Infant found dead in foster home

A 4-month-old girl who was recently placed in a temporary foster home was found dead on Thursday night at the foster family's house in the northwest valley, authorities said.

Police were called to the house on the 8700 block of Shady Pines Drive, near Durango Drive and El Capitan Way, about 7:45 p.m. and found the girl dead. The infant, who wasn't identified, was with 10 other children on Thursday night when she was discovered, Clark County officials said.

Authorities said the children were being watched by a 14-year-old at the time of the death.

Six of the children inside the house were siblings of the 4-month-old and were later removed from the home and placed in Child Haven, the county's emergency foster care shelter.

Police are investigating the death, said Lisa Teele, supervisor of the Metropolitan Police Department's abuse and neglect unit.

Teele wouldn't say whether there were any signs that the infant was abused. The Clark County coroner's office on Friday had not yet released a cause of death for the infant.

Jennifer Knight, a spokeswoman for the county, said the county placed the 4-month-old girl and her six siblings into the temporary foster home on June 20 because the birth parents had mistreated one or more of the children. Additional details of the children's history with Clark County Family Services were not available on Friday.

Knight said the temporary foster family is known as "fictive kin," meaning that they were close family friends to the birth parents. The children have not yet been declared wards of the county, she said.

Knight said a family court judge had approved the temporary placement of the children into the home on Shady Pines Drive.

Knight said she couldn't discuss the status of the remaining children who belonged to the foster family.

"We always take the necessary steps to ensure the safety of the children," she said.

The county looks into a foster family's background before placing children in its care. This includes checking to see whether the family has any prior charges of abuse or neglect, running FBI background checks, fingerprinting, and conducting a safety assessment of the home, Knight said.

The county declined to comment further. Knight could not confirm if all of those checks had been performed in this case.

"Until there's a determination on how the child died, we're limited on the information we can give," she said.

Earlier this month, 2-year-old Zander Martino was found beaten to death in his father's home. The county previously had taken Zander out of the home because he was abused but later returned him.

The father, Richard "Todd" Martino, is now facing murder charges in Zander's death.

The investigations into the deaths of Martino and the 4-month-old girl are unfolding in a time of stricter standards and more stringent reviewing requirements for child fatalities in Nevada.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers enacted new laws aimed at reforming a faltering child welfare system. Legislative efforts were rooted in widely publicized problems within Clark County child welfare-related services, including the failure to investigate 79 suspicious child deaths that occurred between 2001 and 2004.

A report conducted for the state showed that those deaths should have been investigated for abuse and neglect and were not.