Hennepin County recently settled a $1.3 million lawsuit with relatives of Arianna Hunziker, the three year-old who was starved to death in a 2019 kinship foster placement. Near the end she was eating pea gravel and crayons. Negotiations are still underway with the other party to the suit, Allina Health Systems.
As KARE-11 News reports, the suit alleges that Allina medical providers and the county social worker ignored multiple red flags, including that Arianna dropped from the 98th to the 13th percentile for weight.
Unfortunately her situation isn’t unique. Our project to analyze Minnesota child fatalities has found other cases in which medical providers overlooked indicators of potential child maltreatment called “sentinel injuries,” for example fractures in infants who are not yet mobile.
These incidents suggest that improved training and accountability may be needed for medical providers around child maltreatment.
I was a volunteer Guardian ad Litem in Ramsey County for ten years. I was often leery of kinship placements. While they were frequently sought, in order to keep the child(ren) within the family, and were often acceptable to the biological parent(s), it seemed as if they often were no improvement on the situation the child was being removed from. The fact that they had never been reported or substantiated for abuse or neglect did not necessarily mean that such did not exist in their families.
Thanks Carol for the comment. The standards for recruiting and monitoring foster placements overall are hit-or-miss across the state and from what information is available it appears that whatever standards exist are relaxed for kinship placements. Counties talk about the increase in kinship placements as a good thing but if they are not safe or good places what is the gain? I have tracked fatalities from child maltreatment and over the past three years one in five have been in kinship placements like Arianna.