By admin 
A call to Santa Clara County’s child abuse hotline and an email to social workers from a doctor about possible physical abuse of 2-year-old Jaxon Juarez sounded the alarm:
An “immediate assessment” was necessary, the hotline report said, “as the child presents with suspicious injuries that have not been explained.”
Two days later, the boy was found unconscious and not breathing in the San Jose foster home he shared with his cousin and her three children. His 17-year-old foster brother, who had been left home alone with him that Easter Sunday morning, is now charged in juvenile court with murder and multiple counts of sexual assault. He also faces a separate charge: “assault with a hair tie” that left an open wound on Jaxon’s neck.
Case files obtained by the Bay Area News Group through a California Public Records Act request reveal for the first time how warnings about Jaxon’s injuries were delayed, dismissed or left to his foster mother to resolve in the two days before he was found unresponsive. The documents show:
-The social worker who performed the requested immediate assessment marked him as “safe” and left it up to the foster mother to schedule a doctor’s visit for three days later.
-A division manager dismissed an email from a child abuse center physician requesting that the child be brought in by social workers “as soon as possible.”
-A social worker placed responsibility for the tragedy on the foster mother, even after the agency had ignored a felony child endangerment conviction that should have barred the child’s placement with her.
-Prior sexual abuse allegations were made involving one of the foster mother’s adult relatives, though names were redacted, and the documents say no criminal charges were filed.
The county, which released the case files, said the documents do not present the complete picture of what happened. They declined to answer specific questions.
Steve Baron, a member of the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council, said the revelations are shocking, especially for a division manager to apparently ignore the doctor’s email.
“I have to catch my breath here,” said Baron, who said he wasn’t speaking for the council. He hadn’t seen the documents, but relevant excerpts were read to him. “If it is accurate that the manager, because the email was sent to her in error, took no action to ensure that the child was seen by the clinic, that’s absolutely inexcusable. There should be no wrong door at DFCS for that information.”
Jaxon’s April 9 death at San Jose’s Valley Medical Center, where he was brain dead and removed from life support, is the latest tragedy involving a child in the care of the county’s troubled Department of Family and Children’s Services. The child welfare agency was already under state oversight and amid reforms after the fentanyl overdose death of infant Phoenix Castro three years ago. The California Department of Social Services is investigating Jaxon’s death as well. Jaxon had been placed with his cousins less than six weeks earlier.
Now, child welfare experts and advocates are calling for a grand jury investigation, including 10 members of a Gilroy child welfare nonprofit called CARAS, who showed up at a Board of Supervisors meeting earlier this month to demand accountability.
“The public is outraged at what’s going on. This has to stop. All these deaths of these children, we have to hold (leaders) accountable,” said Marty Estrada, part of the CARAS group. “Is this systemic? We need to get to the root of this problem and figure out what needs to be done from this board here.”
Jeoffry Gordon, a member of a state-mandated citizens review panel that evaluates child fatality cases, also encouraged a grand jury review and said the state should consider even stronger intervention.
“It’s been a prolonged period of time now where the problem has been pretty explicit, and children have continued to die, and yet there hasn’t been the leadership to revitalize or restructure child welfare services,” Gordon said. “Energizing the grand jury would put a fire under the county executive that the Board of Supervisors has been unable to do.”
The county coroner has yet to release Jaxon’s cause of death. But the documents, which include heavy redactions made by county lawyers, show that once he arrived by ambulance to Valley Medical Center, doctors observed bleeding to his brain and ”there was no observable brain function.”
In the aftermath of Jaxon’s death, the county placed on paid leave 10 employees, including social workers, supervisors and managers involved in his case. It has yet to explain, however, what went wrong inside the department in the days before Jaxon was found unresponsive. In a recent statement, the county said that its internal investigation of Jaxon’s death remains underway and “we will be in touch as soon as we can share more.”
Concerns about Jaxon’s health appeared to begin April 2 at his daycare center, where staff members noticed a rash on his body and a line on his neck. In an interview last month, the daycare director said she called Jaxon’s foster mother to take him to the doctor. This news organization is not naming the foster mother, who is Jaxon’s paternal cousin, to protect the identity of her teenage son, who is facing charges in juvenile court.
On that Friday, April 3, the foster mother took Jaxon to the SPARK Clinic which serves foster children. Jaxon returned to the daycare center that afternoon, the director said, with a doctor’s note suggesting they use cream on his rash.
Why Jaxon wasn’t immediately seen downstairs at the Child Advocacy Center, which partners with the SPARK Clinic and specializes in assessing children for signs of sexual abuse, isn’t entirely clear. But it appears there was a paperwork problem that prevented him from being seen immediately. At about 1:40 p.m. that day, Jaxon’s father, Albert Juarez, was asked by his social worker to sign an authorization form allowing Jaxon to be treated there. By then, however, Jaxon was napping at the daycare center across town before an Easter egg hunt planned that afternoon. Jaxon had been removed from his father’s care last summer when his mother was dying of liver and kidney failure, and a judge determined that his father, who had serious health issues, was unable to properly care for him.
After Jaxon’s appointment at the SPARK Clinic, a call was made to the child abuse hotline about his “suspicious injuries,” the newly released documents show. The hotline keeps the identities of callers private.
The same day, a doctor at the Child Advocacy Center emailed both a social worker and a division manager.
The doctor, whose name was blacked out, was “requesting the child be seen for an evaluation as soon as possible and requesting the assistance” of the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services “to bring the child in for the evaluation.”
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That didn’t happen.
Instead, the social worker forwarded the email to her supervisor, “noting she was not available to bring the child in the next day but would ask the caregiver to do so.” The division manager, meanwhile, “responded that she had been sent the email in error,” according to a summary of events put together by the county as part of its internal review.
There is no indication in the reports that the social worker, the supervisor or the division manager took any further action to ensure the doctor’s requests were addressed.
The emergency response social worker who was called out to “immediately assess” signs of possible physical abuse that Friday afternoon noted that Jaxon’s cheeks were rosy and he had a “scratch” on his neck and bumps on his ear. But the social worker wrote that she “was unable to determine whether it was eczema or impetigo.”
In a letter from the Child Advocacy Center the day Jaxon died, a doctor wrote that “in young children, skin injuries on the neck and ear are highly sensitive and specific for child physical abuse.”
The social worker, however, wrote that Jaxon “presented unharmed, made no sounds and appeared to be appropriately attached to his caregiver.”
The foster mother told the social worker she was busy Saturday and would take Jaxon to the Child Advocacy Center on Monday, the documents show. On Saturday, she dropped off Jaxon for several hours at his father’s home, even though he was not authorized to see his son without supervision.
When the social worker was later asked whether they had called the Child Advocacy Center or law enforcement that day “regarding the injuries observed/investigated,” the social worker said she “had not,” the documents say. A CAC doctor would later say that the office had tried without luck since Friday to schedule an appointment.
County officials declined to answer questions from this news organization, including why Jaxon was marked “safe” and why there wasn’t more effort to act with urgency in getting him to the Child Advocacy Center. A memo to staff shortly after Jaxon’s death, however, appears to address the same decision point at issue in Jaxon’s case: whether a child with suspected abuse injuries could be deemed safe before the Child Advocacy Center determined whether he needed to be seen.
In the memo, Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, who leads the child welfare agency, reminded social workers of their obligations: “They must consult with the Children’s Advocacy Center before determining whether a child is safe” and “leave it up to them to determine if the child should be seen and when.”
Kinnear-Rausch also said, in a more recent statement, that while the released case file “provides important information,” it doesn’t present “the complete picture of what occurred in this case.”
In the documents, key details about the April 3 events are redacted, including a summary of a social worker’s interview with the teenage foster brother that afternoon and again the next week.
But child welfare experts say the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services should never have placed Jaxon with his paternal cousin and her children to begin with. She had a criminal record that they say should have disqualified her: a 2014 felony child endangerment conviction for driving drunk with her then-1-year-old daughter in the back seat. Five years later, records show she was arrested again for drunken driving while her children were in the car.
In the same memo from Kinnear-Rausch, she also reminded staff that they are prohibited from placing a child on an emergency basis with anyone who has been convicted of a felony involving child abuse, crimes against a child or willful injury to a child, which the foster mother was.
The case file also references prior sexual abuse allegations involving one of the foster mother’s adult relatives, raising questions about whether the county fully understood the potential risk factors before placing a 2-year-old in the same home. That history came up during an interview with the foster mother, the documents show, when social workers had just learned of prior sexual abuse allegations against one of her adult relatives. The names of the victim and alleged perpetrator were both redacted, but the foster mother said that no criminal charges were ever filed against her relative and that he was young at the time and the family had “moved past that.”
When a social worker asked why the foster mother had never revealed that sexual abuse history in the family while she was being vetted to be a foster mother, the documents show, she “asked why no one complained or had concerns about her own criminal history” when they placed Jaxon with her.
It was a question that the county has yet to answer.
In the case file, a social worker recounting the final days of Jaxon’s brief, tragic life called the ongoing abuse he suffered “horrifying.”
On Easter Sunday morning, Jaxon’s foster mother left Jaxon home with her teen son while she and her daughter went to church, got a pedicure and went shoe shopping. At about 12:30 p.m., the teenager texted his mother that Jaxon was unresponsive. When the mother and sister came home at 1 p.m., according to an interview with the sister, someone there whose name was redacted called 911.
As the toddler lay hooked up to a ventilator in the pediatric intensive care unit, a social worker met with a Child Advocacy Center doctor who “stated the CAC had been trying to see (Jaxon) since Friday, but the foster mother did not come to the appointment as there were concerns due to a mark on his neck,” the narrative recounted. “The CAC attempted to schedule an appointment for Saturday, but no one could confirm appointment or transportation to the CAC for him to be evaluated.”
There is no indication from the case file that sexual abuse was suspected on Friday when the social worker met with the foster mother. But when Jaxon was hospitalized Sunday, a doctor said that Jaxon “was not only suspected to be a victim of physical abuse, but also a victim of sexual abuse.”
This time, with Jaxon breathing with help from a ventilator, a social worker prepared a new assessment of Jaxon’s safety:
Risk Level High.
Outcome: Unsafe.
After four days in intensive care, doctors determined Jaxon had no brain activity and removed him from life support. A social worker prepared a 17-page report, explaining the events that led up to his death.
He was “sexually assaulted and severely neglected,” the narrative said. “The pain and agony experienced in the last few weeks of his life is unimaginable.”
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