A baby born in a tent on a rural homestead last July received no medical attention and died before reaching three months old, the Oregon Department of Human Services said in a report designed to evaluate whether child welfare workers did everything they could to prevent the tragedy.
How exactly the baby died is unclear in the state’s report. The child’s parents said at one point that the infant was stillborn. Then the father said he woke to find the baby, who had health problems, had died during the night of Oct. 2. The child’s mother told a relative, however, that the father broke the infant’s leg while helping during delivery, then threatened the mother’s life if she called 911. The relative also said mother told them that the father had suffocated the infant.
The baby was cremated, the parents said, its grave under a burn pile on their property. The report does not identify the family or where they lived.
Less than a month before the baby was born, a caseworker with the Department of Human Services met with the family, after receiving reports that other children in the family were neglected. The state’s critical incident review team, which scrutinizes state involvement in cases where a child dies, found “missed opportunities” in that July child welfare assessment.
Police in the unspecified community had heard from several residents about their concern for the couple’s children, ages 1, 3 and 10, the report said. When police checked in, the children said they hadn’t eaten breakfast and the 3-year-old had urinated on their clothes the day before but hadn’t been cleaned or changed. The 1-year-old was wearing a moldy shirt.
“The children did not appear to have bathed in over a week, though the family reported they showered the day prior,” the report said.
The mother told the caseworker she was pregnant but she didn’t need or want prenatal care, it said. She and the rest of the family did not have access to hygienic care, as they were living had no running water. The parents had purchased a piece of land and were living in a tent until they could fix up a structure, the report said. The building had electricity but no running water and an outhouse for a bathroom. The parents told caseworkers they used a community tap for drinking water and showered at a truck stop or, occasionally, a motel.
The 10-year-old child was not enrolled in school, the caseworker found, and the children received medical care rarely if ever. Only one child was born in the hospital, and the 1-year-old had not received any routine infant care.
The caseworker gave the family pull-ups and diapers, clothes and a carseat, the report said. But child welfare officials wrote that they were “unable to determine” whether the parents had in fact neglected the children.
Caseworkers didn’t know at the time that the father had a “pattern of violent behaviors toward infant children,” the state said.
The review team, convened after the state learned in December of the baby’s death, found that a delayed communication with child welfare officials in Washington and possibly elsewhere prevented caseworkers from realizing sooner that the father had a “history of biting and harming infant children.” It also suggested the state develop a more standard process for following up on “time-sensitive child safety decisions” and indicated that child welfare advocates had some dispute over whether to intervene with the family. The report recommends that the local child services agency come up with a process to arbitrate when “child safety consultants and the local branch do not agree whether legal intervention is required or necessary.”
“Our hearts go out to the family, community and others who are impacted by this heartbreaking loss,” Department of Human Services spokesperson Jake Sunderland said in an email on Wednesday. He declined to provide specific information about the family, citing child privacy rules.
The family had first come on the state’s radar in January of 2024, when the Department of Human Services got a tip that three children were living in an RV with their parents. They had recently moved to Oregon from another state when their motorhome broke down, the report said, and the father appeared to be burning trash with the windows open to warm the RV yet prevent carbon dioxide poisoning. The report didn’t reach the threshold of a child protective services screening, the state determined, and child safety workers didn’t follow up.
In July, the state got the second tip, alleging the children were being neglected.
This time a child protective services worker followed up. The parents were traveling from out of state back to their rural property when the caseworker tracked them down, the report said. The family claimed to live a “homesteading lifestyle.” The first caseworker, who noted the mother’s pregnancy, living conditions and children’s lack of routine medical care, transferred the case to another worker in the county where the family lived, the report said. That caseworker “made many attempts” to try and reach the family over the phone, through contacts and home visits, “but these attempts were unsuccessful, and contact did not occur again in this assessment,” the report said.
State employees also requested child welfare records from Washington, where the family had previously lived. Those didn’t come in immediately, but they eventually revealed that the father had been criminally charged for harming a child in a previous relationship. The child welfare records also revealed that the 3-year-old child, the only one born in a hospital, had tested positive for methamphetamine at birth.
“An out-of-state child welfare agency attempted to intervene and safety plan for the children, however, the intervention did not lead to a legal removal of the children,” the critical incident report said. “Instead, the family was assigned an ongoing caseworker to help provide services.”
After discovering that “concerning information” about the family’s child welfare history, a child protective services safety consultant recommended that the agency get a protective custody order for the children, the report said.
The report states that “attempts were made” to contact the family, but those were unsuccessful and another check-in never happened. A protective custody order was “not pursued,” the report said – it doesn’t specify whether child protective services didn’t ask for one or if law enforcement couldn’t find the family to carry that out.
The Department of Human Services heard again about the family in December, when police again fielded concerns about the children. Police and a caseworker went to the family property and found the “state of the home and the condition of the children was significantly concerning.” Police arrested the parents and the state took custody of the three surviving children.
It was during that December visit that authorities learned the youngest child, born in July just three weeks after the family first met with a child protective services worker, had died.
The father told police that the baby’s tongue was fused to the bottom of its mouth and it had a hard time keeping down formula. The baby was thin and unresponsive to sight and sound, the dad said, but he “didn’t feel the concerns warranted medical attention.” The mom told authorities that she “should have put her foot down and obtained medical attention,” but was afraid to argue with the father, who she alleged was physically abusive. The mother told a relative that after the father broke the baby’s leg while helping to deliver the infant, he “stuck a gun in the mother’s mouth and told her not to call 911,” the report said.
The parents were charged with neglecting the three surviving siblings, the report said.
State evaluators also recommended that the Department of Human Services reevaluate a memorandum of understanding with the state of Washington and look for faster ways of sharing information.
If you know anything about this case, please contact reporter Sami Edge, who covers state government for The Oregonian. You can reach her at sedge@oregonian.com or (503) 260-3430.
©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
