Illinois 18-year-old Mackenzi Felmlee was tortured and, in May 2024, killed by her long-term foster parents. A year later, after the state issued criminal charges, it was revealed that Mackenzi had been beaten, deprived of food and water, and subjected to cruel and degrading punishments for incontinence. She was ultimately left to die of an untreated blood clot, as the foster family watched, laughed, and recorded her suffering.
Deaths in foster care are rare, and children placed in foster care are far less likely to die than children who remain at home following maltreatment. Yet, these deaths—especially murders committed by foster parents—reflect serious and systemic failures by government agencies. Mackenzi lived with her foster family for four years under the supervision of Illinois DCFS caseworkers, courts, and other service providers. A caseworker visited the home two days before her death.
How could this happen? State and federal laws contain multiple safeguards for foster children, including mandatory health assessments, monthly face-to-face caseworker visits, biannual court review hearings, and background checks and home studies of prospective foster parents. But as anti-foster-care advocates often point out, these safeguards are not foolproof—and they are eroding.
The key to preventing deaths like Mackenzi’s lies not in abolishing or pushing kids out of the foster-care system, but in ensuring that our agencies are staffed by more and better-trained childcare workers.
The foster home Mackenzi lived in had been investigated several times for allegations of abuse involving other children. None of those investigations uncovered sufficient evidence of maltreatment. This is unfortunately common. Less than 15 percent of reports of all reports of maltreatment were substantiated nationwide in 2023.
Often, children must be reported several times before their concerns are taken seriously. Some reports about Mackenzie’s foster home were expunged, making it difficult to discern patterns of behavior and protect her and other children living there.
Illinois recently passed the KIND Act to make it easier to place children with relatives and to pay those relatives. In doing so, the state embraced home-licensing standards that further erode safeguards. These “best practice” standards don’t even ban applicants with substantiated histories of child abuse from becoming paid caregivers on behalf of the state, and they don’t require states to consider histories of repeated unsubstantiated reports or any misdemeanor criminal convictions.
Illinois also leads the way in noncompliance with the Adoption and Safe Families Act—a federal law that seeks to prevent children from lingering in foster care for years. The law has long been the target of repeal efforts by anti-foster-care activists because they believe it promotes adoption instead of giving biological parents more time to reunify with their children. Long-term foster care means higher caseloads for social workers, meaning that many children who should have been reunified or permitted to exit to guardianship or adoption are instead trapped in the system.
In the 1990s, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) ranked among the nation’s worst child-protection systems. Indeed, the widely cited claim that foster care is worse than staying in an abusive or neglectful home is based on a study of 1990s Illinois.
Advocates continue to cite that study today to argue for a framework in which simply reducing foster care is treated as a proxy for improving children’s outcomes. When Illinois halved its foster-care population between 1997 and 2002—owing to its reversal of a policy that had turned informal relative-care arrangements into formal foster-care placements—the Pew Commission on Foster Care widely praised the state, claiming that it had set the “the gold standard.”
But policies focused on avoiding foster care altogether—or replacing traditional foster care and adoption with relative care and guardianships—would not have helped keep Mackenzi safe. And they’re the wrong choice for Illinois and for the nation.
Mackenzi clearly needed to be in foster care. Though the full details of her case have not been released, her mother reportedly sex-trafficked her and then handed her off to a relative who also sexually exploited her. Once in foster care, Illinois DCFS attempted placements with other relatives. Each arrangement broke down quickly.
What might have protected Mackenzi? Until DCFS releases a thorough investigation of the events leading up to her death (something they have routinely failed to do in other cases), we cannot be sure. But information released so far points to a problem that plagues nearly every child-protection system in the country: the inability to recruit, train, and retain high-quality workers.
Prior reports on DCFS found that one-fifth of child protection investigator positions were unfilled and that caseworkers were assigned unreasonably heavy caseloads. Mackenzi had ten different caseworkers, including one who was under multiple restraining orders and is believed to have falsified case records.
The agency conditions that enabled Mackenzi’s murder by her foster parents are the same kinds that led to the deaths of thousands more children at the hands of biological parents and relatives across the country.
Keeping children safe, whether at home or in foster care, requires a vastly larger and differently trained workforce than the one we have now. Nationally, schools of social work—a pipeline for the child-welfare workforce—are reporting fewer and fewer students interested in this line of work. Child-protection work has little to offer our best and brightest: low pay, low prestige, long and unpredictable hours, hostile clients, and life-or-death decision-making with little preparation or support.
Ideological trends are also at work here: students and others in the field are increasingly embracing the belief that child protection is really “family policing”—a racist, punitive system that destroys far more lives than it saves.
Until these trends reverse, we will continue to hear about more cases like Mackenzi’s.
Photo: Catherine Falls Commercial / Moment via Getty Images
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