Daniel’s secret was supposed to keep the happy child safe.
As an approved monitor for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, she was responsible for overseeing the Feb. 18 visit between Justin Bulley, who was beginning to talk at 17 months, and his mother, who had struggled with abuse. of substances at all times. his short life.
DCFS placed Justin and his two older brothers with a foster mother the previous year after his mother’s boyfriend fatally overdosed on fentanyl with the children at home.
At around 6:15 p.m., Justin’s mother called 911. The child stopped breathing.
“It was fentanyl,” Justin’s grandfather told paramedics when they arrived at his Lancaster home, according to the sheriff’s report.
By this time, Daniel had already left the house.
Daniel was not a social worker, but a friend of Justin’s mother, Jessica Darthard. DCFS approved her as a monitor, unaware that she lived in the Lancaster home with Justin’s grandfather, Jessie, who had a long history of heavy drug use, according to a county source familiar with the welfare case. Justin’s child, who was not allowed to speak. publicly.
Jessie Darthard told sheriff’s deputies that he had fallen asleep on the couch while smoking fentanyl and woke up with Justin lying next to him, unresponsive.
Jessica Darthard appeared intoxicated, with slurred speech and bloodshot eyes, according to deputies.
An autopsy would confirm that Justin died from exposure to fentanyl, a highly potent opioid that can be deadly for children in the smallest quantities.
Justin’s death highlights dangerous deficiencies in the way DCFS decides who should care for a child spending time with a troubled parent and where those visits should occur.
“If you’re doing the work comprehensively, you’re going to want to figure all this out,” said Michael Nash, a former presiding judge of the Los Angeles County juvenile courts who now oversees the county’s Office of Child Protection. “Who is this family friend? What is the relationship? Where do they live? What is the background? It’s just common sense. It’s not rocket science.”
It is common for a family to ask a friend or relative to serve as a monitor during visits, rather than a social worker. But it is extremely unusual for DCFS to allow the settlement for a child whose case involves recent fentanyl use, said Sharon Balmer Cartagena, director of the Public Counsel’s Children’s Rights Project.
“We typically see an overabundance of caution,” she said. “It seems like a huge aberration.”
According to police and social worker reports included in a 200-page file on Justin’s death, DCFS officials knew about Jessica Darthard’s recent history of substance abuse. Six months before he died, Justin was in the backseat, unbuckled, when his mother was in an accident on the 405 freeway, according to a DCFS report. His blood alcohol level was nearly three times the legal limit.
After Justin’s death, tests showed that his 3-year-old brother and 5-year-old sister also had fentanyl in their systems, according to the sheriff’s report.
The same happened to Daniel’s three children, who also lived in the home, according to two county sources, one familiar with the criminal investigation and the other with Justin’s child welfare case, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Since November, fentanyl has claimed the lives of at least three children in the Antelope Valley, which has the largest to assess of youth hospitalizations with fentanyl in Los Angeles County. This month, two more children – twin babies – he died in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Winnetka after authorities said they were exposed to drugs laced with fentanyl.
Jessie Darthard, 72, was a heroin addict and had recently been released from prison, her daughter Jessica told detectives. On Jan. 22, he was arrested after his ex-girlfriend accused him of raping her with a glass narcotics pipe while they were both high on fentanyl, according to the sheriff’s report.
On the morning of Feb. 18, he bought fentanyl for $20 on the street and smoked it all day, he told detectives.
He fell asleep around 4 p.m. on the living room couch and woke up two hours later with the glass pipe in his hand and his grandson lying next to him, he told sheriff’s deputies.
When the police arrived, foam was coming out of the grandson’s mouth.
He later denied falling asleep with his pipe.
Jessica Darthard, 38, was also napping that afternoon, her 5-year-old daughter told officers. Darthard told them that she had fallen asleep in a bedroom after taking a double shot of Jose Cuervo tequila.
She said she called 911 after her son fell out of bed and became unconscious. After officers arrived, she said she wanted to make another attempt, according to a DCFS report.
Neither Darthard nor his father mentioned a monitor in any of the social worker or sheriff’s reports reviewed by The Times.
See more information: In the fentanyl crisis, babies and young children become innocent victims
One report noted that Justin’s adoptive mother had released him and his siblings to the monitor, but that “it was not known whether the monitor was with the mother when the incident occurred and information was not being released about all of the adults who were there.” .
Justin’s adoptive mother said her daughter gave the child and her siblings to Daniel that morning at a Taco Bell. Darthard gave a conflicting account to detectives, saying she had taken the children from their foster mother the day before.
Kishena Jackson, who lives next door to Darthard’s house, told The Times that Daniel showed up with shopping bags around 7 p.m., saying he couldn’t go home because of the warning tape and police cars. Daniel didn’t seem to know why law enforcement was there, Jackson said.
Daniel and Jessie Darthard did not respond to a letter left on their doorstep.
DCFS officials declined to answer a list of questions about Justin’s case, citing state confidentiality laws. The child welfare agency has opened four cases involving Darthard since 2012 and has monitored Justin since his birth, when Darthard tested positive for marijuana.
DCFS said in a statement that supervised visits are essential to a child’s emotional health and can ease the path for parents to regain custody. A monitor is required for these visits if there are safety concerns, the agency said.
DCFS almost always requires a monitor to supervise parental visits, even when there is no obvious danger to the child, which can make arranging visits difficult, said Brooke Huley, supervising attorney at Los Angeles Dependency Lawyers. She called DCFS’s discretion over monitor selection “broad and almost unfettered.”
Prefects must pass a background check, be financially independent of parents and have “no conflict of interest,” according to DCFS Policy. Family friends or relatives are not paid to be monitors.
Nash, head of the county child protection office created after the brutal murder of an 8-year-old child Gabriel Fernándezsaid he would expect a DCFS employee to periodically participate in visits where a family friend is the monitor.
“What we saw is that when a relative or friend is a monitor… they don’t really monitor. They just let the parents keep the child without really monitoring the visit,” he said. “We see this happen enough times to worry.”
Justin’s father, Montise Bulley, plans to sue DCFS for $65 million, accusing the agency of failing to protect her son by placing him in the care of a monitor with a conflict of interest.
“She is the only person hired to protect these children, and to the extent she has any type of relationship with the parents she is supposed to monitor, that is categorically unacceptable,” said Bulley’s attorney, Brian Claypool, who represented families. suffering from some of the most harrowing recent cases of child abuse and neglect in Los Angeles.
Bulley was estranged from Jessica Darthard and said he was trying to gain custody of Justin.
In a brief email, Darthard said Bulley was “lying about that night.”
“As a grieving mother, the lies and all this are for [sic] a lot,” she wrote. “I have children who saw this and now is not the time.”
Social workers described the three-bedroom beige house in Lancaster as “the family home” and “the mother’s residence” in reports written after Justin’s death.
Darthard told detectives she was homeless and only went there to visit children. She said it belonged to her brother, who suffered from seizures and smoked “sherm,” slang for cigarettes dipped in PCP, according to sheriff’s reports.
Jackson, the neighbor, said that when she moved in about a year ago, Daniel was already living next door. Darthard also used to be next door, Jackson said.
Justin’s autopsy report said all three Darthards lived at the residence.
DCFS policy does not explicitly prohibit monitors from living with the parents they are supervising. But some experts said that would be highly unusual and could be seen as a conflict of interest.
Justin’s adoptive mother said she was trying to stop the supervised visits because she believed Darthard was drinking during them. She said Darthard sometimes smelled like alcohol.
A social worker told him that Darthard had the right to see the children.
“When I tried to speak, no one wanted to listen. All they said was, ‘She needs a visit, she needs a visit,’” she said, her voice breaking. “Look what happened.”
The adoptive mother, who told The Times she did not want to be interviewed but spoke at her doorstep in Palmdale, said she was trying to adopt Justin and his two brothers.
After Justin died, she said, DCFS removed the brothers from her care, accusing her of neglect.
Investigators are working with prosecutors to determine whether to file criminal charges, said Lt. Michael Gomez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s homicide division.
Montise Bulley, 52, said she holds DCFS responsible for her son’s death.
Bulley said he struggled with a drug problem that landed him in prison seven times while his three oldest children were growing up. For Justin, his “twin,” he wanted a different childhood. He became a truck driver and tried to stay clean.
In the children’s section of Inglewood Park Cemetery last week, Bulley placed Justin’s stuffed Elmo on top of the boy’s tombstone.
“Our brightest light,” says the stone. “Daddy’s kryptonite.”
Times writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.
