‘Breach of trust’: Santa Clara County supervisor calls for overhaul of child welfare system at hearing over baby Phoenix

SAN JOSE — In a packed and passion-fueled special hearing Tuesday over the fentanyl death of a 3-month-old, Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors President Susan Ellenberg made one thing clear from the start: There is “no doubt that our system failed baby Phoenix.”

Over the next four hours, the county’s child welfare leaders and social workers, public health nurses and doctors, nonprofit leaders and parents, the district attorney and a juvenile dependency judge clashed over what’s best for vulnerable children: Keeping families together despite reports of child abuse or neglect or removing them, even temporarily, from their homes.

But Supervisor Sylvia Arenas saved the most dramatic confrontation of Tuesday’s special hearing for the end.

Citing what she called “a breach of trust” with the county’s child welfare leaders, Arenas called for a restructuring of the system, stripping the Social Services Agency of its role in overseeing the county’s child protection agency and moving the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services to report to a deputy county executive with a background in child welfare instead.

The shakeup, which county supervisors will consider in March, culminated an explosive hearing that follows a Bay Area News Group investigation into the county’s missteps leading up to the death of Phoenix Castro. The baby died in May after the county’s child welfare agency discarded numerous red flags before sending baby Phoenix home with her father, who had a history of drug abuse.

In a series of pointed questions, Arenas, who spent her career as an early-education specialist, grilled the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services Director Damion Wright and his boss, Social Services Agency Director Daniel Little, for what she called a “tone deaf” report that emphasized the agency’s family preservation strategy during the hearing. Arenas was especially upset that Little had failed to share with the supervisors that the county was under investigation last year by the state of California over its dramatic decline in child removals from troubled families in the last three years.

“This is a lack of trust,” she said. “Unfortunately for me this is a breach of trust, when a department head … doesn’t provide that information.”

“I wish I would have lifted that up,” Little responded, “and shared it with the entire board so we could have had that discussion back then.”

She also took Wright to task for telling a story during his presentation about the importance of family to his 1-year-old granddaughter taking her first steps.

“It saddens me to think that Phoenix will never reach that stage where she’s walking because she stayed with her family,” Arenas said from the dais as Wright remained in his seat at the front table. “We need to make it clear that safety is first.”

Earlier in the hearing, one by one, more than 50 speakers stood up to tell their stories, from civic leaders opposing family unity models to parents who lost custody of their children who supported the county’s approach to help troubled families heal with services such as parenting classes and drug treatment.

Still, the biggest concern among many of the speakers was without dispute: Who is watching out for the safety of children?

“Something has gone awry,” Juvenile Dependency Judge Shawna Schwarz told the supervisors, noting that the number of child welfare cases before her court plummeted over the past five years from 3,000 to 400 because of the county’s shift toward family-preservation policies. She wants to know, she said, what has happened to those children who didn’t come before her court:  “Are they safe, and how do we know they are safe?”

District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who is prosecuting baby Phoenix’s father on a felony child-endangerment charge and the parents of 1-year-old Winter Rayo on murder charges over a similar fentanyl death, said the county needs to rethink and re-balance its efforts to protect children. When children are sexually abused, physically hurt or grossly neglected, he said, “our goal must be to remove children from danger to safety.” The problem, he said, is that “our efforts at prevention seem to be focused on preventing kids from entering systems designed to protect kids, rather than on preventing child abuse and neglect.”

Social workers also expressed their anger at the agency’s leaders for their policies that failed baby Phoenix and their lack of accountability for her death. Alex Lesniak said that the “issues that brought us here today were flagged for years, the concerns were predicted.” Her colleague Sandra Gregory said that she and other social workers “saw the writing on the wall that there would be grave consequences.”

Still, numerous others agreed with child welfare agency director Wright and his boss, Little, who in 2021 doubled down on their family-unity model: “Removing children from families creates long-term harm,” Little said.

Katie Joh, managing attorney for the nonprofit Dependency Advocacy Center that works to reunite parents and children, told the supervisors that “far too many people … are still living with the scar from an approach that assumed taking kids away from their families was automatically the same as keeping them safe.”

Parish Green, a parent mentor with the advocacy center, said that because of his addiction issues years ago, his children were removed from him five times, and his son was lost to adoption.

“Removal harmed my kids in a way that they will never heal from,” he told the supervisors.

Now, the county will spend the next months evaluating its child welfare system in an effort to balance the needs of both parents and children.

Throughout the hearing, baby Phoenix’s great uncle, Ed Morillo, sat in the back and waited for his turn to speak. He was the only family member present.

Baby Phoenix’s father was in jail. Her mother, Emily De La Cerda, had died of a fentanyl overdose four months after her daughter. And her grandmother Rita De La Cerda, was caring for Phoenix’s two older siblings, now 3 and 4, who were removed from her parents more than a year ago — a termination of rights that wasn’t enough to keep Phoenix out of her father’s care.

“My heart is broken in many ways,” he told the supervisors. “This tragedy could have been avoided. I hope some good will come of this.”