A young girl was tortured to death, but authorities evade blame

PHILADELPHIA - Malinda Hoagland was 12 years old and weighed 50 pounds when her body gave out. She'd shown up for school with fresh cuts and bruises and, malnourished, hoarded food in her locker. But day after day, school officials still sent her home to be tortured by a woman who already had a hand in killing another child.

Cindy Warren faces the death penalty for what prosecutors, and surveillance footage from her own home, say she did, like starving and beating her boyfriend's daughter - not to mention chaining her to furniture while naked and covered in Vaseline.

Her criminal trial is scheduled to begin Monday. Elsewhere in civil court, the sisters of Malinda Hoagland pinned blame on two Pennsylvania counties and two school districts that allegedly failed to step in and help.

Philadelphia federal judge Mark Kearney, though, has largely rejected their case. On Aug. 13, he threw out just about all of it at an early stage, not even letting the sisters get to a level that would allow them to possibly collect more evidence that school officials knew something evil was happening at Malinda's house and did nothing.

"Sad case, wrong defendants," he wrote in an opinion that was "abominable," according to the attorney for Malinda's sisters, Tom Bosworth.

"It's wrong," he told the Pennsylvania Record. "And I don't just mean it's wrong from a moral standpoint, though it is. It's legally wrong.

"People in a democracy, we ought to be outraged at stuff like this, particularly where government officials clearly weren't protecting the child here.

"The very people we all pay to protect children, which is the most sacred and most important thing you could do, they failed. Now, we have another branch of the government, the judiciary, that failed to provide a rightful avenue for this child's family to pursue."

Kearney focused on the law's ability to hold government entities responsible for what goes on inside a person's home and whether inaction on their part is a "state-created danger." But what is alleged, and what is generally supposed to be taken as true by the judge during the early part of litigation, is that in 2022 Malinda's condition was so obvious that lunch-room workers at Scott Middle School routinely gave the child extra food to eat.

She'd keep extra food in her locker. She'd miss days without a doctor's note. The allegations of abuse show a young girl who would apologize while being tortured at home and called a "bitch."

At North Brandywine Middle School, the unexcused absences piled up (25 in total) while the Coatesville Area School District sent warnings that it would initiate truancy proceedings but never did.

A March 14, 2023, call from the school nurse said Malinda wouldn't be allowed to come back to school without a doctor's note, which led Warren to suggest to her boyfriend, Malinda's father Rendell (who also faces murder charges) that they pull Malinda from the school.

State truancy law required notifying a magisterial district judge, but that never happened, the lawsuit says. "Had CASD not employed the unlawful and unconstitutional policies, customs and practices... Malinda Hoagland would have been lawfully removed from the custody of Cindy Warren and Rendell Hoagland prior to her death and she would be alive today."

And all of this happened with a custody agreement on file in Monroe County that said Warren could only be left alone with Malinda for a maximum of one hour. It is alleged Chester County and CASD knew of the agreement and Warren's past yet failed to ensure children under high risk for abuse were seen once a week.

But Kearney wrote the lawsuit doesn't plausibly allege anyone at the county read the agreement upon Malinda moving there. He threw out all claims against the school districts and left only a negligence argument related to Malinda's sexual abuse against Chester County.

"The judge has to significantly strain and go far beyond the pleadings and extrapolate what the court thinks the evidence might show or what the evidence could show," said Bosworth, who plans to appeal.

"It's totally inappropriate for a motion to dismiss. At the same time, the court misconstrues the factual allegations and flat-out gets them wrong."

Malinda wasn't the first child Warren abused, prosecutors say. A 2-year-old with traumatic injuries died in December 2000 after living with the woman. Monroe County had been monitoring the child's wellbeing due to safety concerns.

In 2007, Warren was charged with abusing her 3-year-old son, who was locked in a bedroom for days. He was found with bruises, lacerations and a burn mark when detectives visited. She blamed the death of the 2-year-old on her then-husband before admitting she had also been at fault and pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of children.

She was sentenced to a maximum of seven years in prison. Years after her release, she began dating Malinda's father. When she found out Malinda was stashing food in her school locker, she made her stand still while holding books over her head, the suit says.

At a parent/teacher conference at North Brandywine, Warren and Rendell demanded to search Malinda's locker, which the teacher allowed. Finding food, the two "ragefully burst out in anger at Malinda and her teacher," the suit says.

An employee did make a report to Chester County the next day, saying Malinda "often came to school hungry and asking for more food." There was also "an unexplained black eye."

Again, the county was notified Malinda was living with a convicted child abuser, the suit said. Warren blamed Malinda's hunger on a decision to not give her breakfast, and no in-home visit occurred. She never went back to school after December 2023 but CASD ignored the fact she was now not enrolled anywhere, the lawsuit says.

Five months later she was admitted to Paoli Hospital and died. An autopsy showed blunt force injuries and starvation had killed her and revealed about 75 bruises on her body, plus ulcers and pressure sores.

The ensuing investigation showed Rendell and Warren had installed surveillance cameras around the house and they depicted the torture Malinda had faced when she got home from school, prosecutors say.

Federal judges are often asked to handle civil rights cases that allege a failure to act by authorities placed a person in more harm. For example, last month a Pittsburgh judge declined to blame cops for leaving an intoxicated woman behind at the scene of an accident.

She said not giving the woman a ride didn't place Faye McCoy in more danger because she already didn't have a ride - her friend's car had been wrecked. McCoy attempted to walk home and was struck and killed in a hit-and-run.

That judge said a failure to do something can't be the basis for a state-created danger claim under precedent from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Kearney, in Malinda's case, felt similarly.

Chester County didn't leave her more vulnerable when it failed to act on the school worker's complaint, he said. "It left her only as vulnerable," he wrote.

"The principles we apply today are not novel," Kearney added. "They may be surprising to a layperson moved by Malinda's tragedy. But governments are not guarantors of safety from crime (even as heinous as the abuse upon Malinda) absent specific conditions created by the government."

Kearney hasn't always been this quick to dismiss a state-created danger claim. For example, he allowed a wrestler who broke his leg playing a football-style game on anti-slip mats to sue the Pocono Mountain School District. And he let the theory be pressed against corrections officers who allegedly put an Iranian inmate in a cell with a white supremacist.

But he tossed the claim when the parents of a bullied student who committed suicide sued the Springfield School District. He did the same in a sexual assault case against the School District of Philadelphia. Each case is analyzed as to whether the state actor's decision "shocks the conscience" and the harm that results was "foreseeable and direct."

In Malinda's case, Bosworth felt he had adequately alleged those conditions were present, like a failure to investigate a clearly starving child who had stopped going to school with no explanation.

"The one thing the judge kept going back to is when you make one of these constitutional claims, you have to prove the government's conduct... placed the person at greater risk than otherwise," he said.

"The judge kept going back to it, that she already lived in an abusive home."

But each day Malinda was sent back to live with Warren was a new instance of abuse, Bosworth said. Action by authorities "would've spared her from many, many, many different acts of abuse. It's a cheap, lazy and unrefined way of looking at it."