CINCINNATI — Ruling in a case that already has been to the Ohio Supreme Court once, an appeals court held three Hamilton County caseworkers may be sued over the murder of a two-year-old by her parents, who starved and beat her to death.
The Ohio Court of Appeals, First District, reversed a trial court’s dismissal of claims against the Hamilton County Department of Family Services, saying a jury might find caseworkers failed to intervene despite strong evidence of abuse. The court didn’t rule on whether the caseworkers were also responsible for leaving her in the presence of her violent father, who was accused of swinging the two-year-old by the feet against a wall the night before she died and ultimately pled guilty to manslaughter.
The child identified as G.B. was born to Andrea Bailey and Glen Bates in January 2013, and immediately placed into foster care along with four siblings already in the care of the state due to her parents’ abuse and neglect. The Hamilton County DFS urged juvenile court to return all five children to Bradley in August 2013, even though the foster mother said she was concerned Bradley wouldn’t feed them.
Over the next year, caseworkers visited the home and reported some instances where food was lacking, once noting Bradly was intentionally withholding food from G.B. because she thought she was overweight. Three months after Bradley had regained custody, G.B. had dropped from 20 pounds to 16 pounds.
The caseworkers performed no weekly weight checks between Dec. 14, 2014 and March 2015, when Bradley brought G.B. to the hospital, dead on arrival. The county coroner concluded the little girl had been beaten to death, but also suffered from starvation. She weighed 13 pounds at death.
Bradley ultimately pled guilty to murder, while Bates was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He pled guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter after the Ohio Supreme Court reversed his conviction in 2020 because his defense lawyer failed to question a white juror about racial bias she expressed in a questionnaire.
The child’s grandmother sued three caseworkers, accusing them of failing to act on evidence G.B. was being abused. A trial court dismissed her claims under the governmental immunity statute, which limits liability to cases of gross negligence, defined as reckless disregard for whether a person will be injured.
The Ohio Supreme Court reversed that decision in 2021, ruling the trial judge demanded a higher standard pleading on the evidence of gross negligence than necessary. The trial court dismissed the case again, finding insufficient evidence of recklessness, but the appeals court reversed the lower court in an Oct. 23 decision.
The trial judge defined recklessness as “a perverse disregard of a known risk” and found the caseworkers didn’t know enough about the abuse to disregard the risk G.B. would be killed by her parents. The appeals court disagreed, saying a jury might find the risk was one a “reasonable person in the caseworkers’ position would have recognized.”
“The employee need not have had actual knowledge of a risk; rather, as to whether the employee had sufficient knowledge of the risk, it is enough that a reasonable person would have known and appreciated the risk,” the court said.
The Ohio Supreme Court reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit against caseworkers in another case involving the killing of a two-year-old on that basis, the appeals court said, while the high court has upheld immunity where caseworkers thoroughly investigated allegations of neglect and abuse and a death occurred anyway.
FG+G, Jacqueline Greene and Alphonse A. Gerhardstein represented the plaintiff.
