The search for warning signs in death of young AJ Freund
In the wake of Crystal Lake 5-year-old AJ Freund's murder in April, we began researching shortcomings and failures of the state's child welfare policies.
We knew the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services had long been in contact with his parents, who stand accused of his beating death. The obvious concern was that warning signs had been overlooked.
Reporter Lauren Rohr began looking for advisory groups that are in place to provide recommendations to DCFS after consulting a tip sheet from the journalism nonprofit group Investigative Reporters and Editors. The search led her to a report issued each year by the Child Death Review Team, a group of experts that investigates the deaths of children involved with DCFS in the last year of their life as well as most other child homicides in the state.
Lauren found a report with data from 2016, but was told by the executive director of the CDRT that the newest report — with 2017 child death data — would be published sometime in September.
The report indicated how each child had died, but it specifically detailed the manner of child homicides.
Armed with this information, I wanted to see if any trends would emerge from the data. We were eventually able to procur reports from 2006 through 2017.
While reading about each homicide case, I could see that the vast majority of kids beaten to death each year were very young, so I started plotting the ages of each child beaten to death in the spreadsheet. Almost immediately, I could see that almost all of the children beaten to death between 2006 and 2017 were 5 or younger.
In fact, when all the data was in, it showed 87% of the 302 children beaten to death in Illinois over those 12 years were under 6-years old. Additionally, we could see most of these children were killed by a parent or guardian.
I made a quick call to a school district to ask when school was mandatory in Illinois, and was told first grade or usually 6-years old. We also contacted people connected to AJ's case and determined the boy had not been in any type of day care or early childhood education program in the years since he had been returned to his parents' custody.
Lauren and I began calling child welfare experts to discuss the findings and learned that this type of extrapolation had never been done before. We also found state reports that recommended all children under DCFS supervision be enrolled in a day care or school.
The experts were basically in agreement that children 5 and under were in greater danger from being beaten to death because of the lack of required child care or education for that age group. They surmised children in school are at an advantage because educators are mandated reporters of suspected abuse or neglect. Also, younger children not in some type of child care program are at a greater risk of harm because they are with their potential abuser with greater frequency.
On Oct. 12, we published our report documenting our findings.