“No parent should have to bury their child.” — King Theodin, The Two Towers, by JRR Tolkien 

On Saturday, May 24, Briauna Morgan received a call at work from the Person County Department of Social Services (DSS) to tell her that her one-year-old son, Kemari, had died earlier that day. She didn’t get an in-person visit with a grief counselor or someone trained in delivering terrible news. She didn’t get an in-person visit at all, just a phone call to tell her that she would never see her baby boy again.

Kemari had died at the foster placement where he spent much of the last year. Person County Child Protective Services (CPS) removed him, along with three of Briauna’s other children, from Briauna’s care, and she has spent much of the last year trying to get them back.

CPS forcibly took those children away from their mother, broke up their family, and put them in the homes of strangers. CPS and the DSS system bear responsibility for the children they take, and they failed at the highest possible level of destructive incompetence and deliberate neglect. Accountability for this child’s death falls squarely at the feet of Person County DSS, and tragedy of this magnitude demands a reckoning. 

Of course, the system cannot abide challenge, and so it does its thing; social workers, judges, county commissioner boards, and everyone in between all unite behind the system, making it certain no one will ever suffer any consequences. Right now, the only two priorities for DSS and Person County should be a complete and independent investigation into the tragic death of a one-year-old child and supporting a shocked and grieving mother in every way possible.

Instead, the courts backed DSS’s determination that Zariyah, Briauna’s daughter and Kemari’s sister, would have her best interests served by remaining in foster care, unable to talk to her mother. 

It is at this point in the story that I reached out to Amanda Wallace, founder of Operation Stop CPS, to see if the Libertarian Party of North Carolina (LPNC) could help. Amanda started Operation Stop CPS after spending time as a social worker, where she witnessed firsthand how the system denies people their rights and harms children and families, and wildly disproportionately hurts black children. 

Operations Stop CPS has been leading the charge to find some modicum of justice in Kemari’s tragic death, and Amanda personifies the organization, fearless in her push to protect children from state-sponsored kidnapping. She has to be; the retaliation from the state has been brutal. Amanda has been arrested more than once, barred from courtrooms, served no contact orders, and more since she started the organization.

We all attended a Person County Board of Commissioners meeting the week after Kemari died and were given two minutes each to speak, because freedom of speech is apparently limited to two-minute segments when discussing the death of a child. We all voiced our concerns with the utter disaster that had been Person County’s handling of the situation. 

Amanda was arrested again immediately after leaving the meeting because of a trespass charge taken out against her by the director of Person County social services. A memorial to Kemari was placed near his house, and he apparently dislikes being reminded of children who died on his watch so much that he felt Amanda, who never went on his property, should face time behind bars. 

Nothing has been done to help Briauna get answers on how a previously healthy one-year old boy could simply die. To this point, she has been told essentially nothing, except that an autopsy is pending and could take months, or even more than a year.

Amanda said that the way the system was treating Briauna, the investigation into Kemari, and the entire situation, didn’t surprise her at all. 

“Only Child Protective Services, or more accurately called the family policing system, could have a child die in their ‘care’ without any explanation, and then accept no responsibility or accountability. This system holds the most terrifying power — the power to forcibly separate families with little to no oversight. Kemari’s life shines a light on a system that has operated in the dark for far too long.” 

CPS in North Carolina has a long history of abject failure with no accountability. In just recent years, CPS has faced multiple lawsuits alleging it fails the children in its care at eye-popping rates, been the subject of a damning documentary, dealt with shortages in foster-care placement options even as the number of children forcibly removed continued to climb, and a multitude of other shortcomings in their ostensible mission to help children who are in danger.

For every child placed in foster care, the agencies involved receive anywhere from $25,000 to $200,000 in federal funding, which creates a perverse incentive, especially for people dealing with children. 

The General Assembly recently passed legislation to attempt to address the pervasive problems in CPS. While the bill improves some of the oversight measures to the absolute bare minimum, like requiring a criminal background check for foster care workers, it is just a band aid on a wound that grows larger with every child who suffers under the care of NC CPS. 

NC CPS consistently fails in its intended purpose, to help children in danger. Things need to change, starting with answers and accountability in the death of Kemari Morgan.