WTHR-TV won a 2005 Casey Medal (television short form) for this story.

Public records are the foundation for many, if not most, good investigative projects. But this is a story about a project for which many of the key welfare system records were not public -- and about how our persistent reporting led to changes that opened a whole new category of records in our state.

It began when 4-year-old Anthony Bars died in January 2002, his little body battered and severely emaciated. He weighed just 24 pounds, half what a normal child his age should weigh. It took five months for prosecutors to file charges against the parents and a year and a half more for the case to come to trial. It was a horrific case of abuse by adoptive foster parents, but it received little notice in the media, garnering just a brief in the local paper. Acting on a tip we received while investigating allegations of child abuse in state-licensed foster homes, we found how much more there was to this little boy’s tragic story.

We discovered that the state hadn’t done a proper background check before placing Anthony Bars in the home in which he was killed. A proper check would have revealed a history of abuse by the adoptive father, including a battery conviction for tying his daughter to an exercise bike and whipping her with an extension cord.

The Bars case became the centerpiece of what would turn into 16 months of coverage highlighting problems in Indiana’s child welfare system. The first series showed how the state failed to protect children it had removed from abusive homes and placed in foster care. We documented numerous instances of children abused in foster care and were surprised to find the federal government actually has a standard for the number of such cases states are allowed to have while receiving federal funds – Indiana was 28 percent above that limit.

We had to rely on sources to provide us with internal documents for our initial report since Indiana Child Protective Services case reports were exempt from disclosure under the state’s public records law. However, state legis­lators responded to our findings by introducing a bill to open up files in cases in which children died of abuse or neglect. We continued to push the issue with dozens of stories reporting developments and the progress of the proposed legislation. A bill eventually was passed and signed in the spring of 2004, creating a new set of public records and paving the way for the next phase of our reporting.

We promptly put the new law to the test by asking the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) for all abuse and neglect fatality files for the previous two years. We wanted to be the first to attempt an exhaustive look at child deaths in the state, but it wasn’t easy. We faced road­blocks from FSSA, which stalled and avoided our requests and forced us to get our lawyer involved, and from some county judges who stuck to an extremely narrow interpretation of the law.

Under the law, the agency is required to forward the requested files to judges in the counties where the deaths occurred. The judges are charged with redacting any “non-relevant” information. The pro­cess took months since the state took an inordinate amount of time to release the records and some judges heavily redacted the files. Among the items blacked out on some files: victims’ names; perpetrators’ names; and even portions of published newspaper articles included in the files. Reconstructing the cases from the files became a major test of our shoe-leather skills.

As we pored over hundreds of pages of records, we identified many issues of poor compliance of the new disclosure require­ments. One crucial discovery was that we were not receiving records that showed when the state had contact with a child or child’s family prior to the death. State officials argued that previous contacts were not always relevant to the death, but legislators we interviewed disagreed.

Ultimately, we petitioned the judge in our home county to force the agency to provide complete records on two specific cases. And in a pointed order last December, juvenile court Judge James Payne rebuked FSSA and came down squarely on the side of disclosure when it comes to records of prior contact.

The battle for the records dragged on and racked up major legal fees. In the end, we didn’t get all the records we wanted, but we were able to piece together a story based on the records we did have and based on dozens of interviews with family members, police, prosecu­tors, judges, attorneys, legislators, social workers and state child welfare officials.

The result was a second series that aired in November. Among other findings, the stories revealed a significant number of deaths that hap­pened despite pre-existing state intervention. In some instances, in fact, caseworkers had contact with the family mere days before a child died.

We did a segment exposing how FSSA had chosen not to comply completely with the new law, which prompted the authors of the legisla­tion to seek amendments to make the language more forceful with regard to what records must be disclosed.  The refined law spells out exactly what can and cannot be redacted from the records and ensures that previous case history files are released.  It also extends the disclosure requirements to near-fatalities as well as actual deaths.

As the death files came in, we logged each one into a database we created to track the cases, including details such as the classification of death and whether the state had any previous contact with the child or the child’s family. This allowed us to easily put together an in-depth online presentation of our research, including a description and details of each case.

Our stories increased the amount of information available to the public in the critical area of child protection. Especially with a new legal category of disclosure, we viewed it as our obligation to put forth a vigorous effort to enforce the right of public inspection of these records. We believe our persistence in pushing for these records, including our willingness to engage our First Amendment attorney, set an important precedent for members of the public or media who might seek these documents in the future.

Bill Ditton is a cameraman at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis. Gerry Lanosga is a former investigative producer at the station, and Moreschi is a former investigative reporter.