CPS Agent found Guilty

Upstate Illinois CPS news:

A judge found a former DCFS worker guilty and his supervisor not guilty of mishandling abuse investigations of AJ Freund leading up to the Crystal Lake boy’s 2019 murder.

Carlos J. Acosta, 57, of Woodstock, and Andrew R. Polovin, 51, of Island Lake, were both charged in September 2020 with two counts of endangering the life of a child causing death, a Class 3 felony, and one count of reckless conduct causing great bodily harm, a Class 4 felony.

Lake County Judge George Strickland announced his verdict Friday afternoon after closing arguments in the trial concluded in the morning.

He found Acosta guilty of two counts of child endangerment and not guilty of his third charge of reckless conduct.

The judge found Polovin not guilty of all three of his charges.

Strickland outlined numerous steps that the DCFS workers failed to take in their investigation and several parts that they ignored or failed to further investigate.

A grand jury indictment in 2020 charged Acosta, a DCFS child protection specialist, and Polovin, a DCFS child protection supervisor, with “not acting in good faith” within their official capacities.

The indictment said the two, in a “willful or wanton manner,” knowingly caused or permitted the life or health of Andrew Freund Jr. to be endangered and that was the proximate cause of the boy’s death.

Freund Jr., who was five years old and resided in Crystal Lake, was murdered in 2019 by his mother, JoAnn Cunningham.

Maybe Acosta should have asked for a jury trial, and testified in his defense.

The core problem here is that the parents were irresponsible drug addicts, and medical evaluation of the kid's injuries was inconclusive.

I do not see how it can be a crime for CPS (aka DCFS) agents to fail to act. Government authorities let dangerous people loose all the time. Judges, prosecutors, police, etc.

Acosta wrote some incomplete reports, and failed to call in more knowledgeable experts. Okay, how did that get to be a crime?

Ann Coulter has another opinion, about a different case:

I was innocently reading my New York Times last week when I was startled by this ghastly headline:

“Judge Let Abusive Parents Keep Daughter. Days Later, She Was Dead.”

As we shall see, this wasn’t a mistake; it was the logical consequence of a demented ideology that demands “reuniting” helpless children with their psychotic parents.

See if you can spot any telltale signs that Ella Vitalis should not have been sent back to her parents, Johnson Vitalis and Lafeyette Browne, ever, under any circumstances, even if they were the last people on Earth.

Ella first came to the attention of the authorities last year when she was just 3 weeks old and police, responding to a domestic violence call, found her with two broken ankles, a fractured skull and a brain hemorrhage. The parents had no explanation for any of this.

Child welfare authorities promptly placed both Ella and her 1-year-old brother, Liam, in foster care with their grandmother.

Just a month later, Ella’s father was left alone with her during a child visitation and, in that short amount of time, managed to slice the little girl’s tongue with a “sharp object,” requiring her to be fed intravenously for six days.

So far, Ella’s parents had spent a total of three weeks and a few hours with her, during which time she ended up with multiple broken bones, a brain hemorrhage and a bloody, mangled tongue.

So naturally, when family court judge and de Blasio appointee Erik S. Pitchal was assigned Ella’s case this past August, he ordered the children to be “reunited” with their parents. What a happy homecoming that must have been!

Based on this account, it appears that the judge made a poor judgment, but was it a crime? Will that judge be prosecuted?

I do not think that CPS agents or family court judges have the judgment or ability to make reasonable decisions about taking kids away.

At best, here is what they can do. If the parents commit crimes, they can be charged and convicted. If the parents are drug addicts, then can be forced to test clean to get their kids back. Beyond that, interventions are apt to cause more harm than good.