Author’s note – this reporting contains descriptions of child abuse and horrendous crimes.
Multiple missed reports to CPS before the murder of five children in Greenbrier County and a 27 percent employment vacancy rate in West Virginia’s Child Protective Services (CPS) were presented to the Senate Joint Committee on Children and Families on Tuesday, December 7.
The Senate committee was joined by several speakers, including Commissioner Jeffrey Pack of the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Greenbrier County residents Sarah Peters and Mike Spradlin, Lieutenant Colonel David Nelson, and Centralized Intake Director for CPS, Rebecca Carson.
Pack’s testimony brought a startling number for the committee to consider – a 27 percent vacancy rate in West Virginia’s Child Protective Services.
“When you’re up over 40 percent [vacancies], you’re in trouble. Hampshire, Hardy, and Pendleton [counties] are at 50 percent. They’re missing half of their work force due to vacancies. Just to think about what that means, if you’re a CPS worker. … Ordinarily, you would have 12 cases. Well, now you’ve got 24.”
The numbers across the entire agency are near Pack’s “trouble” rate.
“We have a 33 percent vacancy in our adoption unit [and] a 29 percent vacancy rate in our home finding unit,” Pack said. “Our crisis unit does not have any vacancies. … Additionally, below that, you’ll see that we have a 15 percent vacancy rate with centralized intake.”
Vacancies lead to short staffing, which leads to increased individual case loads, which can lead to mistakes, misreporting, and missed chances to help children in need.
Sarah Peters spoke of her missed CPS report remotely during the hearing. |
One example was presented by Sarah Peters, a dental hygienist at Greenbrier Valley Pediatric Dentistry. Peters attempted to make a CPS call in a high-profile Greenbrier County homicide case.
“I had a patient in the chair and I noticed a large bruise knot on [the child’s] arm,” Peters said. “I took a photo of that. At the end of the day, I called the CPS hotline. I was asked a few questions, such as the patient’s address, siblings that I thought lived there, the parents’ address, and a few things. Then she asked me a few questions about why I was calling. I told her I had a photograph, the child seemed super scared of his dad. We also witnessed the dad in the parking lot being verbally abusive to the smaller child. … I was not through with my description and she never asked for the photograph. She just abruptly said, ‘I think I have all the information I need, thank you,’ and the call ended. That was on August the 10th. … There was no investigation done and [a letter was] mailed to me [saying] the information does not meet a legal definition of abused or neglected child, so it was not looked into at all.”
Committee member and Greenbrier County Senator Stephen Baldwin asked several follow up questions after Peters spoke.
“You’ve worked at the dental office there for 11 years, is that correct? [Peters confirmed.] In those 11 years, how many referrals to the CPS hotline have you made?”
“I’ve personally made two,” Peters answered. “The doctor has made one.”
“You were never interviewed by law enforcement, you were never interviewed by CPS?” Baldwin continued.
“No,” Peters said.
“Five children, including the one you made the referral on, were murdered later that year, is that correct?” Baldwin asked.
“Yes, that is correct,” Peters said.
On Tuesday, December 8, 2020, at approximately 3:30 p.m., members of the Greenbrier County Sheriff’s Office and the West Virginia State Police responded to a residential house fire on Flynn’s Creek Road near Williamsburg. What they found was explained on January 21, 2021, by Greenbrier County Sheriff Bruce Sloan after an investigation.
“All five children were accounted for,” Sloan said. “Our moral fabric finds it unconscionable that a mother could take their child’s lives,” Sloan said. “… Through all the facts and evidence, that’s what we concluded did occur on December 8.”
Oreanna Antionette Myers, age 25, of Williamsburg, was confirmed as the shooter, killing five children, aged 7, 6, 4, 3 and 1. Myers was the biological mother of three of the children, while her husband, Brian Bumgarner, was the father of two, through his ex-wife.
The child Peters reported to CPS was one of the five children killed on December 8.
This was not the only time the case was reported. Mike Spradlin spoke with several individuals close to the children, looking to confirm rumors that CPS had been notified.
“I knew that that woman didn’t wake up one day and decide to kill those kids,” said Spradlin. “I knew there had to be a history of that. … I go to Raven, the mother of [two of the] children. I sat down for hours and hours with her. Now she’s got her own problems, [but] there’s not drugs or not alcohol. … She was sharing custody with her husband. … She had lost custody of those kids for a couple months. … She was at work and she had a boyfriend after the divorce. … He’s playing a video game or whatever he’s doing, and the child gets out in the driveway. CPS is called, they take the child from her for a couple of months, then they’re given back. … She names names for who she talked to [when she had concerns over Myers and Bumgarner], specifically her case workers. [There] was an allegation that she told a CPS worker and [they responded] ‘I can’t do anything about it, you’ve gotta call the 1-800 number, we can’t get involved.’ … Raven says she called the [CPS] 800 number.”
According to Spradlin, her concern emerged from a specific incident.
“In talking with her, I found out that [one of the children] had supposedly fallen down the steps where [they were] later murdered. That was the story that dad gave, he wasn’t even there. They take the child to the emergency room. There’s stitches and the tooth is knocked out. … Later on the little [child] says Oreo pushed me down the steps. [They] couldn’t say Oreanna, [they] said Oreo, pushed me down the steps. Raven confronts [Myers and Bumgarner] out there. They beat her up.”
In response to the alleged attack, police are called, and another report to CPS is made.
“She gets beat up and there’s a police report, a written arrest report,” Spradlin continues. “The trooper goes out there, arrests Oreanna after an investigation. He refers that to … local CPS, saying that these kids are witnessing violence in their home.”
Spradlin then pointed to an alleged report made by the children’s uncle.
“The boy’s uncle, his name is Tyler Frisbie, that’s Raven’s brother,” Spradlin said. “They say they grew up in that world and that system, they were taken out of a home as well. On May 10, he says he goes down to the local CPS, [and he] says ‘what are you going to do about my nephew’s tooth being knocked out?’ … I don’t have any paperwork where it was reported and then came back down saying it’s not consistent with child abuse. I don’t have that, I’m taking his word for it. He’s got me convinced.”
“Excuse me,” said Mike Spradlin as his voice cracked with emotion. “I’ve got grandkids that age.” |
Then Spradlin returned to Peters.
“That takes us up to August 10, when the little kid goes into [the doctor’s] and [Peters’ testimony]. … Then, almost four months of the day, they’re murdered. The way they’re murdered, I can tell you if you want to hear it, but it’s on the internet, you can read it for yourself. What’s important is, one year ago today, [several of the children’s father] Brian Bumgarner calls 911 and says ‘can you do a safety check on my family, Oreanna is sending me some weird text messages.’”
Spradlin explained that after he spoke with several people claiming they made reports, he brought the information to Baldwin, which resulted in him speaking at the hearing.
“I’m not here to throw rocks at CPS,” Spradlin said. “My daughter worked for CPS. But we’ve got to know what probable cause is. … If this would have been someone showing up at a police station with [the bruises], that would have been probable cause to proceed. We just want answers. We want an explanation. Whatever that explanation is, we can live with it, and we’ll improve the system. I want to thank Mr. Baldwin.”
Rebecca Carson, the Centralized Intake Director for CPS, spoke to how calls are currently handled after Peters and Spradlin’s testimony.
“Our headquarters is in Fairmont and we also have a secondary site in Kanawha County,” said Carson. “[Agents at both sites] take referrals 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The call center, of course, does the job of moving the call to the next available operator. … Every agent answering the CPS, APS, law enforcement [calls] are licensed social workers in West Virginia. They’ve had at least a 16 week training course in child welfare and DHHR policies and protocols, just as our field workers do. They shadow CPS workers in the field to see what the outcome of their report later turns out to be. They are bound by the same guidelines and ethics and responsibilities of all social workers in the state. Each of them are performing interviews, … as the call comes in. … We have somewhat of a template and a script for them to follow, but every situation is different. You have to follow facts or allegations down a path that may not have actually been on the script.”
Carson, noting that intake was formed in 2015 and has “evolved over the last couple of years,” explained that a call review process is in place.
“If we screened out a CPS or an APS referral, the next day, in the morning, a CPS supervisor peer reviews [50% of all screened out referrals] those to see if they agree with those decisions,” Carson said. “If the decisions were not agreed with, it goes up a level to a social service coordinator, or myself if he’s not available. … Those kind of checks and balances are not 100% foolproof, but they are in place so that we don’t make the catastrophic mistake, or even a small one, we don’t want to leave any kid or a vulnerable adult in an unsafe situation. … As of October of 2021, record every phone call that comes to centralized intake. If we have a complaint about how a caller was handled, or that information wasn’t properly gathered, we can review that entire recording and act accordingly.”
Centralized Intake Director for CPS, Rebecca Carson |
Carson also cited a study from the Federal Capacity Center for children, where the approximately 20,000 calls into central intake were analyzed. Of these calls, 0.07 percent were “screened out at centralized intake,” then “within 121 days, they came back,” resulting in “an open case or CPS findings.”
“They indicated that’s consistent with the other states they’ve performed this study in,” Carson said. “There’s humans involved in all all steps of [intake], so it is kind of consistent nationwide with what they’re seeing. That might be relevant to consider as well.”
The committee ran out of time before follow up questions about centralized intake could be answered.
Lieutenant Colonel David Nelson of the West Virginia State Police also testified, explaining that “today we had a senior staff meeting and asked the captains if we still had the problem going on.” Nelson said that, of those that answered, the answer was yes.
After the hearing, Baldwin made several statements relating to the information presented, one of which pointed to a potential root cause for the issues at CPS.
“We do not truly value our child and adult protective service workers,” Baldwin wrote. “They are underpaid, overworked, and under-resourced. They are put in an impossible position by a system that is overwhelmed. … A worker is regularly responsible for dozens upon dozens of children at the same time who all have serious needs. If we are going to fix the system, we must value the people charged with such important work by compensating them, resourcing them, appreciating them, and employing enough people to make caseloads manageable. We must also get at the root issues which drive an immense amount of need – substance abuse and poverty.”
Although human error was pointed to as a factor in how the reports were missed, the vacancy rate was also highlighted by the hearing. As of October 2021, according to the information provided by Pack, the statewide vacancy rate for CPS was 27 percent. More specifically:
– In centralized intake, the 15 percent vacancy rate translates to 61 total positions and nine vacancies.
– In adoption, there are 49 total positions, including seven supervisors, with 15 vacancies, including one supervisor.
– In homefinding, there are 45 total positions, 11 vacant, and seven filled supervisor positions.
– Although the crisis response team is full, there are a total of 12 positions in this unit for the state, with coverage areas varying.
The average salaries of the workers were presented during the hearing.
– For the 119 Child Protective Services Worker Trainees, the average salary is $30,913.25.
– For the 277 Child Protective Services Workers, the average salary is $39,315.36.
– For the 47 Child Protective Service Senior Workers, the average salary is $44,315.27.
– For the 103 Child Protective Services Supervisors, the average salary is $48,890.84.
“I would encourage you to consider, when you’re thinking about what the folks make, because of vacancy rate, they work a lot of overtime,” Pack said. “If you ask a CPS worker, what did you make last year, they … may say, ‘well I made $42,000,’ but $9,000 of that might have been over time.”
In Judicial District 11, including Greenbrier and Pocahontas counties, the average CPS case backlog count is 19.29. This includes data from from January 2020, with 18 backlogged cases, to October 2021, with 37 backlogged cases.
Commissioner Jeffrey Pack of the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources |
After giving the CPS vacancy numbers, but before Peters’ and Spradlin’s testimony, Pack asserted he did “not know” the system could be “broken.”
“The last thing I’ll say is this – people ask me all the time … how [we’re] gonna fix it. First of all, I don’t know that it’s broken. I know everybody’s like wait a minute, what are you talking about? There are counties that do this well. … Some counties do this really well, other counties struggle. What I’m trying to do is identify things that they do well in the counties that succeed and [ask] how can we duplicate this? … Raleigh County is phenomenal. If you look at their metrics on your own time, you’ll see that they just knock it out of the park, every single month. So this is doable. We just need to arrive at a point where we can have the focus to do it.”
Baldwin disagreed with Pack in a statement made after the hearing.
“Tragedy doesn’t begin to describe what happened to those five children in Williamsburg last year. It rocked our community to the core. I’ve never seen first responders have to deal with something so heinous. When I heard calls had been made to the CPS hotline but those calls were never referred to the local CPS office or local law enforcement, my heart broke all over again like it did when the kids died. We had a chance for those kids to have a different life if those calls had gotten through. At least one came from a trusted medical professional and should’ve been acted upon immediately.
“I asked for the hearing today not to dwell on the past but to learn from it. We have to understand what went wrong in order to get it right next time. We can’t let what happened to those children happen again. The intake system is broken, and it must change. Today was a first step at bringing all the parties together. We will continue that process next month and move towards adopting legislation.”
The three-hour hearing can be found at wvlegislature.gov by clicking “Streaming Audio and Video” in the lower left-hand corner.
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