In 2020, a Central Florida foster family was able to adopt eight children who had been removed from their homes by the state’s Department of Children and Families — despite the fact the foster parents had been investigated 18 times by that department, suggesting their home was a troubled place, not a safe haven, for the kids.
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Over the next six years, DCF would investigate the foster family 37 more times, based on concerns about the children voiced by relatives, medical professionals, counselors and school employees. The agency documented alleged physical and sexual abuse, along with “bizarre punishment” and “parental hallucinations,” according to a recently released grand jury report.
But DCF did little to help the youngsters and did not permanently remove them from the home until early this year when the father was arrested for alleged sexual offenses against the eldest.
The case — which appears to be one from Lake County — and others like it were detailed by the grand jury in a scathing report that concluded DCF was “failing catastrophically” in its duties to protect the vulnerable. The agency’s “systemic inaction” led to severe trauma and the preventable deaths of children and the elderly across a five-county region in north Central Florida, it said.
The grand jury’s report was an effort to “sound an alarm” about the DCF, which it called an “agency in crisis.” But it also said the crisis was not new, and that local agencies in the region had repeatedly gone to DCF leadership with concerns, to no avail.
The report, which became public earlier this month, quickly prompted calls for statewide reform of DCF by some state lawmakers, who also noted problems with the agency were longstanding and the subject of past grand jury reports.
The most recent grand jury, sitting in Marion County, detailed seven “heartbreaking” cases in its report where DCF had been called to investigate but took little to no action. Six of the cases resulted in death and the seventh in the arrest of the father on sex abuse charges.
The deaths included that of a toddler who died from skull and spinal injuries, and whose mother — who had a 17-year history with DCF — was charged with his murder. Another was that of an elderly women who was regularly found on the floor naked and covered in human waste but who remained with her caretaker, though DCF knew that person had been using illegal drugs.
“Children were exploited, abused, neglected. Children died,” said Sen. Don Gaetz, a Panhandle Republican, at a press conference a few days after the report’s release. “The department delayed, denied, lied and then did nothing.”
Gaetz said the grand jury’s 34 recommendations would be incorporated into legislation he and others push in the Legislature’s 2027 session.
“We have a systematic failure of the governmental agency that is supposed to protect and support Florida’s children and Florida’s families,” he said.
DCF, in a statement issued Thursday, said it took the grand jury’s findings seriously.
“Any case in which a child or vulnerable adult may not have been adequately protected warrants careful examination,” the agency said, “and when opportunities to improve our practice are identified, we have an obligation to act.”
DCF said Florida’s child and adult protective systems have undergone significant changes since some of the earlier cases highlighted by the grand jury. The department added that some of the jury’s recommended reforms have already been implemented, although it declined to specify which ones.
The report looked only at DCF activities in the five counties in the Fifth Judicial Circuit where the state attorney empaneled the grand jury — Lake, Marion, Hernando, Citrus and Sumter — but children’s experts said its findings apply statewide.
“I mean we see these issues every day, candidly,” said Justin Grosz, an attorney and co-founder of Justice for Kids, a Fort Lauderdale-based law practice specializing in lawsuits against public agencies that failed to protect children in their care.
Grosz said his practice is currently handling cases similar to the seven listed in the report.
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But he also said DCF’s issues are part of a larger picture and that the agency doesn’t deserve all the blame.
“You have different entities performing different functions for the same child in a given case. And then depending on the county…you may have two or three agencies involved in the care of a child,” he said. “I think it’s very fractured, and it leads to children falling through cracks that they shouldn’t be falling through.”
No names or identifying details about any of the cases were provided in the report, and the state attorney’s office declined to provide any.
However, based on media reports and court records, the Orlando Sentinel has identified some cases that appear to match the details in the report.
Mark Caruso of Umatilla, for example, was arrested in February and charged with sexual battery of a child under the age of 12 and aggravated child abuse. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial, court records show. His Lake case seems to match that of the foster family that grand jury said was allowed to care for and then adopt eight children, despite numerous reported problems.
Another case mirrored that of 15-month-old Daltin Miller, who died in Ocala in 2024 from ingesting drugs. The grand jury report described how an infant, born with drugs in his system, was removed from his parents’ care but later returned to them despite “concerns of the parents’ ongoing drug use and criminal histories.” The toddler died of a “fatal overdose from the combined effects of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and xylazine.”
The grand jury was empaneled by State Attorney Bill Gladson, the top prosecutor in the Fifth Judicial Circuit. It completed its report Aug. 27. Gladson’s office declined to comment on the report.
The grand jury said other local officials have, over the years, tried to meet with DCF to address problems, but the agency did not change its practices.
It also found that DCF regularly failed to respond to calls after 5 p.m. and on weekends, instead directing callers to hospitals or mental health facilities. In one instance, someone was left in a hospital for up to a year while awaiting permanent placement, the jury report said.
DCF investigators also coached people with obvious mental capacity issues during assessments to ensure they appeared more competent than they were. That meant the agency was no longer legally obligated to help them, effectively “abandoning them” in the abusive or neglectful environment that led to the investigation, according to the report.
The grand jury also found DCF closed cases prematurely without thorough review, misinterpreted policies to shirk its responsibilities, was often unprepared in court, frequently did not follow court orders and did not take advantage of all options to protect children from harm.
The report also noted a dozen cases where law enforcement accused DCF or case management workers of falsifying records, making up phone conversations, home visits and family interviews that never occurred. Prosecutors ended up filing criminal charges for official misconduct in eight of those cases.
The grand jury spoke to law enforcement, firefighters, lawyers, a member of the judiciary and employees of a service provider for DCF. However, the six DCF employees invited to participate in the investigation either declined or did not respond.
“It’s horrendous. To read about the wanton gross negligence of an institution that exists to help already vulnerable children — it’s heartbreaking, and it cannot continue,” said Jenny Rossman, an attorney with the Boca Raton-based Herman Law firm that specializes in representing victims of child sexual abuse.
Rossman, a former top prosecutor with the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office, said she worked frequently with DCF on cases. She sometimes saw individual failings but not the systemic issues listed in the report.
“I think that some of these should be reviewed and determined if there are people who were so negligent that it rises to the level of criminal negligence,” she said.
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