Baby Lauren Never Had a Chance : Texas: Tina Jones explained away her daughter’s bruises and cuts, and social workers believed her. But the child died of a beating before her second birthday.

Nearly every time Tina Jones left her 17-month-old daughter, Lauren, alone with her live-in boyfriend, bruises and cuts would appear on the child’s body.

Jones said they were accidental, but neighbors thought differently and called the Harris County Children’s Protective Services. A caseworker visited the house twice, but she believed the mother’s story each time that Lauren had fallen on her toys. The girl was left in the home.

Three weeks later, on April 3, 1993, Lauren died of a severe beating. The boyfriend confessed.

“I lost it, your honor,” Steven Beason told the judge who sentenced him to 50 years in prison. “I didn’t mean to beat her to death.”

Lauren’s case is tragically echoed by scores of others across the country: Children are dying at the hands of parents and caretakers despite warnings and despite the intervention of social agencies.

In Harris County, where Lauren was killed, 70% of all children killed in 1992 by parents or caretakers--14 of 20 children--had been known to the child protective services agency. The number dropped to 10 of 27 children in 1993, the year Lauren was killed.

A former caseworker in Austin, who quit because she was overworked, underpaid and “really stressed out,” contends the agency’s emphasis clearly has been on keeping families together at nearly all costs.

“The big deal was reuniting them, and it got a little ridiculous after a while,” Marty Smith said. “It took three or four times to get them to go to a drug rehab and, as soon as they satisfied somebody, they’d go back to their own thing. The parents do their little show just for the courts, then the court says, ‘You’ve done what you need to do and here’s your kids back.’ ”

But Linda Edwards, a spokeswoman for the Texas Protective and Regulatory Services Agency, defended the agency’s policies. She said its first priority is the safety of the child and the second is preserving the family, not vice versa.

Money shortages only contribute to the agency’s problems, Edwards said. In fact, she said, 40% of all Texas children with confirmed cases of abuse or neglect get either no or inadequate services. That means only the most severe cases get attention.

“Certainly, our agency will tell you we do not make the right decision 100% of the time,” Edwards said. “We are human beings, and errors are made.”