The girl said she saw something awful. Her neighbor, Elwyn “JR” Crocker Jr., an Effingham County boy, had been beaten by a woman for more than an hour. She said a woman whipped JR with a belt and told him to stop screaming. Afterward, he was forced to drop his pants to show off the belt’s marks.
The Division of Family and Children Services, the state agency responsible for protecting Georgia’s kids, heard this account in 2017 but declined to investigate because the alleged incident had occurred a year earlier, according to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The remains of JR and his younger sister, Mary, were discovered in December,
buried behind their family’s trailer in Effingham County. Experts say DFCS, which had an extensive history with the family, should have investigated the girl’s claims.
“In hindsight, it’s pretty clear they made a mistake,” said Ken Lanning, a retired FBI agent who was involved in child abuse cases for decades. “How do you just so easily disregard it?”
The girl, who is not named in documents the AJC obtained through an open records request, talked to a school counselor on March 16, 2017. She said she’d witnessed the incident a year earlier and decided to come forward after a school lesson on child abuse. The counselor then relayed the details to DFCS through its central intake system, which is responsible for screening such reports and then assigning case workers, records show. It isn’t clear if JR was still alive at the time of the girl’s statement; Effingham County Sheriff’s deputies say he was last seen in November 2016 when he was 14. Mary Crocker was last seen in October 2018 at age 14.
“In hindsight, it’s pretty clear they made a mistake,” said Ken Lanning, a retired FBI agent who was involved in child abuse cases for decades. “How do you just so easily disregard it?”
The girl, who is not named in documents the AJC obtained through an open records request, talked to a school counselor on March 16, 2017. She said she’d witnessed the incident a year earlier and decided to come forward after a school lesson on child abuse. The counselor then relayed the details to DFCS through its central intake system, which is responsible for screening such reports and then assigning case workers, records show. It isn’t clear if JR was still alive at the time of the girl’s statement; Effingham County Sheriff’s deputies say he was last seen in November 2016 when he was 14. Mary Crocker was last seen in October 2018 at age 14.
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