The SacBee.com has a very telling story about how a little girl was brutally beaten and killed.

A 3-year-old Fair Oaks girl beaten to death in her home this year had suffered a broken arm and burned hand eight months earlier, but Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services never divulged those injuries to the court or to the attorneys overseeing her welfare, The Bee has learned.

Instead, a CPS social worker assured the court in August 2007 there were “no health or safety concerns” about Valeeya Brazile and recommended that the little girl remain in her home without further court supervision.

The court agreed, and the case of Valeeya Brazile was closed – until she was brutally beaten and died.

“This kid didn’t have to die,” said a furious Robert Wilson of Sacramento Child Advocates, whose attorneys represent children in dependency court, including Valeeya.

Had Wilson’s attorney advocates been told the full story by CPS, they would have aggressively investigated the circumstances and pushed to keep the case open, he said.

“Had we seen that information anywhere along the line, we would have escalated our investigation,” Wilson said. “There would have been red lights and red flags at our end.”

Valeeya died Feb. 5 from a severe beating, though the coroner concluded that the 31½-pound girl had been a victim of battered child syndrome, suffering numerous injuries over time. The mother’s boyfriend, Thomas Jerome Martin, has been charged with her murder.

The revelations about CPS’ knowledge of the child’s injuries – and its lack of disclosure to the court – are contained in internal agency records and juvenile court documents released to The Bee after a seven-month legal effort by the newspaper.

CPS documents chronicle the girl’s injuries. But the juvenile court files show that the girl’s attorneys and the court’s referee – who ultimately decided Valeeya’s placement – were told by CPS social worker Alexis Hince in a court report only that Valeeya was up to date on medical and dental exams. The girl “appears to be meeting normal developmental milestones for her age group,” the social worker stated.

Hince did not respond to a request for comment. CPS spokeswoman Laurie Slothower, in an e-mail response to a list of questions, wrote, “We cannot discuss specific case details because the information is confidential. However, it is CPS practice to provide all relevant information in court documents.”

Juvenile Court Referee Peter Helfer, who made the decision to remove Valeeya from the court’s oversight based on the social worker’s recommendation, did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Children had been placed in foster care

 

Valeeya and her older sibling had been taken away from their mother, Milicca Holmes, in October 2006 after Holmes was arrested for trying to run over a man, whom she had been dating, in a Jiffy Lube parking lot. At the time, Valeeya was in the back seat, in a car seat not belted in.

Initially, the girl and her brother were placed into foster care but were returned home to their two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment Feb. 15, 2007, under CPS supervision. The court was asked to decide in August 2007 whether the children should remain dependents of the court.

In her July 23, 2007, “In-Home Review Report” to the court, social worker Hince praised Holmes for successfully completing counseling, parenting classes, a 15-week domestic violence support group and alcohol and drug treatment and testing. As a result, Hince determined that the children’s risk was “low.”

“The mother immediately recognized the error of her ways and focused on changing her behaviors and reunifying with her children,” wrote Hince in her summary. The summary also bears the name of Lynn Frank, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Hince would acknowledge after the death that she never met Martin and did not know he was living in the home, according to CPS documents.

Helfer, the Juvenile Court referee, agreed with the recommendation on Aug. 2, 2007, and Valeeya and her sibling were removed from the court’s jurisdiction and placed in the “sole legal and physical custody of the mother.”

Enough is enough…

As I have stated on numerous occasions, there needs to be a full investigation at CPS.  They need to start at the top and hand out a few pink slips.

<blockquote>”I reached a point where I felt that the whole staff were fractionalized, that the best thing to do to get this thing back was to make a change,” Davis said during a lengthy news conference. “It hurts because I picked the guy. I picked the wrong guy.”

The Raiders promoted offensive line coach Tom Cable to interim head coach.

Kiffin had a 5-15 record since being hired last year, losing his final game 28-18 on Sunday to San Diego.

The decision to remove Kiffin was more about his frequent criticisms of Davis’ franchise as it was the team’s performance on the field. Those critiques reached a peak when Kiffin distanced himself from the defense after a blowout loss in the season opener, saying that was under coordinator Rob Ryan and Davis’ control.

However, during a news conference Tuesday, Davis also critiqued several of Kiffin’s coaching and personnel decisions. Among other things, he said Kiffin objected to the Raiders using the first pick in the 2007 draft on quarterback JaMarcus Russell.

“I didn’t think it was any one thing, it was a cumulative thing,” Davis said. “The pattern just disturbed me.”

The Raiders said Kiffin was fired for cause, meaning they will likely try not to pay him for the remainder of his contract. He signed a three-year deal worth about US$6 million when he took over last year.

The 79-year-old Davis was front and center for more than 90 minutes, sharing the stage with Cable for some of that time and then sticking around afterward to take more questions.

Dressed in Raider silver-and-black, his face weathered by years of standing on football sidelines, Davis sat at a podium reading from notes illuminated by a large desk lamp. He seemed angry at times, blaming Kiffin for most of the Raider woes, though he also blamed himself for hiring him in the first place.

The firing comes a day after the St. Louis Rams let go of Scott Linehan, marking the second firing at the quarter point of the season. The last time a coach had been fired this early in the season was when Davis got rid of Mike Shanahan after four games in 1989.

Cable is regarded as one of the top offensive line coaches in the game, and worked with successful units in Atlanta and Oakland. He spent four years as a college head coach at Idaho, and was also an assistant at UCLA, California and Colorado.

“This is in many ways a strange day,” Cable said. “I have a friend who lost a job. That’s difficult in this business but, as we know, this is a business. It is time for us to move forward and to put the past behind us. … We have a good coaching staff here and a good football team here.”

Kiffin’s job security was in question as far back as January, when a dispute with Davis over whether he could replace Ryan as defensive coordinator led to a resignation letter being drafted for the coach. Kiffin refused to sign it and the feud went on throughout the offseason as Kiffin questioned big-money signings and other personnel moves made by Davis.

The situation grew more heated with Kiffin’s comments on Davis’ involvement with the defense two days after a season-opening 41-14 loss at home to Denver. Three days after that, reports surfaced that Davis was ready to fire his coach at any time and it dragged out from there.

Kiffin did his best to deflect the controversy and never went to Davis to lobby for his job or a resolution. The team played much better the past three weeks, beating Kansas City and taking leads into the fourth quarter against Buffalo and San Diego before losing.

“I know that we left this team a lot better than when we got here,” Kiffin told KPIX. He is expected to have his own press conference on Wednesday.

Davis’ once-proud franchise has fallen on hard times of late, with the blame going beyond one coach. Oakland has an NFL-worst 20-64 record since the start of the 2003 season, a stretch spanning the tenures of Bill Callahan, Norv Turner, Art Shell and Kiffin.

Oakland has lost at least 11 games for five straight seasons, tying the dismal Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the 1980s for the worst stretch in NFL history.

Since returning to Oakland in 1995, the Raiders have had just three winning seasons and will be on their eighth head coach. The success mostly came under Jon Gruden, who led Oakland to division titles in 2000 and ‘01 before leaving for Tampa Bay. Callahan took the Raiders to the Super Bowl the following season, but there was nothing to cheer about in that 48-21 loss to Gruden and the Bucs - and nothing since.

The one constant during that period has been Davis, who won three Super Bowl titles in his first 21 years with the Raiders but has had little success over the past quarter-century.

Kiffin, the son of longtime NFL defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, was just a 31-year-old assistant at Southern California when Davis hired him to replace Shell following the 2007 season. With that, he became the youngest head coach in the NFL’s modern era.

Davis said at the time that Kiffin’s youth was not an issue, pointing to the success the Raiders had in the past with young coaches like John Madden and Gruden.

Kiffin, instead, is following the path of Shanahan, who was hired at age 35 in 1988 and then fired four games into his second season. Until this move, Shanahan had been the only coach Davis had fired in the middle of a season since joining the Raiders in 1963.

Shanahan went on to win two Super Bowls with Denver.</blockquote>

From the SacBee.com

Democrats are outpacing Republicans in the drive to recruit new voters in the Sacramento region ahead of the November general election.

Amid the change, Placer County has fallen from its post as California’s chief Republican stronghold, a shift that may affect a closely watched congressional race.

Since the two parties largely settled on presidential nominees in April, voter rolls have increased by roughly 19,500 – or 2 percent – in Placer, El Dorado, Sacramento and Yolo counties, according to new figures from the California secretary of state’s office. Democrats accounted for 10,500 of those new voters. Just 2,400 were Republicans. Most of the others declined to state an allegiance.

The regional numbers mirror a statewide trend. California’s Democratic voter rolls have increased by 181,118 since April while the number of Republicans grew by 6,823. Republicans saw a net loss of registered voters in 25 counties, including a loss of more than 15,000 in conservative Orange County. Similar trends are playing out nationally, in several battleground states.

“We’ve had a little weariness with the current administration,” said Craig MacGlashan, chairman of the Sacramento County Republicans, explaining the apparent preference of the new voters. But he said the numbers don’t reflect a recent wave of enthusiasm for the presidential campaign of John McCain. “I’ve seen an uptick with interest since John McCain picked Sarah Palin” as his running mate.

That interest has not been enough to counter the shift in Placer County, which since 2002 had been the state’s Republican leader.

Modoc County, in California’s rural northeastern corner, is now statistically the state’s most Republican.

And no longer are most Placer County voters registered Republicans.

The party’s share dropped from 52.2 percent before the 2004 election to 49.7 percent today.

During the past four years, the Placer County Democratic Party has grown by roughly three registered voters for every two who have joined county Republicans, state figures show.

More recently, from April though August, Placer’s Democratic tally grew by 1,269 while Republican ranks increased by 585, state figures show. Since Labor Day, Republicans have narrowed that 684-voter gap to 424, Placer election officials say.

“I’ve got to attribute that to a strong Democratic effort to get new registrants – a stronger effort than Republicans,” said Gary Dietrich, a local political analyst and president of Citizen Voice, a nonpartisan voter-awareness group.

That drive could play a role in the contest between Democrat Charlie Brown and Republican Tom McClintock to fill the seat John Doolittle now holds in the 4th Congressional District, Dietrich said.

The district, which covers Placer County and much of rural northeastern California – including Modoc County – is rated a “Race to Watch” by Congressional Quarterly.

The district still is solidly Republican, but from April to early September, Democrats added 2,649 voters in the 4th District, compared to 1,582 more Republicans.

Bill George, Placer County Republican Party communications director, dismissed the recent numbers as “statistically insignificant.”

“Those are very incremental types of moves and not indicative of any type of trend or change in the makeup of the county,” he said. “There’s no trend, no change that we see in the numbers that show that we’re becoming less of a Republican Party in this county.”

George added that the party has seen strong voter registration activity since the beginning of September – about 950 new voters registered as Republicans this month, compared to 700 Democrats.

There are, however, physical signs of change in Placer County: For the first time in roughly a decade, it has a Democratic Party headquarters. Located in Auburn, the office is paid for by the Placer County Democratic Central Committee and serves as headquarters for the Barack Obama and Charlie Brown campaigns. It’s staffed full time by volunteers, said Newcastle resident Arry Murphey-Frank, the Democrats’ district manager.

What does this say for our city…

Well the time has finally come to unveil what we have been working on! The National Republicrat. I’ve had people tell me that it would be cool if we had a venue in which both Republicans and Democrats could write, post, comment and have open discussions. Well, now this can happen on one site! We have Democratic, Republican, and Independent bloggers all at one location. So, whatever your flavor is, we’ve got it! You can also chat with our bloggers via our new forums (coming very shortly!).

So while we may still do a bit of posting here, the majority will be done at The National Republicrat.

Please, come check us out…

Stay tuned….

Check back Friday or Saturday and see what all the hype is about…

The Main Street Press may be in love with Barry, but his weakness in the polls is telling. He is polling even or a few points ahead of McCain after his “I’m not the President but I play one on TV” speech in Berlin.

This election may not be the slam dunk the media is hyping it up to be!

Well, I can’t say quite yet! It is something that I’ve been working on for a bit of time.

By mid-August I’ll have some news for you. Stay tuned…