Content warning: This article discusses child abuse and other sensitive topics that may not be appropriate for all readers.
Government scandal is often accompanied by a flurry of questions about what went wrong and when. When politicians abuse the public trust placed in them by the constituents who voted them into office, the public has a right to know the details of how power was abused. When tax dollars are misspent or taxpayer-funded agencies fail with the powers that have been delegated to them, the public has a right to know what went wrong and how their hard-earned money has been misused, particularly when that failure has a human cost.
News broke recently that the body of 11-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia had been found buried in a storage container outside an abandoned house. Mimi’s body was found more than a year after she’d allegedly died, reportedly following long-term abuse, including starvation and restraint as punishment. Mimi’s mother, Karla Garcia, allegedly told her sister, Jackelyn Garcia, that the girl had died after she was starved for two weeks.
Both women have been charged in Mimi’s death, as has Karla’s boyfriend, Jonatan Nanita.
Also disturbingly, another child was reportedly identified as Mimi by Karla Garcia, after the 12-year-old had died, in a Zoom call with the Department of Children and Families (DCF). The call was related to DCF’s involvement with Mimi’s younger sister. However, DCF had previously removed Mimi from the care of her parents and placed her under the legal guardianship of another relative. That arrangement lasted for nine years.
At the time of the call about Mimi’s younger sister, Karla Garcia reported Mimi was being homeschooled and temporarily staying with an out-of-state relative.
“In response, DCF conducted a video call with a person whom the mother claimed to be Jacqueline. This information has been provided to law enforcement. Given that no additional concerns were noted, the department closed the case in March 2025.” NBC Connecticut reported.
A DCF agent mistaking another child for Mimi when DCF had been previously involved in placing her seems to confirm the worst fears of multiple reports from the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) and DCF asking that policies allowing telework for state workers be reviewed, including one OCA report that came following the homicide death of 2-year-old Liam R. DCF had an open child abuse/neglect case against Liam’s family at the time he was killed. OCA’s report notes that telework policies for state workers stemming from the pandemic allow the social worker and supervisor in Liam’s case to work remotely 80 percent of the time.
“As stated throughout this report, OCA found that basic agency standards for case assessment, supervision, and even case documentation, were not followed in Liam’s case. It is essential to understand, from a data-driven and staff/consumer lens, how teleworking at DCF impacts, positively and negatively, the critical functions of the agency, including engagement with children and families as well as recruitment and retention of staff, professional development, and supervision—and whether DCF can meet its mandates with a largely virtual workforce. Legislative inquiry is warranted.” OCA wrote in the October 2023 report.
That legislative inquiry has not come. Right now, we do not know for certain what happened in DCF’s handling of Mimi’s case and whether there were similar deviations from DCF standards, or whether those may have played a role in her death, or even whether DCF noticed that the child identified as Mimi was not Mimi and did anything to follow up.
And we have no way of knowing, outside of information that DCF employees tell news media or what OCA eventually reports following their investigation into DCF’s handling of Mimi’s case.
That’s because child abuse records are specifically not public records under state law.
DCF maintains a registry of findings of abuse or neglect, and statute dictates that any information contained in it, “and any other information relative to child abuse, wherever located, shall be confidential.” Federal law also requires that information about child abuse be kept confidential.
That means that any records DCF has about Mimi’s death, including any notes or agency determinations related to the case worker’s phone call where another child was identified as Mimi, are exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
DCF’s website specifically notes that “records maintained by the Department of Children and Families are confidential and may only be disclosed with the consent of the individual who is the subject of the records or as authorized by the statute.” That blanket protection includes client information and records, including “records created or obtained in connection with DCF’s child protection activities or other activities related to a child while in the care or custody of DCF.”
That’s a problem because, until OCA issues its findings or the legislature convenes a hearing, the public only has access to whatever information DCF officials decide to make public. We have to take the word of agency employees who, based on available information, appear to have slipped up.
Even when OCA releases their report, or if the legislature launches an investigation, the public will still not have access to the underlying documents. Again, they will have to take the word of government officials.
In addition, any answers that come through these avenues, or via a court case, are not going to come swiftly. Government processes take time. From the perspective of sober deliberation leading to good and rational results that have the best impact on what happens moving forward, that’s a good thing.
But DCF is currently handling child abuse cases – and if there are fundamental flaws in how it’s doing so that are jeopardizing the safety of children, the public deserves answers now.
At the crux, this issue is like many other transparency issues and reflects the tension between privacy and the public’s right to know. Transparency is an unquestionable tenet of representative government: the people have a right to know how decisions are made by their elected representatives and how their resources are being used. Any other position gives public officials cover to not only commit corrupt acts, but actively hide them from the public’s knowledge.
But many public services involve interactions with private individuals who don’t deserve to have their privacy compromised just because they’ve come into contact with a public institution. This is reflected in a number of exemptions to FOIA, including those that exempt information about certain police interactions from public disclosure for victims of crimes or for witnesses, those that protect private information the public is required to give government agencies in order to obtain identification, like driver’s licenses, and those that exempt information about minors.
The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) generally requires the confidentiality of abuse/neglect reports in order to protect the rights of children and their parents or guardians. But, should that really be the first concern when a child is dead, allegedly at the hands of their parent?
Both CAPTA and state statute prohibit the release of child abuse information in order to protect privacy and address what actions can and cannot be taken in an effort to preserve that privacy. But, although their prohibition on the release of records except in certain circumstances and to specific people effectively creates privacy for public workers, neither addresses information related to public employees who handle child abuse cases. By default, because their clients have a right to privacy, their actions are also shielded to an extensive degree.
The only exception CAPTA makes to the public release of child abuse information is in the case of a child’s death or near death, meaning any wrongdoing on the part of welfare agencies is shielded from public disclosure unless a child dies or nearly dies. And in Connecticut, this doesn’t mean underlying records related to a child’s death are open to public scrutiny.
State statute tasks OCA with convening a child fatality review panel and writing reports when a child dies. That information, not the underlying records, is what becomes public-facing. And while OCA’s findings frequently list fault with DCF or other agencies, they do not name the names of individuals in those agencies found to be responsible.
That’s inherently at odds with laws like FOIA, which recognizes that accountability is the default position of representative government and that, as logically follows, public employees do not deserve privacy for actions they take as part of their jobs.
The public employees of DCF involved in Mimi’s case don’t deserve any privacy for actions they took as part of their jobs. But Mimi deserves whatever measure of privacy is attainable as the last moments of her life are scrutinized by government watchdogs and the courts. Her loved ones who are not complicit in her death and who tried to help her in life deserve privacy because they did nothing wrong and because they deserve to grieve in private.
In general, victims deserve not to have transparency tools like FOIA abused by those seeking to do them harm.
But, as important as those protections are for the innocent, they still create an impediment for the public and for watchdogs, like the media, who want to ensure that those responsible when agencies do wrong are held responsible and are not able to repeat the same mistakes in the future.
It’s a case where a blanket ban on the release of records that fall under a certain category can sometimes help those it intends to help. There are certain exemptions, such as the preliminary drafts exemption, that require agencies to perform a balancing test and determine whether there’s a greater public interest in withholding information than releasing it.
A similar balancing test applied to child abuse records, which protects the innocent but allows the public to review internal decisions made by agencies like DCF that may have contributed to adverse outcomes, could be beneficial in holding the agency to account and preventing more deaths in the future. Information trickling out in the aftermath of child deaths, or in the chance that an employee who sees wrongdoing decides to become a whistleblower, doesn’t help provide a comprehensive understanding of what went wrong or how similar situations might be prevented in the future.
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