SAN JOSE – Looking back, it was hard to miss the signs that foretold the tragedy of Phoenix Castro’s short life.
Two months before the baby’s birth, her pregnant mother and father submitted to a drug test as part of a safety plan to get their two older children back from Santa Clara County’s child welfare agency.
Their tests both came back positive — for opiates, cocaine and methamphetamine.
The day after Phoenix was born with neonatal opioid withdrawal symptoms, a social worker was called to the hospital to determine whether the baby would be safe with her troubled family in the two-bedroom apartment off Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose.
The result of that assessment, revealed in nearly 200 pages of documents obtained this week by the Bay Area News Group, sounded an alarm in the starkest terms:
Neglect Risk Level: Very High.
Abuse Risk Level: High.
Final Risk Level: Very High.
But even another dire warning from a social worker overseeing the case of the couple’s two older children wasn’t enough to save her.
A day before the infant was sent home, social worker Matthew Kraft sent an email to colleagues, alarmed that the baby’s parents hadn’t “addressed any of the issues that brought them into the system is very troubling.”
The couple’s two older children suffered from neglect so severe it resulted in “developmental delays,” he wrote in the email obtained by the Bay Area News Group. “I worry that Phoenix may be subject to that same level of neglect and possibly result in her death.”
Less than three months later, those fears came true.
Reckoning begins
Left in her father’s care, baby Phoenix died after ingesting a lethal dose of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Now — with Phoenix’s father in jail, facing a felony child endangerment charge, and her mother also dead from her own fentanyl overdose four months after her baby’s death — the question of why so many people disregarded so many warnings is at the heart of a reckoning within the county’s child welfare system.
A Bay Area News Group investigation of child protective service records, internal email exchanges, drug screenings, and interviews with county officials, social workers, family members, neighbors, and others point to a number of glaring missteps and disturbing oversights that led to the death of baby Phoenix. It also reveals an agency struggling to balance the idealistic goal of keeping families together with the critical mission of keeping children safe.
The county’s top executive James Williams admitted in a lengthy interview with the Bay Area News Group that the county “dropped the ball” by sending the baby home with her father, David Castro. In the early weeks, the baby’s mother, Emily De La Cerda, wasn’t in the home because she was in jail on outstanding bench warrants and later checked into a residential treatment facility.
The county promised full transparency and called on the state to review what went wrong.
But exactly who was behind those crucial decisions, and how and why they were made, is still shrouded in secrecy — hidden behind heavy redactions in the records the county Department of Family and Children Services turned over this past week that detail the county’s significant involvement with the family leading up to baby Phoenix’s death.
Many of the redactions in the baby’s case file were the work of the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office, who say the details could jeopardize their criminal case against Phoenix’s father. But at the request of the Bay Area News Group, a district attorney spokesman said they are reviewing the file to determine whether they can open more of the documents to the public.
This news organization also obtained exclusive documents, which the county did not provide, that revealed yet more red flags about baby Phoenix that went unheeded.
County Supervisor Cindy Chavez has called for a special hearing in December to investigate the breakdown.
“Children are the most vulnerable population in our community,” Chavez wrote in calling for the hearing, “and when their care falls upon the government, there is no other public responsibility that is more critical.”
Called her ‘baby girl’
The files make clear that Phoenix’s birth required an “immediate response” from social workers. Kaiser San Jose Medical Center called Santa Clara County’s child welfare hotline to report that the baby’s Feb. 12 nighttime delivery had been complicated by the newborn’s withdrawal symptoms from her mother’s drug use during pregnancy.
The next day, when the social worker arrived in the hospital room, the father was changing the baby’s diaper. He and the mother took turns holding her. Barely a day old, the infant didn’t yet have a name. The parents called her “baby girl.”
De La Cerda, 39, and Castro, 38, were already well known to the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services.
Their two older children, barely 3 and 4, had been removed from the couple’s care less than a year earlier. According to internal emails, both parents were taken to jail for outstanding warrants and the children were placed with their maternal grandmother, Rita De La Cerda. The father had a history of drug arrests. And the mother — who also had two older children with other fathers — had substance abuse and mental health issues and a criminal record of her own.
In 2016, while six months pregnant and driving drunk, Emily De La Cerda crashed into a parked San Jose Police car, court records show. Her 1-year-old son, unstrapped in the backseat, flew into the floorboards. After the accident, she lost custody to the boy’s father. She later lost custody of her second child to the girl’s father.
The two children are now thriving, their fathers say, and Phoenix should have had the same chance.
“Phoenix should have been removed from their care,” said Jessie Conley, father of De La Cerda’s first child. “Everyone says allow the system to work, trust the process. Yet we’re seeing right here right in front of our eyes, that the system does not work. It failed.”
Was county counsel involved?
There are tools in place to safeguard vulnerable children: child abuse hotlines, safety plans and a universal checklist that social workers rely on to decide whether a child could be in danger.
But a question over a significant drop in Santa Clara County’s removals of at-risk children in recent years led last year to a state investigation of the local agency. It found that lawyers in the county counsel’s office often overrode recommendations from social workers and supervisors to remove children from unsafe homes. The legal team’s heightened influence was part of a shift in the county’s philosophy to keep families together through safety plans and essential services.
In Phoenix’s case, the social worker’s first assessment not only warned that the baby was at “very high” risk but also recommended that the agency open a formal case, which could have resulted in the removal of the child.
For reasons that are still unclear, however, the assessment stated the agency would not open a case. Phoenix’s father took her home on Feb. 28 after promising to follow a detailed “safety plan,” which included regularly engaging with a public health nurse and social worker and visits from the baby’s grandmother three times a week, the documents show.
In an interview Thursday, Damion Wright, the director of the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services, said in the baby Phoenix case, the social worker and supervisor made the decision — without consulting the county counsel — to send the baby home with her dad.
“Definitely, in this particular case, regarding this particular child,” Wright said in a telephone interview, “there is no indication of county counsel overriding any decision.”
Social worker union representative Alex Lesniak, a chief steward for the county welfare agency, said she couldn’t comment on Phoenix’s case. But county social workers are concerned, she said, about “the role county counsel has increasingly had in the ultimate decision of whether or not a child is removed from the home.”
Steve Baron, a member of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council, said it’s unfair to blame baby Phoenix’s death on a single social worker or supervisor.
Instead, he said, the county’s child protection agency has a “systemic” impulse to keep children in the care of their parents, even when there are flashing red warning signs that a child may be in danger.
Phoenix’s death, he said, “is not an outlier case.”
The ‘safety plan’
In the hospital room the day after Phoenix was born, the social worker brought up the couple’s poor track record of following through on the very programs that would have helped return their two older children to their home.
He encouraged them “to change this pattern of allowing things to distract them or keep them from regularly participating in services provided to them,” according to the case file.
Two days later, in a “child and family team” meeting, the social worker expressed concern about the baby’s safety if drug use continued in the home.
Back home with the baby in the weeks that followed, Castro failed to follow some of the key measures in the safety plan, the case files show.
He declined to sign up for check-ins with a public health nurse.
On two occasions, when the social worker assigned to the case stopped by the family’s home for face-to-face meetings, nobody answered the door. During one attempt, on March 16, the social worker stood outside Castro’s apartment and called him on the phone, only to hit voicemail.
The very next day, neighbors heard a woman’s voice screaming and crying from the family’s apartment. The mother, De La Cerda, was out of jail and back in the apartment. Police arrived and, according to neighbors, took her away on a gurney.
Details of what happened that evening are redacted in the baby’s case file — at least 10 pages worth — except a note that the disturbance involved “general neglect” and “emotional abuse.” The incident triggered another child welfare referral, the second since baby Phoenix’s birth, and another opportunity to reassess the safety of the child who was now just under five weeks old.
In emails dated March 20, two social worker supervisors expressed concern that De La Cerda was in the home and that Castro seemed “unable or unwilling to set healthy boundaries” with her. But Castro was given credit for calling the police and would soon be on his own with the baby again as his wife sought treatment.
Progress to tragedy
Over the next month, the social worker visited the apartment at least three times and marked continuing progress.
On March 24, the baby was “peacefully resting” in her bassinet with a stack of diapers and wipes nearby. “There was no concerns (sic) of the child crying or being agitated or malnourished,” the social worker wrote.
During two more visits in April, the social worker wrote that the baby “is growing and displayed a calm and peaceful nature,” and “praised the father for his commitment to remain in contact.”
By April 26, the social worker completed the safety assessment, marking the baby “safe” and concluding that “there are no children likely to be in immediate danger of serious harm.”
Baby Phoenix’s heavily redacted case file, however, doesn’t show whether the social worker knew what police would later discover: that Castro “used and allowed other people to use drugs in his home on various occasions, all while Phoenix was in his sole care and custody.” Less than a month before Phoenix’s death, police also found a video that showed Castro and several other people huddled around a table “bustling with drug activity and paraphernalia.”
On the morning of May 13, emergency crews raced to the apartment where the Castro family name was adorned on a bench out front.
Inside, baby Phoenix, just three months and one day old, was dead on the living room couch in a pink-flowered onesie. It isn’t clear how she ingested the drugs,
All the “very high” risk factors were laid out in the kitchen for police to see: They found fentanyl and aluminum foil and — next to a broken glass pipe on the counter — the baby’s bottle.
Baby Phoenix’s file shows a county social worker filled out one more Safety Assessment on May 14, the day after the infant’s death. Again, it is heavily redacted. On the final page, in the final section labeled “Safety Decision,” there is a final checkmark.
This time, it is next to the word “Unsafe.”
