S harlynn Bobo tendered her resignation as head of the District’s Child and Family Services Agency just one day after she refused to accept responsibility for the deaths of two infants under her supervision. Bobo’s sudden departure briefly raised hopes that Mayor Adrian Fenty was finally going to overhaul the troubled child protection agency, hopes that were soon dashed when he selected Roque Gerald, Bobo’s deputy, as interim director.
Youth Today subsequently reported that Gerald, a licensed clinical psychologist, settled a lawsuit filed by a former suicidal patient who claimed he had sex with her in his office in 1989.
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Instead of protesting his appointment, acting Attorney General Peter Nickles euphemistically referred to this blot on Gerald’s record as an “unfortunate incident” — as though it was an accident rather than a serious breach of medical ethics that should have disqualified him for the leadership post.
D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6, also gave Gerald a pass, noting that his twentysomething victim was no longer a child at the time.
The public cannot expect social workers to prevent all incidents of child abuse and neglect in our toxic, anti-child culture.
Like everybody else, they sometimes make mistakes. But at the very least, they should be expected to follow the law and the basic rules of their own profession.
When CFSA got a call in March that a baby boy was being neglected, Bobo should have sent somebody to his home to investigate within 24 hours, as D.C. law requires.
Three months went by and still no visit. It was only after 6-month-old Isiah Garcia died on June 25 that the social worker assigned to his case admitted she had never checked up on him.
This same employee previously worked under one of the six workers Fenty fired for not following up on a similar neglect complaint regarding Banita Jacks, who is now charged with killing her four young daughters.
With such a history and track record, why did Bobo allow this woman to work on dozens of cases virtually unsupervised?
If an ineffectual administrator and a rogue shrink are the best people Team Fenty can find to run an agency charged with protecting the city’s most helpless and vulnerable residents, it’s just a matter of time before another at-risk D.C. child dies because of bureaucratic neglect.
