Six months after 5-year-old Andrew “AJ” Freund’s brutal death exposed oversight issues at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the fallout over the boy’s death continues as three state child welfare professionals face severe discipline following an internal report on the case.
A Tribune review of the state’s involvement with AJ’s family found DCFS employees failed to properly assess the danger the Crystal Lake boy faced.
The warning signs included multiple police contacts, the misdemeanor arrests of his parents, squalid living conditions, substance abuse, domestic violence and the mother’s long history of prior hotline calls. Workers seemed unable to take in the full family history and piece together the extent to which AJ was in peril.
The boy’s parents, JoAnn Cunningham, 36, and Andrew Freund, 60, face murder charges in McHenry County. They have pleaded not guilty and await trial.
The Tribune has previously reported on a suspicious bruise on AJ’s body and his words to a hospital doctor implicating his mother. Additional documents describe in more detail an earlier incident where AJ suffered facial bruising but a DCFS investigator failed to promptly find and examine the boy.
DCFS officials have said discipline for the employees involved might occur once the agency’s inspector general completed her interim report. That confidential document was shared last week with DCFS’ director and the governor’s office. Two sources who have read it told the Tribune that DCFS Inspector General Meryl Paniak recommended in the report that the three workers be terminated.
The report, which focused on the agency’s handling of two hotline investigations — both from 2018 and involving AJ’s suspicious bruising — found DCFS employees “failed to see the totality” of the family’s troubled history and missed chances “to slow down or stop the steady deterioration of the Freund family.”
The report found: “It was because of the indifference and incompetence of the department’s child protection investigators and supervisor that the opportunity to alter this family’s disastrous course was missed.”
DCFS has limited legal authority to remove a child from a parent’s custody and does so only if it finds an “imminent and immediate” risk of harm. Even its most vocal critics concede that not all deaths are preventable, as the overburdened state agency is tasked with the difficult job of trying to predict future human behavior.
Yet the AJ case has raised concerns both inside and outside of DCFS because of the multitude of opportunities to intercede on the boy’s behalf.
The state agency, the Tribune found, had received at least 10 DCFS hotline calls since 2012 regarding Cunningham’s care of children — from police officers, hospital staff, neighbors, a private agency caseworker and even her own mother.
Four of the 10 complaints came in 2012, before AJ was born, and involved the alleged neglect of a foster son she had raised for 15 months and of an older biological son.
DCFS declined to investigate half of the 10 calls, the Tribune found. Only one DCFS investigation ended in a finding of credible evidence of neglect by Cunningham — when AJ was born in October 2013 with a derivative of heroin and other drugs in his system, records show.
DCFS administrators have acknowledged mistakes in some of the agency’s previous contacts with the family. They did not dispute the Tribune’s findings.
Two DCFS employees involved in the case, investigator Carlos Acosta and supervisor Andrew Polovin, were reassigned to paid desk duty in April.
On Friday, a third worker, investigator Kathleen Gold, was placed on paid desk duty as well. DCFS declined to comment beyond confirming a third employee had been put on desk duty.
Also last week, Acosta and Polovin were named as defendants in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the slain boy’s estate. The 36-page suit alleges the employees showed “an inhumane indifference to AJ’s safety.”
Gold is also mentioned in the suit, though not as a defendant.
Polovin, the Tribune found, was involved in all three of AJ’s hotline investigations, including at the boy’s birth when the DCFS supervisor approved his being placed in the state’s protective custody.
Acosta is an elected McHenry County Board member. Both he and Gold were carrying a caseload of investigations above what is allowed under a federal consent decree at the time of their contact with AJ’s family, a systemic problem that has long vexed DCFS and that child welfare advocates say puts vulnerable children at further risk.
In fact, Acosta’s caseloads were over the legal limit in the four preceding months as well, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which monitors DCFS under the decades-old landmark federal case. They said Acosta had nine extra cases in November, one month before the hotline call involving AJ.
The ACLU estimates DCFS assigned more than 3,000 hotline investigations since Jan. 1 to overburdened workers in violation of the consent decree caseload limit.
“The assignment limits are there to keep children safe,” said Heidi Dalenberg, the ACLU’s director of institutional reform. “We’ll never know whether AJ’s life could have been saved if DCFS had kept its promise to follow them, but another tragedy could be right around the corner.”
AJ, who spent the first month of his life in a hospital as doctors weaned him off drugs, was placed in foster care in the home of a maternal cousin who wanted to adopt him, records reviewed by the Tribune show. He remained with her until he was 20 months old, when a McHenry County judge in June 2015 allowed the boy’s parents to begin raising him in their Crystal Lake home.
Both Cunningham and Freund completed drug treatment, counseling, random drug screens and other recovery services, court records show. DCFS had hired a private agency to monitor his foster care case, and a caseworker from that group visited the home twice monthly and reported back to the court. In April 2016, the judge closed the case, thus ending state monitoring.
Cunningham had relapsed on heroin by at least March 2018, when police found her passed out in her parked car on the side of a road with fresh track marks on her body.
The incident was one of four DCFS hotline calls alleging abuse or neglect in 2018. Two of the calls — both involving suspicious bruising — resulted in investigations.
DCFS assigned Gold to the March incident after a hospital social worker called the hotline to report AJ had odd bruising on his face when he and his younger brother came with their father to retrieve some of Cunningham’s belongings. The caller said the boys appeared dirty and guarded, and that Cunningham declined to be tested for drugs.
Gold initially went to Cunningham’s old address from 2012 and failed to see AJ until one month later despite an agency rule that mandates a good-faith effort to see a child within 24 hours, records show. She did not see the inside of the house until nearly two months after the hotline call, when she interviewed Cunningham for a second time and the mother admitted she had relapsed, according to those records.
Gold eventually closed the investigation as “unfounded,” citing among other factors Cunningham’s return to drug treatment and the presence of the boys’ father, Freund, an attorney who was watching the children when Cunningham relapsed.
The last documented hotline call, in December 2018, involved a large bruise on AJ’s right hip. Acosta deemed there was a lack of credible evidence and closed the case as “unfounded” despite the family’s troubled history and the boy’s alarming remarks to an emergency room doctor that included the words, “Maybe mommy didn’t mean to hurt me.”
Acosta did not seek further expert medical opinion or obtain a forensic interview with AJ to try to determine the cause of the bruise before closing the investigation about two weeks after the hotline call was placed, records showed.
Polovin, the supervisor, approved the findings in both 2018 hotline investigations.
AJ was fatally beaten April 15, according to authorities, four months after that last hotline call. Three days later, Freund called 911 to report him missing, sparking a nearly weeklong search effort that ended with the discovery of the child’s body in a shallow grave about 7 miles from his home.
Acosta has declined to comment. The other two employees could not be reached. DCFS officials have said the state employees are not authorized to speak to the media.
The Tribune also found examples after AJ was born where a mandated reporter, such as a police officer or private agency caseworker, called the hotline about an alleged problem in his home but DCFS declined to open an investigation.
For example, Crystal Lake police called the hotline in September 2018 after finding AJ’s home without working utilities and its exterior in dilapidated condition. Earlier that year, in February, the hotline received a call after Cunningham called police to report her roommate, a recovering heroin addict, was missing and possibly suicidal.
The DCFS hotline specialist declined to launch an investigation in both cases.
Coincidentally, DCFS Acting Director Marc Smith’s first day on the job was the same day AJ was killed, April 15. Smith’s administration recently received an 11 percent budget increase and said it will use the money for new hires, better technology and training.
So far, more than 1,200 employees have completed the training, said DCFS spokesman Jassen Strokosch.
“The handling of the (AJ Freund) investigation underscored the need for additional training related to safety, particularly for experienced staff,” Strokosch said. “Veteran investigators across the state are going through a new training regimen that requires two full days of safety training. This is the first step in a number of reforms related to the training of staff.”
cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com
