An Anderson child under supervision of Child Protective Services is dead, her caseworker fired and mother charged with neglect.
Anderson police arrested Julie D. Gray, 24, Anderson, Tuesday on preliminary charges of neglect of a dependent resulting in death, a Class A felony.
Her daughter, 4-month-old Skye Gray-Johnson, died with narcotics in her system, according to Anderson police Detective Joel Sandefur.
“She lived four months; she was 13 weeks premature,” he said. “When she was born, she was about a pound.”
According to police, Skye Gray-Johnson lived most of her short life in the hospital. After her premature birth in December, she spent three months in Riley Hospital for Children before being sent home with her parents, Julie Gray and Duane Johnson, on March, 11.
Just over a month later, on April 20, she was dead.
“This started out as a sudden infant death syndrome case,” Sandefur said. But the autopsy revealed narcotics in the baby’s toxicology report.
In interviews, police say, Gray “repeatedly lied about the care the child received,” according to the probable cause affidavit.
The baby should have been given five medications a day, police said. The prescriptions were never even filled.
She was to have been taken to the hospital for follow-up appointments. Gray missed many, if not all.
Gray gave the hospital staff a substance she said was breast milk. It wasn’t.
She told police that Johnson, the baby’s father, refused to give the baby his last name — he had wanted an abortion.
Hospital officials suspected Gray may have been a drug user and informed the Child Protective Services.
Though a caseworker was assigned, Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said, visits and reports were made rarely, if ever.
“(Gray) misrepresented information time after time,” Cummings said. “The caseworker didn’t act on it.”
The worker, whose name was not available at press time, was fired and her supervisor demoted, according to Cummings.
“I’m just frustrated these things continue to happen,” the prosecutor said. “Someone has to start thinking about the children.”
He said the “institutional attitude” of keeping children with their parents can be detrimental to children. The Madison County Trauma Team, he said, recommended taking the baby away from Gray but the department kept her with her mother.
Cummings said criminal charges against the caseworker are possible. In January 2003, Cummings filed criminal charges against Mike Warrum, the caseworker assigned to protect 8-year-old wheelchair-bound Mark Norris, who died of pneumonia and malnutrition.
But in that case, Norris was a ward of the state, while Gray-Johnson was only under supervision.
When Gray was arrested, she was already in jail, having been arrested on separate charges — theft, a Class D felony, forgery, a Class C felony, and felony probation violation — on May 18.
Just before she was due to be released on those charges, Gray was arrested on neglect charges.
Bond is set at $35,000. If convicted, she faces 20 to 50 years in prison.
Gray-Johnson is the third child in three years to die in Madison County under CPS supervision. Besides Norris, in November 2003 11-month-old April Patlin, died, six months after CPS officials stopped visiting her home.
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