Pennsylvania: Former CPS Worker Charged With Human Trafficking
With all of the reporting coming out in recent days concerning Child Protective Services (CPS), it’s no wonder that this has occurred. The only question that remains is: Why have not countless hundreds, or even thousands, also been charged? Yet, an ex-CPS social worker is now facing charges of human trafficking after recruiting a mother who was her client into prostitution in exchange for a favorable custody recommendation, according to authorities.
Candace Talley, 27, Winslow, NJ charged with 2 counts of human trafficking, promoting prostitution, making threats and other charges.
Candace Talley, 27, of Winslow, New Jersey, was working for the Division of Children and Youth Services in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, when she coerced the mother, whose children were in foster care and whose case Talley was managing, into working as a prostitute, the Delaware County District Attorney’s office announced Thursday.
Talley drove the woman to and from jobs and took more than 25% of the money that was made, authorities said. Talley also promised the woman she would help falsify her drug test results to help her case. Talley was part of an “extensive prostitution ring,” the district attorney’s office said in a press release.
Talley was arrested Thursday and charged with two counts of human trafficking for financial gain, promoting prostitution, making threats and other related charges.
That’s not all, CPS has also worked hand in glove with Planned Parenthood to not only kidnap kids from loving homes but blackmail pregnant mothers to murder their unborn children in order to get their children back that CPS kidnapped from them; and those that refused were told that once they gave birth, CPS would be there to kidnap that child from them too.
CPS also failed to return children they kidnapped from mothers who chose abortion to get their kids back.
10 children taken from Fairfield home, Dad charged with torture
FAIRFIELD, CA – Fairfield police said they rescued ten children found living in squalor and arrested their parents.
Jonathan Allen, a father of eight of the children, was charged with seven counts of torture and nine counts of felony child abuse, by the Solano County District Attorney’s Office. Police believe more charges could be filed as the investigation continues.
Ina Rogers, 30
Fairfield Police Department Lt. Greg Hurlbut said the children were living in unsafe living conditions. Responding officers found spoiled food, as well as animal and human feces on the floor. There was so much debris that some areas of the home were inaccessible, according to Hurlbut.
Investigators believe nine of the 10 children were abused. In interviews the children described incidents of intentional abuse resulting in puncture wounds, burns, bruising and injuries consistent with being shot with a BB gun or pellet gun.
“I have not had a case where we charge someone with torture of their own children if that tells you something. I’ve been in law enforcement since… well… more than 30 years ago,” said Hurlbut.
The Solano County District Attorney’s Office described this type of crime of torture as inflicting pain with the intent to cause cruel and extreme pain and suffering, and in this instance, for a sadistic purpose.
But the children’s mother said it’s all a big misunderstanding.
Officers responded to the home and discovered the apparent abuse when the children’s mother, Ina Rogers, called 911 on March 31.
Rogers told KTVU she called 911 after her 12-year-old son went for a walk and didn’t return home. She said her son was upset when she took his iPad away because he didn’t do one of his chores.
Fairfield police located the boy asleep under a bush and returned him to the family home in the 2200 block of Fieldstone Court. Officers said they conducted a search of the home due to concerns for the safety and health of the child and the child’s siblings.
During the search officers located nine more children, ranging in age from 4 months to 11-years-old. Officers said the children were living in squalor and unsafe conditions.
Rogers said the home’s condition was a result of her “tearing up” the house because her son was missing. “I was afraid that I could not find him. Once that fear sets in, you don’t know what to do so in that moment,” she said. “I tore up my house, I lifted up beds, I ripped things out of the closet, I completely tore up everything to make sure that he really wasn’t here.”
Rogers, a 30-year-old Fairfield resident, was arrested and booked into Solano County Jail for child neglect. All ten children were taken into protective custody by Solano County Child Welfare Services. According to Rogers, the children are now staying with family members.
Investigators from Child Welfare Services, Solano County District Attorney’s Office, Fairfield Police Department’s Family Violence Unit allege there has been a long and continuous history of severe physical and emotional abuse of the children.
Rogers denies any abuse, neglect or torture by her or her husband Jonathan Allen. “I am 30-years-old and I have 11 children and also homeschool all of my children and people don’t agree with that lifestyle. And so I’ve had many people question my right to parent and I feel this whole situation has exploded.”
Ina Rogers denies any abuse, neglect or torture by her or her husband Jonathan Allen. @FairfieldPolice say 10 of her 11 kids were living in squalor & unsafe conditions. The couple have 8 biological children together. 5,6p @KTVU pic.twitter.com/qQMwiWDar0— Henry K. Lee (@henrykleeKTVU) May 14, 2018
On May 11, detectives with the Fairfield Police Department arrested Jonathan Allen, a 29-year-old Fairfield resident. He was booked into the Solano County Jail for nine counts of felony torture and six counts of felony child abuse. Eight of the ten children are Rogers’ and Allen’s biological children. Rogers has 3 older children from a previous relationship. Her oldest child, who is 14, does not live in the home and was not taken by Child Welfare Services.
“This is absolutely appalling to me. I strive and I pride myself on being a good parent to my children, My husband has a lot of tattoos. He looks like a scary individual and that’s why people are so quick to judge him. My husband is an amazing person and I am an amazing mother. I am not going to allow this to break us and I am not going to stop fighting,” Rogers said.
Allen is due back in court May 24th.
Anyone with information on the case is asked to contact the Fairfield Police Department.
James Koppel, Minnesota Department of Human Services.
Child Abuse reports soar across Minnesota, straining child protection system
State reports 25 percent rise, marking 2nd straight year of sharp increases.
A dramatic surge in child maltreatment reports is putting new strains on Minnesota’s child protection system, as local agencies struggle with soaring caseloads and stagnant funding, according to state and county officials.
Maltreatment reports to county and tribal governments rose 25 percent last year, with 39,531 children suspected of being abused and neglected, according to state data released Tuesday. This marks the second straight year of sharp increases since outrage over the death of 4-year-old Eric Dean at the hands of his abusive stepmother sparked far-reaching reforms of the child protection system.
State and county officials attribute the surge to greater publicity surrounding child abuse among mandated reporters — people who are required under state law to report maltreatment — as well as an increase in neglect fueled by the epidemic of prescription drug abuse.
All told, 26 Minnesota children died from maltreatment last year, the highest level in five years. Seven of the children were known to child protection workers before their deaths, state officials said.
“This reflects that we have a lot of families across this state that are under stress,” said James Koppel, assistant commissioner for children and family services at the Minnesota Department of Human Services. “We have to deal with this problem head-on.”
But across much of the state, local funding for child protection has not kept pace with the rise in abuse and neglect reports, resulting in virtually unmanageable caseloads for many social workers. In some Minnesota counties, the average caseload has reached nearly 30 cases per child-protection worker — three times the standard set by Gov. Mark Dayton’s 2015 task force on child protection.
One consequence, say county administrators, is higher turnover of child protection workers, who are feeling emotionally drained.
“We have never experienced anything quite like this,” said Paul Fleissner, director of community services at Olmsted County, which includes Rochester. “The intensity and scrutiny involved with this work can be overwhelming … and we haven’t seen this level of [staff] turnover in a very long time.”
The combination of rising child deaths and climbing caseloads has prompted state and county agencies to put a greater emphasis on abuse prevention. The Department of Human Services is pushing a package of initiatives in the 2017 Legislature aimed at improving stability for children from troubled homes. It includes increased state benefits for children under age 6 who are adopted out of foster care, and a proposal to expand the state’s capacity to monitor local child protection agencies.
Together the proposals would cost about $20 million in the coming biennium, but are not included in the spending bills making their way through the Republican-controlled Legislature. “The system we have is not preventing. It’s responding,” Koppel said. “We absolutely have to put more of an emphasis on prevention.”
In Hennepin County, where reports of child abuse and neglect have nearly doubled since 2009, administrators are not waiting for state help. Last year, the county embarked on an ambitious $13 million overhaul of the county child protection system. As part of the effort, the county is hiring 108 child protection staff and investing millions of dollars in mental health and child care assistance programs aimed at preventing abuse.
Even with these investments, the county is struggling with high staff turnover and excessive caseloads for child-protection workers, said deputy Hennepin County administrator Jennifer DeCubellis, who oversees child protection. “Incrementally, the system is in crisis,” she said. “But we can’t regulate our way out of this. We need to shrink the size of child protection by investing in children and communities.”
My post on January 30, 2016 had a dead link, and I already knew this was one I enjoyed, because Senator John McCain got so upset with Mark Greenberg and CPS, that he walked out of the bipartisan congressional investigation. The article led the reader to believe that possibly 10 – 30 Children were “missing”, when the link was fixed that number had grown to 90,000+ Children.
Lawmakers say Obama administration delivered
illegal immigrant children to predators
The Obama administration sent illegal immigrant children into “modern-day slavery” by turning them over to sponsors who forced them into child labor or subjected them to sexual abuse, members of Congress said Thursday as they demanded that top child protection officials explain how it could have happened.
Social workers don’t verify all sponsors’ identities, don’t make site visits to see the conditions they’re sending the children to, don’t insist on follow-up visits to see how the kids are doing and don’t consider serious criminal records — including child sex charges — automatic disqualification for hosting a child, congressional investigators said.
As a result, the government delivered children into the hands of what amounted to sexual predators or abusers or placed them into abject poverty, investigators detailed in a report about malfeasance at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
One girl was sent to live with a man who claimed he was her cousin and who had paid to smuggle her into the U.S. It turned out he wasn’t related at all, but instead had paid to bring the girl — with her mother’s encouragement — on the understanding that she would become his wife. She became uncomfortable with their sexual relationship, came forward to report the real story and was taken into child protective services.
In another case, a boy was turned over to a man who posed as a relative, but was in fact connected to smugglers who forced the child to work almost 12 hours a day to pay off the $6,500 his mother gave to smuggle him into the U.S., congressional investigators said. That situation is so prevalent it has earned a name: debt labor.
Worse yet, the administration acknowledged that it can’t account for each of the 90,000 children it processed and released since the surge peaked in 2014.
“It sounds like everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” said Sen. Rob Portman, chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which conducted a six-month investigation into the government’s handling of the tens of thousands of children who have poured across the border in the past few years.
Mark Greenberg, acting assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, the HHS agency that oversees the handling of the children, stumbled for answers during a two-hour grilling, but said his officers were only following their policies.
He insisted that if there was a fault, it lay with Congress, who needed to rewrite the laws if it wanted his social workers to do more to keep children safe.
“What we’re talking about today is our understanding under the law,” he said.
The Obama administration admits it was overwhelmed when unaccompanied children — those sent on the treacherous journey north without a parent or guardian in tow — streamed across the border at the rate of more than 10,000 a month during the peak in the summer of 2014.
Local communities waged “not in my backyard” campaigns to keep the children from being housed at facilities near them, so the administration looked to quickly process and release the kids. Part of that meant relaxing the checks that were performed.
The Washington Times reported in July 2014, at the height of the surge, that advocates predicted children would be sent to unsafe homes, with one group estimating that as many as 10 percent of the children were being sent to live in unacceptable or dangerous conditions.
But 18 months on, the Obama administration has yet to revoke a single sponsor’s custody agreement, with the administration saying once it has placed a child in the hands of a sponsor — either a relative, family friend or someone else — they no longer have control.
If a sponsor refuses to answer questions and shuts the door in the face of a social worker, there’s nothing the administration can do, Mr. Greenberg told the Senate panel.
“Our view that we don’t have continuing custody after we release a child is a long-standing view,” he said. “If this is an area where Congress wants the law to be different, Congress should change the law.”
HHS did not disqualify families even if the sponsor was an illegal immigrant in danger of being deported himself.
Home visits are made in just 4 percent of the tens of thousands of cases, and it wasn’t until earlier this week — years into the unaccompanied minor crisis — that HHS adopted a new policy preventing children from being shipped to homes where someone has been convicted of a sex crime.
“We’re talking about felony convictions for child abuse. Hello?” said a frustrated Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat.
About 90 percent of the children were sent to live with parents or close relatives, but that left thousands who were placed with other sponsors — often people claiming to be family friends.
The subcommittee investigation found some sponsors tried to claim multiple children, and some addresses were repeatedly listed on sponsorship forms, suggesting that government officials should have spotted something wrong.
In the worst public case so far, investigators said human traffickers used the government’s placement program to sneak kids from Guatemala to the U.S., where HHS processed them at the border, then delivered them to supposed family friends. But the friends turned out to be sponsors-for-hire who, as soon as they collected the kids from HHS, turned them over to the traffickers who were running an egg farm in Marion County, Ohio, and needed the children for cheap labor.
The children were forced to work 12-hour days, six or seven days a week, and lived together in a dilapidated trailer. The traffickers withheld paychecks and threatened their families back home in Guatemala to intimidate the children, Mr. Portman said.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard. But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers,” he said.
Grieving Grandfather seeks Trump’s ear on
Child Abuse
ROCHESTER, NY – John Geer is a desperate man.
Reeling from grief after his 3-year-old granddaughter Brook Stagles died last month from injuries sustained in a beating that allegedly came at the hands of her father’s girlfriend, Geer has found his mission: raising awareness of child abuse and the pressures faced by the often undermanned, overburdened agencies responsible for protecting the most vulnerable.
And he’s trying to get the attention of a significantly higher power: President-elect Donald J. Trump.
To that end, Geer, a 46-year-old small business owner from Irondequoit, has sunk nearly $100,000 into buying billboards around the country that will deliver his message, “Don’t let children die from child abuse … like Brook Stagles.” The billboards have already gone live in Chicago, Cleveland and Allentown, Pa. More are coming Monday, in cities that include Philadelphia; Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville, Fla.; and Myrtle Beach, S.C. Another will be erected that day in Henrietta.
He’s also purchased the domain name trumpforchildren.com and set that up with a website that details his efforts.
“I want the system fixed,” said Geer. “And I have to make something happen. This needs to be in the national spotlight, that’s why I want Trump to look at it. This is nationwide and we need real reform.”
In the days since Brook died, Geer — whose daughter Ashley is Brook’s mother — has busied himself reading news stories online about children who have died as a result of neglect or abuse. He’s found it overwhelming.
“There are so many cases, so many of these scenarios and it’s happening everywhere,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing and I was so blind to all of this before.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data, state and local child protective services across the country received an estimated 3.4 million referrals of children being abused or neglected in 2012. Of those, an estimated 686,000 children were victims of maltreatment, and 18% of those were victims of physical abuse. The agency estimates roughly 1,640 children in the United States died from maltreatment that same year.
Brook’s father, Michael Stagles, and his girlfriend Erica Bell face criminal charges in connection with the girl’s death. Bell has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter, while Stagles has been charged with criminally negligent homicide. Trials for both have been scheduled to begin May 15.
Prosecutors have not given specifics about Brook’s death, but Michael Stagles is accused of failing to get medical help for his injured daughter; while Bell is accused of acting with “depraved indifference to human life” and engaging in “conduct which created a grave risk of serious injury or death to Brook Stagles, a person less than 11 years old, and caused her death.” The conduct is alleged to have occurred between Nov. 9 and Nov. 12.
Brook died Nov. 14 after being hospitalized the night of Nov. 13. Her death was ruled a homicide four days later.
Geer said Brook’s injuries were so severe that family members were asked at the hospital if the girl had been in a car accident, and Assistant District Attorney Sara Van Strydonck has said Brook was “bruised from head to toe.”
Geer said his granddaughter died of sepsis caused by a ruptured intestine.
Turning to Trump
He said he and other family members contacted Monroe County’s Child Protective Services in September to report that they believed Brook was being abused. Geer’s daughter Ashley and Michael Stagles had ended their long relationship earlier in the summer, but continued to amicably share custody. It was after Stagles began dating Bell in late August or early September that family started to notice unexplained bruises and marks on the girl, Geer said.
He said the response from CPS was inadequate and too slow to save his granddaughter.
In a written statement, Department of Human Services Commissioner Corinda Crossdale has said, “As a community, our hearts are heavy at the loss of any child. Unfortunately, the Department of Human Services cannot discuss any case under investigation.”
A staunch Trump supporter, Geer is hopeful the president-elect will hear of his campaign.
“The whole family is big on helping kids,” he said, noting the Eric Trump Foundation and its work raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. With Eric Trump deciding earlier this month to stop directly soliciting contributions for the charity, due to the possibility that donors could try to use him for access to his father, Geer said child abuse prevention and child protective services reform could become a new banner for the Trump family to carry.
In addition to the billboards, Geer is looking at buying advertising on the sides of buses that would run near Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 in Washington, D.C. He also has $150,000 he says he’s willing to provide the president-elect to be used for any purpose if Trump would just give him 10 minutes of time on the phone.
“This is what I need to do, I need to get this to Trump,” said Geer. “Once I know he knows what’s happening, I’m going to have a million pounds lifted off of my shoulders.”
My Brother's Keeper 