CARSON CITY -- A state analysis has found that 114 of the children who died in Clark County from January 2001 to December 2004 might have died of abuse or neglect, more than three times the number previously calculated.
After examining death information from a variety of sources, the study found that 11 percent of the 1,041 child deaths in the county during those four years might have been due to maltreatment.
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Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said the findings in the report are "disgraceful" and "unacceptable."
"One child death is too much, but this is truly shameful," Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, said.
The higher figure reflects a more comprehensive look at deaths during the four-year time period. Previously, Clark County reported to the federal government that 35 children had died in Clark County as a result of abuse and neglect during those four years.
The numbers reported were used to measure the effectiveness of the state's child protective services.
Wrong numbers mean the conclusions drawn from those numbers were wrong.
For 2002, for example, Nevada's rate of children dying from maltreatment had been posted as one-quarter of the national average, but it now appears Nevada's true rate was much higher.
The Legislature will begin looking into the problem at the January meeting of the Audit Subcommittee, Buckley said.
A committee also will convene to oversee an external review by an independent panel, the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday.
"The committee and the panel are to recommend legislative, administrative and systemic changes needed to improve Nevada child welfare," the department said in its report about the preliminary numbers.
Susan Klein-Rothschild, director of Clark County Family Services, underscored the importance of having accurate numbers about child deaths as the starting point for figuring out what should be done to reduce the number of deaths.
"You can't fix something if you don't know the problem is there. We need to change our reporting system," she said.
Mike Willden, director of the State Health and Human Resources Department, said there's no evidence of deliberate underreporting. But he said more review is needed to end problems with conflicting information and "communication gaps" in medical, police and child welfare systems.
"Most child fatalities are not the result of maltreatment, but those fatalities that occurred as a result of child maltreatment or were preventable are even more heartbreaking," Willden said.
Leslie said problems that led to underreporting included coding that listed cases of children who died when left in cars during hot weather as motor vehicle deaths rather than neglect or abuse. In another case, she said, a child who had suffocated after being disciplined by being closed up in a folding bed had been classified as an "accidental death."
Willden said another reason for the "gap" in the death figures was the way the Child Protective Services investigates deaths. Until a staff transfer was completed in October 2004, the state ran child welfare programs in Clark County.
Willden said Child Protective Services also had not reported deaths as due to abuse or neglect when the victim was the only-child in the family.
"Under current rules, when there are no other children in the family to protect, we don't do a protective services investigation," Willden said.
"It just gets reported as an accident, a health-related death or a homicide, whatever the police investigation or the coroner has determined."
Buckley said that needs to be changed immediately.
Buckley said she cannot understand why state or county officials do not investigate whether abuse or neglect occurred when the family's only-child dies.
"How can that be?" she asked. "We have to find out what can be done to fix it. The sheer number of fatalities is alarming."
Klein-Rothschild agreed.
"I applaud the state for taking these steps," she said. "Everyone here (in Clark County Family Services) wants to do everything we can to protect children."
Klein-Rothschild said children's deaths have been recorded in a similar way in other Nevada counties, so the problem is not restricted to Clark County.
Willden said the numbers are certain to get even worse when other Nevada counties are added in and more analysis is done.
The state's re-examination of the deaths of children under 18 in Clark County was spurred by five letters sent by the federal Administration for Children and Families to the state after officials there noticed that media reports about deaths of children indicated the actual number was greater than the number being reported by state agencies.
Many stories about the deaths of children have been reported in the Review-Journal, the Sun and on Las Vegas Valley television stations in the past year.
The newspapers and KLAS-TV also have been fighting for access to more information about deaths of children. A few months ago, for example, the newspapers and KLAS-TV sued the county to try to gain access to records regarding 2-year-old Adacelli Snyder, who died in a squalid trailer, starved to death and lying in her own excrement about a year after CPS had closed the family's case.
District Judge Stewart Bell ruled against the media, but hours after that ruling, lawyers representing Clark County took the unusual step of asking the courts to decide whether the public would be better served by the release of such information.
Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, a former Child Protective Services caseworker, is an advocate of opening the records to public scrutiny. Reilly has said he agrees with the media's argument that federal law seems to require providing more information to the public about child deaths, which conflicts with state law that forbids release of the information.
Buckley said she is drafting legislation to open records of children who died due to abuse or neglect.
Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, said officials should not be pointing fingers yet. She said there needs to be a determination if the problem occurred because of the shift of child welfare services from state to county control.
Gard Jameson, head of Children's Advocacy Alliance in Clark County, said he was disturbed by the high number of children's deaths, but did not want to criticize anyone at this point.
Willden said the death higher figure does not mean that Las Vegas police will begin arresting additional people for their involvement in the abuse or neglect of children.
"The police already have done the investigations," he said. The problem is in the way "these cases have not been properly classified in our system."
