Fresno County and a local foster parent agency agreed to pay $2.5 million to three sisters who said officials failed to protect them from repeated sexual abuse by a foster parent.
The county agreed to pay $1.5 million and Proteus Foster Family Agency agreed to pay the rest of the settlement to the three women. The lawsuit said the women were between ages 9 and 13 when they were repeatedly sexually abused in the home where they were placed between 2014 and 2016.
The county issued a statement through spokesperson Sonja Dosti on Tuesday.
“(A)ll parties have resolved the claims — the agreement represents a mutual compromise of disputed claims and brings this litigation to a close,” the statement said.
Proteus and the attorneys for the sister did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit from the sisters said Fresno County social workers did not carry out their routine face-to-face meetings with them outside the supervision of the foster parents.
The state’s Department of Social Services manual on foster parents requires social workers to make monthly visits to placement homes and “whenever possible and practicable” those meetings with foster children should be done with the child alone, the lawsuit says.
The three sisters and other siblings were placed in a foster home in 2014, the lawsuit says. They were victims of repeated sexual abuse by the foster father, the court claim says.
In 2015, an older sibling found a journal belonging to one of the girls in which she wrote about the sexual abuse, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit says a social worker was given the journal and conducted an investigation, which included asking the children about the abuse in front of the foster parents. They were identified only by their initials in the filing.
“Terrified, R.H. and M.H. felt forced to deny the sexual abuse to the social workers,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants did not conduct a forensic examination or provide any type of medical treatment or evaluation of plaintiffs.”
The children were disciplined for the incident and the sexual abuse continued, the lawsuit said.
The foster parents “almost immediately” began abusing the children and treating them neglectfully, the lawsuit said. They were not allowed to practice their faith at their church, the lawsuit said, and were not provided with adequate food and clothing.
The children weren’t removed from the home until a brother got into a fistfight in the street with the foster father, the lawsuit says. The father was not investigated by the county of the foster parent agency after the fight, according to the lawsuit.
The father was arrested in 2016 for an unrelated incident after the sisters and their siblings were removed from the home, the lawsuit says. A different child younger than 14 was placed in the home.
Fresno County Court records show the father was sentenced after pleading no contest to battery in exchange for two counts of lewd acts with a minor being dismissed.
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Reporter Thaddeus Miller has covered cities in the central San Joaquin Valley since 2010, writing about everything from breaking news to government and police accountability. A native of Fresno, he joined The Fresno Bee in 2019 after time in Merced and Los Banos.