How were a ten-year-old boy’s mother and her boyfriend allowed to torture him to death after the abuse had been reported multiple times? That’s what we, Robert and Kathleen Raskin of Las Vegas, would like to know. We started our website StopDHR so we can raise awareness of corruption and incompetence in the child protective services organizations that too often harm the very children they are charged with protecting.

California state officials plan to conduct an audit of DCFS in Los Angeles after the child, Anthony Avalos, was tortured to death because his mother and her boyfriend believed he was gay. The details of what this little boy endured are heartbreaking, and there were numerous opportunities for agencies from DCFS to the police to step in and protect him, but the system broke down and failed to stop the abuse. Thirteen times the authorities were notified, and thirteen times they did nothing.

This is all too often the case, but it still remains to be seen whether or not the investigation will actually uncover anything or if they’ll just sweep the details of their ineptitude under the rug. This is far from an isolated instance, and in fact there was a similar case in 2013, when eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez was also brutalized and murdered because his mother and her boyfriend suspected he was gay.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident,” their letter to the audit committee said, referring to the 2013 death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez, who was also tortured and abused for months by his mother and her boyfriend, allegedly because he suspected Gabriel was gay. The last audit of LA’s child welfare department was six years ago, so this new audit is overdue.

Specifically the audit will deal with whether or not DCFS has adequate protections in place to serve the LGBTQ youth who may have an especially difficult time in the system and with caretakers due to their sexual orientation. Will the root deficiencies in the system finally be identified and improved? Only time will tell. What we know now is that this absolutely must not happen to another child.