DCF's Rotten Core: How Massachusetts Keeps Killing Kids Through Neglect and Incompetence

I grew up learning a lesson that no child should ever have to learn. In Massachusetts, "protection" can be a word that gets said out loud while a child keeps suffering in silence. I know that because I was one of the kids the state was supposed to protect, and they did not. And now, after everything I have seen, read, and put together, I am done pretending this is a collection of "isolated tragedies." It is a system. It is a pattern. It is an institution that fails, then reforms itself on paper, then fails again, and the cost is children's bodies. This isn't a few bad apples: it's a rotten core.

People love to talk about DCF like it is a complicated machine that means well. Bullshit. Here is what I have learned, over and over, case after case. When a system "means well" but children die anyway, the intent does not matter. Outcomes matter. And the outcomes in Massachusetts are so consistently brutal that the only honest question left is this: how many more dead kids does it take before we stop treating DCF like a struggling helper and start treating it like what it has become, a government agency that repeatedly proves it cannot be trusted with the lives it claims to safeguard? They are not helpers. They are enablers of horror, hiding behind protocols that kill.

A four-year-old little girl, A’zella Ortiz, is a perfect example of why I am furious, and why you should be ready to burn the whole damn system down. This was not a one-call situation. DCF was involved for years, on and off since 2018, with multiple neglect reports screaming about substance abuse, medical neglect, and kids drowning in filth. There were action plans, six of them, all repeating the same worthless demands without enforcing a single change. There were home visits, 36 in total, but they were lazy, cut-and-paste jobs where workers barely interacted with the kids, accepting parental lies about COVID barriers long after the pandemic ended. And still, nothing got better. The family "stopped cooperating," DCF mistakenly believed they had moved to New York without verifying a damn thing, no address, no well-being check, no urgency despite weeks of radio silence. They closed the case without laying eyes on the children for 114 days, a full violation of any sane standard of care. A year later, A’zella was dead from blunt force trauma, ruled homicide, and her siblings were hospitalized with severe malnutrition, injuries, dental decay, and untreated developmental delays that left them non-verbal. The Office of the Child Advocate's latest report, just released this December, found that DCF followed existing protocol, but those policies were grossly inadequate for chronic neglect in "intact" families. Read that again, because it is the whole scam in one sentence. DCF followed protocol, and the protocol was not built to protect a child like her. That is not a staffing problem. That is not a bad day at the office. That is a design flaw that keeps children in danger until the danger becomes irreversible. They had consultations with specialists twice, recommending substance assessments and family engagement, but DCF ignored them, no follow-through, no accountability. Their risk assessments escalated to "very high" by 2022, but did they act? Hell no. They let chronic neglect fester, treating it like "stability" instead of the slow poison it is, disrupting brain development and setting kids up for lifelong damage. This is criminal incompetence, plain and simple.

If that does not make you angry enough to scream, let me make it simpler. A child can be drowning in neglect for years, DCF can be in the picture the whole time, documenting the same failures month after month without changing a thing, and the system can still decide it is acceptable to close a case when they have not even confirmed the children are present and safe. Then, after the death, everyone acts shocked. That is not shock. That is theater, a cover-up for a bureaucracy that values paperwork over lives.

David Almond is another example, and his case should make every person in this state sick to their stomachs. Oversight bodies described his death as a "multi-system failure," and the Office of the Child Advocate used language that should have ended careers and triggered a total overhaul. "Every single safeguard failed" him. Not "some safeguards." Every single one. The systems that were supposed to see him, schools, agencies, the court process, all failed, but DCF was right in the center of the failure, making decisions, monitoring, and still not stopping what was happening. They reunified him with a neglectful father amid COVID, suspended in-person visits, missed his emaciation and fentanyl poisoning, and let him starve to death. Two managers got fired? Pathetic. That is window dressing for a system that keeps recycling the same deadly mistakes.

Then there is Jeremiah Oliver, and if you want to understand DCF’s culture at its worst, look here. He had an open DCF case for years. There were expectations of monitoring. And yet, records showed that for months, no one from DCF laid eyes on him, while a worker falsified case logs to make it look like visits and well-being checks happened when they did not. Meanwhile, he was being systematically abused. By the time anyone acted, he was already gone, body dumped like trash. That is not just neglect. That is a system where paperwork becomes a substitute for reality, where the file says “visited” and the child is not even alive. Supervisory failures, office transfers, all excuses for a rotten structure that lets liars keep their jobs until kids pay the price.

And before anyone tries to excuse this with "that was years ago," listen carefully. The details shift, but the failure mode stays the same. DCF loses sight of the child, literally, physically, and then backfills the record or accepts a story that lets them close the loop. The danger is not that they miss one thing. The danger is that their processes allow them to call it "resolved" without proving the child is safe. In A’zella's case, they closed without locating the family, ignoring their own policies on interstate coordination, and now the OCA is begging for revisions that should have been in place decades ago.

Jack Loiselle’s case proves the same point in a different way. DCF had an open case. DCF was actively providing services. Professionals were involved. Reports came in. People were around this child. And still, Jack ended up comatose, critically malnourished, with injuries that screamed abuse. DCF’s own review did not try to hide behind polite language. It called the failure to protect Jack "systemic failures both internal and external to DCF." It admitted Massachusetts had been "unable to successfully implement and sustain meaningful change over time." It said DCF lacked the "policy framework, operating rules, and executional follow-through" required to properly serve the children it is involved with. That is DCF indicting itself in its own words. They knew they were broken, and they kept operating anyway.

So tell me this, Massachusetts. If even DCF admits it does not have the framework and follow-through required to protect children, why are we still treating their assurances like they mean anything? Why are we funding this death machine with our taxes?

And it is not just kids kept at home. Children die inside the system too.

Avalena Conway-Coxon died in a DCF-licensed foster home. She was a toddler. She died of heat stroke and dehydration, with bruises screaming neglect. And the Governor of Massachusetts said the foster home "should never have been a foster home." An internal review found policy was not followed during approval, capacity was not properly evaluated, and supervision was deficient. That is the state admitting it licensed and monitored a home that never should have been entrusted with vulnerable children. Overcrowded, unmonitored, a blatant failure, and DCF's response? More empty promises.

Now add another layer of rage, because we need to talk about how DCF screens risk.

Baby William "Baby Billy" Berry was two months old when DCF received a report. DCF accepted the concern, then screened it into Family Assessment Response instead of a full investigation, treating it like something manageable and "lower risk." Within a month, he was violently shaken and killed. We do not need to pretend DCF "couldn’t have known." The entire point of child protection is that you take the report seriously because the child cannot protect himself. When you downgrade the response, you are gambling with an infant’s life, and DCF loses every time.

Bella Bond, the little girl the world called "Baby Doe," had multiple DCF touchpoints, multiple chances for the system to recognize that this child was in a high-risk orbit. Her mother had a history with DCF. There were reports. There were cases. There were closures. A required managerial review was "not properly conducted." The Office of the Child Advocate later flagged inaccurate risk assessment, premature case closures, and failures in decision-making and information sharing. Then Bella was murdered, body dumped in the harbor. DCF's specialty: turning warnings into funerals.

Do you see the common thread? DCF does not just "miss warning signs." It repeatedly proves it cannot convert warning signs into protection. They document risks, pat themselves on the back for "engagement," and walk away while kids suffer.

Here is the part people do not want to say out loud. DCF’s biggest failure is not one bad call, it is the way the agency structurally protects itself. The system is built to be defensible after the fact. It is built to say, "We followed protocol." It is built to produce plans, visits, checklists, and closures that look clean on paper. And then the child dies, and suddenly everybody is sorry, and maybe someone gets reassigned, and they announce a reform, and a year later another kid is in a body bag. In A’zella's report, OCA points out no structured quality assurance for intact families, no real follow-through on recommendations, no recognition of chronic neglect as a killer. It is the same crap we have seen in David Almond, Harmony Montgomery, and every other tragedy.

That is why I am done with soft language.

If you work in a system where a child can be known, visited, discussed in meetings, placed on action plans, and still be left unseen for months, your system is broken beyond repair.

If your system can be fooled by a family "not cooperating," and you close the case without confirming safety, your system is broken.

If your workers can falsify logs and nobody catches it until the child is missing or dead, your system is broken.

If you license a foster home that "should never have been a foster home," your system is broken.

If you downgrade a case involving an infant into a softer response track and the infant is killed shortly after, your system is broken.

And when the Office of the Child Advocate says your policies are grossly inadequate, and when your own internal review says you lack the policy framework and follow-through to protect kids, it is no longer honest to call this "complicated." It is negligent governance. It is institutional failure with predictable victims. It is a slaughterhouse disguised as welfare.

Now let me tell you why this is personal.

I am not writing this as someone who watched these cases on the news and got upset for a day. I am writing as someone who lived through what it feels like when the state is supposed to notice you, supposed to intervene, supposed to protect you, and it does not. When that happens to a child, the child learns that adults with authority can look right at suffering and choose procedure over rescue. That lesson does not fade. It follows you into adulthood. It changes the way you trust, the way you feel safe, the way you sleep, the way your body reacts to the world.

And that is what Massachusetts needs to understand. This is not only about the children who died. This is about the children who survived and carried the damage for life, and about the families who begged for help, and about the communities that kept reporting danger, and about the fact that DCF keeps getting away with calling catastrophe an "outcome" and then moving on.

So here is what I want, and I am not asking politely.

I want Massachusetts to stop accepting the excuse that "confidentiality" means the public never gets to see how decisions were made. Confidentiality should protect children, not protect an agency from accountability.

I want the state to treat chronic neglect as the life-threatening emergency that it is, because chronic neglect is not a "family struggling." It is a slow death sentence, and it often sits right next to physical violence.

I want automatic, mandatory escalation rules that cannot be waved away by "non-cooperation," especially when children are unverified, unseen, or repeatedly reported.

I want independent oversight with teeth, not performative reviews, and I want consequences that match the severity of the harm, not reshuffling titles and issuing statements.

And I want every person in Massachusetts to understand the truth that these cases scream. The danger is not only the abusive parent. The danger is the system that watches the risk stack up, documents it, "plans" around it, and still leaves the child there.

If you are reading this and you feel uncomfortable, good. Sit with it. Because children sat with worse. Some of them sat with it until they died.

Massachusetts DCF has had decades to prove it can protect children. The public record shows a pattern of failures that keeps repeating, and it keeps ending the same way, with children harmed beyond repair. At some point, the only moral response is anger. Not the kind of anger that fades after a headline, the kind of anger that demands structural change and refuses to be silenced by polite bureaucracy.

I am that angry. You should be too.