Texas left more children in dangerous homes while cutting services. Tragedy followed.

From Texas Public Radio:

This story is part of When Home is the Danger, a multi-part series on how Texas is leaving children in dangerous homes and families without ongoing support or monitoring.

In July 2022, Lauralei Crouch searched the Internet for advice on how to report child abuse.

Her inquiries were not academic: Prosecutors say Crouch had for weeks been watching her boyfriend pummel his 2-year-old son, Wyatt, slapping and flinging him into tables and door jambs as punishment.

But Crouch never made that call. Later that month, Randall Pickett, 29, beat Wyatt so viciously that Crouch told police the boy appeared drunk. Rather than calling police or rendering aid, Crouch beat the toddler herself.

Wyatt Pickett died after investigators recommended he be removed from his father’s care, but state lawyers declined to follow through. Court Documents

“You … turned me into a monster,” she texted her boyfriend. On July 25, Wyatt died from what an autopsy said were blunt force injuries to his head and torso.

The father’s troubled and violent family life had been investigated multiple times by the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS).

Yet Wyatt ‘s fate was like many others across Texas, where from 2018 to 2023 a child died from abuse or neglect, on average, more than every other day.

An analysis of those fatalities by TPR revealed a child welfare system so intent on reducing its contact with troubled families that it frequently left children in dangerous households even as it sharply reduced the family services that might have kept them safe.

Compelled by changes to state law in 2021 and to their own policies starting in 2020, DFPS decision-makers closed cases, hoped for the best and walked away.

“The whole system is a failure,” Wyatt’s grandmother Melissa Pickett told TPR. “I can honestly say they could have done so many things differently. My grandson would still be alive.”

More than 1,200 children died from 2018 to 2023 from maltreatment. More than half of the deaths blamed on abuse and neglect occurred in families that had come under state scrutiny.

TPR’s investigation found:

• One out of five of those deaths occurred in families that had already been investigated at least three times for abuse and neglect. Nearly 100 of these families had been investigated six or more times.

• One out of four deaths occurred in families that had been investigated within a year prior. More than 200 happened within six months of an investigation.

• The 2021 law, intended to reduce unnecessary removals of children from their homes, fueled a 40% drop during the six-year period in total removals for everything from physical and sexual abuse to neglect and supervision issues.

• Yet Texas also has radically curtailed the services provided to parents – things like drug testing and treatment and domestic violence prevention efforts – that could lessen the risk to children left with them.

TPR reviewed thousands of pages of DFPS fatality reports, autopsies, police and court records, state reviews and audits, and it interviewed dozens of current and former case workers, investigators, victims’ loved ones, attorneys and judges.

TPR compiled the more than 1,200 deaths into a database, charting the services offered and what caseworkers found, including connections to previous investigations and perpetrators.

The deaths were often predictable and spanned the entire state.

In 2020, a 10-month-old girl in Lubbock was stuffed in her mother’s boyfriend’s backpack and left in his car trunk for hours. An 8-year-old Houston boy with autism was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend and left in an apartment where for a year his siblings were forced to live with the corpse.

And a 2-year-old Waco boy allegedly died at the hands of his drug-addicted mother, who wrapped his body in trash bags and tossed him in a dumpster before reporting him missing.

The families of all three victims had been investigated numerous times by DFPS, records show.

“The system is not working,” said Mercedes Bristol, executive director of Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, an advocacy group that helps grandparents navigate the child welfare system. Kids today “continue to be hurt and continue to be neglected, abused and die,” she said.

DFPS commissioner Stephanie Muth declined TPR’s multiple interview requests. The department also declined to respond to TPR’s submitted list of written questions, though it answered a few in follow-up emails.

In a statement, Muth said that child safety was the department’s highest priority. “Through thorough investigations, family-focused support services and careful adherence to established policies, we are committed to protecting children from abuse and neglect and promoting healthier families,” Muth wrote.

DFPS officials say the sweeping reduction in child protection efforts has not endangered children, pointing to a 60% drop in child deaths since 2020.

Well before the staffing crisis, for decades observers recognized that balancing a desire to keep families together with the need to keep kids safe is a high-stress and often thankless job. It still is.

“We’ve got a system where it’s overloaded, overworked, terribly underpaid,” said Morgan Davis, a former DFPS investigator. “And then you’re told you’re not doing a good enough job, and you’re putting kids in harm’s way. And so at one point you just — it gives.”

Wyatt’s case was reassigned to Daniel Beyer, a special investigator, who visited the family in late 2021. He told TPR that the interview was going well until he asked the parents for a drug test.

“That’s when things went south real quick,” Beyer recalled. “And mom physically shoved me out the door.”

Berger also called 911 and the police arrived. She was irate, screaming and yelling, Beyer said.

Beyer attempted to get the family into Family Preservation Services (also called Family-Based Safety Services), which can include drug treatment, domestic violence intervention, day care, parenting classes, sometimes even financial support for items like for cribs to prevent smotherings or money for rent, utilities or food.

Child Preservation Services caseworkers have the authority to make frequent visits to the homes of unstable families to ensure children are going to school or medical appointments, are well-fed, and don’t have bruises or welts on their bodies.

Pickett didn’t want to drug test, and DFPS rejected Beyer’s request for services. It was part of an explosion of thousands of rejections since 2020, when a policy change narrowed who was eligible.

The number of families rejected for services jumped from roughly 300 to 2,800 the first year the policy was implemented, a DPFS summary of reasons for closing Family Preservation Services indicated.

In 2023, the number of families denied services was back down to 810, still more than double that of 2018.

Investigators decried the changes and warned DFPS executives about the risks. “With limited options for ongoing services, [investigators are] left making quick and difficult decisions,” said a September 2021 Child Protective Investigations briefing obtained by TPR.

Another briefing noted the number of times the department approved services for families with abused or neglected kids dropped 50% compared to the same month the year before.

The absence of services made it easier to close cases. The effect was to turn their backs on troubled families like Wyatt’s.

In the year he died, about 70% of families in which the department found abuse and neglect had their cases closed without state services or continued monitoring.

In a statement, DFPS said there are many reasons a case might be closed without continuing services. An abuse or neglect finding could have been against someone other than the parent, or the family could have received external services based on a state referral.

That doesn’t explain the scale of the drop in state services. More than six in 10 families where abuse was confirmed received none in 2023, which was 20% higher than in 2018.

The investigation into Wyatt’s family was still open when Victoria police officers were called to the apartment on Dec. 9, 2021. Pickett allegedly put a knife to Berger’s throat and threatened to kill her, according to police documents.

“So we did an affidavit for removal,” Beyer said.

But his attempts to get the children out failed. “After reviewing the affidavit and policy, legal intervention was not possible and a motion to participate was going to be denied,” wrote a DFPS attorney in documents reviewed by TPR.

Beyer described an agency that would not act, where investigators with “mounds of evidence” could not obtain or even pursue a court order to remove a child.

“I honestly think it was a time in the department where they didn’t want to remove kids,” Beyer said. “They wanted reunification at all costs.”

Berger took her daughter and left Pickett, who tested positive for methamphetamines and refused treatment or ongoing testing. The department allowed him to keep the twins and move in with his mother, Melissa Pickett.

Dropping investigations

Wyatt was never placed in state custody. His family was among more than a hundred classified at “high” or “very high” risk of harm to children in the 12 months before a death occurred, according to TPR’s analysis of records from 2018 to 2023.

Texas had always been a low-removal state compared to others, even before House Bill 567 was enacted in 2021. The law changed the definition of neglect and raised the threshold for removal, limiting it to emergency situations of “immediate danger.”

The goal as stated by its author, state Rep. James Frank (R-Wichita Falls) was to reduce the number of unnecessary removals and the trauma that goes with them.

“I’m not saying it’s perfect in every case, but I think we have decreased the false and unnecessary removals, and we have made sure to allow that we can still remove those very dangerous cases,” he told TPR in 2022.

The bill passed with wide bipartisan support. Republicans liked that it bolstered parents’ rights, and Democrats thought it could change a system that disproportionately impacted Black families in Texas.

“Disproportionality is real. The disparities are great,” said Kathleen Lavalle, CEO of Dallas CASA, a nonprofit that works with children in foster care.

But even with the new law, that’s still true. Black families in Texas are almost twice as likely to be reported, more than twice as likely to be investigated and 1.8 times more likely to have children removed, according to a 2023 report.

In the fiscal year after the new law took effect, removals dropped by 41% in neglectful supervision cases, the category Frank believed was being misused to remove children who should stay with their parents.

But the law affected removals across the board. Physical and medical neglect removals dropped about 22%. Physical abuse removals fell 30%.

State investigators, meanwhile, continued to confirm abuse and neglect in numbers that did not drop as steeply.

“It’s so easy to look at data and see fewer kids being removed and just point to that in isolation as a good development,” said Lavalle of Dallas CASA. “Your mind instantly thinks there are fewer kids being abused, there are fewer kids being neglected. And that’s obviously not the case.”

Judges, attorneys, child advocates and others have expressed concern over the ways the state has made leaving children in dangerous homes easier.

“So, do you have to be present when someone’s holding a hammer to someone, or a weapon?” asked state Sen. Jose Menendez (D-San Antonio), who called the new “immediate danger” standard for removal a mistake.

Hearing descriptions of child fatalities in a recent interview, a dejected Menendez mused about the possible need to replace the entire department, “scrap the whole damn thing and start over.”

Wyatt’s final months

Melissa Pickett had herself been the subject of DFPS investigations when she was raising Randall Pickett. Now she agreed to sign a safety plan with the department — a document outlining how she would keep the twins safe.

And there the investigation ended, per the agency’s 2020 policy change, because the family had not been given Family Preservation Services, and investigators could not convince department lawyers to go to court.

“Those are the scary cases,” Gushwa said. “We shouldn’t be closing those cases.”

She called the policy a “black hole” of bad outcomes.

“That’s why I retired,” Beyer said. “Because it goes back to me feeling like I wasn’t effective anymore. [The job] was becoming impossible.”

By February, Pickett and the twins had moved in with Crouch, sharing a trailer in Blessing, 90 minutes southwest of Houston. The violence against the twins escalated for months, Crouch would later say, leaving visible bruises on the toddlers.

“I couldn’t even go grocery shopping because I felt like people were looking at me because of the kids,” she said in a video interview with a Texas Ranger presented at her trial.

Pickett was hot-tempered, Crouch told police, flying off the handle over the smallest annoyance. Wyatt often provoked that annoyance.

Crouch’s attorneys called Pickett’s abuse the product of “blood lust.” They said the man admitted to police that he heard voices — ones that told him to hurt people.

But the boys loved their father, Crouch said, and sought him out after his overnight shifts at a plastics factory. Pickett did not return that affection, resenting them and responding to their pleas for paternal tenderness with slaps and shouts, she said.

Wyatt was undaunted and drew the most abuse, but his brother would sit quietly after being hit, afraid even to play, Crouch said. Pickett would encourage Crouch to hit the twins, she told the detective.

“Can you imagine a child so afraid to play?” Lindsay Deshotels, an assistant district attorney in Matagorda County, asked the jury at Crouch’s capital murder trial.

The day before his death, Pickett beat Wyatt repeatedly in a back room of the trailer, Crouch said, and she continued the mistreatment after he left for work.

Text messages between Crouch and Pickett show Wyatt wouldn’t go to sleep, even after she dosed him with melatonin, enough for a grown man.

Her texts then went from upset and annoyed to panicked. “I’m gonna end up locked up,” she wrote.

Prosecutors said Crouch had struck Wyatt so hard his adrenal gland burst, but he could have survived with medical attention. He bled from the mouth, unconscious, but his heart was beating, Crouch told the Ranger.

When Wyatt’s father returned home the next morning, he didn’t call the police. He didn’t go for help. He mowed the lawn and took a nap.

In the afternoon, more than 12 hours after Crouch said the boy lost consciousness, Pickett finally called 911. His son wasn’t breathing.

Paramedics found bruises on the toddler’s head and face and clusters of black bruises on his stomach and legs. His autopsy said blunt force trauma to the head and torso caused his death.

Crouch and Pickett were arrested and charged with capital murder.

“No child deserves to be beaten to death and then left in their crib to die a slow death while they mow the grass and take a nap and then finally decide there’s nothing left to do but call 911 because he’s dead,” Deshotels told jurors who convicted Crouch in October 2024.

She will spend the rest of her life in prison. Pickett pleaded guilty to murder and drew a life sentence.

“The system failed this child,” Deshotels said at the trial. “Anybody thinking, ‘where was CPS?’”

Multiple reports, multiple misses

Jessie Pickle suffered from severe intellectual disabilities that rendered him nonverbal, affected his ability to walk and delayed his toilet training.

But he could learn, and at age 10 he was in Bel Air Elementary School in Athens, about two hours southeast of Dallas.

Teachers said he was a joy to be around — silly, always smiling. He loved everybody. But he never seemed eager to go home.

“He would never want to get on the bus,” said Riley Milligan, one of Jessie’s teachers. “He would just lay down and would flop.”

Jessie lived with his two sisters, his father Sam and his stepmother Shonna.

Teachers, nurses and staff at Bel Air and other schools — many required by law to report suspected abuse — had repeatedly complained to the state that the kids showed up with bruises, were hungry and often had unchanged dirty diapers.

But teachers, including Kayla George, felt ignored. She taught Jessie’s sisters, and she told TPR that she made “hundreds of reports between 2017 and 2019” about what she was seeing.

Jessie Pickle

DFPS did investigate the family — seven times in six years — for abuse and neglect complaints. Shonna Pickle previously had been investigated a half-dozen times and had lost custody of her four biological children years before meeting Sam.

The allegations piled up, but DFPS never removed the children from the home. Pickle was one of more than 250 cases in TPR’s analysis where caregivers of a child who died of abuse or neglect had been investigated by the department three times or more.

Shonna Pickle was required to move out of the house for a time in 2016 when the agency determined she had abused Pickle’s older sister. Jessie’s father was an oil worker, and he was regularly gone. After the family completed Family Preservation Services, Shonna was allowed to return.

None of the six other DFPS investigations confirmed abuse or neglect in the Pickle household.

Milligan, the Bel Air teacher, said she and others continued to report the family. A bus driver saw Shonna Pickle slap Jessie repeatedly across the face, said a report obtained by TPR. Jessie continued to show up hungry at school.

“I would not have been able to sleep at night if those kids were on my caseload,” said Gushwa, the social work professor. “I would just go to my supervisor and say, ‘This is the hill we need to die on.’”

Jessie had sunken eyes, Milligan said. His weight fluctuated. He often had bruises on his arms and hands. She worried that his life was in danger.

“There were definitely days where we cried because we felt bad because we didn’t want to send him home,” she said.

Jesse’s father had installed video cameras in the home so he could observe his kids remotely from his job in the oil field.

On the morning of his death, video showed Jessie dragging himself out of bed at 5:30 a.m., clad in green camouflage shorts and a shirt, a state report said. He had been sick for two days, vomiting blood at times.

As the child struggled to crawl out of his room, Shonna picked him up and put him back in his bed. “Lay the fuck down and quit moving,” she said, insisting he go back to sleep.

Milligan said Jessie had learned American Sign Language at school. Now he used it to repeatedly ask for water. The DFPS fatality report said the video showed his stepmother refused to get him anything to drink.

After she left the room, the video showed, Jessie vomited blood on himself and on the bed. He hit the bed frame, made loud noises. He shook violently, said an arrest warrant affidavit.

Shonna Pickle didn’t return for hours, then called 911. EMS workers tried to revive the boy.

DFPS concluded her decision not to take Jessie to the doctor despite days of vomiting without eating directly led to his death. He died of pneumonia, with blood in his lungs, and dehydration played a contributing role, the autopsy said.

Shonna Pickle was arrested the following year for injury to a child. She declined to answer TPR’s request for comment, citing her upcoming trial.

After Jessie’s death, the state removed his two sisters from the home.

Unenforceable safety plans

Eddie Williams had a tough childhood and didn’t think much about having kids. He worried about being a dad — until his daughter A’Lona was born.

It was the first time he experienced unconditional love, Williams said. A’Lona loved singing songs from the movie Moana and the TV show Doc McStuffins, he recalled years later.

Williams said his 3-year-old could barely contain her excitement when she saw ice cream. And she loved to go for walks.

A’Lona Williams. Courtesy of Mikisha Vaughn

“She loved to start walks,” Williams said. “Then she would have me carry her the remainder, but again, it was just so much joy.”

Williams split up with A’Lona’s mother, Briaona Brown. A’Lona lived with her mother and two brothers, but he was still in her life, every other weekend.

Brown started dating a new man, Joshua Sargent, and after he moved in, Williams said, it became difficult to get time with his daughter. He had to go to court to get his visitation enforced.

Things improved for a while. Then he got a call in the middle of the night on June 23, 2018. Brown was crying and apologizing and told Williams to get to the hospital. A’Lona was gone.

He arrived at Memorial Hermann Hospital in downtown Houston, and a nurse led him to a small, cold room where his daughter lay on a gurney.

“All I could do is just hold her,” Williams said.

It was only later that he found out people had been calling the state for months reporting abuse concerns.

In the last months of her life, A’Lona was taken to the hospital at least three times. In January 2018 she was in the emergency room with a broken wrist. Her mother had waited days to address it.

Brown told DFPS that the girl broke her wrist at a trampoline park, the agency’s fatality report stated. She had told Williams that A’Lona had fallen off her bunk bed.

The hospital also noted belt mark bruises that Sargent would admit came from him disciplining her.

A’Lona was back in a hospital in February, which reported suspected abuse. Hospital staff made two more calls to DFPS in the months before her death, including Texas Children’s Hospital, reporting that she had a bruise on her face, one on her ear and a bruised knot the size of a lemon on her back.

A’Lona’s grandmother, Mikisha Vaughn, told TPR she also reported abuse to DFPS. “I believe they dropped the ball. You had a grandmother presenting you evidence,” Vaughn said. “I mean pictures, facts, statements, evidence, and they dropped the ball.”

DFPS investigators were so alarmed that they put A’Lona on a safety plan, with her mother volunteering to place her with relatives.

Williams said DFPS never asked about placing A’Lona with him and never told him about the abuse complaints or that she had been moved.

“I’m a biological father. Shouldn’t I be reached out to first?” he asked.

Safety plans are in many ways a promise to do better by families suspected or confirmed of abuse or neglect.

But the plans “have no teeth,” said Duke, the UT law clinic director who has seen many such documents. “It’s the honor system, right?”

They are not legally enforceable but are admissible in family court if the child is judged to be in “immediate danger.” They usually last 30 days and are, in the words of one former DFPS investigator, “only as good as the person you are making them with.”

From 2018 to 2023, more than 75 Texas children died within a year of being on a safety plan or dubbed in “immediate danger,” sometimes in the care of the same person who agreed to the plan.

They included:

• D’Money Lewis, 4, reported to DFPS for a large bruised knot over his eye. His family promised not to let his father care for him any longer and to make him move out of the home. But his father moved back in and was later charged with beating the boy to death.

• Khyree Johnson, an infant killed when one of his teenage parents rolled over on top of him in bed. The parents had already lost a child to a co-sleeping accident the year before, according to public documents. Hospital staff reported the parents co-sleeping shortly after Johnson’s birth, and they promised to stop.

• Another infant, Kentrell Hinton, born positive for marijuana. His parents both admitted to habitual use — his mother said she consumed it every day. Both were on drugs when he died in bed with them, 20 days after they signed a safety plan, according to DPFS documents.

A’Lona’s safety plan placed her with relatives of Sargent, both of whom had criminal records. It wasn’t clear from documents TPR reviewed if the state was verifying the girl was staying there.

It also appeared that Brown continued to keep A’Lona in her home with Sargent, violating the plan. That was where A’Lona was when she died.

The family reported they were all sleeping when the girl started throwing up. Police said Brown and Sargent told different stories about what happened. At some point the girl stopped breathing, and neither called 911.

Police were at their apartment complex at the time for a separate incident, and they did not request help. They said they attempted to do CPR until police left so they could take the child to the hospital.

The girl’s autopsy said she had new and old bruises, a liver laceration, vaginal trauma and a rectal tear indicative of sexual abuse. The girl began bleeding the night of her death, and it filled her abdomen with nearly a liter of blood.

Brown blamed a car accident the girl had been in with Williams a month prior but the autopsy found the trauma happened in the last day or two, the result of repeated blows rather than one accident.

Williams said there was nothing safe about the plan for his daughter. Had he known about any of the allegations, he said, he would have gone to court to get custody.

“There needs to be more inclusion, especially if there is a non-custodial parent in the picture,” he said.

Gushwa agreed that these were not appropriate interventions.

“With kids that young,” she said, “you err on the side of caution.”

Brown pleaded guilty to injury to a child, a first-degree felony, awaits sentencing and could face a life sentence.

Sargent was initially charged with murder. That was dismissed, and he pleaded guilty to third-degree injury to a child for another abuse incident. His lawyer said he had nothing to do with A’Lona’s death. Sargent faces up to 10 years in prison.

This series was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.

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