PART ONE OF FOUR

Not even 4 months old, Zion McKeown was hospitalized in 2008 with multiple cracked ribs. They weren’t his first injuries from suspected abuse. Tests revealed the infant had older rib and collarbone fractures that were healing. Alarmed, state officials temporarily removed Zion from his home.

Zion’s mother, who already had lost her parental rights to an older child, eventually got Zion back, presumably after she completed a court-ordered service plan to address a drug problem. But once Zion was returned, his abuse began anew, according to Maryann Rooney, the woman’s mother and Zion’s grandmother.

Zion, 4, died in 2012 from severe abdominal injuries. One court document said his wounds were consistent with someone hitting a concrete wall at 65 mph. Zion’s father and the father’s girlfriend are facing murder charges.

The boy had been reunified with his mother — and subsequently given to the father — despite her history of drug abuse, mental problems, suicide attempts and violence toward her children, according to Rooney.

"She nearly killed him before," Rooney said. "How do you give him back? Why do you do that? It makes no sense."

Critics cite Zion’s case as an example of what they call the state Department of Human Services’ failure to adequately evaluate warning signs before recommending that a child be returned to his or her family — the same family in which the initial abuse occurred.

The agency’s policy of favoring family reunifications has come under fire, with critics accusing DHS of too aggressively pursuing that goal even when there are serious red flags.

"It’s all about a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all government process," said Nevada resident Marilyn Yamamoto, who fought the department’s efforts in 2010 to reunify her Hawaii grandchild with his father.

Hawaii in recent years has reunified abused or neglected children at a significantly greater clip than the national average. In the 2013 fiscal year, for instance, roughly 70 percent of Hawaii children who left foster care were reunited with their families, compared with 51 percent nationally, according to state and federal data.

And while the national rate has dropped a few percentage points since 2005, Hawaii’s has surged in that same period, jumping nearly 19 percent.

The reunification issue has drawn more attention since the Hawaii Supreme Court in February ruled that the department’s 2005 policy of favoring family in permanent placements of foster children was inconsistent with state and federal law.

"I’ve seen kids returned to parents who I wouldn’t give a pet gerbil to," said Frank O’Brien, considered one of Hawaii’s top lawyers in the child protective services field and the prevailing attorney in the Supreme Court case.

DHS officials defended the agency’s practices, though they wouldn’t comment on individual cases because of confidentiality requirements.

Director Pat McManaman said her skilled and dedicated staff uses nationally validated best-practice assessment procedures to analyze risk and make recommendations to the Family Court, which oversees all child abuse cases.

The increase in the percentage of reunifications reflects the success of the agency’s practices, its assessment tools and the inherent skills of the staff, according to McManaman.

She cited a key statistic to make her point.

From 2008 to 2012, Hawaii was among the states with the lowest rates in the country of foster children who were re-abused within six months of being reunited with their families, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2012, for instance, only 1.9 percent of Hawaii children exiting foster care suffered maltreatment within a half year, the fourth-lowest rate nationally. The U.S. average was 5.4 percent.

"I think this is a terrific indicator of how the child welfare system is serving our children and protecting their best interests, a system where their safety and well-being is paramount," McManaman said during an October question-and-answer session with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that lasted nearly five hours.

She stressed, though, that the department’s goal is to assure that no children suffer abuse when returned to their families. "Any recurrence is a cause of worry for the department, the Family Court and the community at large," McManaman said.

Returning abused or neglected children to their families after the underlying problems have been addressed generally is the best option for their development, according to child welfare experts.

Research has shown that successful reunifications promote stability in a child’s life and preserve important biological, cultural and other ties.

Equally significant, parents have a constitutionally protected right to raise their own children. In Hawaii those parental rights can be terminated only if a Family Court judge determines the parents cannot provide a safe home. The evidence must be clear and convincing, a higher threshold than the preponderance of evidence normally used in civil litigation.

But determining whether reunification is in the best interest of the child — and whether a home likely will remain safe — can be exceedingly difficult, even for those trained to make such decisions. Experience and the use of the latest evidence-based assessment tools can help, but making judgments about risk and behavior isn’t an exact science.

The situation often is complicated by issues such as drug abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, homelessness, joblessness or other economic or social pressures on family well-being.

Some attorneys, social workers, foster parents and others who have dealt with DHS on specific cases say the agency tends to put too much emphasis on reunification and not enough on possible warning signs. Some also cite issues related to expediency and budgets.

"It allows them to find an easy path to placement without having additional costs," said attorney Carl Varady, who filed a lawsuit this year on behalf of Rooney, accusing DHS of negligence in her grandson’s death. The lawsuit is pending.

Concerns about DHS’ reunification approach are not new. In recent years, questions have been raised when cases that normally are confidential by law have become public because of tragic outcomes.

Those cases often trigger criminal investigations, civil lawsuits or news stories — sometimes all three.

From the disappearance of Peter Boy Kema on Hawaii island in 1997 to the death of 14-month-old Brayden McVeigh at the hands of his Navy father in 2009, most of the cases have shared a common thread: The children were reunited despite concerns raised by others or despite red flags that weren’t properly investigated.

Brayden’s case reflected the latter. A state judge last year ruled DHS’ negligence was a substantial factor in the baby’s death, and the department was ordered to pay half of a $250,000 judgment to Brayden’s maternal grandmother, Terri Polm, who filed the lawsuit. Matthew McVeigh, Brayden’s father, was ordered to pay the other half.

The August 2013 written ruling by Circuit Judge Gary Chang was unusual in that most child-abuse negligence lawsuits are settled before the court determines whether DHS bungled a case. Because this one wasn’t settled and went to trial, the judge’s 54-page findings of fact provided a rare look at the internal workings of DHS in a death case.

In his pointedly critical assessment, Chang cited misstep after misstep by a DHS social worker overseeing Brayden’s case, including not adequately following up on a baby sitter’s 2009 hotline call about worrisome injuries to the baby.

The missteps were exacerbated by "the inaccuracy and sloppiness of DHS record-keeping," Chang wrote. At one point he referred to the agency’s "deplorable state of documentation and communication."

The DHS case began in August 2008 after Brayden, barely a month old, was diagnosed with a fractured right arm, and his parents were unable to explain the injury. The agency removed Brayden and his older sister from their home but returned them about six months later.

By then April McVeigh, the children’s mother, had completed a substance abuse class for her methadone addiction, and Matthew McVeigh had attended anger management and parenting courses, according to Chang’s findings.

In August 2009, about a month after the baby sitter’s hotline call, Brayden was found unresponsive in his crib. He was rushed to the hospital, suffering from head injuries so severe that part of his brain erupted through the top of his skull.

Matthew McVeigh was convicted in 2011 of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced by the military to 12 years in prison.

Polm, a nurse who lives in Texas, told the Star-Advertiser that she opposed DHS’ reunification recommendation at the time and offered to have the children live with her.

She said she warned DHS that their home environment in Hawaii was too unstable, with their mother dealing with her drug problem and the father facing his own issues.

"Nobody wanted to listen to that," Polm said. "They had their mind made up. I heard ‘reunification’ over and over."

The state is appealing Chang’s ruling, arguing that there was "no evidence that DHS made a mistake in its handling of this matter or that its actions more likely than not contributed to Brayden’s death."

DHS’ frequent visits with the family, visits by a Navy social worker, the involvement of a guardian ad litem (someone appointed by the court to represent the children’s interests) and the work of others did not create a basis for removing either child from their parents, the state argued.

"We cannot predict violence even when there has been a history of violence and especially when there has not been a history of violence," state attorneys representing the depart- ment wrote in their appeal.

Despite multiple requests from the Star-Advertiser over more than a month, DHS did not respond to a question about how much the state has paid since 2000 to settle lawsuits alleging negligence by child welfare workers.

Questions about reunification have cropped up repeatedly for Raynette Ah Chong, who along with her husband, Eddie, has cared for more than 100 foster children since 1994.

Over the years, the Kahaluu couple have opposed DHS’ reunification plans for many of their foster kids, believing the biological parents were unfit to resume caring for the children because of domestic violence, substance abuse or other issues, according to Ah Chong.

The court approved the reunifications anyway. But in at least 20 cases, the child was back in the foster system within months, sometimes getting placed with the Ah Chongs a second time, she said.

DHS’ McManaman said her agency is always guided by what’s in the best interest of the child and that no decision is predetermined. Staff members do a fair and equitable assessment of the facts, and the agency presents a recommendation to the court based on that assessment, she added.

And DHS isn’t the only one weighing in. The child’s guardian ad litem and the parents, who are provided with an attorney if they can’t afford one, also have a say.

"Everyone’s interests are protected and represented by their respective advocates," McManaman said. "At the end of the day, this gives the court a 360-degree view of the family."

Some lawyers, foster parents and former DHS workers, though, say the department is known to selectively present information to bolster its recommendations and has significant influence on the outcome.

"The judges are prisoners of the information they get — garbage in, garbage out," said O’Brien, the attorney.

Raelene Tenno, an advocate for parents and families who have children in the CPS system, said she has reviewed cases with which she was familiar and discovered DHS reports that were substantially watered down or grossly exaggerated to support the agency’s recommendations.

DHS disputes that it selectively submits information, and Judge R. Mark Browning, who heads Family Court on Oahu, said he hasn’t seen that happen.

Browning told the Star-Advertiser that judges won’t agree to reunification unless convinced by the evidence. But he acknowledged that their decisions are only as good as the information presented to them.

"Hopefully we are experienced enough, trained enough and discerning enough to ask the right questions and recognize when we don’t have all the information," he said.

Such assurances are not likely to change the views of those who believe DHS overzealously pursues reunifications.

"In my opinion, the state has gone overboard," said Victor Geminiani, executive director of the Hawai’i Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice.

Rooney, Zion’s grandmother, agreed.

"Making sure the child is safe should be the top priority — and that’s not always with the mother and father," she said. "They really need to look at that." 

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The state of Hawaii has a policy of trying to return abused or neglected children with family members after problems have been addressed, a process known as reunification. In February, the state Supreme Court ruled that the policy of favoring family in permanent placements of foster children was inconsistent with state and federal law. While successful family reunifications promote stability in a child’s life and preserve important biological, cultural and other ties, some reunifications have ended in tragedy.