Ashleigh Elizabeth Brown

I am a great worker and a loving mom and wife!

[Ashleigh Elizabeth Brown @Elizabeth4613A]

@adesjardins1126 Did you end up reading it?

[Ashleigh Elizabeth Brown @Elizabeth4613A]

@Wedgenbigg So sad :(

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

https://t.co/ZYfrJRipre

[Ashleigh Elizabeth Brown @Elizabeth4613A]

https://t.co/fhVa4WYUen

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

I just published a new DCF Chronicles investigation: “Removed for Safety.”

It is about a national pattern that almost never gets described plainly, children removed by child protective agencies, then harmed in state custody or state-arranged placements.

Not hypotheticals. Not rhetoric. Documented cases, repeated failures, familiar excuses, and accountability that too often arrives after the harm.

If you have ever been told, “At least they’ll be safe now,” this is what that promise looks like when the system is wrong.

https://t.co/PFFF3XXqBn

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

New in DCF Chronicles: When Case Notes Lie: Fake Facts, Falsified Records, and How DCF Tears Families Apart.
This is not opinion and it is not rumor. Courts have documented cases where child welfare workers were found to falsify reports, misrepresent evidence, or suppress key facts, and families paid the price. When the file is treated as truth, a single “official” sentence can trigger removal, extend separation, and even push a case toward termination of parental rights.
Read it, share it, and keep your eyes on the paper trail.

https://t.co/SQDwfi5STc

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

America’s Dirty Secret: 39 States Are Robbing Foster Kids Blind. The Feds Are Finally Calling Them Out, But Will Repayments Follow?

America tells itself a story about children.

We say that when a family collapses, when a parent dies, when abuse shatters a home, the state steps in as a last resort, not to replace love, but to keep a child safe until love can be found again. We say we do this because childhood is not a privilege, it is a responsibility. We say it so often that the words start to sound like truth.

Then the check arrives.

A child has lost a mother, or a father, or both. A child is disabled, or grieving, or simply trying to stay upright after the floor dropped out from under them. Social Security sends monthly benefits precisely because the loss is real, because the need is real, because someone worked, paid in, and the system promised that if tragedy came, their child would not be left with nothing. Survivors’ benefits are not a bonus. They are a lifeline with a paper trail of payroll taxes behind it, a small, steady acknowledgment that a dead parent’s labor still matters to the living child.

In too many places, the child welfare system has learned how to turn that lifeline into revenue.

Across 39 states, agencies tasked with protecting foster children have routinely positioned themselves as “representative payees,” taken control of those monthly Social Security payments, and used them to reimburse the state for foster care costs. They take money meant for a child’s future and call it “maintenance.” They take an entitlement rooted in loss and convert it into a budget line that helps the agency today.

It is hard to overstate what that means in practice, so do not picture a spreadsheet first. Picture a kid.

Picture a twelve year old boy whose parents are gone. His benefits are about $900 a month. That money could pay for counseling that actually happens, not just the kind that exists on a case plan. It could keep him in the sport that gives him structure. It could cover school clothes that fit, shoes that do not split open mid semester, a laptop for homework, a driver’s ed course, an emergency fund, a down payment on a room when he turns eighteen. It could sit in a protected account and grow into the first truly stabilizing thing this child has had in years.

Instead, the state often deposits the funds, then withdraws them, again and again, month after month, to offset costs it is already obligated to cover. The child does not receive a choice. The child often does not receive an explanation. The child simply loses.

By the time he ages out at eighteen, the math is unforgiving. The benefits that could have amounted to tens of thousands of dollars are gone. He steps into adulthood with a trash bag of belongings, a thin folder of paperwork, and a system that congratulates itself for “transition planning.” Then we act surprised when former foster youth face homelessness at horrifying rates, when unemployment is common, when the smallest setback becomes catastrophe. We call it a cycle, as if it were weather. We rarely call it what it is, a decision.

This is not an accidental byproduct of bureaucracy. It is a financial incentive embedded inside a moral enterprise.

Investigators and policy analysts have estimated that child welfare agencies divert roughly $170 million to $220 million a year from around 27,000 foster children receiving Social Security benefits. A widely cited figure places the 2018 total around $179 million across 38 states plus Washington, D.C. Even without perfect national accounting, the outline is clear. Tens of thousands of children. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of it taken from survivors’ benefits, sometimes from SSI, the last fragile support for youth with disabilities. This is a system that has learned how to search for eligible children and monetize their eligibility.

The cruelty is sharpened by a simple truth: foster care is already publicly funded. States receive federal and state dollars to provide food, shelter, supervision, and basic necessities. When a state uses a foster child’s Social Security benefit to reimburse itself for that same care, it is not “paying for the child.” It is charging the child for being taken. It is double dipping into a child’s tragedy because it is easier than asking lawmakers for more money, and quieter than raising taxes. It is a budget solution built on the backs of children who cannot vote, cannot hire lawyers, and often cannot even see their own financial records.

A decent society would treat that as an emergency. Many states have treated it as routine.

The legal cover has always been written in careful language. Social Security benefits are protected by federal law from attachment and garnishment, but regulations allow a representative payee to use funds for a beneficiary’s “current maintenance.” When the state becomes the payee, it interprets “maintenance” in the broadest way possible and points to its role as custodian. The conflict of interest is obvious. A fiduciary is supposed to act in the beneficiary’s best interest. Here, the fiduciary is also the bill collector.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Washington State Department of Social and Health Services v. Guardianship Estate of Keffeler gave states a path to keep doing it. The Court held that the practice did not violate the anti garnishment statute because it was not a traditional seizure like a levy or an execution. The decision landed like a locked door. It told states, in effect, that if you take the money the right way, through payee status, you can call it care. You can take what a child owns and label it “support,” even when the support the child actually needs is exactly what you are stealing from their future.

After that, the practice spread, hardened, and hid behind procedure. Some states offered thin safeguards. Some required notice that came too late to matter. Some made it so hard to track the money that only litigation could force clarity. The worst part is how ordinary it became. Paperwork, deposits, withdrawals, monthly repetitions that feel invisible until the day a young adult asks, often for the first time, “Wasn’t there money for me?” and the answer arrives like a second abandonment.

There is a particular violence in taking a dead parent’s last protection and feeding it into the machinery that failed a child in the first place. It is one thing for the state to struggle with resources. It is another thing for the state to solve its resource problem by draining the accounts of children who already lost everything. This is not belt tightening. This is extraction.

And it echoes far beyond a single bank statement.

A foster youth with a preserved reserve can take a breath. They can afford a security deposit. They can keep a phone on so employers can reach them. They can pay for a certification, a bus pass, a car repair. A disabled teen can bridge gaps in care that public systems routinely leave open. That money can be the difference between stability and the street. Taking it does not merely make life harder. It engineers crisis, then pretends crisis is inevitable.

In recent years, the silence has started to crack. Advocates, youth attorneys, and investigative journalists have pressed states to stop appointing child welfare agencies as payees, to preserve benefits, to require notice, to put surplus funds in protected accounts that follow the child, not the agency. A growing number of states have moved to end or restrict the practice, not because the morality suddenly changed, but because sunlight finally hit the ledger.

Now federal officials have reportedly begun pressing governors to halt the diversion of benefits and to align child welfare practice with the basic idea that children’s entitlements belong to children. For the states, the easiest response is forward looking reform, a promise to stop taking money tomorrow. But for the young adults already emptied out, tomorrow is not justice. Tomorrow is an apology without restitution.

The question hanging over every “reform” announcement is the one that makes institutions nervous: who pays it back?

If a state drained a child’s survivors’ benefits for six years, if it converted that child’s loss into reimbursement, if it took tens of thousands of dollars and used it to pad budgets, then the moral math is simple. The money was never the state’s. It belonged to the child. Ending the practice does not erase the theft. It merely stops the bleeding while the victim is told to live with the scar.

This country has built an entire vocabulary to soften what it does to vulnerable people. We say “services” instead of surveillance. We say “placement” instead of removal. We say “maintenance” instead of taking. We say “transition” instead of pushing someone off a cliff.

Here is the plain version.

A child’s parent dies, or a child is disabled, and Social Security sends money meant to help that child survive, heal, and eventually stand on their own. The state takes custody, takes the money too, and spends it on itself. Then it releases the young adult into a world that is already stacked against them and calls that independence.

This is not a paperwork problem. It is a values problem.

If we mean what we say about protecting children, then the standard cannot be “stop eventually.” It has to be “stop now,” and “show the accounting,” and “repay what was taken,” and “punish the incentives that made this feel normal.” It has to be reform with receipts, not reform as public relations.

Because the ugliest part of this scandal is not just the money. It is the lesson it teaches a child in state care, a lesson delivered quietly, month by month, in withdrawals and omissions.

Even after everything that happened to you, even after the loss, even after the trauma, even after the state took you, we still found a way to take from you again.

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

In 39 states, foster kids’ Social Security checks have been treated like a reimbursement stream. Survivors benefits and SSI that should have followed a child into adulthood often got routed back into agency budgets instead. Federal officials are finally calling it out, but a bigger question is still sitting on the table: will the money ever be paid back to the people it belonged to?

I wrote this to make the practice impossible to ignore. Read it, share it, and if you work in policy or child welfare, ask yourself why this was ever considered acceptable.

https://t.co/xh9FUTaa0Q

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

I grew up learning a lesson that no child should ever have to learn. In Massachusetts, "protection" can be a word that gets said out loud while a child keeps suffering in silence. I know that because I was one of the kids the state was supposed to protect, and they did not. And now, after everything I have seen, read, and put together, I am done pretending this is a collection of "isolated tragedies." It is a system. It is a pattern. It is an institution that fails, then reforms itself on paper, then fails again, and the cost is children's bodies. This isn't a few bad apples: it's a rotten core.

People love to talk about DCF like it is a complicated machine that means well. Bullshit. Here is what I have learned, over and over, case after case. When a system "means well" but children die anyway, the intent does not matter. Outcomes matter. And the outcomes in Massachusetts are so consistently brutal that the only honest question left is this: how many more dead kids does it take before we stop treating DCF like a struggling helper and start treating it like what it has become, a government agency that repeatedly proves it cannot be trusted with the lives it claims to safeguard? They are not helpers. They are enablers of horror, hiding behind protocols that kill.

A four-year-old little girl, A’zella Ortiz, is a perfect example of why I am furious, and why you should be ready to burn the whole damn system down. This was not a one-call situation. DCF was involved for years, on and off since 2018, with multiple neglect reports screaming about substance abuse, medical neglect, and kids drowning in filth. There were action plans, six of them, all repeating the same worthless demands without enforcing a single change. There were home visits, 36 in total, but they were lazy, cut-and-paste jobs where workers barely interacted with the kids, accepting parental lies about COVID barriers long after the pandemic ended. And still, nothing got better. The family "stopped cooperating," DCF mistakenly believed they had moved to New York without verifying a damn thing, no address, no well-being check, no urgency despite weeks of radio silence. They closed the case without laying eyes on the children for 114 days, a full violation of any sane standard of care. A year later, A’zella was dead from blunt force trauma, ruled homicide, and her siblings were hospitalized with severe malnutrition, injuries, dental decay, and untreated developmental delays that left them non-verbal. The Office of the Child Advocate's latest report, just released this December, found that DCF followed existing protocol, but those policies were grossly inadequate for chronic neglect in "intact" families. Read that again, because it is the whole scam in one sentence. DCF followed protocol, and the protocol was not built to protect a child like her. That is not a staffing problem. That is not a bad day at the office. That is a design flaw that keeps children in danger until the danger becomes irreversible. They had consultations with specialists twice, recommending substance assessments and family engagement, but DCF ignored them, no follow-through, no accountability. Their risk assessments escalated to "very high" by 2022, but did they act? Hell no. They let chronic neglect fester, treating it like "stability" instead of the slow poison it is, disrupting brain development and setting kids up for lifelong damage. This is criminal incompetence, plain and simple.

If that does not make you angry enough to scream, let me make it simpler. A child can be drowning in neglect for years, DCF can be in the picture the whole time, documenting the same failures month after month without changing a thing, and the system can still decide it is acceptable to close a case when they have not even confirmed the children are present and safe. Then, after the death, everyone acts shocked. That is not shock. That is theater, a cover-up for a bureaucracy that values paperwork over lives.

David Almond is another example, and his case should make every person in this state sick to their stomachs. Oversight bodies described his death as a "multi-system failure," and the Office of the Child Advocate used language that should have ended careers and triggered a total overhaul. "Every single safeguard failed" him. Not "some safeguards." Every single one. The systems that were supposed to see him, schools, agencies, the court process, all failed, but DCF was right in the center of the failure, making decisions, monitoring, and still not stopping what was happening. They reunified him with a neglectful father amid COVID, suspended in-person visits, missed his emaciation and fentanyl poisoning, and let him starve to death. Two managers got fired? Pathetic. That is window dressing for a system that keeps recycling the same deadly mistakes.

Then there is Jeremiah Oliver, and if you want to understand DCF’s culture at its worst, look here. He had an open DCF case for years. There were expectations of monitoring. And yet, records showed that for months, no one from DCF laid eyes on him, while a worker falsified case logs to make it look like visits and well-being checks happened when they did not. Meanwhile, he was being systematically abused. By the time anyone acted, he was already gone, body dumped like trash. That is not just neglect. That is a system where paperwork becomes a substitute for reality, where the file says “visited” and the child is not even alive. Supervisory failures, office transfers, all excuses for a rotten structure that lets liars keep their jobs until kids pay the price.

And before anyone tries to excuse this with "that was years ago," listen carefully. The details shift, but the failure mode stays the same. DCF loses sight of the child, literally, physically, and then backfills the record or accepts a story that lets them close the loop. The danger is not that they miss one thing. The danger is that their processes allow them to call it "resolved" without proving the child is safe. In A’zella's case, they closed without locating the family, ignoring their own policies on interstate coordination, and now the OCA is begging for revisions that should have been in place decades ago.

Jack Loiselle’s case proves the same point in a different way. DCF had an open case. DCF was actively providing services. Professionals were involved. Reports came in. People were around this child. And still, Jack ended up comatose, critically malnourished, with injuries that screamed abuse. DCF’s own review did not try to hide behind polite language. It called the failure to protect Jack "systemic failures both internal and external to DCF." It admitted Massachusetts had been "unable to successfully implement and sustain meaningful change over time." It said DCF lacked the "policy framework, operating rules, and executional follow-through" required to properly serve the children it is involved with. That is DCF indicting itself in its own words. They knew they were broken, and they kept operating anyway.

So tell me this, Massachusetts. If even DCF admits it does not have the framework and follow-through required to protect children, why are we still treating their assurances like they mean anything? Why are we funding this death machine with our taxes?

And it is not just kids kept at home. Children die inside the system too.

Avalena Conway-Coxon died in a DCF-licensed foster home. She was a toddler. She died of heat stroke and dehydration, with bruises screaming neglect. And the Governor of Massachusetts said the foster home "should never have been a foster home." An internal review found policy was not followed during approval, capacity was not properly evaluated, and supervision was deficient. That is the state admitting it licensed and monitored a home that never should have been entrusted with vulnerable children. Overcrowded, unmonitored, a blatant failure, and DCF's response? More empty promises.

Now add another layer of rage, because we need to talk about how DCF screens risk.

Baby William "Baby Billy" Berry was two months old when DCF received a report. DCF accepted the concern, then screened it into Family Assessment Response instead of a full investigation, treating it like something manageable and "lower risk." Within a month, he was violently shaken and killed. We do not need to pretend DCF "couldn’t have known." The entire point of child protection is that you take the report seriously because the child cannot protect himself. When you downgrade the response, you are gambling with an infant’s life, and DCF loses every time.

Bella Bond, the little girl the world called "Baby Doe," had multiple DCF touchpoints, multiple chances for the system to recognize that this child was in a high-risk orbit. Her mother had a history with DCF. There were reports. There were cases. There were closures. A required managerial review was "not properly conducted." The Office of the Child Advocate later flagged inaccurate risk assessment, premature case closures, and failures in decision-making and information sharing. Then Bella was murdered, body dumped in the harbor. DCF's specialty: turning warnings into funerals.

Do you see the common thread? DCF does not just "miss warning signs." It repeatedly proves it cannot convert warning signs into protection. They document risks, pat themselves on the back for "engagement," and walk away while kids suffer.

Here is the part people do not want to say out loud. DCF’s biggest failure is not one bad call, it is the way the agency structurally protects itself. The system is built to be defensible after the fact. It is built to say, "We followed protocol." It is built to produce plans, visits, checklists, and closures that look clean on paper. And then the child dies, and suddenly everybody is sorry, and maybe someone gets reassigned, and they announce a reform, and a year later another kid is in a body bag. In A’zella's report, OCA points out no structured quality assurance for intact families, no real follow-through on recommendations, no recognition of chronic neglect as a killer. It is the same crap we have seen in David Almond, Harmony Montgomery, and every other tragedy.

That is why I am done with soft language.

If you work in a system where a child can be known, visited, discussed in meetings, placed on action plans, and still be left unseen for months, your system is broken beyond repair.

If your system can be fooled by a family "not cooperating," and you close the case without confirming safety, your system is broken.

If your workers can falsify logs and nobody catches it until the child is missing or dead, your system is broken.

If you license a foster home that "should never have been a foster home," your system is broken.

If you downgrade a case involving an infant into a softer response track and the infant is killed shortly after, your system is broken.

And when the Office of the Child Advocate says your policies are grossly inadequate, and when your own internal review says you lack the policy framework and follow-through to protect kids, it is no longer honest to call this "complicated." It is negligent governance. It is institutional failure with predictable victims. It is a slaughterhouse disguised as welfare.

Now let me tell you why this is personal.

I am not writing this as someone who watched these cases on the news and got upset for a day. I am writing as someone who lived through what it feels like when the state is supposed to notice you, supposed to intervene, supposed to protect you, and it does not. When that happens to a child, the child learns that adults with authority can look right at suffering and choose procedure over rescue. That lesson does not fade. It follows you into adulthood. It changes the way you trust, the way you feel safe, the way you sleep, the way your body reacts to the world.

And that is what Massachusetts needs to understand. This is not only about the children who died. This is about the children who survived and carried the damage for life, and about the families who begged for help, and about the communities that kept reporting danger, and about the fact that DCF keeps getting away with calling catastrophe an "outcome" and then moving on.

So here is what I want, and I am not asking politely.

I want Massachusetts to stop accepting the excuse that "confidentiality" means the public never gets to see how decisions were made. Confidentiality should protect children, not protect an agency from accountability.

I want the state to treat chronic neglect as the life-threatening emergency that it is, because chronic neglect is not a "family struggling." It is a slow death sentence, and it often sits right next to physical violence.

I want automatic, mandatory escalation rules that cannot be waved away by "non-cooperation," especially when children are unverified, unseen, or repeatedly reported.

I want independent oversight with teeth, not performative reviews, and I want consequences that match the severity of the harm, not reshuffling titles and issuing statements.

And I want every person in Massachusetts to understand the truth that these cases scream. The danger is not only the abusive parent. The danger is the system that watches the risk stack up, documents it, "plans" around it, and still leaves the child there.

If you are reading this and you feel uncomfortable, good. Sit with it. Because children sat with worse. Some of them sat with it until they died.

Massachusetts DCF has had decades to prove it can protect children. The public record shows a pattern of failures that keeps repeating, and it keeps ending the same way, with children harmed beyond repair. At some point, the only moral response is anger. Not the kind of anger that fades after a headline, the kind of anger that demands structural change and refuses to be silenced by polite bureaucracy.

I am that angry. You should be too.

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

As a survivor of Massachusetts DCF's systemic failures, I'm calling on @FBI to investigate fresh evidence of document tampering and cover-up in my case.

In 1998, at 17, a disabled minor with ADHD/PTSD and other mental health issues, DCF abandoned me after a family crisis. They explicitly instructed me to "find my own place to live" and refused placement. No due process, just left me homeless.

Then they fabricated a "happy ending" in records: claimed I was stable, employed, engaged, despite zero contact after May 1998.

I requested my records in 2024. In February 2025, DCF's legal team (Michael FitzPatrick) sent files with "redactions" that weren't secure. Simple OCR exposed everything, including the abandonment and inconsistencies.

This isn't a dusty old crime, it's active tampering THIS YEAR to hide violations.

When I appealed to the Public Records Division with proof, they refused to rule on the redactions' legality, closing my case without accountability.

These docs prove DCF willfully abandoned a minor and is still covering it up. I've submitted to FBI Civil Rights and ACLU, but need your help to break through. @FBIBoston @FBI, please investigate.

Evidence available.
#DCFScandal #ChildWelfareAbuse #FBIHelp

[Ashleigh Elizabeth Brown @Elizabeth4613A]

@Wedgenbigg @FBIDirectorKash @FBI @FBIBoston FBI needs to investigate these crimes!!!

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

As a survivor of Massachusetts DCF's systemic failures, I'm calling on @FBI to investigate fresh evidence of document tampering and cover-up in my case.

In 1998, at 17, a disabled minor with ADHD/PTSD and other mental health issues, DCF abandoned me after a family crisis. They explicitly instructed me to "find my own place to live" and refused placement. No due process, just left me homeless.

Then they fabricated a "happy ending" in records: claimed I was stable, employed, engaged, despite zero contact after May 1998.

I requested my records in 2024. In February 2025, DCF's legal team (Michael FitzPatrick) sent files with "redactions" that weren't secure. Simple OCR exposed everything, including the abandonment and inconsistencies.

This isn't a dusty old crime, it's active tampering THIS YEAR to hide violations.

When I appealed to the Public Records Division with proof, they refused to rule on the redactions' legality, closing my case without accountability.

These docs prove DCF willfully abandoned a minor and is still covering it up. I've submitted to FBI Civil Rights and ACLU, but need your help to break through. @FBIBoston @FBI, please investigate.

Evidence available.
#DCFScandal #ChildWelfareAbuse #FBIHelp

[Ashleigh Elizabeth Brown @Elizabeth4613A]

@Wedgenbigg This is sad 😔

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

Massachusetts DCF: Ignoring "Very High Risk" Warnings While Families Face Unjust Scrutiny

A brand-new report from the Office of the Child Advocate (released December 2025) exposes deep flaws in how DCF handles families where kids stay at home.

In the tragic case of 4-year-old A’zella Ortiz from Worcester, who died in October 2024 from blunt force injuries ruled a homicide.

DCF had been involved with her family for nearly four years due to chronic neglect, substance exposure, filthy conditions, and missed medical care.

Risk assessments flagged the family as "very high risk" multiple times.

Yet DCF did not escalate interventions, lost track of the family (wrongly believing they moved to New York), and closed the case after 114 days without seeing the children.

No real improvements happened despite years of visits and action plans.

Her siblings were found malnourished and injured when A’zella died.

The OCA calls this indicative of broader problems: weak risk assessments, no quality checks for "intact" families (78% of DCF cases), and failure to adapt as dangers grew.

This echoes past horrors.

Jeremiah Oliver (5 years old, disappeared 2013, body found later).David Almond (14, starved in 2020 despite reports).Patterns repeat: missed signs, poor follow-up, lack of accountability.

Meanwhile, many families face aggressive DCF involvement over poverty, misunderstandings, or false reports - leading to unnecessary separations and trauma.

The system fails vulnerable kids in danger AND tears apart others without cause.

True reform means better tools to protect at-risk children, independent oversight, and distinguishing real abuse from family struggles.

How many more reports will it take for change?

Have you experienced DCF ignoring real risks or overstepping in your life?

Share your thoughts or stories (anonymously if you prefer).

Repost to spread awareness.

Tag lawmakers, media, or advocates.

Demand accountability now.

#DCFReform #MassachusettsDCF #ChildWelfare #AZellaOrtiz #JusticeForKids

[RyanMatta 🇺🇸 🦅 @Ryanmatta]

In my new documentary, Never in America, we pull back the curtain on one of the darkest corners of our government.

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

Read this before you tell me it didn’t happen.

Massachusetts DCF documented, in their own records, that at 17 years old, with known mental health disabilities, I was told I could not go home, would not be placed in foster care, and was expected to find my own place to live.

They wrote it down.
They timestamped it.
They approved it.
Then they tried to erase it.
This document is not my story. It is DCF’s story, reconstructed line by line from their internal case logs, service plans, and dictation reports. It shows exactly when the decision was made to abandon a minor. It shows how, months later, timelines were altered, events were reframed, and a fake “successful transition” narrative was created to justify closing the case.
If you think the system protects kids, read it.
If you think records don’t lie, read it.
If you think this was just a troubled teen acting out, read what the adults in charge actually did.
And if your first instinct is to defend the system instead of asking why a child was told to survive on his own, then you are part of the reason this keeps happening.

This is not opinion.
This is evidence.

https://t.co/mKjt3MymFq

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

Four year old A’zella Ortiz did not “fall.”
She died in a filthy Worcester apartment, rail thin and covered in bruises, after @Mass_DCF closed her “very high risk” intact family case without seeing her or her siblings for 114 days.
https://t.co/v14LhNkmuF

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

Dear @Mass_DCF
Explain to the public how a “very high risk” case gets closed after 114 days without a single visit to the children.
Explain how that child ends up dead less than a year later.
Until you can, you do not get to say this system is working.

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

In 1998, when I was 17, @Mass_DCF abandoned me and told me to find my own place to live after a family fight. This violated their duty to protect a minor. In December 2024 I requested my records. After pushing the issue through the Public Records Division, I received redacted PDFs. When I ran OCR on them, the hidden text revealed falsified entries and misconduct. I have direct evidence of this. I state that Michael FitzPatrick, DCF regional counsel, oversaw redactions not for privacy reasons but to cover up crimes committed against a minor. I am demanding a full probe and justice. @MAChildAdvocate @MassAGO @PlymouthCtyDAO @maura_healey @MassBar @SecretaryOfMass @DianaDiZoglio @ACLU_Mass @BostonGlobe @WBUR @wonderfundma #DCFCorruption #ChildWelfareFail #Massachusetts

[Paul Brown @Wedgenbigg]

@ACLUMass I’m requesting review of a documents-based civil rights matter involving the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.

Records produced to me regarding my time in DCF care as a minor in 1998 contained insecure redactions. I was able to recover concealed text documenting my abandonment by DCF when I was 17 and disabled. The concealed material contradicts later narrative summaries and appears to hide evidence of civil rights violations under color of law.

After I documented the insecure redactions, DCF counsel stopped responding and failed to produce additional records to which I am entitled. I have submitted this matter through the FBI Civil Rights intake and am seeking civil liberties review and assistance.

Paul Brown, Massachusetts