Jemiere Robinson’s murder is one of the most horrific child deaths King County prosecutors have ever seen. But being an outlier doesn’t mean the case of a 14-year-old apparently tortured to death by his own mother has no lessons to offer about holes in our child welfare system that threaten many more kids.
Last year’s fatal stabbing of 4-year-old Ariel Garcia at the hands of his mom also points to a serious, correctable, deficiency.
Both of these stories — much easier to ignore than confront — suggest a failure in connecting the dots between seemingly isolated incidents. As one veteran child abuse investigator put it to me: “If you’re going to kill a kid by beating them, you’ve beaten them before.”
First, some context: Washington’s child welfare agency has been the subject of numerous lawsuits over the years, and in response, our state has mounted major reforms. Generally, they aim to take fewer children into foster care. Over the past six years, the number of kids in care has been cut by half, driven by a new state law that raises the bar on criteria for removing them from their parents.
In theory, that could be a good thing. Overall, foster care is bad for kids — just look at the off-the-charts rates of homelessness and incarceration among former foster youth — even if they land in relatively benign placements.
As an alternative, many more families are being channeled away from child abuse investigations and toward a voluntary program known as the Family Assessment Response, where caseworkers have three days to make an appointment with parents and offer assistance.
But when a family is reported again and again, that’s a history that makes a pattern, even if each referral doesn’t merit much urgency on its own.
This is what happened when grandmother Maria Garcia called Child Protective Services last March and said her daughter Janet, a mother to two boys, was “acting crazy,” and hitting the younger child, 4-year-old Ariel.
Her concerns were viewed neither as evidence of abuse nor an indicator of imminent physical harm. The following day, police called CPS intake workers with another report. This time, the case was referred for a family assessment. A few hours later, a nurse called with her own observations, which also merited a family assessment.
That is now three reports on a family from three different people, within two days. Meanwhile, when CPS staff received the written police record, they noticed details that had been missed before. Result? One more referral for a family assessment, which — to reiterate — is voluntary. No parent is required to participate.
Ariel’s mother never did. The following afternoon, four days after Maria Garcia’s first frantic plea for help, Ariel’s mom showed up at a hospital with blood on her clothes. Ariel was found later that afternoon by a fence near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, stabbed to death, according to a Child Fatality Review. His mother, charged with murder, has pleaded not guilty.
Last year, only 30% of the nearly 135,000 calls to state CPS were screened in for some sort of agency response, and half of them were referred to the less urgent family assessment system, rather than a child abuse investigation. No wonder. The worker assigned to the Garcias was drowning under twice the number of open cases recommended for good practice.
But even within the tightly compressed timeline of this tragedy, there was a pattern, a cluster of reports that, arguably, should have triggered more red flags.
That brings us to Jemiere Robinson and his mother, Denaya Young, where the history of reports and alleged abuse goes back years.
Jemiere’s mother said so herself.
“I cut his ass a little too hard,” she explained when officers arrived at her Beacon Hill home on Jan. 30, after she’d told her boyfriend to call 911.
Young said she’d become so enraged at her son for failing to do his chores that she beat him with the type of thick, round extension cord usually used to connect computers. This assault went on for three hours, Young told police, until Jemiere collapsed on the kitchen floor and stopped breathing.
The medical examiner found so many lacerations on the boy — 1,172, covering every inch of his body — that he determined the child’s heart gave out trying to pump blood to the affected areas. There were older injuries too.
“It’s a recurring thing,” Young said, according to court records. “I let my anger get the best of me with the extension cord.” It had been more than a month “since the last ass-cutting,” she noted.
We don’t see many of these cases in Washington. But Jemiere’s death was absolutely preventable. Two states could have saved him. First off: Denaya Young, who gave birth to Jemiere when she was just 14, had turned her son over to a great aunt in South Carolina when the child was just a baby. The courts finalized that arrangement in 2022, which means officials knew his mother could not care for him.
He arrived here last summer, purportedly for a three-week visit. But Young never returned him to his great aunt. Instead, she enrolled Jemiere in a home schooling program, prosecutors say, preventing schoolteachers from ever laying eyes on him.
It should never have gotten that far. Washington state knew Young was a potential danger to her kids back in December 2021, after her own sister petitioned Pierce County for an order of protection against her.
“She is a very unfit mother and needs anger management. She is always yelling and screaming at her kids. They eat only 2/3 times per day,” Young’s sister told the court. “She gets upset when people offer her a hand with anything — kids, life, just support. She feels like it’s a threat to ask if she is okay today after yelling and hitting her young children in my home.”
She noted that Young had “an active foster care case” in South Carolina and a long history of “domestic violence and suicide attempts.”
This is the point where a flag should have been triggered, notifying Child Protective Services. Perhaps one was. The Department of Children, Youth and Families won’t discuss the matter, citing privacy concerns.
But patterns will out. Prosecutors say that in 2023, CPS received yet another report about Young’s family, this time claiming that one of Jemiere’s little sisters was being mistreated. The allegation was ruled “unfounded,” which means an intake worker deemed it serious enough to investigate, but — for whatever reason — another worker determined there wasn’t evidence of imminent harm.
Step back, squint and a picture coalesces: The foster care case in South Carolina. The order of protection in 2021. The CPS referral two years ago. Again, DCYF won’t discuss the details.
How many times has this story been written? Back in the early 2000s, child deaths routinely prompted news conferences, pronouncements from the governor’s office and exhaustive reports. Not these days.
But who does all the quiet protect? Certainly not Jemiere or Ariel. Conceivably, it shields their mothers, though with both now charged as murderers their lives will soon be exposed to every kind of scrutiny.
The main beneficiary, it seems, is the Department of Children, Youth and Families.
