that period, the girl continued to be sent to her grandfather’s home for family visits while the report apparently languished in a Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services file. She later told authorities she endured more sexual abuse in that time.

Moreover, Long Beach police now allege that the girl was also being sexually molested at home by her stepfather, with whom she and her mother lived. Both men deny the charges.

The child told a therapist at a Long Beach counseling center in April, 1989, that her grandfather had been sexually abusing her for years, Long Beach Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Rose said. The therapist, in accordance with state law, filed a report with the county children’s services office in Long Beach, but due to an apparent oversight, the referral was ignored, Rose said.

The county is required by law to investigate reports of suspected child abuse and inform police. But no such actions were taken, and the girl continued to be molested by the two men, who live approximately 2 miles apart, over the course of 13 months, Rose said in court at a bail hearing this week.

The director’s office of the Department of Children’s Services has ordered an investigation to determine where the system might have failed, said Emery Bontrager, executive assistant to Director Robert Chaffee.

Long Beach police are conducting a similar investigation, Rose said.

“Any time a child is in danger--and sexual molestation is certainly that--we go out and make a face-to-face assessment,” Bontrager said. “If that didn’t happen in this case, then someone didn’t do what they were supposed to do.”

Finally, the girl, now 12, told her stepmother on June 6 about the alleged molestations, saying she was “just tired of it,” according to the police report.

The stepmother immediately called the local children’s services office and the girl was removed from her stepfather’s home in 3 hours and 20 minutes and placed in protective custody, the family said.

Eleven days later, the girl’s grandfather, James T. Fields, 59, and stepfather, Theodore Woodrow Wilson, 36, were arrested and charged with 16 child molestation counts. They pleaded not guilty and are being held on $100,000 bail each pending a preliminary hearing July 9 in Long Beach Municipal Court.

“It could have been stopped a lot sooner. It fell through the system somehow, I don’t know how,” said the girl’s stepmother, who withheld her name to protect the identity of the child. “Once the system started to work, it didn’t let (the child) down.”

Police files show the girl’s therapist sent a report of suspected child abuse to the children’s services Long Beach office on April 11, 1989. No social worker was dispatched and police were not informed, Rose said.

Children’s services officials said they were trying to determine what action, if any, was taken after the referral was made.

The therapist who made the report apparently never followed up. Dr. Marion Solovei, clinical director at Family Service of Long Beach, said it is the agency’s policy to report all suspected abuse to the county, but therapists are unable to track each case.

“Sometimes we are able to get a reply from the (county) and sometimes we are not,” Solovei said. Citing privacy restrictions, she would not discuss details of the Long Beach girl’s case.

The prosecutor said both men might have been arrested a year ago had the report been properly handled.

“She would have been aware that she did not have to be the subject of molestation. She would have had a social worker assigned. The police would have watched,” Rose said. “She would have known she had a place to turn.”

The Department of Children’s Services investigates about 9,500 reports a month of child endangerment, neglect, physical or sexual abuse, exploitation and abandonment. Each complaint is ranked according to urgency and must be answered within 2 hours to 10 days by one of 450 emergency case workers, Bontrager said.

According to the charges, the girl had been sexually abused by her grandfather since 1984 and by her stepfather since 1986. She told police she was sodomized with sexual devices and made to watch pornographic films.

Police searched Wilson’s house the day of his arrest and found a trunk filled with sexual devices and pornographic films in a bedroom closet where the child directed officers to look, Rose testified.

The prosecutor said the child sought help several times before going to her stepmother earlier this month, but got none.

In April, 1989, the girl told her mother that her grandfather was abusing her, but police were not called, Rose said. Instead, the family enrolled both the child and Fields in therapy for about eight months, but shortly after the counseling stopped, the molestation started again, she said.

Last Christmas, the child told her mother that the stepfather was also molesting her, Rose said. But Wilson denied it and later told the girl that if she informed on him again, his 3-year-old twin boys would lose their father and she would be at fault, the prosecutor said. That night, the girl told her mother she had lied about Wilson, Rose said.

The girl also confided the alleged molestations to her best friend, who told her own mother, but the woman never made a report, the police report said.

Wilson, who works at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, maintains he never molested the child and that she invented the allegations because she was jealous of her younger half-brothers, his attorney, Morton Zahler, said.

“For a long time she was the apple of everybody’s eye and then the stepfather and the mother had the twin boys and all of a sudden she was in the back seat. She was lashing out,” Zahler said. “The girl had nine visits with a therapist and she never mentioned anything about her stepfather molesting her.”

Deputy Public Defender Nina Law, who represents Fields, had no comment.