Web Posted: 07/29/2007 01:14 AM CDT

Nancy Martinez
Express-News

The state of Texas doesn't want you to know about Ruben Reyna.

You should not know he was beaten to death with blows to the head or who is suspected of killing him.

You should not know that Child Protective Services had investigated his family on two earlier allegations of abuse involving Ruben.

You should not know if Ruben lived or died next door to you.

You should not even know the boy's name. State law says so. That information is confidential.

One CPS official says the law is necessary. "It's an important law, not meant to protect the reputation of our agency, rather to protect the citizens of Texas," said Sherry Gomez, CPS San Antonio region director. But critics say the lack of transparency prevents the sort of public scrutiny that has helped bring about meaningful reform elsewhere.

"The way you protect children's rights is by exposing the system to scrutiny so it can be made better, said Richard Wexler, executive director for the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Virginia. "The child is dead, so there is no issue of invasion of privacy. There won't be real accountability until the system is completely open to scrutiny so that we can see all the mistakes they make and when they get it right or when a tragedy is not their fault."

In 23 other states and the District of Columbia, child abuse and neglect cases are considerably more open to the public, as are the workings of the system charged with protecting kids.

Tiffany Ellis, chief of staff of the Office of the Child Advocate in New Jersey, said her office reviews all child abuse and neglect deaths to provide guidance to child welfare workers. She said the transparency in child death cases has helped.

"It has raised awareness and recognition of the prevalence of abuse and neglect," Ellis said. "Putting reports out helps people realize that it's everyone's responsibility to prevent child abuse and neglect. Bureaucracies run like molasses. It takes a lot of pushing from a lot of different angles to effect change."

In New Jersey, the child's name, where he or she died, and the child protection agency's involvement with the victim and family are publicly disclosed.

Why the difference? Each state comes up with its own rules to address a 1996 federal law requiring confidentiality of child abuse and neglect records. The law also requires states to release details in child abuse and neglect fatalities and near fatalities. But it doesn't specify which details.

New Jersey began disclosing details about child abuse and neglect in 1997.

"What we require is that the state has provisions that expose finding of cases to the public," said Wade Horne, the assistant secretary for Children and Families, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"Neither the law nor our policy requires the state to release the entire record, but we don't prohibit it."

In Texas, however, all you're allowed to know about Ruben Reyna is when he was born, when he died and that he's the 11th of 14 Bexar County children who died of abuse or neglect last fiscal year.

Vicki Ernst, Bexar County Child Fatality Review Team co-chairwoman who was a CPS caseworker and supervisor for 10 years in San Antonio and in Virginia, said if CPS could release more information, it could be to the agency's benefit.

"(CPS officials) have no choice, it is the law, but at times it hurts them because they can't communicate what they've done to address a specific case," Ernst said.

Because of the secrecy in Texas' child-welfare system, it took the San Antonio Express-News 10 months to uncover and report Ruben's story and the stories of the 13 other children who died last fiscal year. A step-by-step recounting of the process by which we brought you their stories, many of them previously untold, shows how difficult obtaining even the simplest information can be.

The newspaper started out by filing an open-records request for all child death records from the year we chose to examine. CPS, citing the law, denied the request.

The paper then filed a request with the Bexar County Child Fatality Review Team, the only other entity that collects information. The agency returned six reports — with names and identifying information crossed out. Details in the reports are haphazard or generic, such as whether the victim was a boy or girl or what kind of weapon, including fists, was used to kill the child.

The Express-News appealed to scores of people who had access to the information: CPS sources, law enforcement authorities, attorneys, court staff, lawmakers, county and city employees, hospital medical staff, funeral homes, medical examiners and others.

Several of the sources provided the reports.

Child Protective Services agreed to confirm the names after the newspaper learned them.

CPS provided few other details, but, with the names of the children, the Express-News was able to request police and autopsy reports that revealed information about their deaths.

Interviews with family members filled in the gaps, though sometimes relatives too had little information to share. Most of the children hadn't lived long enough to have much of a life story to tell or even to have been in many photographs.

Ruben's family said it had no photos of the baby, who was 6 months old and weighed less than 21 pounds when he died of blunt force trauma to his head.

The only image by which to remember Ruben is a photo of his grave, which was paid for by the county's pauper funeral program.

nmartinez@express-news.net

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA072907.01A.
child_death_obstacles.37cbef7.html

Emphasis added by H4K Editor