NYT: S.C. DSS Under Scrutiny Before Killing of 5 Chidren

The state child welfare agency that investigated whether a South Carolina father was capable of caring for his five children before he allegedly killed them and dumped their bodies in rural Alabama has itself been under scrutiny in recent months, facing allegations of botching similar cases that resulted in child deaths.

The department’s leadership will be asked to justify its handling of the case of the five siblings in a State Senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.

“We intend to ask a lot of questions,” said Senator Joel Lourie, a Democrat and member of the panel. “This is a tragic, horrific situation.”

The scrutiny comes as Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, a Republican who has faced sharp criticism for more than a year over her handling of the department, runs for re-election. Her Democratic opponent, Vincent Sheheen, who trails badly in polls in an overwhelmingly Republican state, had been running television ads before the five siblings’ deaths saying the department had failed to protect vulnerable children.

Documents released this week show that the South Carolina Department of Social Services investigated two reports this year that Timothy R. Jones Jr., a 32-year-old engineer who was raising his children in a Lexington, S.C., trailer home, had physically abused them. The children were not removed from Mr. Jones’s custody in either case, nor were they removed after an investigation into the conditions of the home Mr. Jones made with his wife at the time in 2011 and 2012.

Long before Tuesday, when the authorities said Mr. Jones helped lead them to the bodies, South Carolina’s social services department had come in for sustained criticism from an array of Democratic and Republican state legislators.

Earlier this year, during a number of high-profile hearings by the Senate subcommittee, Mr. Lourie said he and his colleagues determined that department managers were fixated on meeting quotas in an effort to reduce the number of children in foster care, resulting in some children being removed from such care and returned to unsafe homes.

Mismanagement led to plummeting morale, Mr. Lourie said, with many caseworkers quitting. Some of those who remained, he said, found themselves dangerously overloaded with cases.

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