Will Turpin report spur Riverside County to improve child, adult protective services?

The system left abused and neglected children worse off. Riverside County hired an outside firm to review its child protective services and suggest improvements.

The firm did so, but concluded the county’s safety net for at-risk youths and adults is getting stronger.

These words could describe the Larson law firm’s report — 634 pages that cost $868,000 to produce — that was discussed by the Board of Supervisors this week. But they also could apply to a 2019 review of the Children’s Services Division that cost the county $147,000.

Similar language about overworked and outnumbered case workers can be found in a recent grand jury report. Or one from 2014 on the Public Guardian’s office. Or in multiple settled and pending lawsuits over the years against Riverside County that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

With the county vowing to implement recommendations from attorney Stephen Larson’s investigation commissioned to probe troubling allegations about the county’s care of the 13 tortured Turpin siblings, critics are skeptical that anything will change in child protective services or the Public Guardian, which looks after adults who can’t take care of themselves.

“Here we are again, paying for another report because no one followed the recommendations outlined in the (earlier) report,” Jackie McCray told supervisors Tuesday, July 12. “How many more children will be hurt?”

Megan Richmond, a lawyer representing social workers who have sued the county alleging they’re owed money for unpaid work, agrees.

“I would love to be able to say ‘Wow, this Larson report is a great shining example of a Board of Supervisors that’s taking a stance,’” she said. “It’s possible the the Larson report could be the impetus to move this culture of this county towards properly paying social workers who are treating our community.”

“But then you would have to ignore the fact that you have the grand jury reports dating back to the beginning of time” and her litigation, Richmond said, adding she sued the county in 2019.

Asked what’s different this time, County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen, the county’s top administrator since February 2021, said: “We have the right leadership in place today. We have the right (Board of Supervisors). We have the right department heads. We have the right employees to make real and significant systematic changes.”

Changes were made after the 2019 report, Van Wagenen, adding that the grand jury report on children’s services released earlier this month showed “real progress” over the past two years.

That 2019 report followed several high-profile cases with horrific outcomes for children on social services’ radar.

Court records showed social workers checked on 8-year-old Noah McIntosh of Corona at least three times before his March 2019 disappearance, but did not remove him from his home despite reports his hands were zip-tied behind his back and he was dunked in cold water and that he showed up to school without pants. Noah’s father has been charged with his murder.

In 2018, the county agreed to pay roughly $11 million to settle two lawsuits, including one that alleged a toddler was found hugging her dead infant sibling’s mummified corpse and one alleging a girl was repeatedly raped and gave birth to her rapist’s child. Child protective services ignored red flags and failed to remove the children from their homes, the lawsuits alleged.

Other recent Riverside County cases include:

After Kittrell’s grandmother sued in 2021, county spokesperson Brooke Federico said: “Our social workers are dedicated to best practices and keeping children safe” and that the county also is “saddened when a child dies.”

In 2019, Federico said the county made a number of changes, including “stronger contracts with foster family agencies,” after Ramirez’s death. Regarding the Yoder case, social services spokesperson Gene Kennedy said in 2020 that the agency has “a number of continuous quality improvement measures to improve safe outcomes for children at risk of abuse and/or neglect.”

The Turpin children lived most of their lives chained to their beds, neglected, malnourished and abused by their parents in their Perris home until they were freed in 2018.

The county announced the hiring of Larson LLP following an ABC News “20/20” report that aired last November in which some of the adult Turpin siblings described a lack of help from the Public Guardian, difficulty accessing community donations and being forced to live in bad neighborhoods.

Larson’s report concluded that, while the county provided considerable care to the Turpins, the county failed the 13 children “all too often.” Supervisor Karen Spiegel said one deputy public guardian, who normally handles at least dozens of cases, was assigned solely to deal with seven adult Turpin siblings.

Five of the children appear to have been placed with foster parents Marcelo and Rosa Olguin of Perris, who along with their daughter have been indicted on charges they abused nine children under their care. The Olguins have pleaded not guilty.

The Larson report “looks at the entire safety-net system,” Van Wagenen said. “And so ultimately, we now have a deeper-dive report with more information, more recommendations and if we made real progress on the last report, I think the public can believe that we will make more improvement and significant improvement moving forward.”

By hiring an outside firm, “we wanted to make people know that we’re serious,” said Spiegel, who with Supervisor Kevin Jeffries serves on a special ad-hoc committee overseeing the Larson report and improvements to child and adult protective services.

“It’s not gonna be shoved on a shelf in a closet,” Spiegel said of the report. “We’ve made this so public — as much as we can. We want to share the information. We’d love to share all of it because there’s always more to the story … and we can’t share part of the story.”

Larson LLP redacted sections of the report focused specifically on the Turpins to comply with a court order protecting the children’s privacy.

Spiegel later added: “The plan is not just for today or next week or next year. This is a long-term plan.”

The report praised child and adult protective services staff as hard-working and dedicated, but stymied by high turnover rates and systemic barriers such as client confidentiality laws that prevent public agencies from sharing information about the same child or adult.

Larson also told supervisors that the county’s child and adult protective services are “on an upward trend.”

Spiegel said the county is working with state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, R-Yucaipa, to pass state legislation to ease confidentiality rules so public agencies helping at-risk children and adults can communicate better.

Van Wagenen said Riverside County “has already made some investments” from its own funds to strengthen its safety net. The county budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 includes $713,000 to hire five new deputy public guardians to ease caseloads.

“We will lobby our friends in Sacramento to support (our) efforts,” he said. “We’ve got to find the dollars, one way or the other, to meet the need.”

Supervisors on Tuesday directed Van Wagenen’s office to prepare an action plan with deadlines on how to implement the Larson team’s recommendations. A report on those efforts, as well as continuing measures to improve child and adult protective services, is due in 60 days to the ad-hoc committee.

County officials “with external partners” will determine what in the report “can be implemented and when” by working with the committee, Van Wagenen said.

He said policy changes to improve child and adult protective services will go before the Board of Supervisors and be placed on its agenda, which is made public before meetings. The board also will get regular updates on improvements, Van Wagenen added.

Roger Booth, an attorney who represents four of the Turpins and the minors who got $11 million to settle their lawsuits against the county, said he is “cautiously optimistic that the county is taking this report seriously and will commit the resources needed to adopt the report’s recommendations.”

Riverside County needs more foster homes, especially for kids with serious medical or mental health issues, Booth said.

There’s also “a culture in which social workers often fail to take decisive action to protect kids who are clearly being subjected to serious abuse and neglect. It seems to take an extreme event … to finally force CPS to do something, and by then it’s too late to prevent the real harm from occurring.”

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