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Inquirer Investigation: 'Bury Your Mistakes'
Ransom-Garner said the agency had improved its call-routing system, but had not implemented Goad's other recommendations.
One year after Porchia died, McGee, then the agency's operations director, said: "It's much less likely that a case like Porchia's will happen again."
Not again
People knew Bryanna was in danger from the day she was born.
Nurses at Frankford Hospital-Torresdale Campus became concerned when her mother, Viola Redmond, a 22-year-old with an IQ below 90, told them that she didn't want the child.
"It was alarming. . . . She didn't pay any attention at all to the baby," testified the social worker, Columbia Elmelhaoui.
Her testimony, and this account, is drawn from court documents in the Viola Redmond murder case, interviews, and other public records. DHS declined to comment on the case.
A DHS caseworker went to the hospital shortly after the birth in January 2003. Three days later, the worker visited the home in the tidy Crescentville section of Northeast Philadelphia where Viola Redmond was living with her parents.
Along with baby Bryanna, Redmond was caring for a 16-month-old son, Jaleel. She worked a cleaning job at the nearby IRS office.
The caseworker, Robin Goodwin, reported that Redmond seemed "mentally retarded" and "childlike."
Though at risk, Bryanna would be OK, Goodwin decided, "because of the fact that there are both maternal grandparents in the home." She did not respond to a request for comment.
