Santa Clara County to investigate own role in 3-month-old’s fentanyl death

Less than a week after a father was charged in the fentanyl overdose death of his 3-month old daughter, Santa Clara County officials on Wednesday called for the state to investigate how the county’s own child protective services agency may also have failed the baby named Phoenix.

“No stone will be left unturned as we seek to understand everything that could have been done to prevent Phoenix’s tragic death,” the county said in a statement late Wednesday.

The announcement comes after inquiries by the Bay Area News Group, which found that the County’s Department of Family and Children’s Services had numerous encounters with the infant’s family, including concerns for the couple’s two older children, ages 3 and 4, who are now in the custody of a grandmother.

In its statement, the county acknowledged that the family had “significant involvement” with its child protective services department prior to the baby’s death and said it would also conduct its own internal investigation.

“The County’s most important obligation,” the statement said, “is to protect the safety of any child who may be experiencing abuse or neglect.”

Questions over what the Santa Clara County Department of Family and Children Services did to protect Phoenix during her short life call attention to another death of a child in 2022. A trail of documents unearthed by the Bay Area News Group showed how Alameda County social workers repeatedly overlooked warning signs that 8-year-old Sophia Mason was in danger in the year before her body was discovered in the bathtub at a home where her mother and mother’s boyfriend lived.

On May 13, responding to a 911 call, police found Phoenix Castro unconscious in the family’s San Jose apartment. They also discovered a baby bottle in the kitchen on a counter “littered” with fentanyl, broken glass pipes and aluminum foil. The baby later died at Good Samaritan Hospital.

Compounding the tragedy, four months later, Phoenix’s mother, Emily De La Cerda, also died of a fentanyl overdose at the couple’s apartment in San Jose’s Blossom Hill neighborhood.

The county’s request for an outside investigation came shortly after Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez told the Bay Area News Group a review was needed to determine “how this family was supervised and how the safety and welfare of the children were assessed.” She called Phoenix’s death “tragic and preventable.”

In interviews with the Bay Area News Group this past week, neighbors said they called the police a number of times, concerned about loud arguments coming from the apartment and fear that the baby was living with parents who clearly had drug problems. The mother had been in and out of rehab, another neighbor said, even after Phoenix was born.

Neighbor Nancy Wetherington told the Bay Area News Group that she noticed police at the family’s apartment after a disturbance weeks after Phoenix was born. When officers left, Wetherington called police to make her own report.

“I told them they need to do a welfare check on the baby,” Wetherington said. “Why wasn’t something done?”

It’s a question county officials are scrambling to answer.

The infant’s death, first reported by the Bay Area News Group in August, sparked outrage among local officials who have been working to combat the fentanyl crisis, which claimed over 6,000 lives in California last year.

At the time, Chavez called Phoenix’s death “outrageous and inexcusable“ and said “I’m even having a hard time understanding how a three-month old would ingest it (fentanyl), I mean, they don’t even crawl.”