State report says Santa Clara County lawyers overrode social worker decisions to remove children from unsafe homes

Santa Clara County top exec admits county 'dropped the ball' in baby's fentanyl death

SAN JOSE – Santa Clara County’s top executive acknowledged Saturday that county agencies in charge of protecting children made mistakes in allowing a father with a history of drug abuse to care for his 3-month-old daughter Phoenix Castro, who died of a fentanyl and methamphetamine overdose in May.

“The county dropped the ball,” County Executive James Williams said. “My opinion is that baby Phoenix shouldn’t have been in the care of the father – period.”

Williams’ admission came during an hour-long interview as the Bay Area News Group pressed him on a newly-obtained, troubling state report that found the county’s legal office frequently overrode decisions by social workers to remove kids from unsafe homes.

Williams, who until July served as the county’s lead counsel, disputed that claim, but said the county has shifted its philosophy as part of an effort to avoid splitting up families. He wouldn’t say whether that factored into the death of baby Phoenix.

The report – released Friday evening to the Bay Area News Group – was delivered to the county in February after the state Department of Social Services received “concerns” that the county counsel’s office was making key decisions that could leave children in danger.

As part of the investigation, the state said it reviewed multiple cases of children who had been placed into protective custody by law enforcement, but that the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services “immediately placed the children back in the care of the unsafe parent.” The report also found social workers expressed confusion and frustration over the county’s updated “threshold” for removing children.

Revelations from the report come after neighbors recently told this news organization that they called police numerous times to express their concerns about baby Phoenix being left alone with her father before her death May 13.

Williams, who called some of the state’s findings “extremely alarming,” declined to provide details of baby Phoenix’s case. He wouldn’t say whether social workers had requested that the baby be removed, or whether county lawyers denied the request. But he did acknowledge that although the county conducted an assessment of the father’s fitness to take custody of Phoenix, that assessment was insufficient.

Phoenix was born in February, the same month the state delivered its report to the county. The infant was exposed to fentanyl and methamphetamines while still in the womb, and her mother, Emily De La Cerda, was sent into drug treatment.

Phoenix’s father, David Castro, was allowed to take the baby home to the couple’s apartment off Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose. Less than a year earlier, the county’s child protection  agency had already removed the couple’s two older children, now 3 and 4, from their home.

Williams said he couldn’t explain why the agency deemed the parents unfit to care for those children, but allowed the father to care for the new baby. The county has still not released records, requested by this news organization, about Phoenix’s case.

Four months after baby Phoenix’s death, her mother De La Cerda also died of a fentanyl overdose. And Castro, who had eight previous drug convictions and confided to a neighbor he was addicted to fentanyl, is now in jail facing a charge of felony child endangerment. The day Phoenix died, police found drug paraphernalia and broken glass pipes on the same kitchen counter as the baby’s bottle. It’s unclear how the baby ingested the drugs. The mother was in rehab and wasn’t nursing.

In response to inquiries from the Bay Area News Group, the county said last month that “no stone will be left unturned” in its review of the troubling case.

It also called on the state to review its handling of baby Phoenix’s death. At the time, county officials didn’t reveal that the state had already been probing the county’s handling of child welfare cases.

As part of that investigation, the state interviewed a dozen social workers, managers and supervisors last year.

Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council member Steve Baron, who oversaw mediation for hundreds of child abuse and neglect cases in the county, said that the state’s findings “can only be considered a scandal.”

He said the county counsel seemed to be playing a dramatically outsized role by overriding the traditional process for removing children from unsafe homes.

“It seems like the county counsel is making decisions … that really relate to the safety of the child,” he said. “And they’re not qualified to do that. That’s not their role.”

In its written response to the state report, the county defended its prioritization of family reunification, saying the practice is “based on increasingly clear evidence demonstrating the significant and lasting trauma children experience with even brief periods of removal from their family.”

Instead of separating families, the goal is to develop safety plans and provide services to help them stabilize. County officials pointed out that repeat referrals for abuse and neglect were down since 2019, and are now below the state average.

In a grim irony, the county also told the state in April that “as of the writing of this report,” the county’s Department of Family and Children Services executive team “is unaware of a single example where a child was determined to be ‘unsafe’ … and was subsequently left in the care of the offending parent.”

Two weeks later, Phoenix was dead.

The scrutiny on baby Phoenix’s case comes amid a clash in philosophies in the child welfare community about the importance of keeping families together vs. the risks of leaving children in unsafe homes.

In an email to the county Department of Family and Children’s Services staff in 2021, then-Director Dan Little explained the county’s strong commitment “to racial justice and to healing the historical wounds underlying disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system.”

The shift in Santa Clara County to keep more kids with their parents has led to a dramatic drop in removals in the last two years, from just over 60 removals in August of 2020 to fewer than 20 in February of 2022, according to the state report.

Williams, the county’s top executive who had been chief counsel in the county’s legal office during the Castro case, said that to his knowledge, his office did “not often” disagree with social workers’ advice to remove children from unsafe homes. But he said that social workers have raised concerns internally about the agency’s shift away from separating parents from their children.

“There’s extraordinary passion, I think on all sides,” Williams said. “What are the best things to do to take care of children and their families?

“We want to improve, we want to learn, we are deeply troubled. There’s nobody I’ve talked to who isn’t incredibly affected by the death of a 3-month-old baby.”