Florida foster mom charged with killing 4-year-old faced abuse allegation 4 months earlier

A Florida foster mother charged with beating and strangling 4-year-old Joy King-Castro to death in August had just four months earlier faced allegations of physically abusing a pair of foster siblings, according to police records.

Child welfare workers in April removed the siblings from Lakeisha Mitchell’s Titusville foster home and reunified them with their mother ahead of schedule “due to the injuries seen" on one of them, records obtained by USA TODAY show.

One sibling had facial abrasions and bruising, a lump on the back of their head where a patch of hair was missing and bruises on their buttocks, an April 20 police report states. An investigator also noted markings on one child’s ribs and back that “appeared to be from some type of cord or thin instrument.”

The children told a Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF ) investigator that Mitchell, 41, spanked them with her hand, belts, shoes and a spatula and that some of the bruises resulted from falls, according to the report. Mitchell was not charged.

Despite the allegations, Brevard Family Partnership, a nonprofit that contracts with DCF to oversee child welfare services in Brevard County, placed Joy and another young child with Mitchell in June, according to Joy’s former caseworker, Kirsten Larson, who came forward to USA TODAY following the newspaper’s ongoing investigation into Florida’s child welfare system.

Larson resigned Monday from her position as care coordinator and housing specialist at Brevard CARES, one of the nonprofit’s sister agencies that works with parents to prevent child abuse and neglect.

In a letter to Brevard Family Partnership executives that Larson provided to USA TODAY, Larson wrote that she was “devastated” by the news of Joy’s death and had even considered offering to foster Joy herself because she had been shuffled between caregivers who didn’t seem to know how to connect with her.

“I loved this little girl. She was not just a kid I had to stick in a placement somewhere,” Larson wrote. "She was a real person. She was wild, sassy and brilliant.”

Larson also laid blame at the feet of agency officials who she said had allowed Mitchell to continue fostering children and withheld their knowledge of Mitchell’s prior reports from caseworkers.

“Their error in judgment cost this child her life,” Larson wrote. “Joy would still be alive today if we had closed Ms. Mitchell’s home. It’s great that it’s closed now, but it took the murder of a child to make that happen.”

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Partnership CEO Philip Scarpelli declined to comment because “the situation remains under investigation.” Attempts to contact Mitchell’s family were unsuccessful. Joy’s relatives could not be reached or declined to comment.

DCF did not respond to questions about why it did not revoke Mitchell’s foster license after the April reports.

Larson told USA TODAY that it was not until she stood at Joy’s hospital bedside that she learned of the earlier allegations against Mitchell.

When Mitchell was accused of abuse in April – her second such complaint –Brevard Family Partnership disciplined her by issuing a corrective action plan that required Mitchell to do little more than watch training videos “where they tell you ‘Don’t hit kids,’” Larson said.

In June, one week after Mitchell completed the plan, Partnership placed Joy in her home, Larson said. A 2-year-old child was placed there soon after.

Few foster caregivers face repercussions

The missteps Larson cited in Joy’s case are not uncommon in Florida.

As USA TODAY’s six-part investigation revealed last year, state lawmakers rewrote rules in 2014 to make it easier to seize children from their parents, but they did not have a plan for where to house the growing numbers. As a result, caseworkers placed kids in dangerously overcrowded homes and with foster parents who later faced charges of physical and sexual abuse. Nearly 200 boys and girls were sent to live with foster parents on whom the state had some evidence that abuse had occurred.

In January, a government official who asked not to be identified provided reporters with foster parent corrective action plans, license revocation notices and a spreadsheet of 4,300 abuse hotline complaints against state caregivers from 2015 to 2020 – records that DCF officials and executives in charge of nonprofit groups that run the child welfare system on the local level had refused to hand over.

Hundreds of the complaints detailed children being starved, beaten and molested, yet DCF told USA TODAY that the allegations – many of them from teachers, health care professionals and day care workers – did not rise to a level that would trigger an immediate investigation. Instead, they were classified as “foster care referrals” – potential license violations that may prompt an administrative review.

Among the five years of records were just 58 corrective action plans in which foster parents agreed to take training courses and accept additional monitoring to retain their licenses.

After USA TODAY’s investigation in March, DCF conducted an internal audit of more than 1,100 complaints against foster caregivers. The review found that nearly 40% of the allegations were accurate and an additional 21% were partially accurate.

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Caregivers faced few repercussions: Just 1% had their foster license revoked. Another 1% had to complete a corrective action plan.

A former case manager with more than a decade of experience working with foster parents in Central Florida said corrective action plans are meaningless and unenforced.

Asking that she not be identified because she still works in the child welfare system, she recalled a case of a foster family that was accused multiple times of using physical discipline. The caregivers were asked to re-sign paperwork agreeing to not use corporal punishment and complete virtual training.

“If you don’t follow (the plan), you still get kids,” the former case manager said.

'Wild, but good’

Joy was a sweet girl with a sharp intellect who could “read people like a book,” Larson said. The girl also could be difficult to manage, especially for foster parents who expected “little well-behaved angels instead of kids who had been through trauma.”

Joy was one of those kids, Larson said.

DCF removed Joy and her siblings from their mother because of “ongoing physical abuse” by the woman’s partner, who struck the children on their arms, legs and faces with a belt, court records show.

From the time she entered foster care in January, Joy was shuffled among several homes, Larson said.

When Mitchell agreed in June to care for Joy, Larson said she thanked Mitchell for not giving up on the girl. Mitchell seemed “incredibly sincere,” she said, adding that she never saw indications of abuse during her frequent visits with Joy.

It was not until Mitchell’s arrest that details of life inside the foster home became public.

More on child welfare in Florida: Florida took thousands of kids from families, then failed to keep them safe.

Mitchell told police on Aug. 23 that Joy threw herself to the ground and pretended her legs didn’t work. She said she placed Joy upright and fully clothed in a bathtub of water and left the room because she believed the girl was faking unconsciousness, a probable-cause affidavit states. Mitchell said when she returned to the bathroom, Joy was unresponsive and her face was submerged.

Joy was hospitalized in critical condition and pronounced dead two days later at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children in Orlando. A medical examiner determined the child died from a combination of brain bleeding caused by blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation. There was no evidence of drowning, the affidavit states.

Mitchell told police that Joy had extreme behavioral problems and had been “speaking with demons.”

Mitchell faces charges for first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse with great bodily harm, neglect of a child and child abuse.

At an all-day bond hearing Monday, Mitchell’s attorney, Jason Wandner, highlighted Joy’s behavior, quoting a report by an analyst who stated she did not believe Joy could feel empathy or pain like a typical 4-year-old.

The analyst documented Joy falling down, exhibiting “self-injurious behaviors” and claiming falsely that people had hurt her, Wandner said.

He described Mitchell as a “decorated veteran” and said police and prosecutors had jumped to conclusions.

Starved, beaten, molested: Reports detail thousands of Florida foster care complaints, yet few caregivers punished

Prosecutors played a deleted video extracted from Mitchell’s cellphone. The clip showed what Mitchell had described as Joy having an “episode,” prosecutors said. Mitchell could be heard saying during the recording: “I don’t even care. Die. Die, bitch, die.”

Mitchell remains incarcerated at Brevard County Jail. Her bond hearing is set to continue Dec. 6.

For Larson, the immediate future brings a move out of state and a search for a new job as she grapples with questions of guilt and responsibility.

“I just want people to know how simple it would have been to prevent (Joy’s death),” Larson said. “She was a good girl. Wild, but good. And even if she wasn’t, no child deserves to be hurt by anyone but particularly by people who are supposed to be protecting them.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida foster mom charged with murder faced earlier abuse allegations