PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A $100 million lawsuit accuses Oregon’s Department of Human Services (DHS) of overlooking physical and sexual abuse of foster children living in a Marion County foster home – and then trying to cover up the agency’s own failures to prevent that abuse.
Attorney Steve Rizzo filed the lawsuit in Oregon’s federal district court on Friday on behalf of 3 foster children whom Oregon DHS sent to live with Casey Ray Miller and Melissa Mary Miller. In 2015, Rizzo won a record $15 million lawsuit against Oregon DHS for a case in which 9 foster children were abused by their state-appointed foster father, James Earl Mooney.
The foster father in this case, Casey Ray Miller, was given a 30-year sentence in September for sodomizing one of the foster children in his care. Previously, he had been found guilty of first-degree criminal mistreatment, after it was discovered that he had broken seven bones of a 10-month-old girl in his care.
The lawsuit alleges that none of the children should ever have been placed in the Millers’ care at all. KOIN 6 News reached out to DHS for comment but was told the agency could not comment on pending litigation.
“These people were not fit. They were not even financially independent. They had serious health concerns, both mental and physical,” Rizzo said. “They never should have been put in charge of children.”
The older siblings were sent to live with the Millers starting in 2011. Within a month, the complaint says the two children showed signs of child abuse, including bruising and emotional outbursts — signs that the agency allegedly never fully investigated.
According to the complaint, the 10-month-old was then placed with the Millers two years later, in 2013. Even after Miller admitted he had abused the infant – abuse that occurred a month after the infant entered the home — DHS allegedly “chose not to conduct a medical evaluation or child abuse assessment” of the two older children in the home. The lawsuit claims this failure to investigate put the two other children at significant risk.
DHS is also being accused of seeking to cover up its own wrongdoing, as it pertains to the 10-month-old abuse victim. The lawsuit says that after Miller admitted to abusing the infant, DHS sought a “self-serving” diagnosis of brittle bone disease for the girl – a diagnosis that Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU) did not deem accurate after examination.
“What we’re alleging is that, in this case, when the agency became, frankly, aware of abuse, the agency took upon itself to investigate the conduct leading to abuse and ultimately fed into what we are alleging was a cover-up,” Rizzo said.
Then, in January 2017, one of the older children who had been living in the home came forward to say that Miller had repeatedly sexually abused her while she was living in his home.
The lawsuit claims that DHS employees Karla Major, Marcy Stenerson, Jennifer Laib, Heather Uerlings, and Sherrie Mahurin did not properly investigate signs of child abuse in the Miller home, thereby failing to protect the children in the state agency’s care.
The lawsuit alleges it was Mahurin “set in motion a plan to conjure or suggest that [the 10-month-old child’s] multiple fractures were not caused by Casey Miller’s admitted child abuse; but rather, that they resulted from brittle bones.”
The lawsuit also questions DHS’s practice of approving foster parents who will be financially dependent on the money they receive from the state for the care of foster children, arguing that this dependency violates DHS rules and “creates a substantial risk of serious harm to foster children and perpetuates child abuse.”
With the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are seeking to have the courts forbid the state agency from certifying non-relative foster parents who don’t have the financial resources to care for foster children outside of the state’s foster care payments. The plaintiffs are also seeking to stop DHS from conducting investigations of child abuse that happen in the state’s foster care program, claiming that it is a conflict of interest. The lawsuit also asks to have the agency fire the DHS employees who participated in the alleged cover-up.