It starts with her parents, of course.  Neither wanted her; Danieal’s mother, Andrea Kelly, seemed embarrassed to even have her around.  She never took care of her disabled daughter’s basic needs: almost never clothed her or combed her hair, or took her outside for fresh air, or enrolled her in school or made doctor’s appointments.  Andrea hated changing Danieal’s diaper, so she gave her as little food and liquid as possible.  Eventually Andrea stopped caring altogether, and left Danieal to literally rot and starve to death in a filthy, feces-covered bed inside her stifling Philadelphia apartment.

It’s not that Andrea Kelly couldn’t take care of her daughter.  She had at least seven or eight other children living with her, and while she provided lax supervision and a filthy, roach-infested apartment, the other kids were not starving.  And she showed enough initiative each month to cash Danieal’s disability check.  But Danieal was simply too much trouble.

Danieal’s father was hardly better.  He isn’t facing murder charges only because he wasn’t around to witness his daughter’s final, agonizing days.  At first Daniel Kelly did try to take care of Danieal, but his commitment didn’t last long.  He took her and his son to Arizona, where he lived with his girlfriend, about the only person close to Danieal who seemed to care about her.  Kathleen John made sure Danieal was clean and well-groomed, and took her to school, where the teachers were charmed by the girl’s spirit and beautiful singing voice.  Despite cerebral palsy that kept her confined to a wheelchair, Danieal thrived in school.

It didn’t last long.  Daniel Kelly split up with his girlfriend, and Danieal stopped going to school.  Her father eventually returned to Philadelphia and invited Andrea’s mother, and eventually Andrea herself, to move in to help care for Danieal.  This despite the fact that Daniel knew that Andrea had a long history of neglecting her children.  Soon he was gone too, never to look back.  Danieal was simply too much trouble.

But Danieal’s parents weren’t the only ones who couldn’t be bothered to help her.

The city’s Department of Human Services received multiple reports of neglect at the Kelly home.  Nearly all of these complaints were assigned to Dana Poindexter, a 16-year employee of DHS who incredibly was still employed there as of this week, when the grand jury’s report was unveiled.  Poindexter was an “intake” social worker, whose job was to investigate complaints and determine if services were needed to assist the family.

But Poindexter did virtually nothing.  He received reports on Danieal’s neglect as early as 2002 and he never once followed up on them.  And he never made recommendations for services, or closed the complaints as “unsubstantiated”, within 60 days as required by DHS policy.  Thus new reports kept coming in, which he also ignored.  Even when other intake workers received complaints about the Kelly home, they were reassigned to Poindexter because he never closed the earlier reports.

Poindexter sat at his desk, eating lunch and tossing the fast-food wrappers into a bin with other trash, where buried at the bottom lay Danieal’s case file.  He continued to ignore the girl’s plight and even lied about his work on the case to other DHS employees.  He couldn’t be bothered to do his job.  Danieal was simply too much trouble.

Even when DHS finally managed to open a case for Danieal and order services for her, the agency they hired, MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, not only did not deliver services, it defrauded the city (and the taxpayers) by lying about it.  Most of MultiEthnic’s work was performed by an intern, who was not familiar with the case history and in six months of work, only managed to set up a single doctor’s appointment for Danieal, which her mother did not keep.

After the intern left MultiEthnic, the case was turned over to Julius Murray, who made only a few visits to the Kelly home between April and August 2006, when Danieal died.  Absolutely no other action on Murray’s part can be substantiated; it’s not even apparent he ever entered the home.  In fact, MultiEthnic hurriedly fabricated most of its progress reports on Danieal’s case on the day of her death.  Yet it had billed DHS for 10 months of services, none of which was ever provided.  Danieal was simply too much trouble.

How could this happen?

Danieal Kelly might still be alive today had one person who was aware of her condition given a damn, or had listened to someone who did.  And her relatives did try to help.  They urged Andrea Kelly to get help for her daughter, but she pushed them away.  They called DHS, but their complaints disappeared into the black hole centered in Dana Poindexter’s cubicle.  MultiEthnic’s intern paid visits to the home and tried to help, but his inexperience and unfamiliarity with the case doomed his efforts.

At every level—from her parents to the government to the private agency hired to help her—Danieal was ignored, left to starve to death, literally rotting in her bodily fluids.  They all share responsibility for her murder.  Yet the more important lessons will, I fear, be lost as long as people continue to believe the state exists to serve them.

Well, it doesn’t.  The state exists only as a self-perpetuating entity.  It cannot simultaneously serve its own interest and those of the people, because they are mutually exclusive.  And we find ourselves at the state’s mercy because we have surrendered to it the responsibility for protecting our rights, our safety, our “general welfare”.  Yet it is precisely when people are at their most vulnerable—the Danieal Kellys, the refugees from Katrina, the children in crime-ridden housing projects and crumbling public schools—that the state demonstrates its most heartless indifference.

Hardly anyone seemed to care about Danieal Kelly when she was alive, least of all the state.  And it won’t care about the next Danieal Kelly.  But we can.  We must.

Two Philadelphia social workers were among nine charged yesterday in the death of a Danieal Kelly, a 14-year-old girl who starved to death in 2006, her body eaten by bed sores to the bone.

Unveiling a blistering grand jury report today [PDF], District Attorney Lynne Abraham blasted the city’s Department of Human Services as an indifferent and callous agency that had let Kelly die needlessly.

Drawing gasps at a news conference in which she showed a photograph of Kelly’s bloody, emaciated corpse, Abraham urged the state to take over DHS – a call that was not embraced by state officials.

The grand jury report contains just one photo of Danieal after her death (be forewarned: it’s horrifically graphic), but even it cannot convey the full horror of what this young girl must have suffered, not only at the hands of her mother, but through the wanton neglect of Philadelphia’s DHS and the private agency it contracted to provide services she never received.

This may be the worst example I’ve seen of the state’s failure to perform even the minimal duties expected of it: to guard the safety of its citizens.  If it fails—fundamentally fails, at every level of responsibility—in even this basic endeavor, how can anyone argue it is competent to manage our health, our children’s education, or the economy?  And keep in mind, this isn’t an issue of strained resources or overwhelmed caseworkers—the DHS in Philadelphia is well-funded and staffed, and doesn’t even provide services directly to clients.  It simply decides if action is warranted and then refers cases to private agencies to provide the actual services.  Yet it failed even at what amounted to button-pushing.

It’s true that in Danieal’s case, a private agency demonstrated callous indifference towards her plight, even as it was busy forging paperwork and bilking taxpayers for nonexistent services rendered.  But it could get away with it because its customer, the Philadelphia DHS, was complicit in its crimes.  One administrator even admitted to the grand jury that falsifying and backdating reports was common practice at the agency.

This isn’t an isolated incident.  You can’t find no less than nine adults, four of them social workers, responsible for a person’s death and assume this was a tragic exception to the rule.  As the grand jury wrote in its report:

The fate of a sweet and promising child depended on the willingness of a number of particular adults to do the bare minimum of what they were supposed to do. Danieal’s mother, her father, DHS employees, the agency that contracted with DHS to provide services for Danieal and her family – these make up a rather large cast of characters. Yet, had just one of them performed their duty or done their job, Danieal would be alive today. The combined criminal negligence that transformed the little girl in the school portrait into the shriveled corpse in the autopsy photographs was so callous, so cruel, and so relentless, it constitutes nothing less than homicide.

Indeed.  If I could, I’d charge every one of these people, with the possible exception of Andrea Kelly’s friends, with murder.  And even her friends are morally if not legally culpable when they knew how badly Danieal was suffering and didn’t say a word about it to anyone.

Not that it would have made any difference, given how the city handled the case.  The maggot-infested bedsores covering Danieal Kelly’s body aren’t the only things that have rotted to the bone.