And late this evening, we spoke via telephone to the Director of Human Services, Shawn Vargas. He explained that the foster family was well vetted prior to placing Baby Ayana and her sister, and that the incident has been equally shocking and devastating for them.
And while the family claims that he told them after the fact that they had access to the child, he says that's not exactly so.
He explained more on our phone call.
Voice of: Shawn Vargas, Director of Human Services
"I do understand the reaction of the mother and on behalf of the ministry, I share my condolences with them, as like them, we at the department we're in shock and it was very emotional for us on Friday."
"But our system of screening didn't bring up anything negative on the family who we placed the baby with. The family submitted their application in June. We did all the screening and nothing came up in terms of police report through the child abuse and neglect checks and we have everything on file so that this was a very good placement and this was a short term placement that's the specific request to the department. Their approval was for short term placement and the short term placement included sibling set."
"So these short term placements for sibling sets are few and barring between so and those are so many things we look at and so for us we are at shock So the placement was really really what we believe and what is on record a good placement."
"No, I have mentioned to the family because I visited with the mom the morning to explain to her what had happened and what the police had reported to me and in the afternoon when we went back there after we received some additional information from the police since I visited Cayo to sit with the investigating officer. She had mentioned to me that the mom couldn't get access and I explained to her that not because you're a family member you have access to the child. We are operating under a court order here and so access will be granted to the mother and the mother can say I would want this person to come along with me for visitation but if the family member would just come on her own then we will not get grant access that is not the way it works."
But with this incident out in the open, other parents may fear for their child's safety while in the custody of the Department. And what about Ayana's little sister? That's what we asked Vargas.
Reporter
"I don't want to call this a blackeye because it's much more than that. It's a tragedy that will most likely lead to the distrust of a system that a lot of people already don't have a lot of trust in."
Voice of: Shawn Vargas, Director of Human Services
"I can't agree with your statement. Yes, this has happened and this is an isolated incident. I can't say that people don't have trust in the system. The department works extremely hard. The department's social workers work extremely hard to look at placement."
"We are in the business of protecting children and this has happened. Yes, you will, I will call it a blackeye. You said it's worse than that and indeed we cannot trivialize what has happened any at all and we won't make an effort to trivialize what has happened at all and what has happened but this is a learning experience for us."
"I believe this is the first time we have ever lost a child in foster care and so we have to look at our screening procedures again and we have to look at some of the basic things in terms of recommendations because I can tell you this, this foster family, we did not go out to seek them."
"They came to us but they came to us on referral from other foster families in the Mennonite community in the Spanish Lookout community because we have Bona fide foster parents in the Spanish Lookout community and so they made the referral and we went through the entire process with this foster family."
"So I won't say there is a distrust in the process, it's something that we from the ministry need to look internally and to see how we can even work on strengthening what is already a tedious process of screening foster families."
Reporter
"What will happen to the mother's other daughter?"
Voice of: Shawn Vargas, Director of Human Services
"Well we asked the family to find placement initially and I have to be kinda a little bit careful how I speak at this point but initially we had reached out to the family and asked them to help us with placement because our continuum of care looks at family first but at the time of removal none of the family members wanted to be a part of that process and so we went to the next option on our foster care component on the care for children which is to look at foster placement and these are young children we don't want to put them in a facility but I have asked the father to try again in terms of sorting with family members and we're working on that internally."
