Texas Child Abuse Deaths
By Paul Flahive, Texas Public Radio and NPR
Wyatt Pickett spent much of his young, short life being abused by the one person whose job was to protect him–his father.
Twelve days after Wyatt celebrated his second birthday in July 2022, Randall Pickett allegedly punched and slapped his little boy before flinging him into tables and door jams in their home at a south Texas trailer park, according to court records. He later died.
It wasn’t the first time that Pickett, 29, was accused of mistreating the blonde, cherub-cheeked toddler and his twin brother, or being violent toward their mother. And the state’s child welfare system knew it.
“The whole system is a failure,” Melissa Pickett, Wyatt’s grandmother, said in an interview with TPR.
Wyatt's case is not uncommon.
Across Texas, children have been killed in the most heinous ways by those closest to them. In 2020, a 10-month-old girl in Lubbock was stuffed in her mother’s boyfriend’s backpack and left in his stifling car trunk for five hours while he was at work. An 8-year-old autistic boy in Houston was beaten to death that same year by his mother’s boyfriend and left to rot in an apartment while his siblings were forced to live with the corpse. A 2-year-old Waco boy allegedly died at the hands of his drug-addicted mother, who wrapped his body in trash bags and tossed him in a dumpster before reporting him missing in 2020. The families of all three victims had been investigated numerous times by the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services before the deaths, records show.
A review of child abuse and neglect fatalities in that state by NPR and Texas Public Radio found a child welfare system riddled with problems. At least 1,200 children died between 2018 and 2023, with more than half of those deaths occurring in families that previously had been reported to DFPS. In scores of cases, the agency repeatedly failed to remove the at-risk children, leaving them in dangerous homes and at the mercy of violent, drug-addicted or neglectful family members, according to records and interviews.
Some deaths, like Pickett’s, occurred after the agency’s own investigators failed to convince department lawyers or a judge to remove the child from their home where the abuse or neglect took place. Others happened after state lawmakers passed legislation making it harder to remove children from homes that posed a threat to them.
“It's just unfortunate that we're having so many children continue to be hurt and continue to be neglected and…abused and die because the system is not working,”
said Mercedes Bristol, executive director of Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, an advocacy group that helps grandparents navigate the child welfare system.
Our investigation also found:
One out of every five deaths happened in families that previously had been investigated by DFPS at least three times for abuse or neglect. More than 115 families had been investigated six or more times.
Nearly 200 children died despite a child welfare investigation occurring six months before their deaths.
The number of children removed from abusive or neglectful homes dropped 40 percent within a year after state legislative reforms making removals more difficult were implemented in 2021.
The state has denied thousands of families who need services to keep children safe in their home.
Texas Public Radio and NPR built and analyzed a database of 1,200 child fatalities and reviewed thousands of pages of child fatality reports, autopsies, police reports, court records, state reviews and audits. We also conducted scores of interviews with current and former case workers, investigators, child abuse experts, judges, attorneys relatives of victims and a convicted child abuser.
“QUOTE HERE ABOUT WHY THE SYSTEM IS FAILING THESE CHILDREN.”
[ Wyatt’s story ]
Wyatt Everett Pickett was born to Randall Pickett and Dallas Payne on July 12, 2020. He was a typical little boy who loved puppies, baseball and playing with toy trucks, according to his obituary. But his brief life was tumultuous, with the abuse beginning when he and his brother were barely a year old, records showed. Pickett often complained to girlfriend Lauralei Crouch that he had never wanted the children, but had been trapped by their mother, Crouch later told police.
Wyatt’s death is an example of a flawed DFPS system, including recent state laws and policies intended to keep children out of the state’s care. His family was well known to the state’s child welfare system–they had been investigated three times in the year before the boy’s death– including allegations that his parents were abusing methamphetamines, according to DFPS documents.
“A previous investigation is a predictor of the likelihood of future abuse or neglect, and it is a predictor of child maltreatment fatality,” said Melinda Gushwa, a social work researcher and professor of social work at Simmons University in Boston who works with states to improve the way child abuse investigations are conducted. “Instead of treating every call or every report that comes in the hotline as…a one off, you have to really put the pieces together.”
At the time of Wyatt’s death, he and his twin lived with their father and Crouch in tiny Blessing, Texas, about 100 miles southwest of Houston. The family moved there three months before he died. During that time, the abuse worsened, according to records and Crouch’s interviews with authorities.
“I couldn’t even go grocery shopping because I felt like people were looking at me because of the kids,” she later told a Texas Ranger about the myriad visible bruises on Wyatt and his brother.
But soon, she began abusing the boys too, authorities said.
Wyatt was mischievous and “full of energy,” his grandmother said. And it was usually he, rather than his brother, who was beaten. Crouch later told police that Wyatt was always whining, even after he was beaten. His brother, though, would sit quietly after being hit, afraid to even play, she told them.
On the night of July 24, 2022, Pickett allegedly beat Wyatt so badly that the boy staggered as he walked, Crouch later told police. He then left the twins with Crouch while he went to his job at a plastics fabrication plant.
That’s when things turned deadly.
Crouch, 33, reportedly got upset with Wyatt because he wouldn’t settle down, so she gave him melatonin–enough to put an adult man to sleep, according to evidence later presented in court. She texted Pickett and told him that something was wrong with the toddler–blood was oozing from his mouth. He was still breathing, but neither she nor Pickett sought medical attention for him at the time, according to court records.
When Pickett returned home from his shift the next morning, he didn’t check on Wyatt. Instead, he mowed the lawn and took a nap, Crouch later told police. Then, at 2:41 p.m., more than 12 hours after she said the 22-pound child lost consciousness, Pickett called for help, telling a dispatcher that his boy wasn’t breathing, according to a review of the 911 tape. When paramedics arrived, they found bruises on the toddler’s head, face, stomach and legs, according to a DFPS report. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The cause of death was blunt trauma to his head and torso, according to the autopsy report.
“I can honestly say they (DFPS) could have done so many things differently,” Melissa Pickett said. “My grandson would still be alive. My son probably would not be in the trouble he’s in.”
Crouch and Pickett were arrested and charged with capital murder. A Matagorda County jury found her guilty last October and a judge sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She is appealing. Pickett pleaded guilty to murder in October and was sentenced to life in prison, according to Matagorda County Assistant District Attorney Lindsay Deshotels. Wyatt’s brother is now living with a relative, according to his court-appointed attorney.
“The system failed this child,” Deshotels told the jury during Crouch’s trial. “Anybody thinking, where was CPS (Child Protective Services)?”
What does it say about the child welfare system in Texas? Does it need an overhaul? If so, what specifically needs to be done?
Months before his death, the investigation into Wyatt Pickett’s case had been left to languish after the investigator left the department. His was just one of thousands of child abuse or neglect cases that went unresolved for months, records showed. For the last several years, Child Protective Investigations, which examines abuse and neglect allegations, has experienced a surge in backlogs across Texas. By the end of 2023, there were nearly 3,400 backlogged cases, which meant that children were being left in possibly dangerous households, records showed.
“Sometimes…it had been six months since they (children) had last been seen,” said Sharon Fonvielle-Baughman, the former director of special investigations for DFPS. “The situation had never been this bad.”
Fonvielle-Baughman’s unit, largely tasked with finding families and investigating difficult cases, found itself reassigned to help reduce the backlog. The mandate increased caseloads and prompted dozens of skilled, veteran CPS investigators to leave the agency–46% within a year, she said.
“There was no staff who really knew how to conduct good, thorough investigations,” she said. “And supervisors were being promoted who had no supervisory experience.”
“When I left, CPI was in a crisis,” said Fonvielle-Baughman, who retired in 2023.
[ Overlooking at-risk children ]
DFPS officials knew that the Pickett home was not ideal for the children. But rather than remove Wyatt and his brother after finding instances of methamphetamine abuse and domestic violence, DFPS left them with their father, according to Daniel Beyer, who investigated the case. The agency provided no services to keep the boys safe, he said.
“I honestly think it was a time in the department where they didn’t want to remove kids,” Beyer said. “They wanted reunification at all costs.”
Beyer, a 16-year veteran with Child Protective Services, a division of DFPS, said that agency officials often “tied our hands” on cases that forbade them from removing children, even if investigators had “mounds of evidence” to show they should be removed.
When he took on the Pickett case, Beyer said he reviewed previous investigative reports on the family, including the alleged drug use by the boys’ parents. The agency closed those cases without drug tests or ongoing monitoring, agency records showed. He also learned that Wyatt’s 11-year-old half-sister told a teacher that her mother allegedly made her urinate in a cup so that the woman would pass a drug test. When Beyer visited the family in October 2021 and requested that the parents take a drug test, Payne, Wyatt’s mother, told him to leave and called 911, he said.
Beyer said he completed paperwork to get the children removed later that year and to continue monitoring the parents. DFPS denied the family those services and the children remained in the home, he said.
The parents split by early December 2021, with Payne taking her 11-year-old daughter. The boys remained with Randall Pickett, who DFPS knew had a history of domestic violence. He agreed to move in with his mother, Melissa Pickett, who signed a safety plan with the agency outlining how she would keep the boys safe. Beyer said he still wanted the children removed because he didn’t want their father to have access to them. A DFPS attorney rebuffed his request and closed the case, he said.
“That’s why I retired,” Beyer said. “Because it goes back to me feeling like I wasn’t effective anymore. It (the job) was becoming impossible.”
“They wanted reunification at all costs.”
Daniel Beyer, Retired Child Protective Servcies
Randall Pickett uprooted the boys from their grandmother and moved an hour away to Blessing several months later. When a case is closed, the safety plan is no longer in place.
“Those are the scary cases,” said Gushwa, adding that DFPS should have done more to protect Wyatt and his siblings. “We shouldn’t be closing those cases.”
Six months after the agency closed the case, little Wyatt was dead.
“A previous investigation is a predictor of the likelihood of future abuse or neglect...”
Melinda Gushwa, a social work researcher and professor of social work at Simmons University
“This child should not have died,” said Lori Duke, director of the Children’s Rights Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. “And he did so in a really violent, awful way that could have been prevented.”
Since 2020, the Texas child welfare system has reduced the number of children it removes from homes and reduced services it provides to families of those children.
State laws aimed at bolstering parental rights and lessening the trauma of removing children from troubled homes has led to removal rates plummeting. Texas, compared to states like California, removes children from abusive or neglectful homes at a much lower rate–1.3 per 1,000 children compared to 2.2 per 1,000 children, according to welfare agencies in those states.
“What it feels like on the ground is that CPS is implementing policies that turn a blind eye to real issues in families,” Duke said. “Instead of trying to fix the issues, they’re trying to figure out a way to avoid even addressing them.”
Lawmakers, attorneys, child advocates and others have expressed concern over some state law revisions that now make it easier to leave children in dangerous homes.
“This change in the standard to remove children…was a mistake,” said state Sen. Jose Menendez (D-San Antonio).
A DFPS policy change in 2020 redefined who could receive services to keep families together and children safe, leaving thousands once eligible without services, our investigation found. The number of families rejected for family preservation services more than doubled from 2018 to 2023–from 344 to 810, records show.
A Texas law passed a year later made it more difficult to remove a child from the home based solely on risk. House Bill 567, which took effect in September 2021, was aimed at reducing the number of unnecessary removals and the trauma that goes along with it.
State Rep. James Frank (R-Wichita Falls), who authored the bill, argued that the legislation will keep overzealous investigators from breaking up families.
“I’m not saying it’s perfect in every case, but I think we have decreased the false and unnecessary removals, and we have made sure to allow that we can still remove those very dangerous cases,” he said.
The bill had bipartisan support. Republicans believed it would bolster parents rights; Democrats hoped it would change the system, which disproportionately impacts Black and brown families. Since its implementation, child abuse removals in the state have dropped 30%; neglect removals declined 22%. Black children continue to be unfairly targeted by the child welfare system, according to a 2023 DFPS study. Brown children had similar outcomes to whites.
Kathleen LaValle, the CEO of Dallas County’s Court Appointed Special Advocates, said that eliminating non-emergency removals can endanger children.
“It’s so easy to look at data and see fewer kids being removed and just point to that in isolation as a good development, because your mind instantly thinks there are fewer kids being abused…being neglected,” she said. “ And that’s obviously not the case.”
Despite HB 567 being one of the largest reforms to the state’s family code, DFPS acknowledged it hasn’t done an audit to determine the bill’s impact on child safety.
[ Multiple Reports, Multiple Misses ]
Ten-year-old Jessie Pickle was autistic and suffered from severe disabilities that prevented him from speaking, affected his ability to walk and delayed his toilet training. He was a special education student at Bel Aire Elementary School in Athens, about two hours southeast of Dallas, and teachers said the boy had an infectious smile and was a joy to be around. But he also never seemed to want to go home at the end of the school day.
“He would never want to get on the bus,” said Riley Milligan, one of Jessie’s teachers. “There were times when we would have to put him in a little wagon and pull him out to the bus.”
The Pickle family was well known at Jessie’s school and the school his two sisters attended. The children often came hungry and with dirty diapers, according to teachers and DFPS records. But most troubling to teachers and staff were the number of bruises they said they repeatedly found on the three siblings.
Kayla George, a teacher at the school the Pickle girls attended, said she found bruises on Jessie’s sisters, ages 11 and 9, both of whom have special needs, and complained repeatedly to DFPS.
The agency investigated Pickle’s father, Sam, and stepmom, Shonna, seven times in six years beginning in 2016 for abuse and neglect complaints against the three children, DFPS records showed. One complaint against Shonna was substantiated, but DFPS never removed the children.
“If you have a string of reports from the school nurse, the teacher…you shouldn’t be ignoring them,” Gushwa said.
Years before marrying Sam, Shonna Pickle had been investigated myriad times for abuse and neglect of her four biological children, according to a DFPS fatality report. The children were removed and the courts terminated her parental rights of all four by 2012, a move that should have concerned child welfare workers, Gushwa said.
“He would never want to get on the bus,” said Riley Milligan, one of Jessie’s teachers. “There were times when we would have to put him in a little wagon and pull him out to the bus.”
The Pickle family was well known at Jessie’s school and the school his two sisters attended. The children often came hungry and with dirty diapers, according to teachers and DFPS records. But most troubling to teachers and staff were the number of bruises they said they repeatedly found on the three siblings.
Kayla George, a teacher at the school the Pickle girls attended, said she found bruises on Jessie’s sisters, ages 11 and 9, both of whom have special needs, and complained repeatedly to DFPS.
The agency investigated Pickle’s father, Sam, and stepmom, Shonna, seven times in six years beginning in 2016 for abuse and neglect complaints against the three children, DFPS records showed. One complaint against Shonna was substantiated, but DFPS never removed the children.
“If you have a string of reports from the school nurse, the teacher…you shouldn’t be ignoring them,” Gushwa said.
Years before marrying Sam, Shonna Pickle had been investigated myriad times for abuse and neglect of her four biological children, according to a DFPS fatality report. The children were removed and the courts terminated her parental rights of all four by 2012, a move that should have concerned child welfare workers, Gushwa said.
“You don’t put a child with someone who wasn’t even capable of caring for their own kids, especially with this level of high need,” she said.
Shonna Pickle, 40, was required to move out of the house in 2016 after DFPS determined that she abused one of Pickle’s sisters, according to DFPS records. After undergoing a psychological exam, parenting training and counseling, she was allowed to move back in.
But reports of abuse and neglect continued. In 2020, Jessie was hospitalized for dehydration and an infection, agency records show. He also had a burn on the top of his foot that Shonna Pickle could not explain.
On Dec. 20, 2022, Samuel Pickle left for work in the oil field, he later told authorities. Before leaving, he placed cameras throughout the house so that he could see what was going on while he was away working, often for weeks at a time. He knew that Shonna Pickle sometimes yelled at the children and spanked them with a hair brush or wooden spoon, according to records.
The day after Christmas in 2022, Samuel Pickle saw on camera that Jessie was on the floor in his bedroom and called his wife to check on him. But instead of comforting the boy, Shonna Pickle yelled at him to “lay your ass down,” according to a Henderson County arrest affidavit obtained by NPR. When Jessie motioned with his hands that he needed something to drink, she refused and shouted expletives. The child started coughing and gagging, and spewing liquid, including blood, on himself, the bed and floor.
Jessie died the next day from pneumonia, according to his autopsy report. He was dehydrated and had blood in his lungs, the report found. Shonna Pickle was charged with injury to a child and is awaiting trial, the affidavit said. She declined to discuss the matter with TPR.
The state removed Jessie’s two sisters from the home after his death.
“I would not have been able to sleep at night if those kids were on my caseload,” Gushwa said. “I would just go to my supervisor and say, ‘This is the hill we need to die on.’”
“If you have a string of reports from the school nurse, the teacher…you shouldn't be ignoring them,”
Melinda Gushwa, a social work researcher and professor of social work at Simmons University
[ Unenforceable safety plans ]
Eddie Williams didn’t think much about having children; he had a tough childhood growing up in the Houston area and worried about being a father–until A’lona was born. He described his baby girl’s birth as his first taste of unconditional love.
Williams and his wife, Briaona Brown, separated not long after the girl’s birth, but Williams stayed in his daughter’s life for the next couple of years until Brown began seeing someone else. Williams said it became tough to get time with his daughter, so he went to court to get visitation. Things improved–for a while.
Then, on June 22, 2018, Brown called Williams, telling him to come to the hospital. A’lona was dead, she told him tearfully. When he arrived, a nurse took him to a room. It was empty, save for his 3-year-old daughter’s bruised body on a metal gurney.
“All I could do is just hold her,” Williams told TPR in an interview. “I had to come to the realization that this warm, loving, perfect example of unconditional love is actually dead and cold in my arms.”
It was only afterward that he learned about multiple calls made to Child Protective Services by people concerned about his daughter’s welfare. He said he was unaware that in January 2018, A’lona was taken to the emergency room with a fractured wrist, belt marks and an “unexplained abdominal bruise,” according to a CPS investigative report obtained by TPR. The hospital called a child abuse hotline about possible abuse.
Brown, who worked overnights as a security guard, often left A’lona in the care of her live-in boyfriend, Joshua Sargent. She told DFPS that the girl fractured her wrist playing on a bouncy, agency records showed. She told Williams that their daughter fell out of her bunk bed.
The following month, A’lona was taken to the emergency room again after suffering head abrasions, the CPS investigative report found. Brown told hospital staff that the girl fell off the sofa. Hospital officials suspected abuse and contacted DFPS. The toddler was taken to the emergency room at least three times in four months, according to agency records.
DFPS caseworkers concerned about the girl’s well-being created a safety plan to prevent more abuse. The plans, which are used when the agency believes that a child is in immediate danger, can include appointing a monitor to check on families, parenting classes, drug testing or removing the parents from the home. They typically last up to 30 days but aren’t legally enforceable. Nearly 30 children died in Texas while on safety plans between 2018 and 2023, our analysis found.
“They have no teeth,” Duke said about the plans. “It’s the honor system.”
Nearly 30 children died in Texas while on safety plans between 2018 and 2023, our analysis found.
Brown agreed to send A’lona and her two older half-brothers, ages 4 and 8, to live with their maternal grandmother, Mikisha Bridgewater, after DFPS made her a safety monitor. But after an anonymous complaint to CPS about her alleged treatment of the children, they were ordered to stay with Brown’s boyfriend’s parents, Jerome and Charonda Williams. Both had criminal records, documents showed. It’s unclear whether the three children ever lived with the couple. Bridgewater said she believed her daughter made the anonymous complaint against her out of anger.
Brown declined to be interviewed for this story.
Williams said he was unaware of the abuse allegations until Brown called him with news of A’lona’s death. He said no one from the child welfare system notified him.
“There needs to be more inclusion, especially if there is a non-custodial parent in the picture,” Williams said.
When A’lona died in June 2018, she had a stomach full of blood and multiple bruises on her body, according to the CPS investigation report. She was found unresponsive at her mother’s house around midnight after complaining of stomach pain and repeated vomiting. There were signs that she was sexually abused, according to the agency fatality report.
“I wasn’t some frantic grandmother,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I know what I saw. But they wouldn’t listen. Now, they want to apologize.”
Three years passed before police arrested Sargent and Brown for A’lona’s death. Sargent was initially charged with murder, but authorities reduced it to injury to a child, a third-degree felony. He pleaded guilty last September and is expected to be sentenced on Feb. 11, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office told NPR. Brown, the girl’s mother, pleaded guilty last October to injury to a child and is expected to be sentenced on Feb. 6. Both face up to 10 years in prison.
Bridgewater said she has since adopted A’lona’s two half-brothers.
This story is a collaboration from NPR’s Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism; and Texas Public Radio. NPR senior producer Robert Benincasa contributed to the data analysis.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.