Danieal Kelly was a 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who starved to death because her mother didn’t feed her. But the extent of her mother’s neglect didn’t end there. Danieal was kept hidden away in a filthy apartment and often left to lie in her own waste for days at a time. She didn’t go to school and she didn’t receive any medical attention.
But what truly gets me is the utter failure of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services and its contractor to investigate the numerous complaints they received regarding Danieal’s mistreatment. She had the supreme misfortune to have her fate rest in the hands of incompetent, apathetic bureaucrats and social workers who demonstrated little interest in performing their jobs.
As I was reading the scathing grand jury indictment [contains one very graphic photo] late last night, I began to cry. I don’t cry easily, but Danieal’s story devastated me. Perhaps it was all the systemic failures that contributed to her death. Perhaps it was the bleak horror of Danieal’s life in the care of a neglectful mother. She was an innocent kid who must’ve been in a great deal of pain and nobody lifted a finger to help her. And there are probably plenty of other kids like Danieal out there, suffering in isolated anonymity.
It is true that people care for other people, and that not everybody is indifferent. That’s what your story made clear to me.
I don’t think I have ever spent hours paging through an entire grand jury legal document as I just did. Certainly I never sat this riveted and horrified while I read it. These are the types of atrocities we have been seeing again and again in Philadelphia thanks to the inaction of the DHS, and, apparently, their subcontractors as well. Who is going to stop them? How many more children have to die painful, agonizingly slow deaths?