Suffolk saw a 10-year high in child abuse, neglect deaths. CPS told NYS it struggles with 'less experienced staff.'

A 2-year-old boy drowned in a backyard pool while his grandmother slept and his mother showered.

Suffolk County’s Child Protective Services received a report that same day alleging he died because adults at the home failed to supervise him. It wasn’t the first time the agency looked into the family.

The boy’s July 2024 drowning in Islandia came after at least nine prior complaints to CPS about supervision of other children in the home. It was one of several cases in which Suffolk CPS failed to fully investigate allegations of abuse or neglect, or properly assess children's safety — a pattern identified repeatedly by state officials, a Newsday investigation has found.

The county blamed its failures on having "a high number of less experienced staff" — a phrase it used over and over again in responses to the state Office of Children and Family Services.

The Islandia tragedy occurred amid a 10-year high in child deaths involving some form of abuse or maltreatment in Suffolk, state records show, even as several high-profile cases have prompted CPS reform plans and a grand jury report.

Since the 2020 freezing death of 8-year-old Thomas Valva in his father and stepmother’s garage, Suffolk has boosted the ranks of its CPS caseworkers by 36%.

But the "less experienced staff" line reveals that more workers with less time on the job are now making potentially life-or-death decisions about children. As of March, more than half of CPS caseworkers had less than three years of experience, according to data provided by the county.

"The county should treat this as an urgent child-safety issue and respond with transparency [and] accountability," Legis. Jason Richberg (D-West Babylon), the minority leader and a member of the seniors and human services committee, said in a statement responding to the state documents reviewed by Newsday.

Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine ran in 2023 on a platform of reforming CPS, and has overseen much of the staffing increases.

Romaine also pledged more action in the wake of the killing of 9-year-old Eli Henrys in 2024. Eli's mother, Kerri Bedrick, crashed her car with the boy in the back seat after allegedly driving the wrong way on the Southern State Parkway while high on methamphetamines, prosecutors charged.

Last year, after Newsday reported that CPS caseworkers had dismissed numerous complaints about Eli's care, Romaine ordered the convening of a "Child Fatality Review Team," a group tasked with examining systemic problems and recommending strategies to reduce deaths. County lawmakers had mandated the group be formed a decade earlier, but it had never launched. 

But the fatality review team never got off the ground, Romaine's spokesman, Michael Martino, confirmed this month to Newsday. Romaine did not agree to multiple requests for interviews; neither did social services officials.

"The Child Fatality Review Team is currently still in development," Martino told Newsday in an email, citing an "extensive" application process as a reason it hasn’t been activated.

10-year high in deaths

County CPS agencies investigate the deaths of all children involving allegations of abuse or neglect, as well as cases in which the agency was actively involved in or already monitoring the child’s care.

The state then reviews the county investigations for compliance with state regulations.

In 2023 and 2024, Suffolk County CPS investigated the deaths of 42 children, according to records Newsday obtained from the state Office of Children and Family Services through a public records request.

Of those 42 deaths, the county determined that some form of maltreatment or abuse had occurred in 25 cases: 12 in 2023 and 13 in 2024, both of which were the highest since 2015, the data shows.

Martino said that figure reflects "increased public awareness of child abuse and neglect, more frequent and informed reporting to the State Central Registry" — a statewide screening service for abuse allegations — and "evolving state criteria." 

He noted that as safe sleep practices, in particular, have become better understood, "cases that may not have been substantiated in the past are now more likely to meet the threshold."

Most deaths that prompted a Suffolk County CPS investigation in 2023 and 2024 did not involve actual physical abuse. Instead, those fatalities occurred mostly while an infant was sleeping with a parent or family member, or a child was unsupervised in a pool, records show.

Martino noted the county has launched initiatives to reduce drownings and sleeping accidents, in addition to hiring additional CPS caseworkers.

In 2023, the latest year for which statewide data is available, Suffolk County CPS investigated 6.7 deaths per 100,000 children, according to a Newsday analysis. That was slightly below the state average of 8.3 deaths per 100,000 children. Nassau County's rate was 1.7.

Academics who study child welfare told Newsday that comparing child fatality rates between different areas is a tricky exercise, even when populations and regions are similar. Different CPS agencies, for example, may have varied criteria for cases they investigate.

"It's really hard to know what's driving those numbers in a way that can enable us to draw real conclusions," said Kate Sullivan, a New York University Silver School of Social Work professor, citing the potential for disparate rates of poverty, housing insecurity and parental stress.

'You need to look deeper'

When the state finds errors in how county CPS agencies handle a case, it requires the agency to file a "program improvement plan." Newsday recently obtained 14 of these reports through a public records request.

The reports cover incidents between 2018 and 2025. Most of the 14 plans stemmed from child deaths: the Thomas Valva and Eli Henrys cases; five sleep-related deaths; one pneumonia case, a drowning, and another death for which records were not available.

State records involving child fatalities are anonymized, but Newsday used dates and other narrative information to identify publicly reported cases, including the 2024 drowning of the 2-year-old boy in Islandia.

Newsday is not publishing the boy's name in this story because none of his guardians were criminally charged in his death, unlike in the Thomas Valva and Eli Henrys cases.

Thomas’ father, Michael Valva, an NYPD officer, and his fiancee, Angela Pollina, were both convicted of second-degree murder at separate trials for the boy's death of hypothermia in the garage of their Center Moriches home in 2020. They are serving terms of 25 years to life in prison.

Earlier this week, Newsday reported that a pending $9 million settlement in Thomas' mother's wrongful death suit against Suffolk could be scrapped and the case headed to trial.

Meanwhile, the criminal case against Eli's mother, Bedrick, has yet to be resolved. Bedrick was charged with depraved indifference murder following the crash that killed her son, but a judge in March ruled her incompetent to stand trial.

A year and a half before the crash, Bedrick wandered into a local firehouse showing signs of paranoia. Eli told caseworkers that his mother was hearing voices and that "bad things" were happening at home, but CPS took no action.

Jorge Rosario, former chief of the Suffolk Legal Aid Society's children’s law bureau, said a family with a history of CPS reports, such as Eli’s — Bedrick was previously accused of neglect, abuse and drug use — should prompt caseworkers to examine a case more carefully.

"Unless you've determined that somebody's making a report out of revenge or something of that nature, then I think you need to look deeper," said Rosario, who reviewed Suffolk’s program improvement plans at Newsday’s request.

But Martino, the Suffolk County spokesperson, told Newsday in an email that "All investigators proceed in the same objective manner regardless of whether or not there are prior reports."

In the child fatalities for which Newsday reviewed program improvement plans, the state cited Suffolk CPS for multiple failures, including in "gathering information," "decision making," and "case planning."

In one case involving the 2023 death of a 2-month-old boy who was found unresponsive in his bassinet, the state found that Suffolk CPS failed to properly assess the safety of the child’s family — including the potential risk posed to surviving siblings by the child’s father, a registered sex offender.

"The father was aware [of] the conditions of his probation prohibiting him from being around children, however; he continued to frequent the mother's home, which placed the two non-verbal developmentally disabled siblings at imminent risk of harm," state records read.

The number of errors cited by the state in Suffolk CPS’ handling of cases isn’t unusual for similarly sized counties in the region, according to state OCFS spokesman Daniel Marans. In fact, the state cited Suffolk CPS for fewer errors in the past five years than the state average, Marans said.

Anne Oh, counsel to Suffolk's Department of Social Services, said in a statement CPS has "continued to implement critical improvements ... including hiring new case workers and providing additional training to our dedicated staff."

‘Strengthened collaboration’

Suffolk County, responding to the state's criticisms, said that its CPS staff were in fact following protocol in some cases — they just did not always properly document it.

The county’s four most recent program improvement plans (three stemming from 2024 deaths in which families had prior contact with CPS) include the identical "less experienced staff" explanations for why caseworkers did not properly collect information about a child’s household before or following a death.

County officials told the state they were addressing the problem through "face to face" presentations to staff and "informational emails" to workers on how to correctly gather information at a child’s home.

The administration would develop and deliver an in-house training for all CPS investigations staff and review eight cases a week at random, to be continued "until the needed changes are evident," officials said.

Martino, the county spokesperson, said in an email that the county has also "strengthened collaboration with schools, law enforcement, and service providers, and enhanced internal practices — such as increased use of medical experts in cases of suspected medical neglect — to better identify and mitigate risks to children."

Suffolk County has also sought to increase the ranks of its caseworkers, although it has seen multiple CPS staff retire or depart the agency, according to Martino.

"This expansion has led to promotions of experienced workers into supervisory roles and increased hiring of new caseworkers, resulting in a larger proportion of less experienced staff in the field," he said.

Caseworker trainees increased from 20 to 37 between 2023 and 2024. The next year, many of those trainees were promoted, prompting the number of regular caseworkers to jump from 54 to 95, according to a Newsday analysis of Suffolk CPS staffing data.

For caseworkers, "The pay is not attractive," said State Sen. Dean Murray (R-East Patchogue), who has pushed to make state public employee pensions more generous. "It's an extremely difficult job, one that you certainly are not going into for the money."

Officials from the Suffolk County Association of Municipal Employees, the union that represents CPS staff, declined a request for an interview.

Annette Mahoney-Cross, the union’s executive vice president and a former Suffolk CPS director, said in a statement that people should not retroactively judge how CPS handled cases.

"Child protective work is complex and challenging in ways few can truly imagine," Mahoney-Cross said. "Caseworkers and supervisors are tasked with making heart-wrenching decisions that can impact children and families for a lifetime."

Romaine addressed CPS' shortcomings in a November 2024 conference on child welfare at Suffolk County Community College.

"I don't want to see too many more missed opportunities," he said at the event, according to a video posted online. "I want to make sure that we have the proper training, we have sufficient staff and we have the resources and the funding to do it."