Sandra Eastman was searching for love. With a childhood marred by violence, instability, cocaine and abuse, as an adult she wanted a peaceful family life of her own.
Eastman’s mistake, perhaps, was to let that need blind her to the threat her husband posed to her baby girl, Dezirae Sheldon. Dennis Duby, who friends described as an angry, jealous, violent liar, is charged with Dezirae’s murder.
Eastman is not the only person in Dezirae’s life who didn’t see Duby as a threat.
The events that led to the toddler’s death tell not only the story of a broken family, but also of a social services agency that is struggling to protect children of abusive parents.
Social workers at the Department for Children and Families assigned to protect Dezirae ignored warning signs about Duby as they pushed to reunify Dezirae with her mother.
Ever since DCF failed a federal audit in 2007, the department has worked to improve its policies – and its statistics – which track how quickly DCF finds permanent homes for child.
The requirements are a double-edged sword. No one disputes that a stable home for a child is best. But is federal pressure causing social workers to rush children back into unsafe homes?
Absolutely not, DCF officials say. But the details of Dezirae’s story show where the agency, more than once, took steps to rush the toddler back to her mother without investigating the threat of abuse perpetrated by Duby who has been accused of breaking Dezirae’s legs a year before he allegedly crushed her skull.
Dezirae’s story is not an anomaly. A month after she was killed, Winooski toddler Peighton Geraw died just three months after he was returned to an unstable mother and her boyfriend.
His mother, Nytasha Laforce, is now charged with Peighton’s murder. She allegedly smashed his head on the floor. A DCF social worker who saw the child shortly before he was declared dead followed protocol in that case, police ruled this week.
Meanwhile, other parents, grandparents and foster parents across the state tell stories of their own Deziraes and Peightons. Family members and caregivers are fed up with DCF policies and have asked lawmakers to pass new laws to better protect children from abuse and death.
FIVE AND UNDER ALWAYS GO HOME
Sandra Eastman’s family moved from New Hampshire to Holopaw, Florida, when she was 4.
In Florida, Eastman’s grandfather abused family members, murdered his wife then turned a gun on himself in 1994, Eastman said. That year her family, including her three siblings, moved back to New Hampshire, and Sandra bounced between households.
She dropped out of high school at 14 to care for her sisters as her mother’s health declined. Her father promised to pay for correspondence courses but that didn’t happen and she didn’t finish school.
“I take care of myself, it’s always kind of been that way,” said Eastman, 31.
She lived for a while with her father, then with a boyfriend. She took cocaine and moved to Fair Haven to live with a friend.
There she became pregnant by her friend’s son, Tylor Brown, and gave birth to her oldest daughter, Destany, a name Eastman chose because the baby was a surprise.
In what Eastman describes as unfair circumstances, she pleaded guilty in 2008 to lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor, because Brown was under age.
In 2012, Eastman voluntarily enrolled at Lund Family Center in Burlington, a residential treatment center. Dezirae was born at Lund on Feb. 18, 2012, and Eastman left the center in June. She says she was never addicted to opiates.
Later that year Eastman met Duby. They reconnected on Facebook after she had dated his brother eight years prior, Eastman said.
From the beginning, Dennis told her a string of lies she said she believed. He said he was a police officer in a nearby town and a South Burlington firefighter, Eastman said. At one point he was a volunteer firefighter in the town of Pittsford.
After Duby was charged with Dezirae’s murder and pleaded not guilty, he posted $250,000 bail and is living with relatives.
“Dennis portrayed himself as something he totally wasn’t. He fooled a lot of people,” she said.
Dezirae’s father, Willis Sheldon, at first didn’t want anything to do with Dezirae, but later took care of the toddler on weekends, Eastman said.
Things got worse when Dezirae’s legs were broken in February 2013.
DCF removed Dezirae from Eastman’s home after the event at the hospital, when Eastman admits she lied to DCF and police because she didn’t know why her 12-month-old had two broken legs.
They charged Eastman with child cruelty, which she pleaded down to medical neglect. A police affidavit from the time says Eastman offered several explanations that doctors considered implausible, and she admitted to concealing the incident. Eastment did not immediately seek medical attention for Dezirae because she thought she would be in trouble.
“(Sandra) completely ignored her daughter and it was all about Dennis,” she said.
Holden, the sister of Dezirae’s father, cared for Dezirae for seven months before a judge decided to return the child to Eastman. Holden told DCF it was a bad idea, she says she knew Duby was violent and angry and that Dezirae was afraid of him. Dezirae had nightmares and threw up every time she visited her mother, Holden said.
Eastman also wasn’t psychologically stable, Holden said. She slit her wrists when she lost Dezirae, Holden said.
Holden also reached out to DCF and begged social workers not to reunify Dezirae with her mother, because Duby was violent and jealous of Dezirae’s father. Social workers told the family to stop digging for dirt, Holden said.
“Five and under always go home, they say, unless it’s really horrible,” the social worker told Holden. Dezirae was reunified with Eastman in October 2013. Four months later, on Feb. 21, she was dead.
In Eastman’s opinion, she deserved Dezirae back. Where DCF went wrong, she said, was never investigating who broke Dezirae’s legs.
“I’m not perfect and I have never claimed to be but I have never once abused my children ever in life,” she said.
Eastman appealed the child cruelty DCF decision. Several attorneys and social workers later told police they didn’t know about the appeal while Dezirae was being reunified, a factor they said could have changed their plan for keeping Dezirae safe.
THE JUDGE DECIDES
DCF can ask a judge to grant the state custody of a child if the agency can prove a child is abandoned or abused.
After a series of court proceedings, a judge later decides whether the child should be returned to the parent, in many cases after the parent has completed services such as counseling or drug treatment. In some cases, the court also evaluates potentially dangerous living arrangements.
DCF’s top policy goal is to place children with their biological parents, as long as it is safe. The second-best option is to send a child to live with relatives. Foster care is a last resort, primarily because research shows that living with strangers produces worse outcomes for children later in life, DCF says.
Even in some “high risk” circumstances children are not removed from their home or their parent’s custody and social workers try to work with the family in their home.
The court process to terminate a parent’s rights can take at least a year and happens after a series of hearings.
Family court decisions are among the most challenging judicial decisions to make, said Amy Davenport, chief administrative judge for the Vermont trial courts.
Parents have a constitutional right to raise their children, unless they are found unfit to do so, she said.
Judges circulate through civil, criminal and family court in Vermont, and rely on arguments from attorneys to make decisions. In Dezirae’s case, attorneys later told police they had not been apprised of DCF’s progress in the case or of Duby’s involvement with the family.
Some attorneys say that means a judge’s decision is only as good as the information presented by the parties.
Children are often reunified because of negligence on the part of social workers and attorneys, according Kathryn Piper, a Vermont attorney who spent 20 years representing children in DCF court cases and is studying the state agency as part of doctoral research at Brandeis University.
“If DCF, the state’s attorney and/or the child’s attorney and Guardian ad Litem do not do a thorough investigation, they cannot make well-informed decisions about the best interests of the child and there is a danger that children will be returned to unsafe homes,” Piper said in an email.
PRESSURE FROM THE FEDS
Throughout the state’s investigation of DCF’s handling Dezirae’s case, social workers have said the agency has made reunification of children with their parents a top priority.
The pressure to reunify families comes in part from the federal government. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services audits child protective service programs and determines whether states are in compliance with federal regulations.
Vermont, along with every other state, failed the last round of audits in 2007.
Among other critiques, the 2007 review determined that DCF did not reunify children or place children in other permanent homes as quickly as it should.
The next federal review is scheduled for 2015 and Cindy Walcott, the deputy commissioner of DCF, expects the state to fail again.
Not because DCF is failing – the agency has drastically reformed practices since the last audit in 2007 – but because the federal benchmarks are so high, Walcott said.
Pressure to meet quotas for federal audits does not trickle down to front-line social workers, she said. It does influence DCF on a “systems level,” and it is not a cause of flaws in the agency’s handling of the Peighton and Dezirae cases, she said.
“I would never want someone to make a decision that was ill-advised because they thought it would move our data in a way that they thought was considered good by the federal government,” Walcott said.
Vermont is rated on the time it takes to reunify children with families. DCF reunifies 67.1 percent of children in less than 12 months from the time the children are removed from their homes. The state rate of reunification mirrors the national average.
Twelve percent of children went back into foster care within 12 months of a prior episode with DCF in 2012, the most recent year available.
In order to qualify for federal foster care money, DCF must show that social workers made “reasonable efforts” to prevent the need for a child to be removed from his or her home in the first place, Walcott said.
That rule is “good from a financial point of view, but also from a practical point of view,” Walcott said, because the state does not make a good long-term parent.
Failure on national audits can mean financial penalties. The feds did not fine Vermont because the state completed an “improvement plan” in 2011.
Directors of DCF district offices also use rubrics based on the federal criteria to measure the performance of each district.
The results of the audit led to many changes in DCF, including the creation of a centralized intake system, a new system for responding to calls known as differential response and a more concerted effort to visit children in custody more frequently. (In the differential response model, child protection can put a case on one of two tracks: investigation or assessment, depending on the severity of the alleged abuse.)
In 2011, DCF workers visited 38 percent of children in custody each month. The department increased that rate to 90 percent in 2012 and to 92 percent in 2013.
Despite these improvements, a federal study from this year ranks Vermont the sixth-worst state in the nation for the percentage of children (about 25 percent) who re-enter state care within 12 months of being reunified. The data for the study is from the Children’s Bureau Outcomes Report from the federal government, with graphs from Casey Family Services, a national child welfare nonprofit. (See document at the end of this story.)
DCF officials say the study is skewed because the number cited includes juvenile delinquents. DCF also runs the juvenile justice system in Vermont. There are 1,032 children in DCF care, including 138 delinquent youth.
“Am I concerned about our re-entry rates? Yes, I am, and I think we need to continue to understand and address it,” Walcott said.
A professor who studies the Vermont Department for Children and Families said the federal audits encourage the agency to implement best practices, which in many cases it has done. Chief among those best practices is ensuring that children grow up in stable home environments.
“There’s pressure for permanency,” said Gary Widrick, professor emeritus at the University of Vermont’s social work department.
Until recently, Widrick ran a federally funded program at UVM that trains social workers. DCF has come a long way since his days as a social worker in the 1970s, he said, when untrained workers thoughtlessly yanked children out of homes.
Problems today center around high caseloads, not bad policies, Widrick said.
The state recommends a social worker-to-children caseload of 1:12. The DCF ratio is 1:16, although the number varies across the state.
Social workers in Brattleboro handle caseloads of 23 children each while Morrisville employees only have nine each, according to DCF.
WHEN REUNIFICATION DOESN’T MAKE SENSE
DCF social workers say it’s always a risk to reunify a child with parents, but if it works, it’s best for everyone.
“The first thing is you want to keep those kids with their families,” said Janet Dunigan, a longtime DCF social worker in the St. Albans district office.
DCF officials prefer to avoid removing children from their parents’ custody in the first place, but if a household isn’t safe the agency has an obligation to find temporary placements.
Affidavits alleging parental abuse or neglect aren’t filed haphazardly, Dunigan said. But in some cases, social workers find themselves weighing whether a child will survive until age 18.
Reunification also depends on feedback from third-party social service organizations that update social workers about parents’ progress in substance abuse, mental health or other programs, Dunigan said. Social workers are supposed to review each case every six months.
Social workers are also supposed to monitor visits and see how comfortable a child appears and whether parents can enforce rules and respond to a child’s needs.
“Sometimes (reunification) is not the best goal and I think that’s reality,” Dunigan said.
DCF does not reunify all children, or even the majority of children.
In the past five years, 46 percent of children taken into custody were reunified with their parents, according to DCF.
Cathy Paul is a foster mother in southern Vermont who has fostered 25 to 30 kids over the past 10 years. She has seen it all, she said, and she thinks the state’s reunification policies need to change.
Paul spoke to state lawmakers in June at a public hearing about the state’s child protection program in Chester.
“There’s no possible explanation to having one or two or four kids taken away for abuse or neglect, and then give them the opportunity to try again with a newborn baby,” Paul said.
Still, not all reunifications go wrong. Paul said she fostered one young girl whose mother turned her life around and was able to provide a safe and stable home environment for her daughter.
Sandra Eastman says she thought at the time her reunification with Dezirae was a good thing. She was overjoyed to get her daughter back and had a third daughter, this time with Duby.
Now Eastman has lost both her child and her husband. Dezirae is dead, Dubie is accused of murder and the couple is getting divorced.
Eastman’s overwhelming desire to live a normal life seems like a distant dream. She is living in hotels, trying to get her life back in order. Her youngest daughter is in DCF custody. She isn’t thinking about the future; she’s taking life day by day.
“I don’t want a man for a long time, my children are my family and that’s just how it’s got to be,” she said.
Timeline of Dezirae’s life.
(Hover over right side of timeline to scroll through.)
