It’s hard to keep looking at the haunting news photo of Geanna Bradley, the 10-year-old Wahiawa girl found dead Jan. 18 from unspeakable abuse allegedly at the hands of her foster family.
In the photo, the sweet child manages a wan smile despite a horrific existence that authorities say included denial of food and water, being bound by duct tape and confined to small spaces, and suffering extreme physical punishment.
Paramedics found her lifeless body emaciated and with broken teeth, open sores and a large fracture on the bridge of her nose.
The medical examiner described it as a case of “prolonged child abuse and neglect” involving “starvation, blunt force injuries due to multiple assaults, prolonged physical restraint and immobilization, pneumonia and medical neglect.”
An Oahu grand jury last week indicted Geanna’s foster parents, Brandy Blas and Thomas Blas Sr., as well as Debra Geron, Brandy Blas’ mother, on multiple charges including second-degree murder and kidnapping.
Police and prosecutors built their case largely on the defendants’ own text messages and photos allegedly detailing their treatment of the dead girl. Authorities are seeking life imprisonment without possibility of parole because the murder was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.”
What’s missing is any public accounting from state child welfare officials, who paid the foster parents $1,961 a month to care for Geanna, as to why this abuse was never caught or stopped despite numerous red flags including the girl’s removal from school and the parents’ unwillingness to let her attend therapy alone.
It’s frustratingly reminiscent of the case of 6-year-old Ariel Sellers of Waimanalo, whose adoptive parents were charged with murder when she disappeared in 2021 after allegedly suffering abuse similar to Geanna Bradley.
Or even further back, Peter Boy Kema, 6, a badly abused Big Island child who had been through the foster system, whose parents were convicted of murder after he disappeared in 1997.
Two more haunting photos of smiling, hopeful young faces burned into the memories of those who follow the news. And two more cases in which the child welfare system never did a meaningful public post-mortem of how these beautiful children were so tragically failed.
No monitoring system can be everywhere, but clearly we need to do better at protecting these vulnerable kids, and it starts with getting to the bottom of cases that go so wrong with urgency and openness. It’s the only way to find and seal the cracks that children like Geanna, Ariel and Peter Boy fall through.
The child welfare bureaucracy’s debilitating “cover your ass” mentality must be replaced with something closer to NASA’s old dictum of “failure is not an option,” with clear lines of responsibility, accountability and transparency.
With so much at stake, it simply doesn’t cut it to stonewall by hiding behind privacy laws and bureaucratic double talk about ongoing investigations.
Exposing themselves to public pressure to make the system better isn’t a bad thing; it focuses needed attention on the problem and can lead to good solutions, while withholding relevant information does the opposite.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
