MISHAWAKA — Late on the evening of Sept. 22, 30-year-old Austin Kinder was arrested and later charged with abusing a 10-month-old boy named Josiah.
According to charging documents, the baby suffered from abdominal bleeding and bruising, bruises on his face, skull fractures on both sides of his head and to several ribs, and liver and kidney lacerations. Kinder is charged with battery resulting in serious bodily injury to a person less than 14 years old, and neglect of a dependent.
The boy was transferred that night by helicopter from Memorial Hospital in South Bend to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. A Riley doctor told police that Josiah, according to the document filed Sept. 24, "is now in critical condition due to these life-threatening injuries."
The boy's mother was at work during the time period the harm was inflicted, a Special Victims Unit detective confirmed through work records, and Kinder was the only caregiver of little Josiah during that time. Doctors said some of the boy's injuries were in various stages of healing, suggesting he had been hurt before.
Three years ago Tuesday, in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, 2011, 10-year-old Tramelle Sturgis died after being stripped, bound with duct tape, beaten and burned by his father in the basement of their South Bend home.
Part of our horror over Tramelle's death then was the sheer surprise of it. How could this happen here? How did this child and his siblings, who also endured years of abuse, fall through the cracks?
In the months that followed, people involved in the child-protection system began to talk about changes with the Indiana Department of Child Services that concerned them. Despite confidentiality laws, school social workers, police and prosecutors, therapists, foster parents and judges started to discuss publicly the budget cuts and altered policies that sometimes stunted the way the system worked.
Through successful open records requests, including for a child-abuse hot line call six months earlier alleging serious abuse in the Sturgis household, we eventually learned that an on-call case manager waited to respond to that call until the next day, then not finding the family at home for three days afterward. Because of the publicity, then-DCS Director James Payne finally acknowledged a policy change and that the call should have initiated a more immediate response. Big changes came in 2012, including more legislative oversight, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
But the high-profile deaths of two South Bend children this summer — and some other cases, such as the case of Josiah, who we might not hear about at all — should remind us that state government still has a long way to go when it comes to transparency in how well we are protecting our children.