On April 13, 2022, at exactly 6:09 p.m., a child protection investigator assigned to the case of Miami mother Odette Joassaint entered a sympathetic-sounding note into the computer system of the Florida Department of Children and Families.
“She reports that everything is fine.”
The “she” referred to Joassaint, 41, a mother of three who has been enmeshed with the department for years due to persistent reports of domestic violence and poor parenting.
The investigator offered this reassuring picture of Joassaint’s three-year-old son Jeffry: “He likes to play, laugh and grab things.” Regarding Jeffry’s older sister, 6-year-old Laura, the narration went: “She’s a quiet kid [who] is good.”
Actually, the day before, Joassaint was at the Miami-Dade County Jail and Laura and Jeffry were at the morgue. Police had arrived at the mother’s home on Northeast 75th Street to find the children tied and strangled. Their mother told officers the children were better off this way.
Case files are a crucial element of child protection, the records that show families in trouble are being monitored and children being supervised by an objective outsider. The retrospective entry the day after the children’s deaths – one of several – raises questions about an agency whose investigators are known to record visits that never happened. Such fakes have led to deadly consequences.
The visit to Joassaint’s two younger children, which reportedly took place on April 2, took place at the home of Laura and Jeffry’s father, 45-year-old Frantzy Belval, who had consistently cooperated with investigators and sought custody of his children – an effort DCF could not support.
In contrast, Joassaint had a habit of shooing investigators away and often refused to open her door. The department would dismiss such behavior and then repeatedly conclude that the children were not in danger.
Child protection experts say the practice of waiting days or weeks to document events leads to confusion – if not fraud.
“It’s never acceptable to wait that long,” said Beth Barrett, a child welfare administrator who was CEO of Wesley House Family Services, a Florida Keys service provider, and former director of Child Welfare Projects for the Department of Child and Family Studies Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida.
“You should enter these things no later than 48 hours after something was observed or something was done or an activity or home visit took place,” Barrett said. “Everything after and [DCF’s] Our own quality assurance system should have picked it up.”
“cover the butt”
Notes entered weeks late raise the possibility, Barrett said, that they were placed on the case file because investigators or case workers are “covering their own butts.”
Barrett added, “There’s no excuse for not entering these notations on time.”
When asked repeatedly by a reporter about the unusual recordings on the Florida Safe Families Network, the agency’s computer system, a DCF spokeswoman did not respond.
Irregularities have long been a problem within DCF’s mammoth computer system – and they often only come to light when a child or vulnerable adult dies of abuse or neglect, causing the state’s records to become public.
In December 2020, a case worker at the privately run Children’s Home Society was fired after administrators discovered a discrepancy between photographs of an infant under DCF supervision, Rashid Bryant, being entered into an internal casework system and the GPS tracking embedded in the images -Stamp.
DCF has since declined to discuss the irregularities or release any record of its investigation into the case officer.
Since 2013, the first year such cases were available, DCF has reported numerous investigations by its Office of the Inspector General into allegations that an investigator or case worker falsified records. However, the bureau reports only two completed counterfeiting investigations since 2016, one completed in October 2018 and the other in March 2021.
Florida lawmakers made it a crime to falsify information in a child protection file following the disappearance – and alleged death – of 5-year-old Rilya Wilson. Rilya was placed in the care of a family friend, Geralyn Graham, and had been missing for around 15 months before DCF administrators realized she was gone.
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Although Rilya’s body was never found, Graham was charged with her murder in March 2005. In January 2013, a Miami-Dade jury convicted Graham of kidnapping and child molestation — charges stemming from evidence Graham preserved, among other things, that had seen the little girl locked in a dog cage. The jury deadlocked on a separate murder charge, and Graham was never tried again on that count.
Graham has a current release date of 2049 when she would be 103 years old.
go perp
Jim Sewell, a retired Florida Department of Law Enforcement officer, recalls the first time his agency pressed charges under the law that made it a crime to falsify child protection records in Florida.
It was 2002, and Sewell was the regional director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Tampa Bay. The Lakeland Police Department had just charged a couple with killing 2-year-old Alfredo Montez, the little boy they were supposed to be taking care of. FDLE then hired an investigator to cook records to show she had done her job observing the toddler.
Sewell insisted his agents escort the investigator to her booking in front of a phalanx of reporters. It’s a ritual known as the “perp walk,” usually reserved for accused murderers.
“We were extremely public” about the arrest, says Sewell. “It was covered nationwide.”
Waiting weeks for information to be entered into the system is not the same as inventing information. But Sewell said that, too, is bad practice: “You lose all sense of the urgency of the information,” added Sewell, a former DCF adviser who had served on task forces investigating the controversial deaths of two children in Florida .
“It’s dangerous,” Sewell said of entering information weeks after it was collected. “One cannot maintain a measure of truth unless one does it in a timely manner.”
He added, “If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.”
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