Part 2 of a series on child deaths in Southern California. Read Part 1 here.
Justice can’t bring back the dead. But it can provide a neat, narrative closure that allows us to overlook the arguably deeper tragedies lurking just below the surface.
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The demise of 3-year-old twins Josiah and Jestine James made headlines in July 2024. The toddlers got into their mother’s purse, found drugs in a colorful container and died of fentanyl poisoning. Mom Jestice James was charged with murder and child abuse/abandonment; pleaded no contest to child abuse; and was sentenced to 18 years in state prison.
“These innocent boys reportedly came into contact with fentanyl, an opioid that has wreaked havoc across our communities,” then-Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement then. “This tragedy is part of a disturbing trend where babies and toddlers are increasingly becoming victims of the opioid crisis. The deadly capabilities of fentanyl cannot be overstated, and it is our collective responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves. My office is committed to holding accountable anyone who exposes vulnerable children to such dangerous substances.”
What the headlines didn’t mention was that the twins’ family had a troubled history with child protective services and law enforcement. There were reports of domestic violence, emotional abuse, caretaker absence/incapacity, severe and general neglect, and more, according to files detailing the boys’ death investigation. Their mother was an alleged victim when she was a minor, and the same was true for their maternal aunt.
Now, however, their mother was “estranged.” The twins remained in the family unit, living with their maternal grandmother in the San Fernando Valley. Mom attended the party celebrating the twins’ third birthday on July 10, 2024, and stayed the night.
The next day, “police responded to a call regarding domestic violence,” a screener report says. “When officers entered the apartment, they observed several people gathered around a table. Officers heard individuals saying, ‘Give ’em more Narcan, give ’em more Narcan!’… there were two unconscious children lying on the table surrounded by adults…. (Redacted) had been deceased for extended time because jaw/mouth would not open.”
The complexities of addiction, neglect and troubled family histories wreak more havoc than safety systems seem willing to fully acknowledge.
Baby Adam Bumanglag’s start in life may have been as difficult as his exit from it. He was a “prenatally substance-exposed infant” born in July 2023, irritable, “floppy,” with a high-pitched cry. “(M)other is trying to leave against medical advice (without the baby),” a child welfare screener wrote at the time. Adam stayed in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit for a month and was taken into protective custody in Los Angeles County.
His parents were offered family maintenance and reunification services about three months later. Things apparently went well, and in April 2024 — about six months after those services were offered — the state’s jurisdiction terminated and joint legal custody went to his parents, with physical custody to his mother. At about 9 months old, Adam was reunited with his family.
But on Aug. 14, 2025, Adam’s mom called 911 and told the dispatcher that Adam wasn’t breathing. An ambulance rushed him to the emergency room in cardiac arrest. The medical examiner concluded that he died from the effects of fentanyl and cocaine.
Adam was 2 years old. His parents, Jacob Bumanglag and Paloma Ramirezlopez, They have .
The question haunting such tragedies is: Did these children really have to die? Is there more that the child welfare, law enforcement and court systems could have, should have, done to protect them from the complexities of addiction and a drug as murderously ruinous as fentanyl?
It’s well known that substance use usually takes more than a few months to beat. noted it can take as long as eight or nine years after a person first seeks formal help to achieve sustained recovery.
“If you are asking me personally, not in my capacity as a DDA (deputy district attorney), yes, DCFS (the Department of Children and Family Services) needs to do a better job,” said Jonathan Hatami, a veteran of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office who heads up complex child abuse cases. “LA City and County need to do a better job. California should take a more realistic approach to substance use and addiction. Even one child dying from a fentanyl overdose is too much.”
Policymakers at the state and county levels have the power to change this. “We prosecute crimes and try to get justice for children usually after something bad already happens,” Hatami said. “They make laws.”
Heavy weight
The Southern California News Group reviewed thousands of pages of child abuse and neglect fatality case files for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties from 2024 and 2025. We found that drug and alcohol use factored into nearly half of them, and that the overwhelming majority of families were no strangers to the child welfare system. With few exceptions, the dead children’s families were repeatedly scrutinized by child welfare, police and/or criminal justice systems, but children remained with troubled families nonetheless.
That’s at least in part by design. The federal Family First Prevention Services Act changed decades of policy that swiftly swept kids into the child welfare system when their parents struggled with addiction. Instead, states were empowered to use federal funding to wrap those families in the support needed to succeed. Those services could include mental health care, substance abuse treatment, in-home parenting programs, home nurse visits and the like, designed to keep families intact “whenever safe to do so.”
It’s hard to know exactly when it’s safe to do so and when it’s not. Social workers agonize: Will it end badly? Will it improve? Making recommendations to “remove” or “remain” haunt them.
“These are just super hard things,” said Michael Cull, who leads the technical assistance team at the National Partnership for Child Safety. “By and large, the work we see in a case that leads to a fatality is no different than in a case that doesn’t lead to a fatality. You can have good casework with a bad outcome, and bad casework with a good outcome.”
Families may agree to accept voluntary services; services might be ordered by the court. But it’s not clear if these interventions work or are just performative. Entries into the child welfare system have plunged by nearly half over the past two decades, but confirmed child abuse and neglect deaths have ticked up, both nationally and in California.
“The unfortunate truth is that we don’t have highly effective, scalable programs that address the most intractable social problems with the hardest-to-engage populations,” wrote researchers Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font in “Family First’s Big Bet on Prevention Hasn’t Paid Off.”
“The highest-risk families currently receive short-term, often inadequate services, involving limited contact with caseworkers and service providers. Most maltreated children receive few or no services.”
The quality of those services concerns Jessica Heldman, executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego, as well.
“There hasn’t been any requirement or measure or standard for what is an effective service,” she said. “Parents may be recommended, told, required to do this or that, but if that service isn’t effective and tailored to the needs of the family — substance use, domestic violence — what are we doing?”
When a parent is engaged in treatment, systems typically interpret that as evidence that we’re addressing risk, writes Cull. But the evidence does not support that.
“Access to treatment matters, though in many communities it remains uneven or inadequate,” he wrote. “Even when treatment is available and engagement is high, the evidence on its effectiveness is limited. Outcomes are modest and highly variable even under optimal conditions — stable housing, financial resources, social support, and consistent access to care. Substance use disorders are widely understood to be chronic, recurring, and remitting. Relapse is not an exception but part of the clinical reality. In practice, treatment offers population-level probabilities, not assurances, and those probabilities were generated under conditions that differ substantially from the lives of families involved with child welfare.”
In a said that Families First will provide more funding for quality prevention. “There is a plan to measure outcomes and improve services to meet goals,” the statement said. The California Family First Prevention Services Continuous Quality Improvement Plan and Implementation Plan were developed through extensive collaboration, and together outline a framework to drive performance improvement.
Cull is also president and CEO of the Center for the Helping Professions, focusing on safety science, shared data and system reform to reduce child maltreatment and fatalities. It works with several California counties, including Los Angeles, Riverside, Alameda and Santa Clara, extracting lessons from critical incidents.
“We focus on trying to surface the systems issues,” he said. “In the data we have now, the most stable finding is that it takes coordination with those outside of the child welfare system — teaming with law enforcement, education and health care. Child protection can’t do it alone.”
McMansion v. trailer park
Complicating matters further: Officials have differing ideas on exactly what constitutes an abuse/neglect death from place to place.
“The death of a toddler who drowns in a bathtub, for example, may be classified as an accident in one jurisdiction and as a child neglect death in another,” said a federal commission report in 2016.
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“(D)eciding if a child’s death is caused by abuse or neglect is more subjective than it might appear at first glance,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “For starters, there may be differences in the competence of medical examiners and coroners. But also, the same potential for bias that exists everywhere else in child welfare exists here.
“Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a 3-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away. He falls into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion, it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park, it will be labeled neglect.”
Differing yardsticks in differing locations may leave children at risk and deaths uncounted, child welfare advocates say. Consider:
• Orange County is bigger than both Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Orange County also has more children under age 18, and a higher child poverty rate. Yet Riverside and San Bernardino each reported more than 30 abuse/neglect deaths over 2024 and 2025, while Orange County reported eight.
• How often the system moves to intervene in a family varies widely as well. Juvenile dependency petitions are the legal documents alleging that a child is at risk and asking the court for permission to intervene. Statewide, there were 30,415 including 11,096 in Los Angeles County. In Riverside County, there were 3,689; in San Bernardino County, 2,675; and in Orange County, 1,974.
• The number of criminal charges related to abuse and neglect differed as well. Over the two years examined, Riverside County prosecutors filed 862 such charges; Orange County prosecutors filed 1,698; and San Bernardino filed 2,033, county officials said.
“If everyone has a different definition of child abuse and injury, how do you collect the data and look at it retrospectively?” asked Kim Day, vice president of programs for the National Children’s Alliance.
“There’s no national system. It’s all state- or county-based. And each jurisdiction has its own way that child fatalities are investigated. Some have coroners, others have volunteer coroners who may or may not have any education in child abuse and neglect. … Creating definitions that are the same across the country, and requiring states to report on the definition so there could be an analysis of the risk factors, would be very helpful.”
Chi Pham, spokesperson for the Orange County Social Services Agency, said that variations in stats don’t necessarily indicate differences in underlying conditions, and that the county’s priority is ensuring that each case is reviewed thoroughly and consistently in accordance with state standards.
, spokesperson for Los Angeles County Superior Court, said that the central goal of its Juvenile Division is child safety “by delivering intentional, timely and fair justice through trauma responsive approaches in the courtroom.” Initiatives designed to preserve and encourage healthy parental bonds include a specialized dependency courtroom called Helping Our Parents Excel, or HOPE, which focuses on the families of children up to age 3.
Abdication of responsibility?
The National Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities to child safety. “We must effectively marshal the knowledge, skills, and resources of all government and community agencies that come into contact with families and children. We need public will, shared accountability, local and state and federal leadership, and partnerships with the private sector to bring solutions to life,” it said.
California’s list of mandated reporters of suspected child abuse or neglect has expanded to include myriad professionals. The number of child abuse and neglect deaths has remained stubbornly stable nonetheless.
Child welfare reports often begin at hospitals. Social workers follow up on allegations — drug exposure, intentional injury, etc. — but allegations are often deemed “inconclusive” or “unfounded” as parents deny problems (and very young children, the majority of kids at risk, are unable to speak for themselves).
A drug-exposed birth is not enough grounds to remove a newborn from a parent’s care in California. A parent may accept services voluntarily to keep the family together through “Plans of Safe Care.” These are positioned as a compassionate approach to addressing the needs of substance-exposed infants and their families without the stigma and coerciveness of child protective services, explain Sarah Font, Naomi Schaefer Riley and Brett Drake in “The US Is Failing Substance-Exposed Infants.” A drug test is not a parenting test, proponents argue, and stigma and fear of CPS can deter people from seeking help.
“These arguments warrant serious consideration in policy evaluation and reform, but (Plans of Safe Care) do not directly address these concerns,” the researchers said. “Moreover, it is not clear what other entity can respond when parental substance use is likely to inhibit minimally adequate caregiving and that parent rejects or does not benefit from a voluntary offer of services.”
These plans may be nothing more than documentation of services mother or baby already received or were referred to. State and federal laws inhibit child welfare or other agencies from monitoring substance abuse treatment. And the voluntary nature of these plans may mean that the vast majority of eligible parents receive no substance use treatment at all, as studies in New Mexico and Delaware have found, they said.
“Individuals with substance use disorders may take many years to be ‘ready’ for treatment, but there is no pause button on infants’ development,” they wrote. “Beyond the effects of prenatal substance exposure itself, the effects of untreated substance use disorders on parenting are undeniable: Young children face increased risks of fatality, poisonings, injuries, physical and sexual abuse, and severe neglect, in addition to poor physical, cognitive, and emotional development.
“As states and the federal government myopically prioritize the avoidance of CPS as an end unto itself, (Plans of Safe Care) have been applauded without any evidence — or even requirements to collect evidence — as to their actual efficacy in keeping children safe and ensuring that their basic developmental needs are met. This is not compassion but instead an abdication of responsibility.”
‘Intellectually honest course’
The file on Justin Bulley is more than 200 pages long. His family was involved in a dozen referrals between 2011 and 2023, including allegations of emotional abuse, general neglect and physical abuse. He was home when his mother’s boyfriend died of a fentanyl overdose and was soon removed from her care.
But Justin’s mother was allowed visits with him, and he was in the back seat of her car a few months later when she rear-ended a truck in an inebriated state, according to police reports.
“It was known to DCFS that Ms. (Jessica) Darthard had an extensive criminal history including multiple alcohol and drug related arrests, as well as charges for cruelty to a child,” said the. “Further, it was known that all of Ms. Darthard’s children had been born with illegal drugs in their system. Additionally, Ms. Darthard had a prior strike against her in 2006 under Penal Code 246 for shooting a firearm into the dwelling.”
The county’s duty included ensuring that someone kept a watchful eye on mother and child during visits, but the designated monitor was actually a friend who also abused drugs, the lawsuit said.
On Feb. 18, 2024, Justin and his siblings were visiting at their mother’s house. Their grandfather was there, too, smoking fentanyl from a glass pipe with Justin beside him, according to prosecutors. The grandfather fell asleep. When he awoke, he found Justin unresponsive.
Justin died from the effects of fentanyl, the medical examiner concluded. He was 17 months old. “Justin Bulley’s death was caused by the failures of DCFS,” his father’s lawsuit asserts.
Mother Jessica Darthard and grandfather Jessie Darthard were charged with murder. The monitor was charged with willful cruelty to a child causing possible injury or death. They’ve pleaded not guilty.
“We see a number of cases of children in foster care where the parent still has access to them, and there’s drug exposure,” said Putnam-Hornstein. “Because children are going into relative placements as opposed to traditional foster homes, we’re relying on the relative to supervise visits with the parent very quickly. If I’m a nonrelative, I’ll probably be in a better position to report to the agency that, ‘I suspect Mom is high,’ than if I’m Mom’s mother.”
By any honest accounting, “Family First” has failed to deliver on the vision of its architects, wrote Putnam-Hornstein and Font. “The only question now is whether we double down on their flawed assumptions, or chart a new, more intellectually honest course.”
This project was produced in partnership with the USC Center for Health Journalism through its Data Fellowship.
Editor’s note: Children’s full names, rather than their initials, are used in this story because they’ve been publicly identified and their parents have been charged with crimes.
Next: There are no simple solutions, but there are things that can be done to prevent some tragedies.
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