Audits reveal failure to coordinate in preventing Jacks girls' deaths
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
April 2, 2009
Banita Jacks’ four daughters were failed not by a single agency, but by the collective failure of the D.C. government, schools and nonprofit community to coordinate and provide the services they so desperately needed, a new report concludes.
Jacks was arrested in January 2008, shortly after U.S. Marshals discovered the decomposed bodies of her four daughters in their Southeast home. The marshals had arrived to evict the family, some seven months after the home had been sold at foreclosure, and five months after the last of the residence’s utilities were disconnected.
The D.C. Inspector General’s exhaustive review of the case catalogues Jacks’ every interaction with the District, from 2005 on. Several government agencies and nonprofits worked with the family as they should have, the report finds, but Jacks and her daughters needed a team effort that they did not receive.
The girls ranged in age from 5 to 17.
“Multiple entities worked effectively, but largely obliviously to each other’s efforts, to put in place many of the elements necessary for the [Jacks] family to sustain itself,” the audit states. “Yet, no single organization seemingly had the full perspective necessary to see and follow the family’s progress, and intervene when these elements of self-sufficiency began to destabilize.”
The public version of the report is heavily redacted. Among its findings:
» The intake process at the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center was not thorough and the family’s needs were not assessed.
» The nonprofit Families Forward, D.C. General Hypothermia Shelter operator, also failed to conduct a thorough needs assessment.
» The school system’s response to the girls’ many absences was inadequate.
» Meridian Public Charter School did not address the children’s absences and never communicated with Jacks before removing her daughters’ names from the school’s roster.
» The Child and Family Services Agency failed across a wide spectrum.
Based on radio transmissions and the lack of written reports, it does not appear that D.C. police officers actually saw the family as they claimed to on April 30, 2007, auditors also said. The police visit followed a harrowing call from a charter school social worker, who reported that “the mother is suffering from some mental illness and … she’s holding all of her children in the home hostage.”
In January, Jacks was deemed mentally fit to stand trial.
mneibauer@dcexaminer.com
