Clues to 1-year-old’s death — and whether DCF failed him — remain hidden in Florida files

Rashid Bryant lived only 22 months. It was enough time for him to fracture his femur, break a rib, and crack his skull — the last more than once.

Rashid spent the last five months of his life mostly in bed, the consequence of a leg injury his mother ignored, the boy’s sister told police. He stopped breathing in that bed on Nov. 6 of last year, police reported.

It is not possible to say whether administrators with Florida’s child welfare agency, which was involved with the family, did everything they could to keep Rashid safe. Caseworkers for the children of Jabora Deris, 32, and Christopher Bryant, 37, parents of 10, had first come to the attention of the Department of Children & Families in 2013. DCF had investigated at least 16 reports to the state’s child abuse hotline.

A detailed accounting of Rashid’s short life and early death — and the state’s fruitless efforts to protect him — has yet to be told. Though Florida law requires the state to release child welfare records when a child dies as the result of abuse or neglect, DCF has refused to release any documents that would shed light on Rashid’s DCF history.

The Miami Herald sued DCF in February, arguing the agency was violating the state’s public records law by withholding the records of Rashid’s DCF history. About a dozen additional media companies and advocacy groups joined the Herald’s suit, including The Associated Press, The New York Times, the Tampa Bay Times, WPLG-Local 10, the Florida Press Association and the First Amendment Foundation. The suit remains pending.

DCF contends it is not required to release the records because the agency is still investigating whether Rashid’s death was caused by the abuse or neglect of his parents. Until the agency has made that determination, Rashid’s records remain confidential, DCF lawyers say.

In court pleadings in that lawsuit, DCF says that even though police and prosecutors have concluded that Rashid died as the result of abuse or neglect, resulting in the arrest of both parents, DCF is not bound by those determinations. Only DCF, agency attorneys say, has the authority to decide when it is appropriate to release records.

Rashid’s parents already were well-known to Florida child protection administrators when Rashid was born on Dec. 13, 2018. In the months before his birth, investigators had received seven reports to the hotline. The reports alleged that his mother smoked marijuana with her older children, that most of her kids didn’t go to school, that her home had no running water and that her kids were hungry and losing weight.

Though DCF has refused to discuss the boy’s history with the agency, the Herald was able to piece together a partial timeline of his family through confidential agency documents that came into a reporter’s possession.

Rashid’s siblings — there were then eight of them — were removed from his parents’ care a month before his birth, and were living with relatives or foster parents. Rashid was taken into state care after he was born.

Around June 2020, police said, Rashid injured his leg. His mother waited two days to seek medical help, and then she left the hospital with the boy after refusing a doctor’s request that Rashid be X-rayed, an arrest warrant said. One of Rashid’s older siblings, a sister who lives with an aunt, said the boy barely left his room or bed after that.

On. Nov. 6, 2020, Rashid was found dead in his mother’s Opa-locka home, where Deris had begun CPR. Though Rashid was unconscious, and foam was seeping from his mouth when she discovered him, Deris waited 83 minutes before summoning help, she later told police.

An autopsy completed by the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office the day after Rashid’s death reported the boy had over his short lifetime “sustained a broken femur to the right leg, a healed rib fracture, and skull fractures.” The autopsy report has yet to be completed, the Medical Examiner’s Office said, and the boy’s cause and manner of death remain undetermined.

Deris and Bryant were arrested within a week of Rashid’s death and are facing trial on charges of child neglect leading to great bodily harm.

DCF has been unwilling to discuss possible agency missteps with regard to Rashid or other cases despite an overhaul of state law signed by then-Gov. Rick Scott in 2014 that required DCF to be more open to outside scrutiny. The legislation followed an investigative series in the Miami Herald, Innocents Lost, detailing the deaths of about 500 children after DCF involvement.

“The largest piece of the law is that now the department has received our legislative intent, the direction we want them to go,” then-Sen. Denise Grimsley, a Sebring Republican and nurse who co-authored the legislation, said at the time. “We want to see more transparency.”

The elder sister living with an aunt told police she saw the little boy on Nov. 2. He appeared smaller than she had remembered him, and he vomited after eating. The sister, who is now 18, also told police Rashid “appeared to be limp on his right side and was being held up in the sitting position against [a] wall.”

The 16 DCF reports involving Bryant and Deris’ children included allegations of parental drug abuse, physical injury, domestic violence and the parents’ purported failure to properly supervise their large family, according to records obtained by the Herald. The records don’t make clear how many complaints were substantiated, although the removal of a child isn’t done without a substantiated complaint. The sister living with the aunt had been there for several years under a guardianship.

Complaints against the family date back at least to the spring of 2013, when DCF hotline operators received two reports. One said that Bryant had punched Deris in the stomach while she was pregnant with the couple’s daughter. The allegation was closed as not substantiated. New allegations — of physical abuse, drug abuse and “threatened harm” — were received while the domestic violence allegation was still pending.

An April 2013 report into allegations of “physical injury, substance misuse and threatened harm” said Bryant had been running away from police officers while holding one of his young sons, and “threw the child” into his car. As a result of those allegations, DCF asked a judge on June 12, 2013, to order the couple to accept in-home supervision from child welfare caseworkers, a request that was granted.

Around the same time, DCF was told that Deris had given birth to a daughter who like her tested positive for marijuana. The drug test results, on top of the prior allegations, led child protection administrators to remove the couple’s children. The children all were returned to Deris on Aug. 8 of that year while a Miami judge continued to oversee the family.

For the next five years, the family’s child welfare history — if any — is unclear.

By 2018, Deris and Bryant had eight children, two of whom were younger than age 3. A hotline report in August of that year said the couple were leaving a 15-year-old in charge of several younger children. One of the younger kids, a 2-year-old, had been seen outside “alone and naked,” a report said.

In October and November 2018, DCF’s hotline received a total of seven new reports, including drug abuse, inadequate supervision and “environmental hazards.” The couple’s children were taken into custody around Nov. 22, 2018. Less than a month later, their ninth child, Rashid, was born.

By August 2019, a judge had agreed to give the parents unsupervised visits, followed by weekend visitation. Both were canceled in October 2019 when the couple moved without informing DCF or the judge overseeing their children’s welfare — although the visits resumed again the following January.

On Feb. 28, 2020, Rashid and three brothers were returned to their mom — “against the department’s recommendation,” the confidential records say. Deris was given “liberal, unsupervised” visitation with her four other children.

Almost exactly a month later, the couple’s 10th child was born — to the complete surprise of caseworkers. “Mother had hidden her pregnancy,” said the confidential records. Deris was asked in open court if she was pregnant, and denied the pregnancy, the records state.

At that point, Deris had custody of five young children. Three weeks later, a judge ordered the return of four more. Five of the youngsters were younger than age 5, leaving them at heightened risk.

The following August, case managers ceased their oversight of Rashid and the three siblings who had been returned to their mom along with him, the records say. And by October 2020, a judge ordered that all oversight of the family be terminated.

Two weeks after that, Rashid was dead in his bed.

The warrant for Deris’ arrest — signed by Miami-Dade Police Detective Christopher Perez, and approved by Circuit Judge Robert T. Watson — said Rashid had suffered two seizures in the month before his death but the mother never took her son to a pediatrician to determine why.

Deris called her sister at 10:28 a.m. on Nov. 6 when she became worried that Rashid was “unresponsive on the bed and foaming from his nose and mouth.” Deris’ sister told her to take Rashid to the hospital, the arrest warrant application said. Deris never did. About 83 minutes later, the warrant said, Deris called for an ambulance and began CPR while she waited.

Deris told police “she did not call 911 immediately because she panicked and did not want the other children in the house to witness the medical emergency,” the warrant said.

The DCF records show that during the 15 months their children were in state care beginning in November 2018, Rashid’s parents had completed almost none of the tasks a judge required of them to regain custody of their children. Typically they might include parenting classes or counseling. The couple’s “behaviors remained the same,” the confidential records say.

Four of the couple’s children, including then-14-month-old Rashid, were reunified with Deris and Bryant “with no supportive services to assist with the adjustment of five children,” the records say. And when the new baby was born, caseworkers couldn’t plan ahead to protect her because Deris denied the pregnancy in open court.

In January 2020, a supervisor with a private case management agency overseeing Bryant and Deris’ children for DCF recommended the children be reunified, saying that “conditions for return had been met.”

But that wasn’t true, according to the confidential DCF records. “This determination was not supported, given that the reason for removal had not been remedied.”

Moreover, the Miami judge overseeing the family, who was not identified, did not heed DCF’s recommendation that the children be returned slowly, not all at once, beginning only with one of the oldest kids. In February of 2020, the judge ordered that four of Bryant and Deris’ children, including the very young ones, be returned immediately “over the agency’s objection.”

The four children’s reunification occurred “at a critical juncture in the family’s dynamics” — just prior to the birth of Deris’ 10th child, according to the DCF records obtained by the Herald. The remaining children in state care were returned after the newborn’s birth.

The infant, records show, “was deemed to be safe in the home” and allowed to remain with Deris, Bryant and her siblings.

After Rashid’s return, records say, caseworkers discontinued all supervision of him and the three siblings in his reunification “cluster.” At that point, the records say, there was no “ongoing assessment” of the children’s safety performed each month, despite federal standards requiring that.

And though services were available to Deris to minimize the risk to her children, she never really accepted the state’s help, the records say.

“Due to the lack of treatment progress behavior change was not demonstrated.”