Baby Phoenix Castro, the 3-month-old San Jose girl who died of a fentanyl and methamphetamine overdose in May, should be alive today.
Santa Clara County’s child protective services system failed her. The state is investigating. In the meantime, county officials should stand down and abandon their own internal investigation that was tainted from the start with conflicts of interest.
This is a time for an outside independent probe that will produce findings free of any questions of bias or manipulation.
However well-intentioned Damion Wright, the director of the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services, and County Executive James Williams may be in their quest for answers, they have no business being anywhere near the investigation.
The actions of the departments they have overseen are at the center of the controversy over how Baby Phoenix was allowed to remain with her drug-addicted father.
Baby’s opioid withdrawal
As this news organization has detailed in a series of stunning articles by reporters Scooty Nickerson and Julia Prodis Sulek, there were warning signs about Phoenix’s parents long before she was even born.
Her older siblings had been taken away from her parents because they had suffered from neglect so severe that it had resulted in “developmental delays.”
Both parents had tested positive for opiates, cocaine and methamphetamine two months before Baby Phoenix’s birth. Her father had a history of drug arrests. Her mother had substance abuse, mental health issues and a criminal record.
Phoenix was born Feb. 12, suffering from neonatal opioid withdrawal.
The day after her birth, a county social worker called to the hospital conducted an assessment and determined very high risk to the baby if she were left with her parents. The social worker’s assessment recommended the agency open a formal case. That didn’t happen.
In an email the day before Phoenix was sent home from the hospital, another social worker noted the travails of her siblings and wrote, “I worry that Phoenix may be subject to the same level of neglect and possibly result in death.”
Three months later, Baby Phoenix was dead. Her mother died four months later from her own fentanyl overdose. Her father, who had told a neighbor he was also addicted to fentanyl, faces a felony child endangerment charge.
Conflicting accounts
Meanwhile, county officials face deeply troubling questions about why so many warning signs were missed.
At the center of the controversy is the county’s recent policy that prioritizes keeping children with their parents. The change in approach led to the decline from 60 removals of children from their homes in 2020 to 20 in 2022.
There’s a legitimate debate about how to balance the importance of keeping families together vs. the risks of leaving children in unsafe homes. But a state report in February, the same month Baby Phoenix was born, found that the county counsel’s office frequently overrode decisions by social workers to remove kids from unsafe homes.
Wright says that, in the case of Baby Phoenix, the social worker and supervisor, without consulting county counsel, made the decision to send her home with her dad. There is “no indication of county counsel overriding any decision,” he said.
But a union representative for the social workers contradicts that. She says lawyers in the county counsel’s office opposed the social worker’s and supervisor’s recommendations that the child be pulled from her parents’ care.
Internal investigation
Williams, the county executive, says, “We need to look at everything. We need to look at our systems and make improvements.” He’s right that changes are needed and to be commended for wanting to see that happen.
But before county officials can make changes to prevent future fatalities, they need answers about what really happened in the case of Baby Phoenix.
The facts should drive policy changes, not the other way around. And the facts should be ferreted out by independent investigators.
That’s not what’s happening in Santa Clara County. Williams directed Wright to conduct an internal probe using investigators who typically look into community complaints. That’s hardly training for a probe of whether their colleagues, their own department, is to blame for Baby Phoenix’s death.
Moreover, Wright, who already has apparently drawn his own conclusions about what happened and thrown his workers under the bus, is hardly the person to be overseeing the internal investigation.
Then there’s the problematic issue of Williams’ involvement. He became county executive in July, months after Baby Phoenix’s death. Before that, he was the county counsel, ultimately in charge of the attorneys faulted by the state and the union leader for overriding the judgment of social workers.
Williams told us on Thursday that he had no direct involvement in those decisions. “There’s nothing I want to hide,” he said. But that misses the point: His involvement taints the independence of the fact-finding.
He and Wright should step aside, abandon the internal probe by poorly equipped investigators, and let the state Department of Social Services do its job.