Another death roll of kids Minnesota didn't save

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Eli Hart's mother was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday in Hennepin County District Court. Six years old and developmentally delayed, Eli was repeatedly shotgunned last spring and stuffed into a car trunk, having endured a brief, chaotic life of squalor and neglect. He'd been returned to his delusional mother's custody nine days before he died.

Tayvion Davis froze to death in 2018, locked in a garage on a subzero February night. In his eight years, along with his siblings, he had been sexually abused, beaten with a belt, a hammer and a metal rod, scalded with boiling water and starved.

Eight-year-old Autumn Hallow's 45-pound body revealed puncture wounds, bruises and lacerations when she was found dead in 2020 submerged in a bathtub. Her screams had been repeatedly reported, and recorded, by alarmed neighbors. Elk River police had responded to 31 calls about her welfare.

Had enough? There's plenty more, if you can stand it, in "Minnesota Child Fatalities from Maltreatment, 2014-2022," an important if stomach-turning report from Safe Passage for Children, a nonprofit with the straightforward mission of "advocating for a better child welfare system in Minnesota."

We've needed one of those for a long time. Not least among the horrors the stories of Autumn, Tayvion, and Eli have in common, along with many other stories in the new report, is that Minnesota public servants charged with protecting the defenseless — child protection officials, police, judges, medical personnel, etc. — knew or should have known that these children were in danger. But through a combination of incompetence, miscommunication, inadequate resources and, above all, misguided leniency toward abusive and neglectful caretakers, innocents were left to suffer and die.

It's important to remember that for every maltreatment fatality, a heartbreaking number of lives are being permanently blighted by childhood trauma and despair.

Last week Rich Gehrman, executive director of Safe Passage for Children, sent the group's new report to me and other local journalists he thought might give some renewed attention to this tragic and maddening state of affairs because they agree that "the children deserve it."

Yes. But one grows weary. I was first introduced to this issue well over 20 years ago, when Kathleen Blatz, then serving as the first female chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, led an effort to open the proceedings of child protection and juvenile courts to scrutiny by the public and the press. The idea was that in those days too much secrecy prevented the broader community from seeing for itself whether children were being sufficiently protected in our state.

While opponents of openness back then said they were worried about sensational media attention, Blatz and others hoped that if only the public could see what was happening to too many Minnesota children — and how many "second chances," or 15th chances, the system was giving some of their tormentors — well, that somebody would decide the children deserve better.

In fact, it was many years before much in the way of any media attention surfaced, sensational or otherwise. In 2014, then-Star Tribune reporter Brandon Stahl published a shocking article, "The boy they couldn't save," and a series that documented scores of deaths and severe harms among Minnesota children whose danger was known to the child protection system. Stahl revealed "the failings of a system" in which reports of maltreatment "often go uninvestigated and don't get referred to police," failings that moved then-Gov. Mark Dayton to appoint a distinguished task force to recommend reforms.

Some improvements have been implemented, but the new Safe Passage report, covering the years since the task force issued its findings, makes it clear that far too little has changed. The report studies 88 maltreatment deaths that occurred between October 2014 and May 2022, about half of all such deaths in the state during that time, which occurred at the rate of roughly two per month.

"Many of these deaths were preventable," the report bluntly declares, adding equally bluntly that they were not prevented because of "a child welfare philosophy which gave such high priority to the interests of parents and other adults in households, as well as to the goals of family preservation and reunification, that child safety and well-being were regularly compromised."

Gehrman adds that the system "often seemed to accept extraordinary levels of neglect and violence against" children and that "we believe the values of the system are out of alignment with the values of community overall."

I'd like to believe he's right. But candidly, after all these years and all the revelations they've brought along these lines, I have yet to see convincing evidence that the "community" in Minnesota harbors anywhere near as much passion for safeguarding children as it exhibits for safeguarding the abortion rights, or gun rights, of adults.

Adults are simply much better at advocating for their interests than children are, and far better able to make life miserable for politicians or officials who resist their demands. We have here a classic, appalling case of what's often called "regulatory capture," in which government watchdogs come to better sympathize with the particular institutions and individuals they regulate than with the broad public they supposedly protect.

The challenges of child protection aren't simple. The power to come between parents and their children is fearsome, and must be wielded with compassion and care. But compassion for those who cannot possibly protect themselves must come first.

As advocates for parents' rights often insist, it is traumatic to separate a child from its family — but not as traumatic as starvation, a hammer blow or a shotgun blast.

D.J. Tice is at doug.tice@startribune.com.