SPECIAL INVESTIGATION:

'THE LAST GOODNIGHT'

TRENTON -- The federal court monitor for New Jersey's child welfare agency said she will open an inquiry into its botched handling of a call to the state child abuse hotline that warned an infant might be at risk. The agency did nothing, and the baby died 103 days later.

On May 1, 2015, two days after Jalon Josiah "JoJo" Lemons was born at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, a hospital worker called the hotline to report the baby's mother, Micael Jordan, had revealed that one of her children had suffocated while sharing a bed with her and others.

But an NJ Advance Media investigation published Thursday found the child welfare agency never followed-up on the call or dispatched caseworkers to Jordan's apartment on South 11th Street in Newark, where they would have seen a family with four children financially struggling -- and without a crib.

"The best practice in this case would have been for the hotline to accept the call, and minimally, gone out to do an assessment and have a conversation with the parent," said the monitor, Judith Meltzer, deputy director of the Study for Social Policy in Washington, D.C. "What we will do next is we will follow up with the department and have a conversation about the handling of this."

State lawmakers are also calling for action in response to the news organization's investigation. On Thursday, hours after the account was published, Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto vowed to get to the bottom of the case in order to make the child welfare agency more accountable.

"This astonishing investigation is both sad and maddening," Prieto, D-Hudson, said in a statement. "Clearly, questions need to be asked, whether that be through a committee hearing or other means, about how the state's child welfare agency failed to act on a potentially lifesaving call."

"I will be talking to my committee chairs about our next steps," Prieto said.

On the night of Aug. 11, 2015, JoJo was put to sleep on a single, full-size mattress with four other people, including his mother, Jordan, and his father, Hakeem Lemons. When the parents awoke the next morning, they found JoJo not breathing.

Jordan tried to revive him, but JoJo was pronounced dead an hour later at University Hospital in Newark. Lemons told investigators it was a "mistake" to lay JoJo with them on the mattress. He was the third of Jordan's children to die while bed-sharing, or co-sleeping.

A day later, on Aug. 13, 2015, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office signed an arrest warrant for Jordan and Lemons on charges of reckless manslaughter and child endangerment. The two later pleaded guilty to a single count each of child endangerment.

Despite the guilty plea, the child welfare agency, the Division of Child Protection and Permanency, concluded JoJo's death was not caused by abuse or neglect. That meant the agency was not legally obligated to release any information about the death, including the botched hotline call.

What's more, agency investigators omitted any reference of the hotline call from their final report on JoJo's death. That report has never been made public, but sources familiar with it confirmed its contents to NJ Advance Media.

For the past two years, the division has declined to answer questions posed by the news organization about the case and JoJo's death. It has also declined requests for interviews with the commissioner of the Department of Children and Families, Allison Blake, who oversees the agency.

On Friday, a day after NJ Advance Media published the investigation, Blake released a letter in which she did not directly address the hotline mistake and JoJo's death, but said, "our hotline receives more than 14,500 calls a month, useful context the article does not provide."

"The individuals answering calls to our around-the-clock hotline are trained professionals, and their work, dedication, and service has been documented over the years," Blake said in the letter, which was sent to department employees and child welfare professionals

Despite the work being "emotionally challenging," the hotline staff earned Meltzer's praise in a 2012 report, noting a "high degree of professionalism," Blake said.

When asked Friday about the hotline mistake and JoJo's death, Gov. Chris Christie said he "didn't see" the news organization's investigation and declined comment.

Blake's letter also raised new questions about the agency's finding of no abuse or neglect.

The commissioner said that it's difficult for the agency to prove abuse or neglect in cases of infant deaths involving bed-sharing because there must be an aggravating factor, such as "gross negligence or recklessness, like falling asleep impaired from alcohol or substance use."

"But reaching this conclusion often requires the parent admitting to their impairment," Blake said.

However, in JoJo's case, records obtained from the Essex County Prosecutor's Office show the baby's father, Lemons, told police he had been smoking marijuana that afternoon, and that the mother, Jordan, had been out until about 11 p.m. having drinks with friends.

What's more, civil and administrative investigations such as the one completed by the department have a lower burden of proof than a criminal prosecution, which, in JoJo's case, was successful.

The entire episode suggests the federal court monitor needs to do a comprehensive re-evaluation of the hotline, said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of A Better Childhood, the national child advocacy group whose lawsuit forced New Jersey into the ongoing supervision.

Lowry said she would ask Meltzer to review the hotline's operations in the next biannual monitoring report.

Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, chairman of the Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee, said he intended to ask questions of Blake, including, "why no action was taken in response to the hospital's call to the hotline."

"When a hospital sounds an alarm about a child in danger, there has to be appropriate follow-up and accountability from the department," Vitale said.

Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri-Huttle, D-Bergen, called NJ Advance Media's report a "heartbreaking expose."

"At the heart of the primary account detailed in this investigation are some serious questions about the effectiveness of the Division of Child Protection and Permanency," Huttle said.

Lawmakers also promised to do more to publicize the risks of unsafe infant sleeping practices. From 2005 to 2014, 304 infants in New Jersey died while sharing a bed, according to the state's child death reports. About 25 to 30 infants die annually in the state while bed-sharing.

Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin said she's worried a bill to require the state to better promote safe-sleep practices and improve access to "baby boxes" -- bassinet-sized cardboard boxes that can hold a sleeping infant in lieu of a crib -- has stalled in the Senate.

"We know that unsafe sleeping often coincides with poverty and concerns such as tobacco usage," Marin, D-Essex, said. "We need an all-out effort to keep these babies safe. ... We cannot control personal behavior, but we can do more to raise awareness of safe sleep practices."



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'THE LAST GOODNIGHT':

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Op-Ed: Why parents should never bed-share

Timeline: How the tragedies unfolded

About this project



Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.