DALLAS — Three years ago, state lawmakers made it harder for the state to remove children from their homes on the grounds of neglect.
The idea was to preserve families and prevent children from being pulled into the state’s troubled foster care system. But a WFAA investigation found the law change may be keeping children trapped in dangerous households.
For years, state law said Child Protective Services could remove a child for neglect if investigators believed there was a “substantial risk of physical or mental harm.”
After Sept. 1, 2021, investigators had to believe the child was in “immediate danger.”
“That’s a very high evidentiary standard,” said Kathleen LaValle, CEO of Dallas Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA, which is assigned to assist children once they are removed from their homes and placed in foster care.
The law changed as a result of House Bill 567, authored by State Rep. James Frank, R-Wichita Falls.
“We were trying to get more precise with the wording so that there would be more consistency across the state, and so children weren’t being removed for simple neglect,” Frank said.
The law only impacted the definition of neglect; it did not change the state’s interpretation of the removals based on abuse.
“There is a difference between abuse, which is proactive, and neglect which is where you’re not providing something,” Frank said.
According to national CASA data, historically, most cases that result in removal are neglect cases.
NEW LAW TESTED
On June 27, 2022, Dallas police found Zamaurian Kizzee dead at his home in South Dallas’ Bonton neighborhood. He was five years old.
His 26-year-old mother, Tiffany Williams, was arrested and charged with injury to a child causing serious bodily injury. According to an arrest affidavit, Williams told detectives she beat her son multiple times, hitting him in the temple and stomach with her fist. The affidavit also says she hit him with an extension cord multiple times on his back and face. She admitted to police, according to the arrest affidavit, that she abused her son daily.
Ulysses Kizzee, the boy’s 74-year-old father, was also arrested for injury to a child by omission. Kizzee admitted to both police and WFAA that he was aware that Williams physically abused their son.
After Zamaurian’s death, CPS removed the couple’s five other children, ages 3 months to seven years.
The family had a history with CPS.
When a Texas child dies from abuse or neglect, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services creates a report that includes the fatal incident and any history the child has with CPS. WFAA obtained the state’s report on Zaumarian Kizzee through an open records request.
According to that report, the agency had removed Zamaurian and his siblings and put them in foster care in 2017 for neglect after the children were found in a room with their mother, who had been choked unconscious by Kizzee.
In 2020, they were removed again after a report to the agency about Williams’ drug use. CPS investigators wrote that the children tested positive for cocaine in their hair follicles, and they were able to determine that she physically abused the children.
Then, in December 2021 – three months after the state changed the definition of neglect– CPS received a report that Zamaurian had a “deep” gash on his forehead. According to the state’s fatality report for Zamaurian, “he said he fell on a toy, then he stated that he was hit”.
Investigators determined his parents committed medical neglect for not taking him to the hospital immediately. But they closed the case, writing he did not make an outcry and stated he didn’t have any other bruises or marks on his body, and wrote he hit his head on a coffee table.
Zamaurian was killed about seven months later.
‘DIFFICULT TO ASSESS RISK’
“It’s very difficult to assess risk. It’s not an exact science, particularly in instances where a child has already been the subject of physical abuse…sexual abuse,” LaValle of Dallas CASA said. “Our concern is that an investigation is closed in circumstances where that child would have been removed, or siblings would have been removed, five years ago – today they’re not being removed. How do we measure that impact?”
WFAA looked at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services data for the past 10 years, including the two fiscal years since the state’s definition of neglect changed.
There was a steep drop in removals. Just before H.B. 567 went into effect, more than 16,000 children were removed for abuse and neglect in Texas. In fiscal year 2022, just after the law change, removals dropped by nearly half, to 9,623 statewide.
In the 19 counties that make up CPS’s North Texas region, removals dropped by more than 1,000, from 3,096 to 1,985.
“I knew that we would decrease removals, but I did not know that it would decrease that much,” Rep. Frank said. “The thing you get concerned about as that starts to happen is, are you not removing kids that should have been?”
DEATHS DOWN
But Rep. Frank said he’s also kept his eye on another set of numbers.
“There hasn’t been an increase in child deaths,” he said. “It doesn’t appear that we’re missing kids that we should have.”
The state’s data on child fatalities shows that 37 children in North Texas died from abuse and neglect the year after the law changed. That is the lowest number since 2017.
“Neglect becomes very subjective, depending on who you are,” Frank said. “A dirty home, in some people’s case, is neglect. Poverty is neglect. That’s not what children should be removed for.”
LaValle said Dallas CASA was not seeing that.
"I don’t think that we observed situations where there was an overreaction, where we were questioning ‘why were these children brought into care?’ It was abundantly clear in each case,” she said.
REPORTS OF ABUSE UP
While the number of removals, and deaths, are both down since the law went into effect, the number of reports of suspected abuse and neglect has gone up.
In the two years since the law changed, they received more than 82,461 reports in 2022, and 82,191 in 2023 of suspected child abuse or neglect in North Texas. That’s more than the state received in the 19 counties that make up Region 3 in at least 10 years.
“That should take away any comfort you have – that fewer kids coming into foster care means fewer kids are in harm’s way,” LaValle said.
In addition to an increase, state data also revealed that the number of children receiving what the state refers to as “Family-Based Safety Services” has been down over the last three years- lower than it’s been since 2014.
“It’s an opportunity to help a family that’s struggling and to hopefully avoid removal,” LaValle said. “And so, if the intent of a higher threshold for bringing children into protective care was intended to be balanced with a surge in services to struggling families, we’re just not seeing that.”
H.B. 567 passed the state Senate unanimously. In the House, only four lawmakers voted against it. State Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos was one of them.
“It wasn’t a yay vote for me, and still to this day, it would not be,” she said. “One has to witness that these children are in immediate danger before you can remove the child. Is CPS going to be there all the time when this child is in immediate danger? The likelihood of this happening is not.”
CONCERN MOUNTING
Rep. Ramos said she's hearing concerns from CPS workers and family court judges, specifically in Dallas County.
“If there is a lighter and there’s gasoline, and the parents are high or whatever, then that’s a substantial risk, versus now – the house has to be on fire for us to be able to remove the child,” she said.
An autopsy found that Zamaurian Kizzee’s death was a homicide, resulting from “acute and chronic blunt force injuries and chronic neglect”.
The boy’s mother and father are both currently in jail, awaiting trial.
“You just can’t help but to wonder what could have been done if the child had been brought in earlier if we had been more protective,” Lavalle said.