Lawmakers are demanding accountability and investigations into how a 16-year-old girl in state care died while being housed at a hotel in East Baltimore.
A scathing audit released earlier this month highlighted concerns over lengthy hotel and hospital stays for foster children.
Dispatch calls
The emergency call came in just after 11 a.m. on Monday. “800 North Wolfe Street. It says Marriott room 1109, a possible D.O.A.”
Baltimore police responded to the Marriott Residence Inn near the Johns Hopkins Hospital campus.
“It’s going to be for a fatal overdose of a juvenile,” first responders later said.
Authorities are not officially revealing the circumstances of how 16-year-old Kanaiyah Ward died, but said there were no signs of foul play.
She is one of several juveniles the state houses in hotels. They are supposed to receive one-on-one care from private vendors—a practice that has been under scrutiny since the audit released earlier this month found lax oversight.
Delegate Jesse Pippy, the House Minority Whip, said the longstanding practice of housing children in hotels must end.
“Absolutely not. It sounds as bad as it actually is,” Delegate Pippy told WJZ Investigator Mike Hellgren Friday. “What was this child doing in a hotel room? How did she die? Are there other children in hotel rooms? How much are we spending on this? Why can’t you place them in a home? What is the reason for this? Why wasn’t somebody there? Who is responsible for watching them? The questions are endless. But it all comes back to something very terrible that a minor child in state custody has died, and we’ve still heard nothing.”
The Department of Human Services told WJZ, “If we find that our standards for care were not met, we will hold our contractors accountable.”
DHS will not provide specific details about what happened, citing the child’s age. “We are committed to transparency and being as open as possible while maintaining the confidentiality of children and their families, as protected by law.”
Delegate Pippy said, “We want to know what the hell is going on with this agency, and we want to know now.”
Hotel concerns
The independent audit revealed that the state placed 280 foster care children in hotels in fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
82 of them had lengthy stays of between 3 months and 2 years.
It cost taxpayers $10.4 million for the rooms and care from private vendors.
Housing foster children in hotels is much more expensive for the state. In one case, Maryland was charged more than $1,200 a day, the audit found.
The audit also revealed vendors were not appropriately licensed or supervised.
“Since one-on-one vendors are not licensed providers, there is a lack of assurance that children in their care received satisfactory services,” auditors wrote. “Other deficiencies… include a lack of criminal background checks for individuals employed by these vendors.”
Auditors also noted “numerous children for which there was no support that educational and health services were provided and who were placed in unauthorized settings without appropriate supervision.”
After the audit’s release, Governor Wes Moore told WJZ, “Some of the challenges that these audits have laid out were things that did not begin with our administration. They began with our predecessor.”
Lawmakers push for accountability
Lawmakers plan to hold hearings.
Delegate Pippy said accountability is critically important. “The absolute most important fundamental responsibility that we have is the safety of our most vulnerable. That’s what this individual was—a 16-year-old child—and it appears the state of Maryland has let this child down. She has died. There’s no greater urgency.”
Maryland’s Secretary of Human Services, Rafael López, touted progress in getting children out of hotels while speaking before the state spending board earlier this month. He said the state moved with “great urgency.”
López noted hospital overstays have been “dramatically reduced.”
He said in February 2024, there were 21 youth who had spent longer than 48 hours in hospitals and 54 staying in hotels. Now, there are 10 in hospitals and 11 in hotels.
“We have focused like a laser on hospitals and hotels which have been a challenge to Maryland for many decades,” the secretary said.