For 17 years, Texas Child Protective Services workers suspected that Almita Nicole Lockhart, a drug addict now accused of starving her daughter to death, was unable to care for her children.

They investigated in 1993 and 1994. In 1996 and 1999. And five other times between 2000 and 2009, the year her 8-year-old daughter, Halle Shamille Smith, died of starvation, records show.

Lockhart, 34, who has nine other children, was arrested this week and remained in jail Friday in lieu of $30,000 bail, charged with injury to a child, accused of allowing Halle to starve to death a year ago.

Lockhart's court-appointed defense attorney, Daphne Pattison, did not return a phone call Friday.

Born prematurely at 27 weeks, Halle had suffered convulsions, meningitis, tuberculosis, a broken arm and a stroke in the years before she died.

She weighed 15½ pounds when she was brought into Methodist Willowbrook Hospital on Jan. 16, 2009, a bundle of “skin and bones,” officials later told CPS.

Halle, fed her entire life through a feeding tube, was five weeks shy of her ninth birthday when she was declared dead in the hospital's emergency room.

According to medical records, Halle weighed 35 pounds at age 2, dropped to 23 pounds by age 4 and weighed 27 pounds in November 2006, the last time it appears she was seen by doctors or nurses.

She lost 40 percent of her body weight between that last visit and the date of her death because of malnutrition and dehydration.

Kept her children

As the Harris County District Attorney's Office moves to prosecute Lockhart, Halle's case is the latest child abuse death involving a child and a family well-known to CPS investigators.

Among the eight previous CPS investigations involving Lockhart's children before Halle's death, only two involved abuse confirmed by CPS.

On the day Halle was born in 2000, Lockhart tested positive for drugs at the hospital. The same thing happened when Halle's brother was born in 2005.

In both cases, the evidence was irrefutable. In both cases, CPS required Lockhart to enroll in treatment for her drug addiction if she wanted to keep her children.

In both cases, Lockhart failed to complete drug treatment. In fact, in the 2005 case she even tried to alter her drug test, CPS spokesman Estella Olguin confirmed.

Yet CPS workers in 2000 and 2005 closed the cases, and no one considered removing Lockhart's other children from her care.

Didn't check with doctor

Halle was last seen by a CPS worker in 2006, the same year Lockhart was convicted on a drug charge. Halle was described by a caseworker as “healthy” despite being on a feeding tube.

However, the caseworker never contacted Halle's pediatrician, despite all her physical needs, to check on her care, Olguin said.

The lack of a check with the girl's doctor and the fact Lockhart never completed drug treatment should have kept the case open. Instead, it was closed.

"At that point in the case, we could have consulted with our attorneys about a possible removal," CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins said. "We did not do so. In hindsight, that can certainly be viewed as a mistake."

CPS heard nothing more until Methodist Willowbrook notified authorities that Halle was dead.

CPS says that when it received the call about Halle's death, workers suspected immediately they had an abuse death on their hands. But Lockhart was not arrested.

“The information I received about why the mother was not detained by law enforcement or hospital officials is that there was ‘chaos at the time' and the mother fled from the hospital,” a CPS caseworker wrote in an affidavit filed last year with the 308th District Court.

It took a year of scouring through Halle's medical records and subsequent forensic tests to determine that the girl's death was a homicide.

Once the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office made the ruling, county prosecutors filed charges last month.

Parents cut off care

Lockhart received monthly federal disability checks for Halle's care, Medicaid for the girl's medical treatment, and in-home medical care from the time she was 20 months old.

But there was no sign of this type of care a year ago, when officials arrived at Lockhart's apartment in the 13500 block of Northborough in the Greenspoint area of north Houston.

“When the police arrived at the residence given by the mother the home contained no furnishing, no food and only contained a feeding pump and formula,” court documents stated.

Other records show Halle's in-home nursing care had been discontinued by Lockhart and her father, who is not charged.

He told prosecutors they discontinued it because they tired of medical personnel coming in and out.

The other children, who range in age from 2 to 18, were living elsewhere and taken into state custody, where five remain today. The four oldest have been placed with their father, Olguin said.

Lockhart's next court appearance is set for Feb. 24, the day Halle would have turned 10.

Halle was declared dead within minutes of her arrival at the hospital; her sole belongings listed as a shirt and a purple blanket.

Today, she lies buried in an unmarked grave at Paradise North Cemetery.

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TRAGIC TIMELINE

It's hard to imagine a sadder life history: Halle was born premature, at 27 weeks, to a drug-addicted mother, was fed all her life through a feeding tube, suffered convulsions, tuberculosis, meningitis, a broken arm and a stroke, and died last year, a few weeks before her ninth birthday, weighing just 15 1/2 pounds — the weight of an average 8- or 9-month-old.

As reported by the Chronicle's Terri Langford and Dale Lezon, Halle's mother, Almita Nicole Lockhart, was arrested last month, accused of allowing Halle to starve to death.

But what is even more distressing is that Lockhart, who has nine other children, had been investigated by Texas Child Protective Services a total of nine times since 1993 and would have lost custody of her children on two of those occasions if CPS had adhered to its own procedures.

In both cases, Lockhart tested positive for drugs — when Halle was born, in 2000, and at a brother's birth in 2005. She failed to complete drug treatment, which should have resulted in loss of custody, but both cases were closed, and the children remained in her care.

Halle's final visit to a doctor or nurse, it appears, was in November 2006, at which time she weighed 27 pounds. That same year she was seen by a CPS worker, who described her as “healthy.” When CPS was informed of Halle's death last year, even though workers suspected abuse as the cause, Lockhart was not arrested. Halle was buried in an unmarked grave. It took another year to determine her death was a homicide, at which point charges were filed against her mother.

But CPS' serious failings in Halle's case are only part of the picture: In December, a team from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services found severe deficits with the Houston-area operations, including that in roughly half of all cases reviewed, CPS caseworkers missed a family history of abuse and transferred cases out of investigation before making a full assessment of risk and safety.

The review, one of many regional reviews slated for this year, was expedited because of three recent child abuse deaths locally. All three children died either during or shortly after CPS investigated complaints of abuse, and all three had been allowed to remain in their homes. Two of the families had been visited several times concerning neglect or abuse. In the third instance, the caseworker left after the mother refused to let her examine the child. The child died of an infection shortly afterward.

To be sure, CPS caseworkers and supervisors, charged with ensuring the safety and welfare of each child and with keeping families intact wherever possible, have a difficult, complex task.

Agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins told the Chronicle that much work has been done to address the “persistent problem” of turnover, most of which occurs in the first two years, and that most workers feel they are underpaid for the work they do. (Average starting salary for an investigative caseworker is $39,000, other categories of caseworker $34,000.)

The Legislature has increased funding significantly the last two sessions, and “recent reforms efforts,” said Crimmins, have improved CPS, in part by increasing the new worker training period from six to 12 weeks. CPS is also committed to implementing the recommendations made by the recent review, including better allocation of workers with specific skills, and prompter court action when necessary to protect children.

Such efforts are to be encouraged, but what remains deeply disturbing is that, in too many instances, local CPS workers have broken their own agency's rules when investigating suspected abuse. They have walked away, closed cases prematurely, failed to follow through … a litany of bad decisions.

Yet apparently no one, at any level, has been held accountable. Crimmins said he was unaware of any “personnel action” in recent cases.

One has to wonder — in heaven's name, and in the names of those dead children — what more would it take?

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/6894036.html