The crisis within Florida's social services agency deepened Monday when a Miami judge blasted the casework on a missing 5-year-old and Gov. Jeb Bush appointed a four-person commission to root out the agency's problems.

"It is absolutely despicable what happened in this case," Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman told agency attorneys in court. "I don't even know how to respond to what has been done in this case by this caseworker, but she also has defrauded this court."

Bush described the case as unconscionable: "It is not acceptable to me to have a situation where for more than a year ... we did not know where that child was."

The Department of Children and Families is scrambling to determine if, why and how a DCF employee wrote false reports about 5-year-old Rilya Wilson, indicating the girl was in foster care when, in fact, she disappeared 16 months ago.

With the crisis taking on political overtones, Bush asked his four-person panel to quickly produce an interim report on Rilya's case by May 20, and a completed report by June 3.

But the rapid-fire review will be at least the eighth such panel to study problems of DCF and HRS during the past 17 years.

"The recommendations at the end of each (study) are pretty much all the same," said Dr. Charles Mahan, a former state health officer who served on two such committees. "Probably the time and effort we put into task forces ought to be put into how we can get the money to pay for adequate supervision of these kids and adequate training for staff."

Reaction to Bush's new panel was mixed.

Prominent child advocate Jack Levine called it the quickest response he could remember in 23 years of watching the state's scandal-plagued social services agency, formerly called HRS. He said the Bush administration "took this very, very seriously."

Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, said another blue-ribbon commission is not the answer. What should occur, he said, is a no-holds-barred criminal investigation.

"With all due respect to those fine, outstanding individuals, those people are not investigators," he said. "I think you ought to have an investigation."

Bush's panel includes David Lawrence, the former Miami Herald publisher who considered running against Bush as a Democrat in 1998; Bush's former general counsel, Carol Licko; Barry University president Jeanne O'Laughlin; and Sara Herald, a group chief administrative officer for Union Planters Bank.

The two leading Democratic candidates for governor, Janet Reno and Bill McBride, both offered Bush their support on Monday.

"I would like to work with Gov. Bush in a bipartisan, caring, thoughtful way to address in a positive sense what we need to do about abuse and neglect," Reno said.

Asked if the governor had failed at what he had made a major campaign issue, Reno answered, "So far, it seems, there is every indication that it failed, but I would rather not take that tack."

Said McBride: "It is imperative that we act quickly to ensure the safety of children entrusted to the care of the state."

The state House on Friday passed a bill that would make it a crime to alter state records such as those produced by DCF. The bill predated the news about Rilya, but several legislators cited the case during their debate.

Sen. Durell Peaden Jr., chairman of the Children and Families Committee, was encouraged to learn of Bush's commission and the people appointed to it. "They're all high-quality individuals; they don't have a political agenda."

Peaden, R-Crestview, said the Rilya case was "disgusting, basically disgusting. You can't manufacture or legislate integrity, but we can put them in jail when they demonstrate the lack of it." He was referring to the records-altering bill, which a Senate committee may take up today.

In addition to the new panel, a House committee already is investigating how the department handles contracts on child protection and other matters.

Another person highly critical of the DCF on Monday was Miami Judge Lederman.

She was reacting to the fact that nearly two months after Rilya was last seen in January 2001, caseworker Deborah Muskelly told Lederman that the girl was in day care.

In a report submitted Aug. 31, 2001, Muskelly said Rilya's custodian was addressing her needs, the juvenile court judge said. Muskelly resigned in March for issues related to her performance in other cases.

Kathleen Kearney, the DCF secretary, said the judge "had every right to be exceptionally angry" for this case.

Detectives are treating Rilya's disappearance as a possible homicide. Investigators are waiting for DNA test results from police in Kansas City, Mo., to see if a girl found beheaded there in April 2001 was Rilya.

And the caseworker's actions are a target of the criminal investigation involving Rilya. Kearney raised the possibility of criminal perjury charges against Muskelly.

Monday's court hearing raised new questions about who had been caring for the child before her disappearance. Testimony indicated two women provided care jointly to Rilya. The two were Pamela Graham and her sister, Geralyn Graham, who has identified herself as the girl's paternal grandmother.

Bush and Kearney both acknowledged the magnitude of the department's missteps on Rilya, but also said they have worked hard to improve the long-troubled agency.

"My personal opinion is we've made good progress," Bush said. "We have fewer kids in foster care, we have fewer kids under the state's protective custody. We're spending more money on prevention programs to assure the cases of abuse and neglect don't happen to begin with. We're funding monies adequately so that case workers have smaller case loads, we're moving to a community-based model. All of those things are positive."

Kearney predicted the panel will view Rilya's as an isolated, tragic case. A state report issued last December said 60 children in Florida had died of abuse or neglect, after the department had received at least one call alleging mistreatment of each child. In 10 of the cases, the report said previous DCF investigations or responses were "inadequate."

On another DCF-related issue, two 14-year-old mentally retarded brothers remain in the Pinellas Juvenile Detention Center, even though a Pinellas-Pasco circuit judge previously ordered the department to find more appropriate placements.

In Largo on Monday, the department avoided being found in contempt, but still faces a judge's order to find placement for two mentally incompetent Pinellas County boys who have been in the detention center for several weeks.

The department appealed the judge's ruling, which effectively gives it more time to find a place for the boys to receive treatment. The department found treatment for another boy who had been in custody, and a 15-year-old girl was allowed to go home while awaiting a placement expected to open up this week.

-- Staff writers Wes Allison, Steve Bousquet, Anita Kumar and Adam Smith contributed to this report. Information from the Associated Press was used. Staff writer Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or by calling (727) 893-8232.

Back to State news

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

Special Links

Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk