More charges in Danieal Kelly's death

In yet another prosecution focused on Philadelphia's child-welfare system, a federal grand jury charged yesterday that a social-service agency let 14-year-old Danieal Kelly starve to death while concocting fake bills to fool taxpayers into paying for nonexistent services.

The fraud charges brought against four founders and five employees of the agency were the latest fallout in an investigation that followed a series of Inquirer articles on the agency - and the 2006 death of Danieal, the child with cerebral palsy found dead in a filthy Mantua rowhouse, covered with maggots and weighing just 46 pounds.

In privatizing social work, the city paid MultiEthnic Behavioral Health Inc. $3.7 million over six years to visit the homes of 500 children, including Danieal's.

Yesterday's indictment said that MultiEthnic's bosses and workers skipped visits, dummied records to show otherwise, and then shredded documents in a coverup to thwart FBI and police investigators.

"Money for nothing," was the phrase U.S. Attorney Laurie Magid used to describe the scam.

The indictment focused on the misuse of federal money funneled to the city for child welfare. It is the second round of criminal charges stemming from Danieal's death.

A Philadelphia grand jury last year charged her parents, two MultiEthnic workers, and two city social workers with crimes ranging from murder to reckless endangerment.

The federal grand jury charged eight MultiEthnic staffers with 19 counts of wire fraud, health-care fraud, and conspiracy; one was also charged with a single count of lying to the grand jury.

The indicted supervisors were agency head Mickal Kamuvaka, 60; and Earle McNeill, 69; Manuelita Buenaflor, 65; and Solomon Manamela, 51.

The employees charged were Julius Murray, 51; Mariam Coulibaly, 40; Christina Nimpson, 53; and Sotheary Chan, 40.

Coulibaly was also charged with an extra count of lying to the FBI and other federal investigators. Finally, a fifth MultiEthnic employee, Patricia Burch, 55, was charged with misleading the grand jury.

Kamuvaka and Murray now face both federal and local charges. The grand jury convened by District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham indicted them on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

In the federal case, FBI agents arrested three of the nine defendants at their homes at 6 a.m. without incident. The rest are to turn themselves in.

After their arraignment, Kamuvaka, Coulibaly, and Manamela were released without having to post bail. Each pleaded not guilty.

According to the indictment, Kamuvaka, a psychotherapist from Namibia known as "Dr. K," was the real leader of MultiEthnic, though McNeill had the title of executive director.

"She's anticipating fighting the charges and vindicating her name," said her lawyer, Lawrence J. Bozzelli.

Coulibaly's attorney, William J. Brennan, praised his client.

"She's obviously very intelligent," Brennan said. "She has a master's in education and a master's in mental health."

The Philadelphia grand jury also brought charges last summer against two former city social workers whose job it was to oversee MultiEthnic, and against Danieal's parents.

On Wednesday, her mother, Andrea Kelly, 39, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison. (Kelly is a mother of 10; her minor children are now in foster care.)

The other defendants await trial. The city grand jury found that Danieal's parents and the city and private social workers shared the blame for her mistreatment and death. Its searing investigative report blasted the city Department of Human Services as "uncaring and incompetent."

After Danieal's death, DHS hired the Annie E. Casey Foundation to improve its oversight of private social-service contractors. It also suspended numerous contractors whose performance was deemed substandard.

DHS spokeswoman Alicia Taylor said the agency would have no comment on yesterday's indictment because the case was pending.

"We remain committed to transforming the agency so that no other children become victims of the systemic problems involved in this case," she said.

In fall 2006, The Inquirer published an investigative series focusing on the deaths of children whose families were or had been under DHS supervision.

As then-Mayor John F. Street was huddled with top aides in response to the newspaper's expose, he was handed photographs of Danieal's corpse. Mortified and angry, Street immediately fired the commissioner and top deputy of DHS and launched a sweeping reform agenda, including the appointment of a blue-ribbon panel to recommend changes.

In subsequent coverage, The Inquirer probed the city's heavy reliance on private agencies for the one-on-one contact with families.

The paper reported that McNeill, MultiEthnic's executive director, had lost his certification as a drug and alcohol counselor after he was convicted of assaulting a girlfriend.

The paper also reported that MultiEthnic gave false information to the city in applying for its contract, listing as advisers people who had never signed on with the agency.

Founded in 1998 and operating out of a shabby building in Southwest Philadelphia, MultiEthnic apparently drew its name from the fact that many of its founders and workers hailed from around the globe: from West Africa, Cambodia, and the Philippines, for instance.

Using mainly federal money, the city paid the agency about $700 per family per month to visit troubled households.

The federal indictment said that the firm's leaders urged subordinates to fabricate records of home visits that had never occurred. The indictment called these "ghost visits."

It says the staff falsified and backdated case reports and other documents to the city. To make the scam easier to pull off, they had parents sign multiple undated forms in advance, the grand jury said.

In a 2006 interview with The Inquirer, Danieal's mother said that with her family, MultiEthnic workers had done precisely that.

Whenever MultiEthnic faced a visit of its own from DHS auditors, the indictment says, its workers, including Kamuvaka, would labor "late into the night to create false records to put into the files."

After Danieal was found dead on Aug. 4, 2006, the indictment says, the document falsification went into overdrive.

Kamuvaka and Murray - the latter a social worker assigned to the Kelly family - and other MultiEthnic employees set to work writing false reports about the child's progress.

Workers also erased or replaced a key computer hard drive to cover wrongdoing, the indictment said.