DCFS timeline shows no abuse reports on foster child until her death

Two days before police found Mackenzi Felmlee gasping for breath at the bottom of the stairs, her caseworker noted the foster mother told her the girl was “struggling.”

On May 11, 2024, Mackenzi, an 18-year-old foster child, died at a local hospital after she was found unresponsive in her Fairview Heights home. Shemeka Williams, Mackenzi’s foster mother, and Williams’ mother, Cornelia Reid, face first-degree murder and child abuse charges.

The caseworker, identified only as S.M., was the 10th child welfare specialist in Mackenzi’s five-year-old case, according to a timeline released by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

One of those 10 caseworkers, identified as D.R., was on Mackenzi’s case for only three weeks. D.R. was assigned the case on May 17, 2023, and ended the assignment on June 5, 2023 — just under a year before Mackenzi’s death.

“That is antithetical to sound social work practices,” said Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, a critic of DCFS. “These kinds of complicated cases need consistency, and if there’s not, it’s likely that things will fall through the cracks.”

DCFS released the timeline in Mackenzi’s case last week, two months after Capitol News Illinois requested it. The state agency noted the information released was sourced from Lutheran Child and Family Services, which monitored Mackenzi’s case, and Caritas Family Solutions, which licensed Shemeka Williams as a foster parent, and “is subject to change as the investigation continues.”

DCFS initially resisted releasing a timeline on Mackenzi’s case, citing the wishes of local prosecutors handling the murder charges against Williams and Reid. The St. Clair County state’s attorney’s office later confirmed to Capitol News Illinois they did not oppose the release of the information.

Williams and Reid were arrested in June, more than a year after Mackenzi’s death. They remain in St. Clair County Jail pending trial.

Mackenzi died from a blood clot that hit her lungs, doctors have said. Her neck, shoulders, legs and face were bruised, and her dehydrated body weighed just 90 pounds.

Williams’ 15-year-old biological daughter recorded a video of Mackenzi as she struggled to breathe at the bottom of the stairs in the Fairview Heights home. Police said it took nearly an hour for someone to call 911.

A doctor who reviewed the case told police if Mackenzi had received immediate treatment, she likely would have survived the clot and made a full recovery.

The details of Mackenzi’s tumultuous teens years included parental criminal activity, drug use, abandonment, sexual exploitation and molestation by a guardian, then bouncing between relatives and foster placements. From May 2019 to April 2020, Mackenzi was placed in “several” foster and relative placements that were “not able to meet her needs,” according to the DCFS timeline.

In April 2020, Mackenzi was placed in Williams’ foster home after DCFS determined she needed a specialized foster home for children with medical, emotional or behavioral disorders.

Mackenzi, a former honor roll student, was diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and depression. She reportedly was under psychiatric care.

In the final year of her life, DCFS records showed LCFS caseworkers and supervisors visited Mackenzi in person 24 times.

But a search warrant application filed in court as part of the criminal investigation into Williams and Reid called into question some of the documentation made by at least one caseworker. In it, a Fairview Heights detective stated that during their investigation into Mackenzi’s death a caseworker was “copying and pasting notes for home visits, which does not appear to have correctly documented the visits.”

Requests to open Mackenzi’s juvenile case were denied.

Mackenzi attended Belleville East High School for 10 th and 11 th grade. Prosecutors said Mackenzi was failing and truant, missing 15 out of 55 school days. She returned for the first semester of her senior year but after turning 18 in July 2023, she stopped going to school, opting to take night classes to finish her GED. She failed most of her classes for not completing the work, prosecutors have said.

Caritas Family Solutions, the agency that licensed Williams as a foster parent, also visited the home in person eight times and conducted two virtual visits.

In the month following Mackenzi’s death, DCFS interviewed Reid and Williams, according to the timeline. Police gave access to some of the investigatory files to a DCFS investigator, but a later request for videos and other evidence was denied by police in September 2024. Fairview Heights police informed DCFS that they were taking the lead on the investigation.

In addition to the reported visits with caseworkers and supervisors, she also met with an unspecified professional who was mandated by law to report allegations of child abuse or neglect. Seven of those visits were virtual and five were in-person.