She had a mother who was repeatedly accused of neglecting Danieal and her eight brothers and sisters.

Her father was an intermittent presence - and faced his own charges of abusing her brother.

Like so many other vulnerable children who couldn't depend on their parents, wheelchair-bound Danieal was supposed to be protected by the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, with help from a team of private social workers. They failed her, too.

On Aug. 4, during a brutal heat wave, Danieal was found dead at age 14, weighing 46 pounds, her bedsores festering with maggots, in a house full of disheveled and dirty children.

While federal and city prosecutors investigate, The Inquirer has turned up new details about the troubled history of the Kelly family, and the institutional breakdown that paved the way for Danieal's death.

For nearly a year before Danieal died, the nonprofit MultiEthnic Behavioral Health Inc. was being paid to visit the family every week and to check on Danieal's health.

But the girl's mother, Andrea Kelly, contends no one from MultiEthnic visited her home for about two months before her daughter died.

Kelly also says a MultiEthnic caseworker had her sign blank forms attesting to visits - forms bearing future dates.

"I was questioning him about that, why was I signing all these papers," Kelly said in an interview. The answer: "So he wouldn't forget" the forms next time, she said.

DHS, in an October letter terminating MultiEthnic's city contract, leveled the same accusation: The company was "requiring families to sign blank encounter forms and consent forms."

A lawyer for MultiEthnic vigorously defended the company and said it was not responsible for the girl's death. Attorney Luther E. Weaver said a firm caseworker had visited the run-down Kelly home in West Philadelphia 18 times in June and July before she died.

As for the contention that a caseworker made the mother "pre-sign" forms, Weaver said: "There's zero tolerance for such conduct. If it occurred, we have no knowledge that it ever occurred."

From dozens of interviews with Danieal's parents, social workers, school officials and others, along with a review of city and court documents, a picture emerges of a girl in growing danger, trapped in a family roiled by constant chaos - and of a city agency that repeatedly missed chances to save her.

DHS opened seven neglect investigations into the Kelly family. Even so, for the two years Danieal lived in Philadelphia, the agency apparently never realized that she was not enrolled in any school.

Danieal's death has become a defining event for the troubled DHS. In its ugly details, hers was perhaps the most appalling death of the 25 since 2003 of childen whose families had come to the attention of the agency.

After an Oct. 15 Inquirer article on the child deaths, Mayor Street reviewed DHS files, becoming particularly upset about the Kelly case. He fired the agency's top two officials and launched an ongoing overhaul of DHS.

"The system clearly failed with this kid," the new DHS commissioner, Arthur C. Evans Jr., said in October.

Danieal's death has focused attention on the city's use of nonprofit social-welfare firms such as MultiEthnic - and how they go all but unmonitored.

Before the latest scandal, DHS auditors did not routinely interview family members or even DHS caseworkers about the agencies' performance. In 30 years, DHS fired just three providers.