The four workers missed other important details as well: Ignorant of the prior abuse conviction, they initially did not speak with the mother's parole officers, who knew she was a crack user who had refused treatment. The workers interviewed Ms. Harden, but never talked to her boyfriends, despite warnings that one of the men was prone to violence and drug dealing. Fatal Burns

It was one of Ms. Harden's boyfriends who later said he had accidentally caused what proved to be fatal burns to the groin, buttocks and legs of her five-month-old son, Jeffrey. The round-faced infant with the soft, fuzzy head of hair died Jan. 17.

The boyfriend, Jeffrey Phillips, told the authorities that he had wiped the baby with a cloth that he had not realized was soaked with cleaning fluid. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, saying the burns were caused by immersing the child in scalding water and noting that the child had three broken ribs. Mr. Phillips has not been charged, and the police say the death is still under investigation. Mr. Phillips declined to comment.

Whether the caseworkers in the city's Child Welfare Administration could have prevented the child's death will never be known, but the flaws in the handling of Jeffrey Harden's case illustrate what experts and advocates for children have long called the Achilles' heel of the child protection system in New York and the nation: the frequently poor quality of casework in a fragmented bureaucracy staffed by inexperienced, overburdened workers who do not stay in the job for long.

Over the last three years, the problem has gotten worse as the Dinkins administration has reduced the staff of caseworkers who investigate child abuse by about 25 percent, even as reports of abuse and neglect have continued to surpass 50,000 annually.

Last year, a staggering 77 percent of the workers who investigate child abuse reports resigned, were laid off or moved to jobs in other agencies. Inevitably, caseloads have risen sharply. In January 1990, investigative workers carried an average of 14 cases. None had more than 30. Now, caseloads average 19.5 and commonly top 30.

In the Harden case, high turnover led to a constant stream of changing workers. In a span of only 18 months, the case was passed to four different workers, each of whom would manage only a partial investigation before transferring out of the unit responsible for the case. By the time Jeffrey died, every worker in the unit was gone.

The city's 22-page reconstruction of the case, combined with court records and interviews with the family, caseworkers and parole officers, shows what happens when workers with too many cases and too little experience conduct investigations.

But the problem is not simply one of human error. In the Harden case, the workers had to make extremely difficult decisions with incomplete information. Child protection workers are not entitled to parents' prior criminal records, which are kept confidential under state laws meant to safeguard privacy.

But if their ignorance of Ms. Harden's prior child-abuse conviction was understandable at first, it was less so after she went back to prison for a parole violation. Workers talked to her parole officers, but never found out what crime she had committed.

Usually, the city's handling of child-abuse investigations is shielded from public scrutiny by state confidentiality laws meant to protect family privacy. But records of the city's internal investigation of the Harden case were provided to The New York Times by an official who believes they highlight failings of the system.

In a recent interview, Ms. Harden denied all reports that she was an abusive or neglectful parent, and she denied ever using crack. She said she had never left her children alone in her apartment, and she disputed the hospital's account of how rarely she visited her baby before he died, saying that she had "visited every day." Caseworker No. 1 A Report of Abuse Is Not Followed Up

Ms. Harden, now 28, first got into serious trouble when she was a teenager. She lived at the time with her mother and most of her 11 siblings in a housing project in the South Bronx. She had dropped out of school in the ninth grade, where she had been in a special class for slow learners.

On May 17, 1981, Ms. Harden, then 17, smoked marijuana and angel dust with a 15-year-old friend, Eva Younger, Ms. Harden later said. Then they sexually assaulted a chubby, 7-year-old girl in pigtails. Ms. Younger told the court that she repeatedly forced a toilet plunger into the child while Ms. Harden held the girl down.

Ms. Harden testified that Ms. Younger made her participate in the assault after threatening to hit her with a stick if she did not smoke marijuana. "I felt dizzy and I didn't know what was going on," she told the judge. "Something just come up in my mind and I did it."

A State Supreme Court Justice, Walter Schackman, gave Ms. Harden a three-to-nine-year prison sentence. "The acts were the most brutal I have seen in five-and-a-half years of sitting in a felony part," he told her.

Ms. Harden served three years and was released in 1984, when she was 20 years old. For the first two years, she kept appointments with her parole officers, said David Ernst, a spokesman for the state Division of Parole. But by 1986, her attendance had become sporadic. In 1987, she gave birth to her first child, a girl named Genise. An Early Sign of Trouble

Finally, in the spring of 1988, she stopped reporting to her parole officer altogether, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. At the time, she was homeless. She was picked up and admitted that she had started smoking crack, Mr. Ernst said. She was referred to a residential drug-treatment program, but never went.

The first time a report of child abuse was lodged against Ms. Harden came the following fall, records show. A city welfare worker called the state central child abuse registry to say that he had seen Ms. Harden hitting Genise, then 10 months old, on the head and chest in a Bronx welfare office because the baby had put paper in her mouth. When the welfare worker suggested to the mother that she take the paper away from the baby instead of hitting her, Ms. Harden flew into a rage.

"The mother became very angry and slammed the child's tush into the seat, screaming bad language and saying it was her kid and she'll do what she wants," the welfare worker said. "She then took the child and ran out."

Heather Staiman was the child-protection worker assigned to investigate the case. But she quickly discovered that Ms. Harden and her daughter had left their last listed address. "It was an easy case," Ms. Staiman said in a recent interview. "We couldn't find the mother, so we closed it."

Soon after that, Ms. Staiman asked to be transferred to another part of the agency after two years as a child-protection worker. "I felt inept," she said. "My supervisor never sat us down and went over our cases with us. If I had a problem knowing what to do, I tended not to deal with it." Caseworker No. 2 A Case Is Closed After 2 Short Visits

A year later, a second person called the state child abuse registry on Dec. 1, 1989, to allege that Ms. Harden was neglecting her child, and spending her money on crack instead of food.

At the time, Ms. Harden was living in the Bronx, but the case went back to the Manhattan unit that had investigated the first charge. The Manhattan unit objected because the case was in a different borough, but was overruled. This would have a powerful effect on the handling of the case.

Carlos Pages, who had two years' experience as a caseworker and a bachelor's degree from Florida Memorial College, went to the home, which he found well stocked with food. Both Ms. Harden and her boyfriend's grandparents, whom she was living with, denied that she used drugs. The couple said they had thrown Ms. Harden's boyfriend out of the apartment because he was violent and was using and selling drugs, the records said.

"When I was visiting her, everything was going well," Mr. Pages said in a recent interview. "She had broken up with her boyfriend."

Agency policy required the caseworker to make monthly visits to the home, but three months lapsed before he stopped in to talk to Ms. Harden again. Again, he said, she and her baby appeared healthy. Review of Case's Handling

Mr. Pages said he was so overburdened with cases and paperwork that it was difficult to make the minimum monthly visits, much less track down relatives, teachers and parole officers, or spend the time it would take to really get to know the families.

"It's impossible to visit these people within a month," he said. "They're all over New York City."

On the basis of Mr. Pages' two brief visits to the home, the case was closed.

But a month later, Peggy Smith, a high-ranking supervisor, reviewed the case because she was worried about the performance of the unit and wrote a scathing critique of the Harden investigation.

She wrote that Mr. Pages had not gathered the most basic facts about the family: He listed Ms. Harden's boyfriend as her child, and he thought she was living with her own grandparents, rather than her boyfriend's grandparents.

Nor did it appear that Mr. Pages had ever read the prior report of Ms. Harden hitting her infant at a welfare office, much less discussed it with her, the supervisor wrote. Ms. Smith directed the unit to reopen the case.

But Mr. Pages said he was never given Ms. Smith's report. He left the unit two months later after he was injured in a car accident. Caseworker No. 3 A Criminal Record Gets Little Notice

Finally, five months after Ms. Smith ordered the case reopened, a new worker, Rose Rivera, was sent to check on Ms. Harden. Ms. Rivera would never lay eyes on Ms. Harden. Her efforts to talk to Ms. Harden were sporadic and unsuccessful.

Ms. Rivera, who has a sociology degree from Brooklyn College, had been hired just six months earlier. She had 14 cases of her own, but because other workers in the unit were often absent, she had to deal with many additional cases.

When Ms. Rivera finally went to visit Ms. Harden in October 1989, she learned that Ms. Harden was in prison for a parole violation and that her children were living with their grandmother. (Ms. Harden had given birth to a second baby, Shaquan, earlier that year.)

In January 1990, Ms. Harden was released, again on the condition that she participate in drug treatment.

The next month, Ms. Rivera talked to the mother's parole officer, but apparently never asked what crime Ms. Harden had committed. The worker reached Ms. Harden by telephone at her mother's Bronx home. They agreed to meet at the agency's office in Manhattan, but Ms. Harden did not show up, the records said.

Ms. Rivera and her supervisor, Susan Kynor, recently declined to comment on the case. Ms. Rivera told city investigators that she had little memory of Ms. Harden, whom she never met. She thought Ms. Harden had been imprisoned on a drug-related charge. Ms. Kynor was under the impression Ms. Harden's crime was robbery.

Almost as soon as Ms. Rivera arrived in the unit, she left, burned out by the demands of the job. "She found herself working six days a week plus evenings," the internal city report said. Caseworker No. 4 Report of Progress, And Then a Death

So once again, in March 1990, a new worker was assigned to the case. Cecilia Parris had only been on the job for four months. She had a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from John Jay College.

She caught up with Ms. Harden at her mother's apartment in the South Bronx. The children looked healthy, but their doctor said that Ms. Harden had not brought them in for regular checkups or immunizations.

Ms. Parris also talked with Ms. Harden's parole officer, Wallace Webb, and asked him to have Ms. Harden take the children for immunizations. In an interview, Mr. Webb said he did not recall talking to Ms. Parris, but did remember that Ms. Harden was attending drug treatment. "She was stabilized and happy to have an apartment of her own," he said.

There is, again, no indication that the caseworker asked about Ms. Harden's criminal history. Ms. Parris declined to comment on the case recently, but city records say she decided to close the case since the mother was in contact with the parole officer. Move to Manhattan

Ms. Kynor later conceded that the case might have been kept open if the mother had not lived in the Bronx, inconveniently distant from the unit, based in lower Manhattan, the city's internal report said.

Later in 1990, Ms. Harden and her children moved into a crumbling, drug-infested building in Harlem, where young men peddled crack and most of the tenants were, like herself, formerly homeless families from city shelters. It is there that her son would be fatally burned.

Ms. Harden became pregnant in 1991. But before she gave birth in August, her boyfriend went to jail for selling crack. Ms. Harden said she was lonely and quickly started seeing her neighbor's cousin, Jeffrey Phillips, 19.

At that time, because the investigation was closed, no caseworkers were visiting the home. But relatives say there were many signs of trouble. In the fall, Shaquan had a nasty bruise on his face. Ms. Harden said Mr. Phillips hit the toddler and sometimes her, too. But Mr. Phillip's sister, Glenda Phillips, who lived in the same apartment with Ms. Harden, suspected Ms. Harden. Shaquan's face looked as if someone with a woman's long, slender fingers had squeezed hard enough to leave a hand imprint, Ms. Phillips said. Children Often Left Alone

Jenna Fleming, who lived across the hall from Ms. Harden and was Mr. Phillips's cousin, said that Ms. Harden sometimes left her two toddlers and infant alone at home when she went to the store or to the laundry. She said she sometimes found 3-year old Genise trying to play mother, rocking the infant and holding an empty bottle to his lips.

On Dec. 15, 1991, Ms. Fleming agreed to watch the children while Ms. Harden went Christmas shopping.

That afternoon, Mr. Phillips dropped by to see Ms. Harden and agreed to watch the children while Ms. Fleming stepped across the hall to her apartment. When she came back, the baby was crying inconsolably. She lifted the sheet and saw that the baby was badly burned. Mr. Phillips later said that while changing Jeffrey's diaper, he wiped the baby with a cloth he did not know was soaked with cleaning fluid.

"Being a little high, he probably wasn't conscious of what was on the rag," said his sister, Ms. Phillips. "He told me he was smoking reefer before he came in the house."

Doctors at New York Hospital found the baby had second- and third-degree burns over one fifth of his body, and that three ribs had been broken sometime before he was burned. Memories of a Short Life

On Jan. 6, three weeks after the baby was admitted to the hospital, a social worker on the burn unit, Joyce Scheinberg, called the city caseworker to report that Ms. Harden was not visiting the infant. Jeffrey needed a skin-graft operation, but his mother was needed to sign consent forms first.

A day later, Ms. Harden signed the consent forms, but then disappeared from her baby's side for another 10 days, Ms. Scheinberg reported. On Jan. 17, he died of a massive infection caused by the burns.

Ms. Harden's surviving children, Genise and Shaquan, were placed in foster care with their grandmother after the death.

Mr. Phillips, who says he hurt the baby by accident, is now in the Union County jail in New Jersey, awaiting sentencing on drug and gun charges.

Ms. Harden is still living in the same dingy Harlem apartment where her son was fatally burned. Four disposable diapers and a single white baby shoe are tacked to the wall to remind her of Jeffrey.

Died August 12, 1998

Report Faults Child Agency In Death Of 6-Year-Old

 

 The boy, Matthew Eli Creekmore, was kicked to death by his father, Darren Creekmore, more than a year ago. But the case is just beginning to have national repercussions as legislatures around the country study a sweeping overhaul of the child welfare laws in the State of Washington that came about as a result of the clamor over the child's death.

The rumblings of change come in the aftermath of a 200 percent increase nationally in reported cases of child abuse in the last decade, and they follow public outrage over cases like the Creekmore killing here and the fatal beating of 6-year-old Elizabeth Steinberg in Manhattan last November. An Issue of Top Priorityt

National experts monitoring the growing problem say that reform of child abuse laws is shaping up as a top priority for state legislatures in the coming year.

After a long trend toward keeping troubled families together, sometimes at the expense of an abused child, states like Washington are reversing previous laws and making protection of the child the paramount concern. In another change, social workers here do not have to wait for substantiated harm before removing a child from the home but can intervene on the basis of the potential risk of abuse.

This state also recently passed a pioneering law that makes child abuse resulting in death the equivalent of first-degree murder. Under this ''homicide by abuse'' law, prosecutors no longer have to prove premeditation or intent to kill to win a conviction. Instead, they must show that the abusive parent displayed ''extreme indifference to human life.''

''Premeditation in child abuse cases is almost impossible to prove,'' said State Senator Stuart Halson, who drafted the law. ''This gets us around that oft-heard defense: 'I didn't mean to kill the boy; I just wanted to discipline him.' '' Other States Study Law

The new law is being studied by a number of states, including New York, where about 100 children a year die from child abuse, according to a spokesman for the Department of Social Services. Experts estimate that nationwide from 2,000 to 5,000 children die each year as a result of abuse. Officially, there was a 23 percent increase in child abuse deaths from 1985 to 1986.

Nationally, ''there is a real crisis going on now in every state,'' said Susan Robison of the National Conference of State Legislatures, which is based in Denver. Reflecting concern about the 2.2 million abuse and neglect cases reported nationally in 1986, many states have recently enacted tightened child welfare laws. But at the same time there is a countertrend toward more legal rights for parents who are accused of abusing children.

For example, while Washington State, in its sweeping 1987 overhaul of child protection laws, gave social workers the right to interview children without notifying their parents beforehand, several members of the Colorado Legislature introduced a bill to allow parents greater legal representation in abuse investigations. That bill was voted down, but its supporters are planning to re-introduce it.

Every state now has some sort of mandatory reporting law, requiring doctors, health or day care workers who come in contact with an abused child to tell the authorities about it, but ''there is still a tremendous amount of under-reporting of abuse going on,'' said Patricia Toth, director of the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse, in Alexandria, Va. Rise in Abuse Cases

Ms. Toth attributes the 200 percent increase in reported child abuse to ''a combination of increased awareness, mandatory reporting laws and perhaps a general rise in parental abuse.''

Ms. Toth said cases such as the Steinberg and Creekmore deaths ''are the catalysts for more change.''

''The country will go along, basically unaware, and then something very awful happens to grab everybody's attention,'' she said.

Deborah Daro, research director of the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, which is based in Chicago, said that after the news of Elizabeth Steinberg's death, ''There was a response like we'd never seen before, an outpouring of outrage, our phones ringing off the hook with people asking 'why,' ''

In the Washington case, social workers from the state Child Protective Services had removed the 3-year-old boy from his home in Everett three times in the 10 months before he died. But each time they returned him, despite reports from his grandmother, doctors and day-care teachers that he was being abused. His father had twice been charged with beating the boy.

At the time of the boy's death, state officials had determined that the family was making an effort to improve the situation. But on Sept. 27, 1986, the boy was kicked repeatedly in the stomach and then left to die in his bedroom. Mr. Creekmore was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 60 years in prison, one of the most severe sentences in recent memory for such a crime. The boy's mother, Mary Creekmore, testified for the state and was allowed to plead guilty to a gross misdemeanor charge of failing to get medical attention for the child.

When the case first came to light last year, hundreds of parents demonstrated outside the social service headquarters in Everett and Olympia, the state capital, demanding that the system be overhauled. They were soon joined by Child Protective Service workers, who said inadequate financing and understaffing had contributed to what the state social service director admitted was ''a breakdown of the system.''

The case, while not unique by national standards, was an example of problems facing overburdened child welfare workers around the country. Nationally, while reported cases of child abuse rose 156 percent from 1981 to 1986, state financing to attack the problem rose a mere 2 percent, according to a recent Congressional study.

''In probably every state in the country, you've got child protection workers not going out on a lot of cases except the high priority ones, and that in itself is very dangerous,'' said Patricia Schene, director of the American Association for the Protection of Children, based in Denver.

''What's clear is that there are bad decisions being made because the system is overloaded, and that means we'll see a lot more foment in the next year or two,'' she said. A lurking problem, she said, is the dearth of foster homes. While the public and state officials are calling for more abused children to be removed from their homes, they have yet to provide adequate money to attract foster parents for those children.

In Washington, because of the fallout from the Creekmore case, more than 5,000 children were removed from their homes in the last year, but officials could only find 3,800 foster homes in which to place those children.

But increased public concern has also led to more private charity. Following the furor over young Eli's death, a new $1.3 million private center for abused children, the Eli Creekmore Memorial Center, was opened near Seattle last month.

In dedicating the center, its director, Patrick Gogerty said, ''In death, his voice became a mighty shout that stirred the conscience of all the people in the state of Washington.''

Confession not enough

Some Washington prosecutors complain that a state law is hindering their ability to bring child-killers to justice.

Nine days after her birth, Amber Pineda died while sleeping in bed with her mother and 2-year-old brother in their Bremerton home. A March 1998 autopsy found no sign of foul play.

But police were suspicious from the start. The mother, Kelly Pineda, 31, was fully dressed when her husband found her in bed with the baby. She showed no emotion at the hospital. And she laughed while telling an officer "maybe I can have another one," according to police records.

Detectives also knew state Child Protective Services caseworkers had previously intervened because Pineda's son showed signs of neglect.

Police questioned Pineda intensively and accused her of smothering the infant.

At first she denied it. But as the hours wore on, Pineda admitted she'd been "tipsy" from drinking four beers and had placed her right side on top of the infant with the mother's hand over its face, police records show.

She was charged with second-degree manslaughter.

"She was not describing an accident to the officers," said Kitsap County Deputy Prosecutor Kevin Anderson.

Pineda's attorney, David Rovang, said police manipulated Pineda during a five-hour interrogation.

"It was a horrible, horrible case," Rovang said. "She is kind of an odd person. But to take those characteristics of her personality and say she must therefore be guilty is not reasonable."

Rovang asked the court to dismiss the charges based on the "corpus delecti" law that requires confessions to be corroborated with physical evidence. The purpose of the law is to protect vulnerable people from confessing to something they didn't do, he said.

In Amber's case, the autopsy didn't independently prove suffocation because the findings were the same as a SIDS death, he said.

Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Leonard Costello reluctantly agreed that Pineda's incriminating statements could not be used without other evidence of a homicide, especially given a previous Supreme Court ruling on a similar case. He dismissed the charges in August 1998.

Pineda did not want to comment when she was contacted recently.

Prosecutors appealed Costello's decision, but the Washington Court of Appeals upheld it in January 2000.

"What this means is not only can you get away with smothering an infant, you can get away with admitting you did," Anderson said in a recent interview.

The court failed to recognize that an infant death can only be classified as SIDS if no other cause is found. That was not true in Pineda's case, he said.

"I don't know if a jury would have convicted Mrs. Pineda," Anderson said. "But I think that baby deserved to have this heard."

The Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys is also concerned, and has lobbied legislators over the last year to change the law so that confessions can be introduced in infant homicide cases. "We believe juries should hear the evidence in these cases," said Tom McBride, executive secretary of the prosecutors association. "I'd argue you should make more of an accommodation because it's the death of a child."

The court's position has had a "chilling effect" across the state, McBride said: "There are cases that are not being pursued."

By RUTH TEICHROEB
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Social Services Department did not know when or how the boy contracted AIDS because there was no requirement for a child placed in foster care to have a medical examination.

 

 

LEAD: A caseworker for the South Carolina Social Services Department has been indicted on charges of failing to investigate or report a suspected case of sexual abuse of an 8-year-old foster child, who later died of AIDS.

A caseworker for the South Carolina Social Services Department has been indicted on charges of failing to investigate or report a suspected case of sexual abuse of an 8-year-old foster child, who later died of AIDS.

The indictment Thursday by a Richland County grand jury charged the caseworker, Frank Edson, with two counts of obstruction of justice and two counts of failure to report child abuse in the case of the Columbia boy, Brett Hall.

The boy's foster mother told Mr. Edson in October 1987 that the boy had been sexually abused, but Mr. Edson waited eight months before beginning his investigation, the indictment charged. By that time Brett was dying of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. He was 9 years old when he died in November.

Julaan Prince, an assistant prosecutor, said the investigation of Brett's death had turned toward the boy's caseworker because there had been was no way to prosecute the person responsible. She said the prosecutor's office did not know how the boy contracted AIDS and was not trying to find out.

She said that there had been no evidence of sexual abuse of Brett and that the statements of the foster mother could not be used in court because they were hearsay. ''If you've got a child that is alive and can talk, 9 out of 10 times you have a case and can be successful,'' Ms. Prince said. ''But at the least you've got to have a live witness.''

A 1977 state law requires child protection agencies to follow through on any suspected case of child abuse or neglect within 24 hours. Each count of obstruction of justice carries a maximum 10-year prison term. Each count of failure to report child abuse carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison and a $500 fine.

Mr. Edson did not return a telephone message left at his home seeking comment on the indictment. A Rare Prosecution

A spokeswoman for the Social Services Department, Norma G. Anderson, who has worked at the agency since 1973, said it was the first time in her memory that an employee had been indicted on criminal charges for failing to follow through on a suspected case of child abuse.

Mr. Edson has been transferred to an agency responsible for providing emergency food and shelter, Ms. Anderson said.

She said the Social Services Department did not know when or how the boy contracted AIDS because there was no requirement for a child placed in foster care to have a medical examination.