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"This is unfortunately one of the most insane, obscene and disgusting things I've heard in all my public life," Mayor Nutter said after an unrelated news conference yesterday.
He added that while city employees may have been negligent in Danieal's death, ultimate responsibility rested with the girl's parents. "I can assure you that should we be successful in our defense, we will go after them for every dime the taxpayers have to spend," Nutter said.
District Attorney Lynne Abraham, meanwhile, told the Daily News: "On the one hand, I'm dumbstruck" because Danieal's parents, Andrea and Daniel Kelly, were "two people who didn't care one iota" for any of their children.
She called the suit a "money-grubbing" scheme consistent with the parents' "desire to get rich."
Civil attorneys Brian Mildenberg and Eric Zajac, who filed the suit Aug. 1, maintained, however, that the suit's intention was not to make Danieal's parents rich, but to benefit Danieal's siblings.
They stressed in an e-mail statement yesterday that if Danieal's parents are criminally convicted or "disqualified as a result of a civil abandonment claim, the proceeds [if any, after a jury trial] would flow by Pennsylvania law to the brothers and sisters of Danieal Kelly, most of whom are impoverished children in foster care."
The attorneys, in a petition filed in Orphans Court yesterday, note that the parents had agreed sometime around July to cooperate in the administration of Danieal's estate. Both parents agreed, the document says, that if one of them were to be disqualified from receiving benefits, the other parent, who would be the sole beneficiary, would put one-third of "all net benefits," if any, into a trust to be administered by Orphans Court.
That trust money would benefit all the children of the parent who was disqualified from receiving any proceeds from the suit, the document says.
Danieal, as a recent Philadelphia District Attorney's Office's grand-jury report detailed, died two years ago of starvation while lying in her own feces, with flies buzzing around her mouth and maggot-infested bedsores ravaging her skeletal back.
Following the grand-jury investigation, Andrea Kelly was charged July 31 with murder. Daniel Kelly was charged with endangering his daughter's welfare.
Two now-fired Department of Human Services workers, Dana Poindexter, 51, and Laura Sommerer, 33, and two employees of MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, Mickal Kamuvaka, 59, and Julius Murray, 51, were also criminally charged. Now-closed MultiEthnic was an outside agency that DHS hired to handle Danieal's case.
The petition filed yesterday by Mildenberg and Zajac in Orphans Court seeks an appointment of a trustee - other than the parents - to Danieal's estate. Specifically, they are looking to have retired Judge Abraham Gafni appointed as trustee, thus replacing the parents as administrators of Danieal's estate.
The attorneys said in their e-mail statement yesterday that they are seeking the appointment of a trustee "in light of the criminal indictments which were returned against the parents."
Mildenberg and Zajac also yesterday filed a motion in federal court to stay the lawsuit until Orphans' Court decides whether to appoint a trustee.
The wrongful-death suit, first filed in Common Pleas Court but which has since been moved to federal court, names as defendants city, DHS, the Commonwealth, the state Department of Public Welfare, Poindexter, Sommerer, Kamuvaka and Murray.
It seeks more than $50,000 in damages and claims reimbursement for Danieal's "medical bills, funeral" and other expenses. It also claims that as a result of Danieal's death, her survivors "have been deprived of [Danieal's] guidance, love, tutelage, companionship, support, comfort and consortium." *
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