Holy Toledo! Is a county learning the RIGHT lessons from a child abuse tragedy?

 

The Lucas County, Ohio, courthouse. (Photo by Joel Rossol)

In Lucas County, Ohio (metropolitan Toledo), a 13-year-old girl, Kei’Mani Latigue, apparentlty living with her grandmother, was kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by her father. There had been at least three reports to the county child welfare agency, but they never found cause to remove her from her home. In the furor that followed, the county created the usual OBRC (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission). That group, the Lucas County Child Protection Task Force, just issued its report. 

So far this is a story you’ve heard over and over. And I was expecting nothing good from a county I’ve criticized for caving to the group home and institutions lobby. Looks like I was wrong. 

Because there’s something different this time: The recommendations from the Task Force are  -- good! They could have embraced the usual cheap-shot, easy recommendations that make the task force and the politicians feel good even as they would make the system worse (for classic examples, see Santa Clara County, California and the State of New Mexico). Instead, the task force opted for doing the hard work and finding real solutions that can make all of the county’s children safer. They've created a blueprint for child safety.

As the Task Force report explains, the members

recognized the complexity of the child protection system and the many partners that influence  child safety and family wellbeing. … Progress will not be defined by any single action, but by the County’s ability to align efforts, adapt over time, and remain focused on outcomes that matter most—family stability, child safety, and community trust.

The first bit of good news is what is not in the report. No cheap shots suggesting that the county was doing too much to keep families together. No scapegoating caseworkers. No drivel about swinging pendulums. No recommendations to make it harder to keep children in their own homes and harder to return them home – as they are pushing in North Carolina and Indiana. The Task Force understood that this is the approach that backfires, exposing many more children to the trauma and the danger of needless foster care and overloading systems, making it harder for workers to find children in real danger. 

Now consider what they did recommend. It’s nothing dramatic, but it’s constructive: 

● Expand community-based visitation, engagement and prevention spaces.

● Map services for child maltreatment prevention and improve family navigation and resource access.

● Implement coordinated prevention networks and post-reunification support.

● Deliver equity-centered workforce training and front-door practice reform.

● Embed lived experience leadership across governance, practice and accountability.

● Launch comprehensive equity-focused kinship and foster care recruitment.

● Increase coordination to reduce placement disruptions and promote stability of foster youth.

● Reestablish a Lucas County ombudsman with public reporting authority..

The full descriptions for each make clear that, while they’re certainly not revolutionary, and the last one could backfire, the recommendations are better than these bland literal “top-lines” suggest. 

Equally remarkable is what top officials are saying. 

Here’s Randy Muth, executive director of Lucas County Children Services: 

“Poverty does not equal child neglect. Poverty does not equal criminality,” Mr. Muth said. “Families can be supported before they’re reported.” 

And from Doris Tolliver, the Task Force facilitator: 

Child services frequently receives reports of families who struggle with parental distress and financial strain, diverting them from helping children who are actively harmed, Ms. Tolliver said. Streamlining support from community-based organizations would allow the agency to focus on families with the greatest needs, alleviating strain on the system. 

What the numbers tell us: 

Although it takes a lot more courage to utter these words than to vomit up the usual (see, again, certain public officials in Santa Clara County, California, and the State of New Mexico), words still are easier than action. What do we know from the numbers? 

I can find no data on entries into foster care in Lucas County, and only limited data on the number of children in foster care on any given day. The picture is mixed. 

The death of Kei’Mani Latigue was discovered in March 2025. But there does not seem to have been a foster-care panic – at least not immediately.  According to data compiled by the Public Children’s Services Association of Ohio, the number of children in foster care on the most recent date I can find,  July 1, 2025, was down slightly from the previous year. But the rate of placement in Lucas County is 36.8 children in foster care per thousand impoverished children, below the Ohio average of 41.6, but above the national average of 30.6. 

And of course, there will be ridicule. The take-the-child-and-run extremists will be out in force. They talk about child safety but advocate an approach that sacrifices safety, suggesting an agenda that’s really about racial and class bias; a desperate desire to see impoverished nonwhite children torn from their homes and placed with white middle-class families. 

To do that, they’ll misrepresent the recommendations, claiming that the Task Force somehow thought they could persuade the killer of Kei’Mani Latigue not to kill. But that’s not what the Task Force is saying at all. Rather, these recommendations will get some of the cases that are nothing like the case of Kei’Mani Latigue out of the system, so workers will have more time to carefully assess every call – including the calls that come in about the next Kei’Mani Latigue. 

It won’t be easy to stand up to that. But at least, it appears, in Lucas County, Ohio, they’re giving it a try.