Agency Criticized in Death of Child

Despite having received six reports suggesting that a Canoga Park toddler was being abused, Los Angeles County social workers failed to protect the boy from his 19-year-old mother, who allegedly beat him so badly last fall that he suffered massive internal bleeding and died, county supervisors said Tuesday.

The mother, Claudia Merlos, told police investigating the Oct. 1 death that she had punched her son, Ivan, in the stomach and then had not called paramedics because she was afraid that he would be taken from her. She was later charged with murder and was being held for trial in Twin Towers Jail in lieu of $1-million bail.

On Tuesday, Supervisor Gloria Molina tore into the county’s Department of Children and Family Services at the board’s weekly meeting, demanding that Director David Sanders act more forcefully to get rid of “ill-trained” social workers whose shoddy investigations endanger children.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Molina said. “This is about people not doing their jobs.... The same ill-trained, ill-prepared social workers could have hurt other people. Don’t you consider it a dangerous situation when you have something as blatant as this?”

Sanders, who has been in the job less than a year, said he wanted “sufficient information” about the Merlos case before disciplining employees.

“I anticipate that there will be serious discipline and corrective action,” Sanders told the board. He said that his department had recently completed a three-month investigation of the case, but that he could not say whether the social workers or supervisors involved had been disciplined. That prompted Molina to decry a slow-moving “bureaucracy” more adept at producing reports than results.

The exchange provoked outrage from several parents who addressed the board, including some whose children had been removed by Sanders’ department because of suspected abuse or neglect.

“I applaud Gloria Molina for standing up and speaking the truth,” said one mother, Candace Owen. “I do believe that there’s an illusion going on. The illusion is: ‘Give us large sums of money and we’ll protect children.’ ”

Many details of the Merlos case remain unclear. Under state law, the Department of Children and Family Services cannot release most information about its cases without court permission. But interviews and police reports showed that the department had logged six referrals involving the boy, including one that described a Sept. 16 hospital visit.

In that incident, Merlos took her son to Northridge Hospital Medical Center with a broken leg. According to a police report, the doctor who treated Ivan determined that the injury was consistent with his mother’s story that he had been hurt in an accident at home.

At Supervisor Michael Antonovich’s request, the board directed Sanders to report back in two weeks with a plan to prevent similar lapses. But Sanders hinted at the magnitude of the problem, saying that policy changes wouldn’t fix the problem of longtime social workers who are not up to the job.

“There is a history and a core of workers,” he said, “that may not be able to do the work that we expect.”