Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the
Carolina Journal. The author of this post is
Andrew Pomeranz.
The North Carolina House unanimously passed the
"Dominique Moody Safety Act," advancing a child-welfare reform package named for the six-year-old girl whose death exposed repeated failures by Mecklenburg County social services officials to act on reports of abuse and neglect.
The bill, Senate Bill 280, passed 113-0 after an emotional floor debate from lawmakers who said the state must do more to identify repeated warning signs before vulnerable children are harmed.
Rep. Allen Chesser, R-Nash, said the bill is intended to create a state-level escalation team that can intervene in high-risk child welfare cases before tragedy strikes.
"The goal is to create an escalation team that has involvement in these child welfare cases before there is a fatality," Chesser said.
"The goal here is to pick up on patterns of behavior and flag activities or lack of activities before they have a negative or detrimental impact on a child."
Building on these preventive measures, the legislation would create a child welfare escalation team within the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Division of Social Services (DSS) to review high-risk child abuse and neglect cases across the state. Chesser said the team would provide another layer of review when a child's history shows repeated warning signs or exceptionally high-risk circumstances.
The bill also requires CPS employees conducting home assessments to take photographs and create verifiable records of their work. Chesser said that the requirement grew out of cases reviewed while the bill was being developed.
"Unfortunately, that wasn't the case in many of the cases that we reviewed leading into this bill," Chesser said.
"And so we feel it's important to make sure that that activity not only occurs but is verifiable after the fact."
In addition to establishing the escalation team, the measure also includes training for recognizing child abuse and neglect, liability provisions for agencies that fail to follow the law and department guidance, child welfare procedure clarifications, funding for predictive risk modeling, a public child safety dashboard, and public disclosure provisions for child fatality and near-fatality cases involving DSS.
Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus, spoke in support of the bill, saying lawmakers have
"no greater responsibility than to take care of the children of our state."
"I read the report on Dominique, and it's enough to make the biggest, strongest man cry to know what that child endured," Jones said.
"No child should ever, ever have to go through the torment that this blessed little soul went through."
Jones said lawmakers owe action to Moody's memory and to other children caught in the child welfare system.
Dominique Moody was a six-year-old Mecklenburg County girl who died in December due to alleged extreme abuse and neglect. Authorities found her body inside a home in what officials described as horrific conditions. Three caretakers were charged in connection with her death, including murder and felony child abuse charges.
"Maybe this will save that one child," Jones said.
"Dominique's not the only one who has ever been through this. We owe it to her to have her name emboldened in the North Carolina law forever."
Rep. Carla Cunningham, U-Mecklenburg, one of the bill's primary sponsors, said Moody was more than the name of a bill before the General Assembly.
"Before Dominique Moody became the name of this bill, she was a little girl born on Jan. 20, 2019, in Cumberland County, later moving to Mecklenburg County," Cunningham said.
"Like every child in North Carolina, Dominique Moody should have grown up in a safe home, surrounded by love, protection, and opportunity."
Cunningham described years of abuse and neglect that preceded Moody's death and said the case should force lawmakers to examine how repeated warning signs can be missed.
"Dominique's story reminds us that abuse and neglect rarely occur in isolation," Cunningham said.
"More often it develops over time, with warning signs appearing long before the crisis."
She said the bill is intended to strengthen coordination, accountability, training, and oversight in North Carolina's child welfare system.
"It recognizes that when children repeatedly come to the attention of child protective services, those reports should not always be viewed as an isolated incident," Cunningham said.
"Patterns matter. History matters. Repeated concerns matter."
Moody's death has become a flashpoint in the General Assembly's scrutiny of North Carolina's county-administered, state-supervised child welfare system. At a House Oversight Committee hearing earlier this month, NCDHHS officials told lawmakers that Mecklenburg County received multiple reports involving Moody's household but failed to intervene further.
State reviewers found that four of five reports involving Moody's home that were screened out with no further action should have been screened in because the information met the legal definition of abuse or neglect.
NCDHHS also found broader problems in Mecklenburg County's child welfare practice. In a review of 122 unrelated CPS records, the department found intake workers failed to ask sufficient questions in 52% of intakes, files lacked required notification to law enforcement and district attorneys in 36% of cases involving possible criminal child abuse, safety plans were adequate in only 43% of cases, face-to-face contact with children occurred at the correct frequency in just 48% of cases, and 58% of cases lacked all required components of quality supervisory oversight.
House Oversight leaders have also asked Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather to conduct a criminal review of county DSS employees and officials who handled reports and decisions in Moody's case.
With this broad bipartisan support, the unanimous House vote sends the measure forward as lawmakers continue examining what went wrong in Moody's case and whether similar failures could be occurring elsewhere in the state.
