Today journalists across Southeast Pennsylvania reported that a jury had convicted the parents of an 8-year-old child, who died in July 2023, of criminal charges that included murder and aggravated assault.
Digesting those reports – and the jury’s determination that the evidence met the high bar of proof beyond a reasonable doubt – was difficult to reconcile with what the Commonwealth’s child fatality review process suggested might be learned from the child’s life and death to keep other children safe. The recommendations issued by the Chester County Act 33 Child Fatality team and the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS) are strikingly anemic when set against the facts reviewed by the team and the evidence a jury ultimately found sufficient to convict.
Last May, the Child Protection Check Up examined the history of Act 33, enacted by the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 2008. The law established a requirement for county and state-level reviews when a child dies or nearly dies and child abuse or neglect is suspected or substantiated. About Act 33, we wrote:
Act 33 was enacted with a solemn commitment: that Pennsylvania would learn from and urgently work to prevent child abuse and neglect. What was promised as a mechanism for learning and prevention has become a bureaucratic exercise consuming far too many resources (human and fiscal), with leaders too often failing to act to close systemic gaps and redacting reports into oblivion.
The Act 33 report posted on DHS’ website notes that the child’s toxicology report “came back for the victim child and cocaine, morphine, and fentanyl were found in the child’s system. The morphine could be a metabolite of heroin.” The media reported:
A test of the boy’s hair found that he had been exposed to fentanyl at least one previous time prior to his death. At the time the boy died, his parents had access to Narcan, a drug that can reverse the effects of a drug overdose, on hand and in the same room with the child, but did not take necessary steps to save him.
And at the time of the arrest of the parents in June 2024, the Chester County District Attorney’s stated on Facebook:
The investigation revealed that the residence where both Defendants and the child victim resided was littered with drug paraphernalia. Investigators located empty heroin bags in three separate locations on the floor of the room where responding officers first saw the victim child. Investigators also found a shoebox that contained hundreds of small glassine bags that each contained blue fentanyl/heroin bags that were either empty or contained residue. Detectives reviewed the Defendants’ cellphones and found messages from July 25, 2023, that showed that they were discussing drug use. Defendant Hawa reported to investigators that the child victim knew not to touch the illegal drugs because both Defendants identified the paraphernalia as “medicine,” and the child victim was not allowed to touch medicine unless given to the child.
DHS’ Act 33 report confirmed prior child welfare involvement:
The Act 33 report, along with other publicly available documents, identifies additional points of intervention prior to the child’s death:
Despite repeated contact with child welfare, medical providers, law enforcement, and family members, the child died at age eight.
Yet the Act 33 Team’s recommendations focused narrowly on generalized prevention messaging. The team suggested “state sponsored media campaigns” about “safe storage of all drugs/medications in order to protect children.” Also, the campaign should “teach parents about harm reduction and the consequences to using substances with children in the home.”
The recommendation is difficult to square with what the review team, by law, should have known: CYS had already provided the family with “medication lock boxes” and Naloxone was reportedly present in the home – an intervention that had it been used, could have constituted an active form of harm reduction.
Meanwhile, DHS indicated it “would like to have a discussion” about launching a “public health” campaign called “Up, Up and Away.” DHS writes this campaign “targets the safe storage of medications out of the reach of children.”
It’s hard not to feel profound frustration.
In fairness, perhaps the local Act 33 team and DHS were unaware that the death scene was described as “littered with drug paraphernalia” including heroin and “hundreds of small glassine bags that each contained blue fentanyl/heroin bags that were either empty or contained residue.” But that possibility raises troubling questions about what information is gathered, shared, and meaningfully analyzed in a process intended to prevent the next child’s death.
A child is dead.
A jury held two parents criminally accountable for this child’s death.
The systems that encountered him repeatedly over eight years—charged by law with learning from tragedy to prevent the next one—have yet to demonstrate a comparable reckoning. Until child fatality reviews grapple honestly with what went wrong, accountability and prevention will remain elusive.
Originally published by the C4CJ-Child Protection Check Up