Nutter lambastes DHS workers connected to girl's death

The horrible details of Danieal Kelly's death brought tears to Mayor Nutter's eyes yesterday, but it was the complicity of city employees in her starvation that made him rage.

At a remarkable City Hall news conference yesterday, Nutter made it plain that he would not tolerate further incompetence or apathy from employees at the city's beleaguered Department of Human Services.

"If you are not prepared to take the action that needs to be taken, if you cannot keep up and stay on top of things, then you should leave this city government right now," Nutter said, addressing himself to DHS employees.

"We don't need you, and we don't want you."

Nutter's comments were easily his harshest critique yet of a city department and its employees. Although he campaigned as a candidate who would throw the bums out of City Hall, as mayor he has frequently gone out of his way to praise municipal workers. The vast majority, he often says, are diligent and dedicated people who get too little respect.

Nutter took care to repeat those sentiments yesterday, even personally thanking by phone four DHS employees who had tried to blow the whistle on the Kelly case. But his appreciation for good work was, for once, dwarfed by his prodigious anger at those who had so badly failed the 14-year-old girl.

"The behavior exhibited by public employees is unacceptable. I am furious at their actions," Nutter said at the news conference.

Hours later, in a private interview in his office, Nutter was still fuming. He said the horrific details of the grand-jury report released last week - including photos of Kelly from happier times, and then at the coroner's office covered in gruesome bedsores - had laid City Hall's failures bare in a way department policy critiques could not.

"Policies and procedures, that's slightly abstract. You had a real live person here, who needed love and needed support, and adults failed this person badly," Nutter said in the interview.

Nutter will meet with DHS employees today to deliver a pep talk - and an ultimatum.

"This is serious work. The fate of a child or a family could be in your hands," Nutter said in the interview. "That's not to be taken lightly. It's not to be pushed over to the side. It's not to put papers in files some place and think the problem is going away."

The mayor said he was certain that his new DHS commissioner, Anne Marie Ambrose, was capable of righting the agency. She was among the last major appointments Nutter made to his administration, but it was not because the department was low on his priority list.

"I had always felt that all things being equal, probably the two biggest, toughest hires were going to be police commissioner and DHS commissioner," Nutter said. "These are both life-and-death jobs."

Nutter was vacationing in Aruba when he received the grisly grand-jury report. It is wrenching reading for anyone. For Nutter, who considers public service the ultimate calling, it was brutal.

"It is so tragic. It is so dehumanizing. It is just astounding to me," Nutter said. "I've just never read anything like that. I hope to never read anything like that again."