MAINE, USA — For months now, state leaders have been taking a closer look at how state agencies are handling child and family services, specifically cases from 2021 where children were killed at the hands of one of their own parents.
The Government Oversight Committee requested the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability (OPEGA) to review documents from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Office of Child and Family Services in the deaths of Jaden Harding, Hailey Goding, Maddox Williams, and Sylus Melvin.
On Wednesday, the Government Oversight Committee held a public hearing reviewing the OPEGA report detailing state agencies’ involvement with six-week-old Jaden Harding’s family prior to his death.
"The questions remain: how do we prevent the deaths of children and how do we give children like Jaden's siblings safety and stability?" Child Welfare Ombudsman for Maine Christine Alberi said.
According to the report, there were failures in the state’s handling of child safety reports involving Jaden’s older siblings for years prior to his birth. Jaden’s mother, Kayla Hartley had been involved with Child Protective Services since 2014 when her newborn may had been exposed to substances prenatally, the report states.
Since 2014, Hartley has reportedly been involved with more than a dozen reports of abuse and neglect involving her other children and former partner.
Jaden Harding was born in April 2021, and CPS did not check in with the family until they received a hospital report stating Jaden had been brought to the emergency room unresponsive, the report states.
Prior to his death, the most recent contact CPS made with the family was in November 2020.
In March, a jury found Ronald Harding guilty of manslaughter in Jaden's death by violently shaking the baby, which caused a stroke.
"As tragic as these deaths are is what makes it worse, is they didn't have to happen," Bill Diamond, a former state senator who has been a child welfare advocate for several years, said. "The system has the morale broken. I think the culture there basically is broken."
This report on Jaden's death is the third of four 2021 child death reviews OPEGA has reviewed.
The agency and Government Oversight Committee said the goal of reviewing these cases is to see where CPS went wrong and how to instill new procedure to prevent incidents like these from happening again.