Rational Outrage

A Beautiful Language Silenced by Neglect:

Danieal Kelly's Heart-Wrenching Story 

On August 4, 2006, Philadelphia teenager Danieal Kelly was found dead on a filthy mattress in a stifling hot, airless room. Her body left a permanent imprint in the mattress. Maggots ate the open bedsores that covered a large portion of her body. Feces covered the floor. She was 14 years old and weighed a mere 42 pounds.

Her mother Andrea and seven siblings were in the home while Danieal lay dying alone in a dark room, but no attempts were made to save her. According to the Grand Jury report, her mother Andrea forbade her concerned brother Daniel from calling an ambulance. It wasn't until Danieal had died and flies were swarming around her emaciated body that Andrea called the paramedics.

Danieal's death was ruled a homicide.  Danieal had cerebral palsy and was an embarrassment to her mother, who refused to feed her, to change her, or to be seen with her daughter in public. Despite concern from friends and requests from authorities, Andrea refused "for years to take her disabled child to the doctor, to enroll her in school, and to obtain readily available home services for her disability." Danieal's last words were cries for water.

Danieal's short life was tumultuous right from the beginning. Concerned about her well-being if left in her mother's care, Danieal's maternal grandmother convinced her estranged father Daniel to take her and her brother Daniel, Jr. when they were young children. Although life in Arizona with her father wasn't rosy, Danieal did attend school occasionally. Ms. Levin, a special education teacher for 37 years, described Danieal as:  

… a really nicely put together little gal. Her hair was always combed nicely and she wore cute little dresses and she had a huge smile. And she loved music and she loved to sing. She didn’t generate a lot of spontaneous conversation, but she was very articulate when she did speak. She had beautiful language. And . . . put on a record or a CD or a tape and she was there; she’d sing every single word. And she actually had a beautiful voice. One of the music teachers who was always impressed with her actually said something in regards that she had almost perfect pitch. . . . Danieal was always eager to learn, always. She was always smiling. Never one time, never one time did she ever say, I can’t do this, ever.  

In 2003, Danieal was back with her mother; her father soon after disappeared from his daughter's life. After several attempts by authorities to have Andrea register her daughter for school, the school psychologist Dr. Wendy Galson finally made a home visit to test Danieal for school placement. The psychologist found Danieal sitting in the dark, with a scarf wrapped around her head and wearing a jacket, even though it was June – no doubt to hide the signs of malnourishment and neglect.  Danieal was no longer "the engaging, smiling, singing girl with 'beautiful language' described by her Arizona teacher." Instead Dr. Galson found a child with minimal expressive communication, except for crying intensely. Unlike in Arizona, where she reached for food to feed herself, Dr. Galson found she had little arm movement and manual dexterity; she had no muscular development and her forearm was "just bone".  

Two months later, Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Edwin Lieberman, a 16-year veteran of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s office, performed Danieal's autopsy, remarking that she reminded him of “many pictures of people in the concentration camps; that’s how skinny, malnourished this child appears.”  

On July 31, 2008, the Grand Jury released its lengthy and disturbing report. The Grand Jury recommended charges against Andrea Kelly and Daniel Kelly for their daughter's death.   

However, the horrific story does not end there. The Grand Jury also recommended charges against several of Philadelphia's Department of Health Services' (DHS) employees – individuals paid to protect children at risk, and two employees of the private agency MultiEthnic Behavioral Health Inc. contracted to provide weekly support services to the Kelly family.   

The Kelly family was not unknown to DHS; child neglect complaints against Andrea dated back to 1997.  But that knowledge did not result in action. In fact, even though Danieal was identified at high risk of neglect and in urgent need of services, her case file was found at the bottom of a large cardboard box filled with unopened mail and food wrappers in intake worker Dana Poindexter's cubicle. When another DHS employee arranged for MultiEthnic to provide the "highest level of service" to the Kelly family in the last months of Danieal's life, such services were not rendered, even though DHS paid for them.   

Several people could have easily saved the young girl's life by merely doing the job they were paid to do, yet they chose to do nothing to protect her.   

Adding yet another twist to the heart-wrenching story, the neglectful parents have filed, on behalf of Danieal's estate, a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, its child-welfare agency, the state, and several caseworkers for failing to protect their daughter, and thus, should compensate the family for its loss. (Her parents' names were later removed from the lawsuit after public outcry.) According to the lawsuit, the death of Danieal, who was denied life's basic necessities and left alone in a dark room crying for water, has deprived her parents and her nine siblings of her "love, tutelage, companionship, support, comfort and consortium" as well as the "economic value of her life expectancy." The wrongful death lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount, as well as reimbursement for medical bills, funeral and burial expenses, and attorneys' fees; even her mother had not taken her to the doctor in years. Any money recovered in the lawsuit would potentially go to Danieal Kelly's siblings, "most of whom are impoverished children in foster care", which means the taxpayers would be paying twice to raise these children.  

Editor’s Note:  On November 7, Danieal Kelly’s mother was bound over for trial on murder charges and one social worker on involuntary manslaughter charges.  The other 7 people charged in the case were not afforded preliminary hearings, based on the extensive information in the coroner’s report and the fact that they had been charged with lesser crimes.  While it is heartening to see the legal system taking Danieal’s life seriously now, and we may hope that these prosecutions will encourage those charged with the safety of children to take those responsibilities seriously in the future, the fact remains that this is a systemic problem.  Numerous people had the opportunity to help Danieal and did not; that lapse runs deeper than an unfit mother or an overworked social worker who didn’t care enough.  

Sources:

Presentment - http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/pdfs/Presentment-DHS.pdf

Grand Jury Report -

http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/pdfs/Grand_Jury_DHS_new.pdf

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Glenda Watson Hyatt avidly writes about disability-related Issues. In her autobiography I'll Do It Myself, she intimately shares her life living with cerebral palsy to show others that cerebral palsy is not a death sentence, but rather a life sentence. She blogs at Do It Myself Blog (www.doitmyselfblog.com) and Disaboom (http://www.disaboom.com/Blogs/Left_Thumb_Blogger/Default.aspx). She does all this by typing with only left thumb.