In North Carolina, a botched review of a baby's death
By Duff Wilson WILKESBORO, North Carolina (Reuters) - Procedures for protecting drug-exposed babies are haphazard in North Carolina. In the case of Caleb Joe Tipton, who died at 4 months of age, authorities failed to check even basic facts about the baby’s life and death. A 2009 report by a child fatality review panel partially blamed a local hospital for not having sounded the alarm on the boy’s mother when Caleb was born. “There was no report or notification to the Wilkes County Department of Social Services when the newborn tested positive at birth for marijuana and opiates by the Wilkes Regional Medical Center,” the report said. Authorities pledged to work with the medical centre to correct the problem, it added. But when Reuters recently asked Wilkes Regional Medical Center about that report, hospital vice president Tammy Love said Caleb wasn’t even born there. The hospital had never been asked about the baby’s birth until Reuters called, she said. In fact, Reuters determined that Caleb was born at a different hospital in an adjoining county, an account confirmed by the child’s birth certificate. Kevin Kelley, North Carolina’s chief of child welfare, ordered state and county officials to review and correct the report. He could not explain the mistake, or why the state promised to work with the hospital but failed to follow through. “We’ve never had this problem before,” he said. North Carolina hasn’t adopted federal standards that all cases of drug-dependent newborns should be reported to child protection authorities. In some situations, hospitals alert social services. In others, they do not. Hospital data analysed by Reuters show the number of newborns in North Carolina diagnosed with drug withdrawal has nearly doubled from 404 in 2009 – the year the report was written – to 796 in 2012. Despite the increase, the state’s Division of Social Services acknowledged that it cannot say how many of those cases have been reported. That’s because the child protection service lumps such cases in a broad category of reports involving drugs and children, including teenagers. James Jones, a doctor and an expert on newborn drug withdrawal at Levine Children’s Hospital in Charlotte, said only about half of the drug-dependent babies diagnosed there are reported to the state. “It just depends on how the mom is doing with her addiction and how appropriate she is with her baby,” he said. In the Caleb Tipton case, Caleb’s mother, Hollie Harrald, had been abusing painkillers for years, she said in an interview with Reuters. Harrald said she moved to a women’s shelter and stopped taking drugs a few months before Caleb was born. She said social service agencies in two counties had been monitoring her before closing their cases. The fatality report faults social workers for an “insufficient level of contact with the family.” Caleb suffocated when he became tangled in a plastic trash bag on the floor of the trailer home where his parents lived. The baby’s father, Eric Ray Tipton, admitted to police that he used cocaine that night. According to the authorities, the parents had crushed Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication, and fed it to Caleb. Harrald told Reuters she couldn’t remember whether that was true. Tipton could not be located for comment. Harrald and Tipton were both convicted of involuntary manslaughter. State records show each served at least a year in prison. (Edited by Blake Morrison.)
