The family of a 13-year-old boy killed along with four other relatives in a Morrisville apartment earlier this year had been on the radar of New Jersey child welfare authorities for seven years, and had two confirmed reports of sexual abuse, according to Pennsylvania records.
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| Shana Decree (L) Dominique Decree |
The revelations in the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services quarterly summaries of child fatalities and near fatalities are the first new details to emerge in the mysterious murder case since the arrests of Shana Decree, 46, and her 19-year-old daughter Dominique Decree on homicide and conspiracy charges.
Bucks County authorities have not revealed any potential motives for the Feb. 23 murders of Decree’s son, Damon Decree, 13, daughter Naa’Irah Smith, 25, Decree’s sister, Jamilla Campbell, 42, and Campbell’s twin 9-year-old daughters Erika and Imani Allen. County officials also have not offered an explanation for a child welfare worker visit that led to the discovery of the murders.
The Decree family or its members are not named in the post, which summarizes the death of a 13-year-old Bucks County boy as a result of “physical abuse” with the boy’s mother and an “adult sibling” identified as the abuse perpetrators. It describes circumstances identical to publicly released information about the murders, including the date it occurred.
According to the state, the New Jersey Department of Child Protection and Permanency received referrals on the family regarding “inadequate supervision, physical abuse and sexual abuse” between 1999 and 2006, but the reports were unsubstantiated.
In April 2006, the NJDCCP received two child protective service referrals regarding sexual abuse that were substantiated, according to the post. No victims were identified in the referrals and no other additional information was provided about the abuse case.
Bucks County Children and Youth in March 2018 received a general protective services referral regarding the 2006 sexual abuse cases in New Jersey, but the referral was screened out because there was no new information to warrant an assessment. A general protective services, or GPS, referral is a report that does not reach the level of abuse, but involves circumstances that can put a child at risk such as truancy, lack of supervision and parental drug use.
In February, county child protection authorities received two GPS referrals regarding “inadequate shelter, behavioral health concerns and conduct by a parent that places the child at risk,” according to the summary. The agency was in the process of conducting an assessment based on the referrals at the time of the murders, the post said.
A Bucks County spokesman said Wednesday that the county was unaware of any formal agreements between Bucks County and New Jersey welfare authorities concerning case referrals. “We refer cases when we think such a referral is necessary and appropriate, but we know of no document requiring them or us to do so,” he said.
The murders at the Robert Morris Apartments on West Bridge Street were discovered on Feb. 25 after a Bucks County Children and Youth caseworker got no response after a second, unannounced visit to the apartment. The caseworker had a maintenance man unlock the apartment, where they found the rooms in disarray with broken glass and furniture and the two defendants appearing dazed and disoriented in bed, officials said.
Shortly after the arrests, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub confirmed the county child protection agency had an open case on the family. County officials also confirmed at the time that none of the children were in the custody of a private or public agency at the time of their deaths and no agencies were under contract to provide them services.
Two weeks prior to Damon’s death, Shana Decree withdrew him from Morrisville Middle/High School, where he was in eighth grade, and informed school district officials that she intended to home school. However, she never filed mandatory paperwork and never returned calls from school officials. Campbell and her daughters previously lived in Trenton, New Jersey, and the twins were not enrolled in Morrisville schools.
Pennsylvania requires state and county child welfare authorities to review the circumstances surrounding deaths and near deaths when child abuse is suspected.
Under a 2008 law, those reviews, called Act 33 reports, are publicly available once they are completed unless a county district attorney orders them certified, which is commonly done with an active criminal investigation or prosecution; the certification is released after a criminal case concludes. The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office has certified the final Act 33 reports involving Damon Decree and the Allen sisters.
According to the county coroner, autopsies show that Campbell was strangled to death while the four others were asphyxiated. All five bodies were found inside a bedroom.
The defendants, who are scheduled for formal arraignment in November, were briefly hospitalized following the murders. They allegedly offered investigators changing accounts of what happened in the apartment but later confessed, and implicated Campbell as well. They claimed everyone in the apartment, including the children, spoke of suicide prior to the deaths, according to the affidavit.
The new information about past child welfare involvement with the family raises questions with some child advocates.
Cathleen Palm, founder and executive director of the Center for Children’s Justice, wondered why the twin girls were not included in the summary.
“That is the first thing that jumped out at me,” she said. “On this day you lost the lives of three children, but you only see one child reflected in this summary.”
Another question Palm had is whether the county screened out the 2018 referral based on the one call or if they made any attempt to get more information from New Jersey child welfare authorities. She also questioned if, when the county received the two referrals in February, they had any record of the 2018 referral or the sudden withdrawal of Damon Decree from school.
Those two factors would raise clear red flags, but without it it would appear that the family had no prior child welfare contact, she said.
“A lot of child safety comes together or falls apart because of that initial piece of information,” Palm added. “If in 2019 there was really nothing about the prior substantiated sexual abuse or general protective services report in 2018, they are looking at this as potentially another family struggling with housing issues, another family with a mom struggling with behavior history. It doesn’t have you jump up and say, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
For Frank Cervone, executive director of the Support Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia, the biggest question mark is what did authorities know about this family and could this tragedy have been prevented.
“It’s possible the answer is nothing and no,” Cervone said. “But a family that has multiple touches with child welfare system over 20 years, and ends in five deaths, warrants a very close look at who knew what and when.”
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