Baby Starves to Death on Foster Care System’s Watch

By the time he died, Danzel Bailey’s full cheeks had hollowed. His ribs, facial bones and the knobby bones of his spinal cord all protruded. The skin of his buttocks and thighs hung in deep folds. There were bald spots on his head. He had no teeth.

Danzel was 11 months old. He weighed 12 pounds--the average weight of a 2-month-old. He had wasted away in a child welfare system intended to protect him and the county’s other 40,000 foster children.

In Danzel’s case, that system placed him in the care of his grandmother, who was sentenced to prison in September for child abuse. It assigned him a social worker, who was recently fired.

Beyond them, others are left with a conflicting set of feelings and responsibilities. Danzel’s doctor, who is facing a complaint filed with the state medical board, stands by his actions, and others remain convinced they did everything they could. But some are haunted by their failure to intervene, and some are left dismayed at the missteps and oversights that allowed Danzel to die.

“After all these months,” said Anita Bock, head of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, “I’m not sure that I can explain it.”

For her and others, the case is especially troubling because Danzel did not die suddenly in a burst of violence, but rather over a period of months. Despite the opportunity that time presented for social workers and others to spot his deteriorating condition, the county’s child welfare system could not keep Danzel alive long enough to celebrate his first birthday.

Today, his case has become a cautionary tale. Bock has used it to help instruct social workers on how to protect young children--and on the consequences of failure.

Here, according to interviews and county and court records, is the story of Danzel’s death:

His mother, Felicia Bailey, was like many mothers tangled in the county dependency system. A high school dropout addicted to drugs since she was a teenager, she was pregnant with her fourth child at 25.

The first three had been taken away by the county Department of Children and Family Services after allegations of severe neglect due to drug abuse; one was born testing positive for exposure to cocaine.

This one, Bailey wanted to keep.

“I already understand I can’t get the other kids, but I want my baby,” she told a social worker. To that end, she enrolled in an outpatient rehab program and had a few prenatal doctor visits.

Shaky From Birth as a Crack Baby

When Danzel was born on May 9, 2000, at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center, he weighed 7 pounds, 1 1/2 ounces and measured 19 inches, healthy but just slightly under average. He had no drugs in his system.

But Danzel shook--a telltale sign, authorities said, that he, like the others, had been exposed to drugs. Social workers decided he’d be safer in foster care.

He was only days old when he arrived at the Inglewood home of retirees Lee and Minor Hanson. Lee Hanson held the baby and talked him through his jittery nights, took him to the doctor for the slightest problems, took lots of pictures.

“That’s his big butt right there,” Lee Hanson said, as she flipped through a photo album of the 24 foster children for whom she has cared during the past 2 1/2 years. Beneath one of Danzel’s pictures is the tiny hospital bracelet he wore when he arrived at her house.

“He was my sweetheart,” she said.

Like many babies exposed to crack, Danzel was a good eater. He gulped down formula and, when he started solids, delighted in applesauce and banana pudding.

Still, authorities sought to move him to a relative’s home in the belief that children fare better with family than strangers licensed as foster parents. State law requires that welfare agencies looking for suitable homes give preference to relatives, who, like all foster parents, are paid several hundred dollars a month to care for young children.

Finding a relative to raise Danzel was not easy. His father was unknown. His great-grandmother cared for his two oldest siblings and, according to a relative, couldn’t take any more.

Social workers identified his 54-year-old grandmother, Sarah Jones, as the most likely relative. Jones initially told authorities she couldn’t take a newborn. She was already raising Danzel’s brother, then a little more than a year old. County welfare workers, then the courts, had placed the older boy in her care when he was days old.

Weeks later, Jones changed her mind and agreed to take Danzel, according to court records. She declined to comment for this story.

At first, Danzel’s social worker hesitated about sending him to his grandmother, who lived in a triplex in South-Central. The social worker told the court in a June 2, 2000, report that Jones’ small one-bedroom apartment was “not appropriate” for Danzel. Already, the grandmother, Danzel’s 17-month-old brother and the boys’ teenage aunt all slept together in the home’s full-size bed. The social worker recommended that Danzel stay in foster care.

At a hearing that day, the judicial officer agreed, but ordered the county to help the grandmother get a crib. The court file noted that Danzel could be placed at the grandmother’s house once that condition was met. A few weeks later, his social worker reported back to the court that Jones had acquired a bassinet for the baby and that the department was working on getting the family a crib and toddler bed.

In a subsequent hearing, the judge ordered that the 6-week-old Danzel be united with his grandmother, who had never visited him in foster care, according to Hanson.

Both the court and the Department of Children and Family Services knew Jones had been arrested several times between the 1960s and 1993 on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, battery and robbery. Only one case ended in conviction--a misdemeanor battery in 1974, according to agency records.

The dependency system often has to contend with past arrests by relatives willing to care for children. In some instances, a criminal history can block an adult from adopting or becoming a foster parent, but the nature of Jones’ record and the fact that her one conviction occurred so long ago made it an easily cleared hurdle.

In 1999, as Jones began the process of adopting Danzel’s older brother, officials dealt with her arrest record by having her sign an affidavit “to effect that she has never handled any deadly weapons,” according to a court report.

Growth Right on Track Before Custody Transfer

The day Danzel was to move in with his grandmother, Aug. 17, his foster mother, Lee Hanson, took him to the doctor early in the morning to get medicine for a runny nose.

According to the pediatrician, Danzel weighed 13 1/2 pounds, right on target. Other than a small weight loss of a few ounces after a brief illness, he said, Danzel had been growing at a steady pace those first months of his life.

That same day, Hanson snapped a final picture of Danzel sitting on a red velvet chair, dressed in white, all cheeks and eyes. She would later proudly display the photo in a frame.

“When he left I said, ‘See you later, Bailey,’ ” Hanson said. “He just smiled.”

About the same time, Danzel was assigned a new social worker, Sheila Armstrong, after the previous social worker was transferred to another office.

Armstrong took the baby from Hanson’s house and left him at his grandmother’s apartment with his medical records and supplies, according to her case notes. She told the grandmother that Danzel had a follow-up doctor’s appointment scheduled a week later.

The grandmother did not take him, and there is no record that Armstrong, who declined to comment for this story, pursued the matter.

On Aug. 29, days after Danzel was placed in his new home, the family services agency’s child abuse hotline received a complaint that the grandmother abused crack cocaine and alcohol and that for years there had been no gas or heat in her apartment. The caller identified herself as Felicia Bailey, the name of Danzel’s mother, who denies making the call.

An after-hours social worker went to Jones’ house, checked the kitchen cabinets and found an “adequate food supply.” The grandmother denied using drugs. The social worker did, however, confirm at least one of the caller’s allegations: Jones had no gas, and thus no heat or hot water.

Jones told the social worker that the main gas supply line was out, but that the gas company was working on fixing it. In the meantime, she was cooking on a two-burner hot plate.

The social worker took her word.

“No child safety concerns/issues that places minors at immediate risk/danger at the time of investigation,” the after-hours worker wrote. “It will also be followed up by [Armstrong].”

Records do not show any follow-up.

In fact, the grandmother had lied, according to Los Angeles police. Detectives said that the gas company, tired of quarreling with Jones over unpaid bills and unauthorized reconnections, removed the meter years ago and put a seal on the line leading to her apartment.

Bock, head of the child and family services agency, said the emergency social worker should have made phone calls to confirm Jones’ explanation and get some assurances that the home would soon have hot water and heat--clear health and safety issues--before leaving Danzel with his grandmother.

A Big Weight Loss Between Checkups

Jones also failed for three months to take Danzel to a doctor. When she did, she arrived without his medical records, according Jack Vossoughazad, who runs a South-Central clinic under the name Jack Azad.

His staff put Danzel on a scale and recorded his weight: 10 1/2 pounds.

He had lost three pounds, nearly a quarter of his weight, in the three months since his last checkup.

Azad said there was no way for him to know of the dramatic weight loss because he had no records of the baby’s earlier examination.

He said he assumed Danzel was just another of the underweight, but generally healthy, foster children he sees daily. Danzel’s length was about average for a boy his age, 26 inches.

Azad gave the baby his immunizations and sent him home.

Medical experts say Danzel’s weight alone--even without comparative information--should have raised a flag. He was seven pounds below the average weight for a boy his age. He was so underweight he had fallen off the pediatric infant growth curve.

“Concerned? I was concerned. That’s why we asked the caretaker to bring him in regularly for follow-up,” Azad said in an interview. Documents show he asked Jones to bring Danzel back in a month.

But the grandmother did not come back the next month. Or the following month. Or the month after that.

Azad said he cannot be blamed for that failure.

“This office is not in Beverly Hills to have five people sit down and calling people to come in,” he said.

Danzel’s social worker, meanwhile, gave no indication in her brief monthly visitation notes that the baby was deteriorating. She repeatedly referred to him as appearing “healthy and happy” and of being “nicely dressed” and “well groomed.” In one report, last December, she said the child was “developing age appropriately and is progressing well.”

Many social workers, who are burdened with heavy caseloads, produce visitation notes that contain such shorthand assessments. But Armstrong’s were “not worth the paper they’re written on,” according to UCLA professor Jorja Prover, who reviewed the file for The Times and who has been training the county’s social workers for nearly a decade.

“I cannot believe that they let this total lack of information pass by,” Prover said of Armstrong’s supervisors and the judicial referee overseeing the case.

Such reports are crucial because they essentially provide the only contact some players within the system have with youngsters in county care.

Children under age 4 are not required to be brought to court in dependency cases. There is no record of Danzel appearing before the judge. At the same time, lawyers appointed to represent children limit their work to the courtroom. They do not make home visits and, by law, are not supposed to engage in social work.

In Danzel’s case, his county-paid lawyer never saw him. The private firm did, however, send its own social worker to the home in January for an announced visit. On this, her only trip to the house, she noted no problems.

“She said he was beautiful and seems on target developmentally,” said Haley Karish, Danzel’s last lawyer. The social worker, who quit after having a second child, could not be reached for comment.

Although the social workers reported nothing unusual at the grandmother’s home, neighbors had a starkly different view. They say, for example, that anyone who entered the house would had to have been struck by the smell.

“It’s a phenomenal scent,” said Alicia Smith, 28, who lived next door to Jones in the same triplex. “You know how something stinks when it’s rotten?”

Smith and other neighbors say they never saw Jones bring her grandson outside. But they would see him occasionally when his mother picked him up for visits.

“He was crying kind of strange, like he was hoarse,” Smith recalled.

“He looked sick. He didn’t look like a normal baby,” agreed Sheila DeBaun, 30, the other neighbor in the triplex.

“You try to give people the benefit of the doubt, not get into their business,” DeBaun explained. “I’ve never called the county or welfare on nobody, but that’s one person I should have called on.

“Every night I pray. I ask God to forgive me for what I’ve done because that could have been prevented,” she said. “We were totally wrong.”

Danzel’s mother said she too noticed her youngest son was skinny, but she never thought he was starving. Also, she said, she thought she couldn’t take him to the doctor because she didn’t have custody.

She was, however, allowed to have unmonitored visits with her son after months of supervised visits and success in staying off drugs.

“All I remember is you can see his ribs. It scared me a little bit,” Bailey said. She also said he did not seem clean when she saw him.

“When I had him, he smelled like mildew. He smelled like an old, nasty towel,” she said. “I was being naive or something. At the time I didn’t think anything was wrong.”

In October of last year, Bailey called the county to complain about her mother, saying she was barring visits with Danzel. She also accused her of using drugs, according to the county case file.

The social worker, Armstrong, said in her notes that she had reprimanded Jones for not allowing visits. There was no indication in the file that she addressed the drug allegation with Jones.

While it is not uncommon for dueling relatives to make false drug abuse accusations in retaliation, the neighbors were also concerned.

“I never saw her do drugs,” DeBaun said, but added that she visited the house when it was filled with smoke from crack. “I’ve walked in . . . and it’s cloudy as mud.”

Also, Jones gave her grandchildren drug- and alcohol-related nicknames. Danzel was “Caine--as in cocaine,” DeBaun said; his brother, “Six-Pack.”

Jones took Danzel to Azad for another checkup in March, four months after his last doctor visit.

Again the staff weighed him and noted Danzel had gained four pounds, but he had come no closer to normal. The average 10-month-old boy weighs 21 pounds. Danzel weighed 14 1/2--the average weight of a 4-month-old.

The malnutrition also had apparently begun to retard his bone growth. In the preceding four months, he had grown only half an inch, to 26 1/2 inches long--the average length of a 6-month-old boy, dropping him off the charts for length for the first time.

But to Danzel’s pediatrician, the weight gain was a sign of progress and health. Azad gave the baby his shots and asked Jones to bring him back for a checkup in two months.

Danzel didn’t live that long.

In April, a month after that last visit, the social worker walked into Jones’ apartment and noticed for the first time that something was very wrong with Danzel. “He did not appear to look right,” Armstrong wrote at the end of her unusually descriptive notes. She asked Jones whether the baby had been sick and was told he had not been.

Rather than send him for immediate treatment, Armstrong left Danzel in the home and returned to the office to talk to her supervisor. They decided to refer his case to a public health nurse who works with Children and Family Services.

The social worker told the nurse, Sue Killian, that Danzel “looks too little, like a small baby.”

“I asked if she felt it was a medical emergency and should he be seen right away?” Killian wrote in her April 13 notes on the case. “She said ‘no,’ but she was ‘very concerned,’ and would transport the child to any appointments I would make, even on her day off.” Armstrong assured her there was no suspicion of abuse, according to police.

Then Killian called the grandmother.

“I questioned her about the child’s development. I asked if the baby was crawling, babbling, saying words, pulling up on objects, or attempting to walk. She said ‘no’ and I told her that was concerning, he should be doing these things,” the nurse wrote. “I told Ms. Jones the baby was very small for his age and didn’t appear to be developing as expected. I wanted to have him evaluated by specialists.”

Before she could make the medical appointments, she said, she needed Danzel’s medical records. On April 13, she started making calls to the doctors who had treated him.

Ten days later, she was still calling around.

By then, it was too late.

Spanked for Crying on Last Night Alive

The last day Danzel was seen alive, April 21, his great-aunt Sadie Childs slept at Jones’ home on the couch. She told authorities she saw Jones feed him a scrambled egg at about 8 p.m., then offer him a bottle of formula, which he refused.

Later, Jones put him to sleep on a folded foam mattress pad on the floor of her bedroom, under a window. This, relatives told authorities, was his bed.

Jones’ teenage daughter told authorities Danzel was crying that night, so Jones spanked him. As she hit his bottom, his head hit the wall. He threw up. The teenager said they cleaned up the vomit and put him back down to sleep.

The next morning, about 10:30, the teenager said, she found the baby with one eye open and one closed, lying in his makeshift bed. She took him to her aunt, Childs.

“I said, ‘It’s time to call 911. He don’t look right,’ ” Childs said during a criminal court hearing. Danzel was “very cold and his mouth looked twisted and he didn’t look alive.”

He was not crying, not making any noise at all. Childs said the grandmother looked stunned.

For 10 minutes they waited for the ambulance and did mostly nothing, she said: “I put my hand on his mouth to see if any breath was coming out.”

Was there, the prosecutor asked?

“Very little.”

When Danzel arrived at the emergency room, his right eye was severely bruised and swollen, Dr. Robert Sandoval told authorities. He had a soiled diaper that seemed as if it had not been changed for a long time. He had dirt between his toes and fingers.

Danzel was pronounced dead in the emergency room.

“I would describe him as unkempt,” Sandoval said in court. “Usually babies do not have a bad odor. This baby did.”

A county pathologist described scars and scrapes covering his body: on his face, back, upper right and left shoulders, the backs of both arms and the front of both legs. He also had open sores on his genitals, which the pathologist attributed to a diaper rubbing against skin fragile from malnutrition and dehydration. He had no body fat.

Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. David B. Whiteman noted that there were fresh injuries to the baby’s head and face, but that they were not the direct cause of death. He determined that Danzel died of starvation and pneumonia, which developed in his final hours.

When Los Angeles police detectives investigating Danzel’s death arrived at Jones’ house, they found about three cases’ worth of empty Colt 45 beer cans. Danzel’s foam “bed” and blankets were in the trash. The only food in the house was a package of frozen chicken. A broken bassinet leaned vertically against a bedroom wall.

Murder Charge Against Grandmother Reduced

A new social worker assigned to investigate the death said Jones’ teenage daughter, who suffers from Down’s syndrome, had a “distinct body odor,” as did Danzel’s 2-year-old brother, who was in a soiled diaper. The social worker took them both into protective custody.

As she investigated, she overheard authorities interviewing Jones.

“I didn’t do nothing to that baby,” she heard the woman say. “I swear to God!”

Police arrested Jones and prosecutors charged her with murder. In September, Jones pleaded no contest to the lesser charge of child abuse causing death. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to an eight-year prison sentence, two years shy of the possible maximum for those reduced charges.

“We would have had a hard time proceeding with murder because she was taking him to the doctor and allowing the social worker to see him,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Walton-Everett.

The social worker also faced repercussions. She was fired in September.

“There are no excuses in this case,” said Bock, head of the Department of Children and Family Services, who questions whether Armstrong saw Danzel as often as her reports indicated. “The social worker simply failed to do her job. How is it that you don’t know the difference between an 11- or 12-month or 6-month-old and an infant, which is what this little baby remained until he died?”

Bock says she hopes his case will be a lesson to young social workers. Addressing a group of interns recently, she posted Armstrong’s assessment of Danzel as “happy and healthy” on a board, then circulated the medical examiner’s photos of his shriveled body.

Armstrong and her supervisor, Sandy Hamilton--who was suspended for 30 days--are appealing their cases to the county Civil Service Commission.

A union spokesman described Armstrong’s punishment as too strong for a worker with an “exemplary record” who tried to do the right thing. Children and Family Services reviewed Armstrong’s other cases and found no problems.

“Making a determination of the medical state of the child--she can’t do that. She shouldn’t be expected to do that,” said John Garfield, spokesman for Service Employees International Union Local 535.

“I think, yes, there is a definite line where a social worker has to take responsibility for what happens to a child, but I don’t think it was her full responsibility. I think the nurse has to take some of the fall for it. I think the doctor has to take some of the fall for it. I think the system has to take some of the fall for it.”

The prosecutor said she filed a complaint with the state medical board about the doctor’s inaction. She said she continues to work on the case.

Anguishing Realization of a Collective Failure

With so many missed opportunities to save Danzel’s life, many are anguished by a sense of a collective failure.

“The perplexing part of it,” said Bock, is this: “What is going on, not just in our agency, but with these medical professionals and everybody else, that this could happen?”

Bobby Black, the lawyer who defended Jones, agrees.

“Why can’t anybody show me that they did anything, however slight,” he asked, “just to show us that they were even moderately concerned?”