Prosecutors charged that nine people, including the girl's parents and four social workers, stood by while Danieal Kelly, who had cerebral palsy, starved to death.

Kelly's bedsore-ridden corpse was found in a boiling-hot and squalid West Philadelphia rowhouse on Aug. 4, 2006, weighing just 42 pounds - the weight of a typical 5-year-old.

District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, who brought the case before the grand jury, said yesterday that the Department of Human Services was in "total meltdown."

The city shook up DHS following investigative articles published in The Inquirer in 2006. Those stories drove then-Mayor John F. Street to fire the agency's two top officials and appoint a blue-ribbon panel to overhaul its operation.

Even so, Abraham said, the agency's culture remained deeply dysfunctional. The new findings in the grand-jury report, she said, should "outrage the whole Philadelphia community."

The grand jury charged Kelly's mother, Andrea Kelly, 39, with murder, and her father, Daniel Kelly, 37, with child endangerment. But it devoted most of its 258 pages to chronicling how those outside the family failed their mission to rescue Danieal Kelly.

The jury criminally charged two DHS social workers - Dana Poindexter, 51, and Laura Sommerer, 33 - with felony counts of child endangerment and misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment. It said Poindexter tossed Danieal Kelly's file into a trash-filled file box and that Sommerer, in a visit to the home shortly before the death, failed to realize that the girl was in dire shape.

Abraham said it was the first time she could recall that a DHS worker had been charged with a crime in connection with his or her job.

The grand jury leveled charges of involuntary manslaughter against two other private social workers - Julius Murray, 51, and Mickal Kamuvaka, 59. They worked at a now-closed nonprofit hired by DHS to provide the most direct help to Kelly and her eight brothers and sisters.

Murray provided so little care that he was almost a "ghost employee," the grand jury said. As for Kamuvaka, it accused her of convening a "forgery fest" to cover up the private agency's failures to help Danieal Kelly.

Kamuvaka was a founder of the Southwest Philadelphia private agency MultiEthnic Behavioral Health Inc., which was paid $3.5 million by the city from 2001 until its contracts were cut off after Kelly's death.

MultiEthnic is now the subject of a separate federal investigation into possible fraud in its billings, according to a lawyer familiar with that probe. Kamuvaka has received a target letter in that inquiry, the lawyer said.

In addition, the grand jury also charged three friends of the victim's mother with perjury. It accused them of trying to protect her by lying to the grand jury about Danieal's deteriorating condition.

Detectives with the D.A.'s Office and Philadelphia police fanned out yesterday to arrest those charged; some turned themselves in at Police Headquarters. By early evening, six of the nine people charged were in custody.

DHS social worker Poindexter declined to comment yesterday.

Craig Hosay, a lawyer for Andrea Kelly, said she was "obviously very upset" but would present a full defense.

Will Spade, lawyer for Murray, the private social worker, cautioned the public to keep an open mind. "These grand-jury reports are very one-sided," Spade said.

The others charged in the case or their attorneys could not be reached for comment.

The case's horror was brought home vividly by a color photograph published on Page 18 of the grand jury's report (Page 23 in the online version). Taken during Danieal Kelly's autopsy, it showed the girl's body shockingly thin and covered with gaping bloody bedsores.