A Girl Lost, an Agency Roiled

Her name is Rilya and she is 5 years old--if she is still alive. Somehow she fell through the cracks of the very system meant to protect her.

Workers with Florida’s child welfare agency were supposed to be checking monthly on Rilya Wilson, the daughter of a chronic drug abuser. She had been taken from her mother by the state and placed with a woman said to be her grandmother. But more than 15 months ago, her guardian said, someone claiming to be from the Florida Department of Children and Families took Rilya away, supposedly for an evaluation.

She hasn’t been seen since.

Officials in the Miami state attorney’s office said this week that they are treating Rilya’s disappearance as a probable homicide. Said Det. Ed Munn of the Miami-Dade Police Department: “The longer the case progresses without locating the little girl, the chances are dim that she is going to be found alive.”

The actions of the children and families agency, said department head Kathleen Kearney, have been “abysmal.” Authorities only learned a few days ago of Rilya’s disappearance because the original caseworker had been filing phony reports, claiming she was visiting the girl each month.

“The ineptness in this case by the worker and the supervisor is appalling,” Kearney said from her office in Tallahassee. The caseworker, Deborah Muskelly, resigned last month after an audit found she had falsified records in other cases.

Rilya’s disappearance has sparked new criticism of how effectively Florida’s government protects its most vulnerable minors. In December, a statewide committee found that 60 children had died of abuse or neglect in 1999 and 2000, even though the Department of Children and Families had received warnings of mistreatment.

“We still have problems; there’s no denying it,” Gov. Jeb Bush said earlier this week. But he added: “The biggest issue here is the lack of wholesome love in family life in our state. To expect that the government can fill that void in a perfect fashion is impossible.”

Some state lawmakers have been questioning Kearney’s leadership or calling for her replacement. But Bush, who appointed her in December 1998, contended that she has turned around an agency that once was “in complete disarray.”

The Republican governor, who is running for reelection, said funding for child welfare has increased significantly since he became governor in 1998.

In testimony to a legislative committee this week, Kearney--a former juvenile judge--explained that her agency has been reorganized 22 times in its 33-year history and crippled by “a chronic lack of funding.”

But in the opinion of some private specialists, the department under Kearney has performed even more poorly.

“They know they’ve overloaded the caseworkers down there [in Miami-Dade County] to the point where they can’t get their job done,” charged Karen Gievers, a Tallahassee attorney and president of the Children’s Advocacy Foundation. “It’s mismanagement.”

Bush and Florida’s legislature have allocated enough money to bring the workload down to the nationally approved 17 children per caseworker, Gievers said. But those funds, she added, don’t seem to have eased caseworkers’ loads--an employee often handles more than double the recommended number of cases.

In Rilya’s case, “the pressure may have been there to fudge records to meet supervisors’ demands,” Gievers said. She said other people in Kearney’s department also had failed the girl, including officials who should have put her up for formal adoption and those who prepared periodic reports on her status for a judge.

“The state had the job to keep this child safe,” Gievers said. “And if any of them had been doing their job, this kid would be alive today.”

In televised remarks Friday, Ellen Morphonios, a former Miami-Dade County judge, also gave a blistering verdict on the work of the Department of Children and Families. Asked to explain how a child in its care could have vanished, Morphonios replied: “Incompetence, No. 1; overworked employees, No. 2; underpaid employees, No. 3; and they just don’t give a damn heading the list.”

In April 2001, the nude and decapitated body of a young girl was found in a wooded area of Kansas City, Mo.

The palm prints of that victim, nicknamed “Precious Doe,” reportedly do not match those of Rilya. But Kansas City and Miami-Dade police are continuing to investigate.

In the view of Jack Levine, president of the Center for Florida’s Children, an advocacy group, what happened to Rilya could have happened in any U.S. city with an overburdened child welfare system.

“And frankly,” added Levine, “there is no city without an overburdened child welfare system.”

The trend in the larger states--including California, New York, Texas and Florida--is to remove children from their parents if there is a threat to their safety or welfare, he said.

But politicians don’t put their money where their mouths are when it comes to appropriating funds to care for children who have become the responsibility of the state.

“We’re like the old woman in a shoe,” Levine said. “We have so many children, we don’t know what to do.”