San Jose, California — A newly released county report found that parental neglect contributed to the deaths of three Santa Clara County children in 2022, despite repeated warnings to the county’s child welfare agency urging intervention, raising renewed concerns about systemic failures within the department.
According to the report from the county’s Child Death Review Team, social workers repeatedly closed referrals as unfounded or inconclusive, referred parents to voluntary services that were never completed, or took no further action until after a child had died. In one case, parents were later charged with felony child endangerment, while in another, surviving children were eventually removed from the home.
The findings add to long-standing scrutiny of the agency following the 2023 fentanyl poisoning death of baby Phoenix Castro, a case that exposed policies prioritizing family preservation over child safety. Investigations previously found that beginning in 2021, Santa Clara County sharply reduced child removals, relying instead on voluntary services with limited enforcement.
The new report, covering 2021 through 2023, identified 12 child deaths associated with neglect and cited an increasing trend of fatalities in dysfunctional family environments. It concluded most deaths were preventable and noted that neglect cases are often minimized, partly because they can be conflated with poverty and are harder to substantiate under California law.
County officials said reforms launched since late 2023 have increased child removals back to prior levels, though supervisors and child welfare experts say neglect cases involving older or disabled children remain under-addressed.
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