The state agency responsible for keeping Illinois’ most vulnerable children safe has failed to produce legally required public reports after examining what went wrong in hundreds of cases of child deaths and thousands of serious injuries, an Illinois Answers Project investigation found.More than 1 ,200 deaths and more than 3,000 other cases of serious injury have met the criteria for "incident-specific" reports since July 2018, according to data the state Department of Children and Family Services released in response to a public records request. Those reports are required when a child dies as a result of what's suspected to have been abuse or neglect or dies or suffers a serious injury while in the state’s care.The failure spurred criticism from child welfare advocates and prompted the Cook County public guardian to call for an investigation.Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who as a state legislator in the late 1990s sponsored the law requiring the reports, called the failure by DCFS “reckless.”“To know that they aren’t even issuing the reports … is stunning, stunning," Dart said. "Just so reckless, so irresponsible.“I can’t conceive of any scenario where this isn’t at the front of people’s lists, you know: We have a child in our care that died. What happened?” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart sponsored the legislation requiring the DCFS reports when he was a state lawmaker in the late 1990s. He calls the failure to produce the reports “stunning.”Victor Hilitski / Illinois Answers Project The reports are required under an Illinois law — the Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act, which provides the framework for the system of investigating abuse and neglect of children. The portion of the law regarding the reports took effect in 1997. In 2008, lawmakers added language to strengthen the public disclosure of the reports.“There shall be a presumption that the best interest of the public will be served by public disclosure of certain information concerning the circumstances of the investigations of the death,” according to the law, which says the agency “shall” release the reports, though with some redactions allowed.Heather Tarczan, a spokeswoman for DCFS, declined to answer questions about the death-and-injury reports or respond to criticism from Dart and others. In a written statement, the agency said other reports it prepares satisfy legal requirements.It’s not clear when the agency last completed one of the required incident-specific reports. A public records request that asked for the agency’s most recent report — whenever it was completed — was denied, with DCFS saying no reports exist. The agency had declined to comply with records requests on the matter for months or even to acknowledge that the reports don’t exist.According to DCFS, it does conduct reviews when deaths or serious injuries happen. But there’s little recourse for the public to learn the results since state law forbids the release of most child-welfare records to protect the privacy of children and families who are investigated or who get help from the state. The reports that DCFS has failed to produce are meant to give public officials insight into what might have gone wrong.Tarczan said other forms of review by DCFS — by the agency’s inspector general, by child death-review teams and by the agency’s crisis-intervention team — satisfy reporting requirements under the state law. But those reviews are subject to different rules. Some have a narrower focus or are not considered public records. The agency's inspector general's reports cover fewer deaths and don’t include information about hundreds more serious injuries each year. The crisis-intervention team reports aren’t public.And the most recent child death-review team annual report covered deaths that occurred five years ago. No reports have been published in years. Heather Tarczan of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.LinkedIn Tarczan wouldn't say why but said the agency had been operating with the “understanding” that what it does satisfies the death-and-injury reporting required in the law. Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, who is responsible for representing 6,000 children in abuse and neglect cases in juvenile court, has asked the state auditor general and DCFS’ inspector general to investigate the agency’s failure to comply with the law. Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert has asked the state auditor general and DCFS’ inspector general to investigate the agency’s failure to comply with the law.Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times file “These reports, which are required by law, are critical to protect children and to prevent deaths and serious injuries to children in DCFS care or who are reported to DCFS as abused or neglected,” Golbert wrote in his request for review.Dart said he sponsored the legislation to require the reports because of “one horrific DCFS case after another.” He pointed to the death of 3-year-old Joseph Wallace as a death that still stands out to him more than 30 years later. Joseph’s mother hanged her son with an electrical cord. His mouth was stuffed with a sock and taped shut. The boy had been put into foster care just after he was born and returned to his mother only months before his death despite warnings she was dangerous. His death became a catalyst for reform.Dart said that, as a legislator, he’d been “jerked around” by DCFS for so long that he anticipated resistance to the law and wrote it in a way where the agency “could not not do it.“You have to do it, and you need to move expeditiously," he said. "Because I mean what if you find out like a vendor or something that was working with that child is the problem? … What, you’re gonna, what, let 10 more kids be subjected to the vendor in the meantime just because, you know, we didn’t get around to it yet? No, we need to move rather quickly on this stuff.“We have to start with the analysis of the deaths. These children have to be viewed as our children, and they’re no different than a child brought up in Wilmette. We need to look at it that way, and we need to take it that seriously."The reports are supposed to include general information about a death, consider the previous five years of social services that might have been provided to the child’s family and then make policy recommendations, if appropriate. Last September, the Illinois Answers Project sought these records from two killings in central Illinois in which DCFS had investigated the victims’ families before the deaths.In one case, 8-year-old Navin Jones died in 2022 after paramedics found him in a bathtub in his home, the shape of his bones visible through his skin, his body cut and bruised. He weighed 30 pounds — a typical weight for a boy just 3 years old, not 8. Police officers found a note on Navin’s door, forbidding his older brother to give him food.A DCFS investigator had visited the family about a month earlier and found the boy emaciated with discolored skin but didn’t seek medical care for him. His father was charged with murder. In court testimony, the DCFS investigator said she didn’t believe she could have the child taken to the hospital.In another case, about 22 miles away in 2019, three toddlers and two adults died in an overnight mobile home fire the origin of which remains in dispute. A 9-year-old boy, whose care had been the subject of DCFS investigations since his birth, was charged with murder in their deaths. The boy and his mother, who survived the fire, were related to the five victims. That criminal trial is ongoing and raised questions of whether DCFS did enough to help the 9-year-old in the years before the fire. He’d been accused of starting other fires, and his parents had been the subject of investigations over whether they had physically abused him, neglected him and failed to take him to school.In both cases, DCFS had been involved in the lives of the children since their births. In both cases, the agency said the death reports weren’t public before acknowledging to the Illinois attorney general’s office that DCFS “had not been creating such reports, so there were no reports to disclose.”For months after, the agency wouldn't say whether it had produced the death or serious injury reports in other high-profile cases — doing so only after the attorney general’s office intervened in early February.In the case of a boy whose death led to criminal charges against an investigator, in another case in which a 7-year-old drowned in the pool of a Springfield aldermanic candidate and in a case in which 10 children died in a house fire in Chicago, DCFS would not say whether it had produced the required reports.The law also requires the agency to produce cumulative reports based on the incidents, so legislators and experts can use the information to improve care for children. The incident-specific reports are supposed to be shared with legislators and the governor’s office when they’re done.Though DCFS has given legislators quarterly reports listing the dates and locations of deaths and serious injuries, they appear never to have complied with the requirement to include “findings and recommendations” in those reports. The law says they’re supposed to be based on the incident-specific reports — the reports that never were done.Golbert wrote to the agency’s inspector general that, “if DCFS is not consistently completing these reports about individual children, the required cumulative reports … will be incomplete and erroneous.”DCFS was audited for compliance soon after the law was passed and notified that it was failing to meet the requirements.The state auditor general's office, which checks state agencies for their compliance with laws related to their work, hasn’t tested DCFS on this section of the law since 1999.Auditors found noncompliance “on seven separate reporting requirement deficiencies,” according to that office.“The department is not investigating the death of a child within the scope of this statute and has not filed a report with the governor and the general assembly,” the auditor wrote. “According to department personnel, failure to submit reports or to submit them timely is a result of inadequate resources and personnel.”The reporting requirements were tested again the following year, and it appears the agency had begun to comply by then, according to the auditor general’s office. DCFS declined to say when it later stopped complying. Peter Nickeas reports for the Illinois Answers Project. Contributing: Meredith Newman ...read more read less