Social workers across North Carolina have too often failed to stop cases of child abuse that ended in death or serious injury, state lawmakers said Wednesday in announcing their support for stricter scrutiny of some cases.
Social services cases are typically handled at the local level. But deaths in recent years of children in Johnston, Nash, Cumberland, Person and Mecklenburg counites, among others, have raised questions about whether county social workers missed signs of abuse or let cases fall through the cracks.
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A bipartisan push, in the form of House Bill 1144, would escalate certain families’ cases out of local oversight, and put them under the watch of a new team inside of state government. The sponsors include several lawmakers — Democrats, Republicans and the state’s only unaffiliated representative — from counties where abuse cases have drawn scrutiny after children’s deaths.
The most recent such case came from Charlotte late last year, when 6-year-old Dominique Moody was found dead with signs of torture and starvation. Local law enforcement and social services officials have been accused of missing signs of abuse in the home, despite dozens of calls to authorities, Charlotte-based WCNC reported.
Dominique and her sister were living with a family member and other adults in a filthy home while the abuse dragged on, until she died, according to Charlotte Rep. Carla Cunningham, who is among those leading the charge for the new bill.
“Her sister stated that Dominique stayed in a cage, and sometimes rats would bite her,” Cunningham said Wednesday at a legislative press conference. “She described Dominique bleeding sometimes from rat bites. She heard her cry and scream, but it was ignored. … The adults in the home would whip Dominique with a belt, a stick, or a poll. The aunt would put a bag over Dominique’s head, and tape her eyes, so she could not watch them eat.”
Cunningham, a former Democrat who’s now unaffiliated, said local officials should have known about the abuse and could have stopped it long before the girl died. The new bill is named in Dominique’s memory.
“Something definitely was missed,” Cunningham said Wednesday. “If the police went there for 911 calls 59 times over a four-year period — four years — something should’ve triggered. I’m not sure that they ever even entered the residence.”
Rep. Allen Chesser, R-Nash, said he has also come to believe that child protective services statewide need a major overhaul. His own county’s department of social services was taken over by the state in 2023 after failures to protect children in its care, but control has since returned to the local level.
Chesser co-sponsored the Fostering Care in NC Act, which became law last year, giving the state Department of Health and Human Services more power to hold county-run social services departments accountable. The law also tightens procedures and deadlines for investigating reports of abuse and neglect within the foster care system. The effort was a key subject of the WRAL documentary "Broken: Foster Care in North Carolina."
“We cannot let this cycle continue to play out and just say that these are isolated incidents,” Chesser said Wednesday. “The Dominique Moody Act here works to correct the lack of oversight that seems systematic in our programs at this time.”
The new bill would spend $100,000 training county social workers on how to better spot child abuse. It would also spend hundreds of thousands per year more hiring a state-level team of social workers to take over certain cases from counties. The bill contains a long list of triggers for the state to get involved, including families who have faced multiple reports to child protective services for child abuse, drug use or medical neglect of their children.
The bill, if it becomes law, would also speed up the ability of state officials to get internal reports, interview transcripts and more. Chesser said that as it stands, many of those documents only become public as part of criminal cases, which can sometimes take years to go to trial.
“If we have to wait until information is publicly available through discovery, more children can be exposed to these situations,” Chesser said. “More lives will be lost and trauma can continue unnecessarily.”
Chesser and other lawmakers are seeking some such documents related to the Dominique Moody case, but a Mecklenburg County judge has blocked them from being released, Charlotte-based WBTV reported last week.