But they got very busy after she died, according to a grand-jury report.

The call came Aug. 4, 2006. She'd been found dead, looking like a victim of a concentration camp, with rotting bedsores and weighing 42 pounds.

That afternoon, workers for MultiEthnic Behavioral Health Inc. scrambled to forge documents to make it look as though they had been visiting the girl and her family, as they were being paid to do by the city's Department of Human Services.

In the months before the girl's horrific death, the workers for MultiEthnic were not the only ones who failed to do their jobs - or to try to cover their tracks afterward - according to the grand-jury report.

"The fate of a sweet and promising child depended on the willingness of a number of particular adults to do the bare minimum of what they were supposed to do," the report says.

". . . Had just one of them performed their duty or done their job, Danieal would be alive today."

The DHS caseworker assigned to the family, Dana Poindexter, ignored warnings that the girl was at grave risk, the report alleges, and later lied to the grand jury to make it appear he had been doing his job.

Months after her death, a homicide detective found the case file - at the bottom of a box filled with food wrappers and dusty unopened letters, some of which were four years old.

Poindexter testified he didn't know that Kelly was entitled to go to school, or that it was against the law for a parent not to provide necessary care. "He must have been asleep during his training," one expert told the grand jury.

Pressed to provide a summary of the case a year before her death, Poindexter wrote an account that the grand jury called "pathetic," "self-serving," and "almost certainly false."

Poindexter, who had been suspended three times for poor performance, testified that he prepared many documents and put them in the Kelly case file.

"The grand jury has no doubt that he never prepared these documents," the report said. He is charged with perjury, along with endangering the welfare of children.

Reached by phone, Poindexter, 51, declined to comment. He was suspended again by DHS yesterday.

Another DHS worker, who did not bother to enter the girl's room during her last visit, backdated her report, the grand-jury report said.

And a supervisor admitted she falsified case records to make it seem that DHS had investigated old neglect reports involving the Kelly family and found them "unsubstantiated." Called to testify, she told grand jurors that was common practice at DHS; she said it was a bureaucratic procedure that helped hasten services to families.

That supervisor, Martha Poller, is still with DHS and recently was given a new job: project manager for a team that will examine child-fatality cases. During a news conference yesterday, District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham said she was incredulous that Poller had been entrusted with that new duty.

Poller did not return phone calls yesterday seeking comment.She was not charged.

The 258-page report brims with outrage and fierce criticism of the people involved in Kelly's case - not just of the nine people who were charged, but also the people who ran DHS, the investigators who responded to the death, and even a Public Health Department official who tried to squelch her employees from talking about the case.

The findings in the report echoed, in part, the findings of a DHS review panel that found deep problems at DHS and suggested sweeping reforms.