District bureaucrats in six different agencies knew for two years that Banita Jacks, now accused of murdering her four young daughters, was in serious trouble. Yet with absolutely no evidence that the family had moved elsewhere, the city’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) closed Jacks’ case file last May, officially ending any hope of rescue for Brittany, 17, Tatianna, 11, N’Kiah, 6, and Aja, 5.
The four sisters spent their last days on Earth with a madwoman who later admitted to starving them, all the while telling relatives and city employees everything was okay. Incredibly, with what they already knew about Jacks, they believed her.
Jacks, a high school dropout, had lived with her convicted drug dealer boyfriend in a homeless shelter and a van before his death last spring. The family lost its food stamps, and water and electricity to the Southeast row house they occupied most recently had been shut off.
Nobody at CFSA had seen the girls for months, and nobody bothered to find out why — even after a school social worker expressed fears that Jacks may have been holding her eldest daughter hostage. If social workers from CFSA — whose mission is to intervene on behalf of vulnerable children — actually visited the home as they claim, they had to ignore clear signs of distress that should have triggered a court-ordered intervention.
Yet the four sisters’ decomposing bodies weren’t found by a social worker, a truant officer or the police, but by a team of U.S. marshals sent to evict the family from the property. By then, of course, it was months too late.
During his news conference Friday, a visibly shaken Mayor Adrian Fenty said that CFSA will reopen 309 other “incomplete” case files, and he vowed to punish or terminate employees who “lost” the four sisters. But the presence of former mayor Marion Barry at the same news conference raises serious doubts.
While Barry’s disastrous administration plunged the city into bankruptcy, hundreds of Barry loyalists embedded themselves in city agencies — including the public schools, the tax office and CFSA — where they have been wreaking havoc ever since. Despite a citywide mandate, Mayor Fenty has still not undertaken a comprehensive, top-to-bottom audit, which is the only way he will ever be able to flush the liars, crooks and incompetents out of the system for good.
And if Fenty doesn’t do this now, the sight of four body bags being removed from the blue house on Sixth Street Southeast will be his legacy,
