NCCPR in Source NM: Torrez’s CYFD investigation will fail if it leaves people out

A child welfare expert weighs in on latest effort to reform NM’s foster system

 New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says he’s going to launch “a comprehensive and wide-ranging investigation” into how the Children, Youth and Families Department fails children. Allow me to save him some time. I can just write the report now — and I’ll throw in the news story that will follow. The story will go like this: 

The beleaguered Children Youth and Families Department and its embattled leadership are plagued with a shortage of foster parents and high turnover among demoralized, overworked and understaffed caseworkers, according to the blistering conclusions in a scathing report released today. 

We know this is what the report will say for a couple of reasons. First, almost (but not quite) all of that is true. Indeed CYFD’s performance is every bit as awful as Torrez says it is. Second, it’s what scathing reports on embattled child welfare agencies all over the country always say, particularly when those issuing the reports show no interest in real solutions. … 

Read the full commentary in Source NM

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 22

 

● Kansas has its own special, ugly little version of hidden foster care. I have a blog post on How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.” 

● Indiana has a law limiting the number of cases family police are supposed to carry – at least it has one for now. WRTV Indianapolis reports on efforts by some lawmakers to sneak repeal of those limits into the state budget – including NCCPR’s perspective on how it all traces back to Indiana’s obscene rate of tearing apart families. 

● Gotthamist and Black Enterprise both have stories on a new report about racial bias in the New York City family policing system. 

● It’s not just New York City, of course. KERA Public Radio and  The 19^th each have stories on Black Texas parents whose child was wrongly torn from them at birth. Now reunited, the family is still trying to fight its way out of what amounts to a child abuse registry Twilight Zone.

● Even as a white middle-class foster parent who doubles as a state legislator in the Child Removal Capital of America, West Virginia, tries to weaken laws protecting the rights of siblings to stay together in foster care, The Imprint reports on a national group founded by those with actual lived experience, that works to strengthen those protections. 

● For children and families who are survivors of sibling separation and all the other harms of family policing, Imani Worthy, co-founder and executive director of Black Failies Love and Unite has a column in The Imprint about what reparations should look like. 

● Here’s something you don’t see every day – in fact hardly ever: a child welfare “ombudsman” who recognizes that agencies make terrible errors in all directions. But Virginia’s ombudsman gets it. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on a “blistering” report by the ombudsman which finds that workers often make decisions “in arbitrary ways with little planning or thought.” 

Among other findings, the story notes, the report echoed concerns of other advocates that decisions sometimes 

-- can be more about the convenience of social service department staff than a child’s needs;
-- do not take account of earlier problems that put a child at risk;
-- result from personality conflicts with parents;
-- are based on hasty judgment calls about parents;
-- and can reflect unsubstantiated worries about children’s safety. 

It’s quite a contrast to the willful blindness of ombuds / “child advocates” in, for example, Maine and Massachusetts. 

● Speaking of Massachusetts, the Legislature there did the right thing when it slightly curbed the number of different conditions mandated reporters are mandated to report. But even that was too much for the state family police agency – which is trying to overrule state law with a regulation.  I have a blog post about the Department of Children and Family’s great big “DCF-U!” to the legislature. 

● Florida Politics reports that Florida is the latest state to introduce Reasonable Childhood Independence legislation. 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions:

● From Searchlight New Mexico: 

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia took his own life at a makeshift home for youth who lack foster placements.  Jaydun’s family included four brothers and a baby sister. He was very close to his siblings, those who knew him said, and a close friend to many kids in foster care. 

“He was always building us up, like helping us all,” said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun’s who lived with him for months in the Albuquerque office building of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, where case workers have often housed kids who don’t have foster homes available to them. … 

And finally … 

● Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating interview with “Alec Karakatsanis on the Media’s Role in Spreading ‘Copaganda’  So what is an interview about covering the police doing in a list of stories about family policing? Well, you don’t have to change the wording much to see the similarity.  Just change a sentence like this: 

[W]hen you report as an objective fact that there’s a shortage of  prison guards foster parents as opposed to too many people in prison too many children in foster care, you’re actually taking a side in a very consequential political debate.

Mass. family police try an end-run around the State Legislature on child welfare and drug use

But don’t worry, the “cannamoms” will still be safe

The Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, recently solicited comment (presumably only because they had to) on a proposed change to regulations defining child abuse. The change is an attempt to get around a wise decision by the State Legislature.

Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the way DCF helped the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” try to sucker a special commission into recommending all sorts of expansion of mandatory reporting. The commission wasn’t fooled. 

Neither was the legislature. They actually passed a good change which, ever so slightly, narrows the long list of conditions mandatory reporters must report.  But DCF isn’t having that!  They’re trying an end-run by changing regulations. 

It all amounts to a great big DCF-U! to the State Legislature.  Let's see if the lawmakers tolerate it.

Here’s the comment I sent to DCF: 

[Your proposed change] contradicts best practice, contradicts the evidence base concerning substance use and child welfare – and flouts the intent of the Legislature. 

The Legislature recently changed state law so mandated reporters no longer must automatically report any instance of “prenatal substance exposure.” They remain free to report it when, in their professional judgment, they believe such a report is necessary to protect a child. This is a clear recognition that this knee-jerk response of automatically reporting every such instance did nothing to improve child safety. On the contrary, it compromised safety by driving pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospital delivery. 

Rather than respect best evidence-based practice and the intent of lawmakers, you now propose to change regulations defining what constitutes “physical injury” – which of course is something mandated reporters have to report. 

Right now, that definition includes “addiction to drug at birth.” That’s bad enough. But your proposal would change the definition so that physical injury includes “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use.” What does that mean? Presumably whatever you want it to mean. (I’m guessing the groups you have in mind are those against whom DCF always comes down hardest: Poor people, especially poor people of color.  I doubt that it means you’ll be going after the “harmful patterns of substance use” displayed by the celebrated Cannamoms of Massachusetts’ affluent suburbs.) 

Here’s what this would mean for mandated reporters: Under state law mandated reporters don’t have to report “prenatal substance exposure.” But under the new proposed regulation, they would have to report “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use” – which, presumably would include “prenatal substance exposure.” 

In short, DCF seeks to overrule the Massachusetts Legislature. It is a classic example of the arrogance that leads Massachusetts to tear apart families at a rate 60%above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. And there certainly is no evidence that Massachusetts children are 60% safer than the national average. 

It is in keeping with the decades-long habit of DCF, and before that DSS, and before that DPW of failing to balance the potential harm of parental substance use (or any other alleged parental failing) against the known severe harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love – and the known risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find far higher rates of abuse than your agency acknowledges in official figures. 

For all of these reasons, and most importantly, for the safety of the children DCF claims it wants to protect, this proposed change should be rescinded.

How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.”

Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t do that. But at last, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

Seventeen years after we first raised the issue, an ugly little practice that leads to hundreds of needless foster care placements in Kansas every year finally is getting some attention – though far from all of the attention it deserves. 

The Kansas Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that may slightly reduce the number of times this practice is invoked – but it still allows the family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, to keep such placements “off the books” – so no one will know how many children really are taken from their homes in Kansas each year. 

The practice is known as placing children in “police protective custody.” It’s a special Kansas twist on the ugly practice of “hidden foster care.” What Kansas allows is so awful that it earns the state a special note in the narrative for the NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index. 

After decades, it appears that DCF finally has leadership that is concerned about the practice and how it leads to the needless removal of children. They supported the modest reforms.  But they’re still sticking to the disingenuous claim that these placements are not foster care. 

Why are police protective custody placements not foster care? Because, DCF says, they’re police protective custody placements, that’s why! 

And no wonder: 

In a foster care placement, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

In a police protective custody placement, on the other hand, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

See the difference?  

Well, actually there is that one difference. When the police take the child (hence the term “police protective custody”) and the child is returned home at or before the first court hearing – which can be as much as six days later – DCF pretends it never happened!  In other words, when Kansas tells the public, and the federal government, how many children were torn from their homes and placed elsewhere by force of law, they don’t count police protective custody placements. 

How many such placements are there? No one knows for sure, but apparently quite a lot – so many that it can take the rate of removal in Kansas from outrageous all the way to obscene. Even worse, it appears that a significant proportion of these placements involve dumping children into the worst, most traumatic form of placement of all – institutionalizing them in parking place “shelters.”   

Officially, in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, Kansas consigned 3,096 children to the chaos of foster care – that made the rate of removal in Kansas well over double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (DCF gives a lower figure for 2024, but the number nationwide also probably has declined, so it’s unlikely Kansas’ relative position has changed.)

But in March, DCF finally released some figures on police protective custody placements. While not precise, they suggest that anywhere from 979 to 1,076 children were taken into police protective custody and then “thrown back” – much the worse for the experience – before the first hearing, and so would never be counted in official figures.  (A link to DCF’s figures and an explanation of the estimate can be found at the end of this post. If anyone wants to suggest an alternative figure, I’d be glad to take a look.) 

National Average   Kansas1         Kansas2

1=Rate-of-removal based on officially acknowledged entries.
2=Rate-of-removal based on likely real number of entries (including 979 PPC placements)

Using the low-end estimate, that would mean Kansas really took away 4,075 children in 2022. That would make the rate of removal in Kansas more than triple the national average and the fourth highest in the country. 

The practice goes back a long way 

We first discovered the practice in 2007, while working on our report about Kansas child welfare. We discovered it when it was referenced in passing in an op-ed column written by the public official who, then as now, might be Kansas’ foremost proponent of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That would be Ron Paschal, then as now the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). His op-ed hinted that the number was huge, but offered no specifics. 

Just as in 2007, the most extreme use of police protective custody placements is still in the Wichita area. In that region, it appears that more than half of all entries into care were police protective custody cases in which the children were returned to family within six days. 

The excuse for hiding all these placements 

Although DCF has more concern about these placements now than it did in 2007, it still uses the same excuse now as then for failing to report them as entries to the public or to the federal government: It’s not foster care because DCF doesn’t have custody of the children – the police do. In other words: Sure, they’re in exactly the same places and subject to exactly the same control as if DCF had them, but hey, so what? That’s our technicality and we’re sticking to it! 

At best DCF is exploiting a loophole in federal regulations concerning what must be reported as an entry into foster care, at worst they may not be following those regulations. 

Those regulations do not say a child has to be in the custody of a given agency to be counted as in foster care.  Rather, the state family police agency must have “responsibility for placement and care of the child.”  In the case of Kansas police protective custody placements, children may be placed in foster homes group homes or institutions that are licensed and overseen by DCF. That sure sounds like responsibility for placement and care.  But, in fairness to DCF, when we asked the federal Administration for Children and Families about this in 2007, they were just fine with letting Kansas do this and looking the other way. That may be in part because if Kansas doesn’t call a case foster care, the federal government doesn’t have to pick up part of the tab for that case. 

So maybe DCF can get away with it legally – ethically it’s a shameful misrepresentation of the full scope of the extent to which Kansas destroys families.

Six-day placements are almost never necessary 

The new data also tell us something else: In nearly 1,000 cases – and maybe more – a Kansas law enforcement officer decided that something was happening to a child that was so awful it required tearing that child from everyone she or he knows and loves and throwing that child in with strangers – at worst dumping them into an institution. And yet, that child could be returned, typically to the home from which she or he was taken, within six days. 

A sadistic, brutal parent out to beat and torture a child does not suddenly reform in six days.  Neither does a parent who’s been deliberately starving a child. In these sorts of extremely rare cases, the problem is not likely to be remedied in six days.  Where the danger is not severe and immediate, odds are there are things that can be done without taking away the child. Here’s a good example, from next door in Missouri, of a police officer who understands that.  

But Ron Paschal doesn’t understand that. In legislative testimony, he cited horrible situations supposedly requiring police protective custody, and declared in written testimony that when the child then is returned home from this supposedly impossibly horrible situation within six days “THIS IS AN INDICATION THAT [POLICE PROTECTIVE CUSTODY] WAS SUCCESSFUL.” (Capitals in original(!)) 

That’s like saying that kidnapping a child does the child no harm, and even declaring success, if the child is rescued in a few days.  I think most people – especially the children in question – would consider it far better not to be kidnapped in the first place.  And make no mistake, particularly for a young child, the trauma is every bit as great as a kidnapping – no matter how “short” the time in foster care – oops, sorry, I mean “police protective custody.” 

If anything, Paschal suggests Kansas still isn’t tearing apart enough families.  He cites claims that child abuse is underreported, and the fact that his position has popular support – as evidenced by viewer comments on a television station website. 

This is a longstanding belief on Paschal’s part. You can read more about him in NCCPR’s 2007 report on Kansas child welfare. 

One other thing about police protective custody placements. They don’t always end with a return to the birth parents. Sometimes they end with an informal arrangement to place the child in the home of a relative – in other words, the classic version of hidden foster care. So Kansas’ special version of hidden foster care – police protective custody placements – probably increases the number of classically hidden placements. 

______________

How we estimated the number of unreported foster care entries in Kansas. 

In written testimony to the Kansas Legislature, Deputy DCF Secretary Tanya Keys includes several tables on Page 5. One of those tables puts the total number of Police Protective Custody (PPC) placements in 2024 at 2,509.  Another table states that of all the children Kansas officially admits they put in foster care in 2024, 1,433 of them started off as PPC placements. So if 1,433 out of 2,509 PPC placements ultimately became officially recognized foster-care placements, that leaves 1,076 that did not. That would be 1,076 children taken from their families but never officially counted as foster care placements. 

But the number might not be that high. In an email, Keys explained that's because the 1,433 figure is actually an estimate, extrapolating from various data sources. (By the way, however much I disagree with the agency, Keys sure works hard – she answered my emails on a Sunday night.) 

But there’s an alternative, simpler way to estimate: The Kansas Reflector reports that during a legislative hearing 

Keys said, the Kansas Department of Corrections reported 39% of children dropped off at juvenile facilities last fiscal year by law enforcement officers across the state were subsequently released to a family member. 

“Forty percent of those children are returned to a parent or relative. That’s their placement outcome after a juvenile intake an assessment worker is alongside that family,” Keys said. 

That would be 979, and that more conservative figure is the one I’ve used to estimate the real rate of removal in Kansas.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 15, 2025

● The family policing system in Philadelphia tears apart families at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. In an extraordinary three-part series, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks at how that city’s system destroys children in the name of saving them – and what can be done about it. Part One deals with widespread abuse in foster care. Part Three compares Philadelphia to the state-run system in neighboring New Jersey, which has improved child safety while dramatically reducing the number of families it tears apart.

But most extraordinary – and perhaps most significant for a national audience - may be part two.  It is the best examination I’ve seen by any news organization into the horrors of “hidden foster care.”  Be sure to read it to the end.

The revelations all were shocking enough to prompt the City Council to plan public hearings.

● Not that we’d ever say we told you so, but NCCPR first wrote about the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds as a family policing slush fund in 2010. ProPublica did a superb story about it in 2021. So it’s good to see, as The Imprint reports, that the Government Accountability Office is getting into the act.

● Here’s another media myth from news organizations in West Virginia: the claim that the Child Removal Capital of America underspends on child welfare. On the contrary, it spends at a rate above, possibly far above, the national average – but it wastes the money on needless foster care.  I have a blog post about it.

● In an earlier post about West Virginia, I discussed dreadful legislation – sponsored by a lawmaker who’s also a white middle-class foster parent – that would make it easier, yes, easier, to keep foster children apart from their siblings. I hope he reads this commentary in The Imprint by a former foster youth describing what that did to her.

● There may be better news from the legislature in Maine. After years of retreating from reform, lawmakers may be reconsidering. As the Maine Morning Star reports, they’re looking at legislation to make it more difficult to confuse poverty with neglect.

● The Observer, in Sacramento, Calif., begins a multi-part series on the racial bias that pervades family policing. 

● And speaking of racial bias, MindSite News reports that 

Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder, which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a new report released this month.

“I often say ODD greases the school-to-prison pipeline,” Dr. Rupi Legha, a Los Angeles-based child and adolescent psychiatrist, told MindSite News. “It becomes a way to shove kids quicker. They’re going to slip and fall a lot more and it’s going to go a lot faster.” 

Of course, this also has implications for which foster children wind up trapped in “residential treatment” – and what happens to them when they’re there. 

● The New York Times has a story about the horrifying implications of Elon Musk’s attempt to gather all the information the federal government has on us into one giant database. Why is that here? Because if you happen to be an impoverished family in Pittsburgh subjected to a call alleging child neglect – it’s already happening to you.  And in that case, The New York Times ran an article (by a white, middle-class foster parent) praising it to the skies! 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● KSDK-TV, St. Louis reports: 

A Lincoln County woman is facing multiple charges after police said she assaulted and abandoned a teenage girl for whom she was supposed to be caring. … 

[The foster mother] collects exotic animals,[Lincoln County Prosecutor Mike] Wood said, and they're investigating allegations that she traded the girl in exchange for a monkey. 

● NBC6 South Florida reports that 

A man has been sentenced to two life sentences in a Miami-Dade human trafficking case involving a child who was in foster care and an adult, prosecutors said. 

And finally,

 ● File this story from The Imprint under “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

West Virginia does NOT underspend on “child welfare” – it MIS-spends

West Virginia probably spends on child welfare at a rate anywhere from 9% to 44% above the national average.

 All posts in this series are available here.

West Virginia Watch is at it again. 

That’s the publication that has published thousands upon thousands of words about the child welfare system in the Child Removal Capital of America – and not one of those words that I can find comes from a parent who lost a child to foster care. 

That’s the publication that repeatedly presents as fact the false claim that West Virginia’s status as Child Removal Capital of America is some inevitable consequence of substance abuse. In fact, as we have pointed out previously, if all substance abuse disappeared in West Virginia tomorrow the state still would be tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

And now it offers up a commentary (labeled as one for once, at least) in which a foster parent condemns another foster parent for daring to tell the truth about money: Money, or rather the alleged lack of it, is not the reason the West Virginia foster care system is so awful. 

To read West Virginia Watch and other news outlets constantly bemoaning a supposed lack of funding for child welfare, you’d think West Virginia was spending at or near the lowest rate in the country.  You would hope that before repeating that mantra someone at West Virginia Watch would have checked to see how West Virginia actually compares. 

Apparently, they never have.  So I guess we’ll have to do it for them. 

Comparing rates of child welfare spending 

A precise comparison is impossible – but a rough comparison can be done.  And that comparison shows that West Virginia probably spends on child welfare at a rate at least nine percent above the national average – even when rates of child poverty are factored in. And that probably is a significant underestimate. 

Here’s what we know, and what we don’t: 

Every couple of years ChildTrends attempts the herculean task of trying to figure out how much every state spends on child welfare. This is incredibly difficult because there are a vast number of federal, state, and local funding streams, some of which are reserved for child welfare expenditures, many of which are not. NCCPR then takes these state totals and divides them both by the total number of children in each state and by the number of impoverished children – which we think is the fairer comparison. It’s based on these cost-per-child estimates that we say West Virginia is spending on child welfare at a rate above the national average. 

Some important caveats 

Because the task takes so long – and requires trying to get answers from every state – the data typically run well behind. Unfortunately, now they are five years behind – the most recent are from 2020. So that’s the first crucial caveat; the spending data are old. But there is nothing to indicate that anything happened in West Virginia to prompt child welfare spending to plummet – and certainly not to plummet more than any other state. 

The other caveat explains why the West Virginia spending figure probably is too low: As I said, ChildTrends tries to get the data from every state. A few states couldn’t or wouldn’t supply the data. Guess which state was among them. Yep. So for West Virginia, and a few other states,  ChildTrends had to craft estimates based on federal data sources – and for some very large categories, it could provide no estimate at all.  Categories that, on average, account for 35% of a state’s total child welfare spending are missing for West Virginia. 

So the real spending total for West Virginia in 2020 probably was significantly higher than the ChildTrends estimate. Indeed, West Virginia may spend at a rate more than 44% above the national average. 

Spending so much, getting so little 

So how is it that West Virginia spends so much, but we’re constantly hearing about overload and shortages? It’s because of the great paradox of child welfare: The worse the intervention, the more it costs. Safe, proven alternatives to family foster homes cost less than family foster homes which cost less than group homes which cost less than in-state institutions which cost less than out-of-state institutions.  So of course, when you’re the Child Removal Capital of America you’re going to spend vast amounts of money and children will get nothing – or sometimes worse than nothing – in return. 

So take it from a proud tax-and-spend liberal: West Virginia does not need to spend more on child welfare – but it sure needs to spend smarter.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 8, 2025

● I’ve never before seen a foster-care story get a “push notice” from The New York Times. But this one did. That’s what happens when a county agrees to pay four billion dollars to more than 6,800 children sexually abused while in the custody of its foster care and/or juvenile justice systems. As I note in this blog post, in every one of the cases in which the children were thrown into foster care, it was done in the name of “child safety.”  The post also includes a link to a story from KFMB-TV about the latest lawsuits against a parking-place shelter in San Diego. Or you can just see it here: 

● The Harvard Law Bulletin profiles the extraordinary life and work of Dorothy Roberts, professor of law, Africana studies, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” – and member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. From the story: 

“We need to radically change how we think about child safety and welfare, and that means we need to focus on supporting families,” says Roberts, author of the 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” She adds, “Our society could be structured in a way to provide for those families’ material needs, but instead, it unleashes this terrorizing system on them.” 

● Speaking of extraordinary work, The Imprint podcast talks to Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark book Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services. 

● To what should be the surprise of no one, there’s still another study showing that concrete help – in this case not evicting people from their homes – reduces child abuse.

● Last year The Marshall Project and Reveal reported on the enormous harm done to newborns when they’re taken from their mothers because of false positive drug tests.  Now, they have a follow-up story about the medical professionals who are saying Enough! 

From the story: 

A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn. 

[Dr. Sharon] Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid — race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care. 

“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering, about past cases. … 

● For still another example of the harm of botched drug testing, check out this story from WANF-TV in Atlanta. 

And in Minnesota, the Star Tribune reports 

A federal racketeering lawsuit alleges that the leading child abuse pediatrician in Minnesota manipulated medical records that directly led to murder charges against a daycare provider in the death of a toddler in Minneapolis more than seven years ago.