Many Problems Found at Foster Care Agency

The private agency overseeing the foster mother who allegedly beat 2-year-old Gilbreania Wallace to death earlier this month has had another foster child die while in its care, and a third was shaken so hard he remains “in a vegetative state.”

All three cases occurred within the past 10 months.

Grace Home for Waiting Children is what is known as a foster family agency, a social service clearinghouse that finds foster mothers to care for neglected or abused children who have been taken from their families by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

Aside from the two dead children and the comatose child, recent investigations of Grace Home have brought to light two cases in which babies suffered broken bones, a lack of supervision by foster parents, and children living in conditions one county official described as “appalling.”

With the blessing of the county department’s top management, the Grace agency was set up in 1992 by a coalition including Girma Zaid, a former department official then on leave from his job. That arrangement raised eyebrows internally because the department soon was assigning foster children--and the public money that accompanies them--to Grace Home. Zaid, listed as the founder, and another notable partner, former Rep. Mervyn Dymally (D-Los Angeles), have left, and have been replaced by two other former department administrators.

Yet Grace Home’s history has been marked by trouble, including critical county audits, numerous citations by the state and, most recently, Gilbreania’s death. The death has led the federal Department of Health and Human Services to demand a report from Sacramento explaining how California ensures that its foster children are protected.

Indeed, the same foster mother charged with murdering Gilbreania was investigated last year, when she brought an infant boy to the hospital who had been injured so badly he remains comatose. Officials later said it appeared that the injuries happened before the child was in her care, and no charges were filed. Two other foster children in the same woman’s home have suffered broken limbs during the past two years.

Grace Home did not return calls for comment Thursday.

Gene Gilden, the Children and Family Services official in charge of monitoring foster family agencies, said that since the first foster care death in April, her unit has been auditing Grace Home. After Gilbreania’s death, the county stepped up its investigation.

County Stops Sending Children to Agency

Grace Home always scored well on the county’s regular quarterly reviews of child safety, Gilden said. But increased scrutiny over the past few months has turned up severe problems.

“We have found some serious problems,” she said. The agency has removed three more children from Grace Home foster parents and will not send additional children to the agency.

State and county documents show that, from the beginning, Grace Home appears to have been a collaborative creation of Los Angeles County, community leaders and Children and Family Services’ Black Employees Assn. In a 1993 letter, Zaid referred to the agency as a “joint effort between the South-Central community and the county Department of Children and Family Services.”

The Black Employees Assn., which includes local, state and federal government workers, selected Zaid to be its project director and representative in all licensing matters because of his “years of experience in child welfare and his commitment to the African American community,” according to a 1992 resolution by the association’s board signed by then-President Clyde Johnson.

The effort got a boost from Peter Digre, the director of Children and Family Services. Digre wrote the Black Employees Assn. in 1992 to say he would “strongly support” its efforts to get county funding and approval for the proposed foster family agency.

In an interview Thursday night, Zaid said that Digre authorized him to take a leave of absence when Grace Home was founded and that he did not return to his county job. County officials said their records show that Zaid officially terminated his county job Jan. 1, 1996, after a leave of absence.

Questions were raised about Zaid running an organization that received thousands of dollars from the county while on a leave from his job. Zaid said his political enemies simply tried to make an issue, but there was no conflict.

Digre, who resigned in April and whose last day at the department will be Wednesday, said it would have been “unthinkable” for Zaid to have remained on the county payroll while running the agency, and stressed that Grace Home served a vital need as the department struggled with ballooning caseloads of foster children.

After its founding, Grace Home grew swiftly, expanding to offices in Panorama City, Long Beach and San Bernardino County. It currently oversees the care of about 170 children, county officials said.

However, a Children and Family Services audit of the agency soon after its founding discovered problems with Grace Home’s bookkeeping, Gilden said. Grace Home agreed to pay the county $66,000, according to one county source, and Zaid stepped down as part of the agreement.

“They were extremely cooperative,” Gilden said of Grace Home’s response to the audit. She attributed the problems to “start-up” difficulties.

Zaid said the audit had nothing to do with his September 1995 departure. He said he had become the target of too many political attacks.

“There were a whole lot of frivolous allegations,” he said.

State monitors also regularly visited Grace Home foster homes, and their reports on problems there take up dozens of pages. The monitors cited Grace Home so many times, in fact, that the agency was ordered to undergo two “noncompliance hearings” in the past three years.

In those hearings, top state officials sat down with Grace Home’s leaders to discuss long-standing problems and to find out why promises to fix them were never carried out, state licensing documents show.

In one of those hearings, on March 4, 1997, state officials were particularly concerned about allegations of “financial misconduct” they had received in a letter and about the “association of Girma Zaid to facility” after he had promised to step down.

Over the past several years, state officials cited many of the problems at Grace Home and its foster homes as serious enough to jeopardize the safety of foster children.

Among them: non-functioning or nonexistent smoke detectors in sleeping areas, knives and “potential poisons” in unsecured areas where children could easily get them, and care workers who had not undergone tests for tuberculosis and other health screenings. It also criticized Grace Homes in June 1998 for not revoking the certification of a home after the foster parent’s spouse admitted being a convicted felon.

The state is now investigating Doris Jean Bennett, who Wednesday pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering Gilbreania Wallace.

Bennett joined Grace Home’s ranks in August 1996. “Ms. Bennett had a desire to learn about foster parenting, the children and the rules and regulation of the agency,” according to a confidential Grace Home memo obtained by The Times. “Ms. Bennett understand [sic] and readily accepted that she had limitations in dealing with older children and the problems they may present.”

The memo notes some incidents that occurred with various foster children Grace Home placed in Bennett’s Willowbrook home. In May 1997, a 1-year-old girl’s arm was broken in two places. Children and Family Services investigators determined it was an accident.

In August 1998, Bennett took an infant boy who had just been placed in her custody to the hospital. The boy was found to be the victim of shaken baby syndrome, and Gilden said medical authorities determined that the injuries occurred before he was in Bennett’s care. The boy’s previous foster parent was decertified by Grace Home and Bennett was not a suspect.

On Jan. 19, 1999, a girl in Bennett’s care suffered an elbow fracture. A doctor’s note states that the injury was consistent with Bennett’s explanation--that the child had fallen in the bathtub.

Then, on June 8, Bennett rushed Gilbreania to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, saying that the 2-year-old had also fallen in the bathtub. Doctors found that the injuries were most likely the result of a blow to the head so severe, internal Children and Family Services documents show, that the baby’s brain was pushed into her spine.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies arrested Bennett, 50, on suspicion of child abuse, and after Gilbreania died the next week Bennett was charged with murder.

Grandmother Says She Reported Abuse

Gilbreania and her older sister Cashey, 5, had ended up in Bennett’s care after a long odyssey through the county’s dependency system. Their grandmother, Florence Wallace, who had initially raised them, said in an interview last week that the children had complained that they were being abused by Bennett.

Florence Wallace said she told Family Services social workers repeatedly of the abuse but nothing was done. Department officials said they have no record of the complaints.

At the time of Gilbreania’s death, department investigators were already turning up the heat on Grace Home.

Only three department investigators are assigned to review the operations of the county’s more than 150 foster family agencies, Gilden said. That number will rise after the Board of Supervisors expands the department’s ranks in next year’s budget, but until then Gilden said her workers have been forced to rely on the somewhat perfunctory quarterly reviews and can only react to tragic incidents.

Such a tragedy occurred April 1, 1999, when a 4-month-old boy, Garnet Peels, was killed in a car wreck. The boy had been placed with a Grace Home foster mother. That woman’s brother, a narcoleptic, drove his sport utility vehicle into a light pole while the boy, a passenger, was not in a secured car seat, according to department documents.

Sheriff’s investigators asked the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to charge the woman and her brother with criminal neglect of children, but prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence, law enforcement documents show.

Gilden said the county found that while the death was certainly an “accident,” Grace Home had to better instruct its foster parents. Children and Family Services also launched its latest audit then, she said.

Then, after Gilbreania’s death, the department intensified its investigation and found more disturbing problems, Gilden said.

“We found a lack of supervision in the foster homes, the physical state of some of them, well, it was appalling,” she said. In one home, she said, two young foster children slept on the floor because their beds were stacked with debris.

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Times staff writer Neda Raouff contributed to this story.