CHICAGO, IL – The Illinois State Auditor General’s Office is seeing more compliance failures in the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). The nearly 140-page report was released in September 2023 outlining several delays of child abuse in the collection reporting, sometimes taking years to report incidents. The report found 33 compliance failures from the DCFS in the fiscal year 2021 and 2022.
“This audit is a roadmap of what can go wrong and what has gone wrong with this agency. We need to do something different,” State Rep. Steve Reick (R), Woodstock, said.
The report found that in 96% of investigations tested, DCFS failed to notify schools in a timely way. The audit found schools were told 431 to 908 days later. State laws require DCFS to notify schools within 10 days after an investigation is completed.
“We have to do something with what’s going on in this state and you can’t blame this on COVID,” Reick said.
In cases involving child death, injury, torture, malnutrition and sex abuse, DCFS is supposed to report this information to state attorneys within 24 hours after an occurrence. The audit found the department didn’t meet that deadline 20% of the time and information was reported 5 to 43 days late.
Click here to view the full report.
An Illinois Times review of public records issued between 2010 and 2024 shows that 176 children under the age of 13 have been killed after coming under the care of the department. Another 272 child deaths of children under the care of the department have resulted from undetermined causes. Abuse and neglect have been rampant, even though 174 watchdog investigations of death and serious injury cases were opened during this period by the Office of the Inspector General for DCFS.
DCFS Failed These Children
CBS 2 dug through 20 years of data. Never has the number of children with prior DCFS involvement died at this rate.
The report includes the case of 8-year-old Amaria Osby where DCFS waited 60 days to make contact with her or her mom after a hotline call came in on her wellbeing. She was later killed by her mother in their Uptown apartment for “loving her father too much.”
Amaria was on the radar of the DCFS as early as age 3. The department admitted rules that were not followed in this case. Just hours earlier, Amaria and her mom were visited at their Uptown apartment by the state child welfare workers from DCFS. DCFS failed to try to make contact with the family for 60 days – after a neglect call on Amaria came in last spring.
Both the DCFS worker and supervisor on this case were pulled from child protective duties. One of them is back to caring for kids.
Another failure from DCFS involves Navin Jones, another 8-year-old child, who died of severe malnutrition and abuse in 2022. A weeklong trial detailed the abuse and further revealed how DCFS didn’t act to remove the child from his parents’ care. The investigator at DCFS believed she didn’t have the authority to remove the boy from his parent’s home about a month before he died, despite her observance of him being sickly.
DCFS has repeatedly come under sharp criticism for failing to intercede to protect children at risk.
In October 2023, a judge convicted a former DCFS worker of child endangerment in connection with the 2019 beating death of a 5-year-old suburban Chicago boy by his mother. A.J. Freund suffered abuse and torture at the hands of his parents in their Crystal Lake home. Police found the boy’s body buried in a shallow grave field near Woodstock.
The police officer who responded to a call from A.J.’s mother several months before his death was overcome with emotion while recalling her concerns about returning the boy to his parents. She contacted DCFS after seeing A.J.’s injury and what she called “deplorable living conditions” in his home.
Prosecutors showed pictures of the home, which they said had animal feces, urine on the floor and junk piled everywhere.
“I told him, ‘There is no way children should be going back to that residence,'” Shipbaugh said.
DCFS returned the boy to his parents. His body was discovered six days after his parents reported him missing in April 2019.
