None of Governor Kate Brown’s advisers or appointees gave written orders to conceal the death of an infant who stopped breathing at a Eugene day care last fall during her contentious race for governor.

Yet emails and texts sent to her office in August 2018 make clear that child care regulators told the governor’s spokeswoman what they would say should news of 9-month-old William Cannon’s death become public. The messages, provided at no cost in response to a public records request, also reference conversations about the baby’s death that left no paper trail.

Brown’s office and the Office of Child Care provided more than 4,500 pages of communications exchanged by the governor, top staffers, regulators and spokespeople during 10 days in August. The messages started the Wednesday William was found unconscious at Little Big Blessings day care, which had been cited months earlier for unsafe sleeping practices. He died two days later at a Portland hospital.

The records reveal that, at the height of Brown and Republican Knute Buehler’s $36 million race for governor, timely and transparent public notice about child welfare matters took a back seat to other considerations. Parents who rely on state regulators to keep children safe in state-licensed day cares had no way to know that normal disclosures were no longer being made.

State regulators broke from usual practice and did not tell the public about William’s death until March, and only did so then in response to reporting from The Oregonian/OregonLive. The Office of Child Care also excluded his death from an annual tally that it is required to post on its website.

A spokeswoman for Brown said in March that the decision not to make the baby’s death public was not politically motivated or influenced by anyone in the governor’s office.

The initial delay was driven in large part by a conversation with a detective in the Eugene police department whom a child care spokeswoman wrote asked agency officials not to provide much information about the death, which was being investigated as a potential crime. Child care regulators did not seek police approval to make public basic information about his death at any point before The Oregonian/OregonLive asked about William’s death.

At the time William died, the public consciousness was tuned to safety at Oregon child cares. Inadequate regulation loomed as a hot-button topic in the governor’s race.

After The Oregonian/OregonLive reported the baby’s death and the state’s silence about it, Republican leaders called for an investigation into what role, if any, that politics played in the decision. The Oregon Department of Justice declined to heed the requests.

Only a small fraction of the emails and texts produced in response to The Oregonian/OregonLive records request clearly reference William’s death. The governor’s office and child care regulators largely focused on other matters consuming their offices in the days after he died, such as rolling out Brown’s education agenda.

The full extent of the conversations among leaders at the Office of Child Care and Brown’s top staffers remains unknown. Some of those conversations were intentionally conducted in person or by phone, the records show. Other discussions may have been included in the texts and emails provided to the newsroom but were redacted. The Office of Child Care withheld three full pages of emails from that time frame, asserting they were confidential.

In at least one instance, the office clearly hid the contents of an email about William’s death, asserting it was confidential without saying why. Through a lapse, the office accidentally revealed that the material it covered up was analyst Seth Allen informing two agency higher-ups that “Little Big Blessings status is now Closed and will be updated with the correct information on Tuesday.”

In another message, an agency spokeswoman contacted a counterpart in Brown’s office in a way that made clear the two had already discussed what happened.

“Nothing new to report, but we drafted the statement below to be ready,” the agency’s spokeswoman at the time, Betty Bernt, wrote to Kate Kondayen, a spokeswoman for Brown, on August 24, the day William died. The statement said: “The Office of Child Care is aware of a tragic incident which occurred in a child care setting in Eugene on Wednesday. We are working with partner agencies to assess the situation and take appropriate action. The child care provider has voluntarily surrendered her license, effective Thursday, August 23.”

Kondayen did not respond by email. Exactly 29 minutes later, Bernt sent Kondayen a revised, much shorter statement: “The Office of Child Care is aware of a tragic incident involving an infant that occurred this week.” Bernt waited an hour before sending the same statement to Dawn Taylor, the child care director, and others in her own agency.

The agency never released either of those statements, or anything else about the baby’s death, until March.

In her second email to Kondayen, Bernt said she shortened the message after talking to the Eugene detective investigating William’s death and learning the detective wanted to limit how much information was disclosed to the public. His death remains under criminal investigation.

In previous instances, the agency promptly disclosed the deaths of children in day cares even as the incidents were being investigated as potential crimes.

Child care officials have scant documentation to explain why the Eugene detective didn’t want the death to be publicly exposed.

The Eugene Police Department declined to say last month why the death should not have been publicly disclosed at the time or afterward or how disclosure could harm the agency’s investigation.

Regulators learned that William had stopped breathing within hours of the Aug. 22 event, text messages show.

Taylor wrote to her boss, Miriam Calderon, that evening that the day care provider did not immediately respond to requests to surrender her license. Taylor wrote that staffers would present the paperwork in person the next morning if the woman did not respond.

“Agree that’s a good plan,” responded Calderon, whom Brown appointed to direct the Early Learning Division over the Office of Child Care.

Taylor emailed key officials at the Department of Human Services about the “tragic incident” at 6:12 a.m. the next morning and set up a conference call to discuss what happened.

“This provider does have some (Child Protective Services) history and think it would be good to have a quick staffing on it,” Taylor wrote.

Despite that history, the Department of Human Services told The Oregonian/OregonLive in March that it was not required to review the circumstances of William’s death. Child welfare officials must conduct public reviews any time a family or caregiver with whom the agency has interacted in the past year is suspected in a child’s death by neglect or abuse.

The messages show that child welfare officials were already responding to the Aug. 20 death of another child, Mason Jordan. Police say the Bend 7-year-old was shot to death by his mother, who was charged with murder a week after he died. Mason had developmental disabilities and received help through another division of the Department of Human Services.

A spokeswoman for the agency, Christy Sinatra, informed Kondayen about Mason’s death at 6:43 p.m. Aug. 22, around the time Office of Child Care officials were responding to news about William.

The governor’s office first redacted the content of Sinatra’s message, but later reversed its decision after The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that the timing of the text message was in line with William’s death.

Sinatra received Taylor’s email about William’s death the next morning. She texted Kondayen one hour later, saying “I have two staff messages I want you to see.” None of the texts confirm the content of those messages.

After William died and the child care agency shortened, then kept private, any statement about his death, staffers at the Office of Child Care worked through the weekend to update the agency’s internal procedures about notifying the public about a baby’s death at day care, emails show.

Procedures dated Aug. 28 require the agency to wait to post news of a child death to an online database “until clearance is received” from child welfare and criminal investigators, because otherwise, “it will show” online.

Brad Schmidt of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this report.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com