Serenity McKinney and Miya Rudd were both on the radar of Kentucky's child protective services prior to their deaths. Why weren't they protected?
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‘This should never happen’; 2 Kentucky child deaths should be under investigation, instead they’re sitting in limbo
When children are killed, there are always questions. When those children were known to state agencies, given the power to protect them, the questions only grow.
Two child fatalities should be under investigation by
Kentucky's Office of the Ombudsman, but instead that office is sitting in limbo. Kentucky Auditor Allison Balls calls it a failure by the state of Kentucky.
“It's just heartbreaking to hear what led to where they're at. Social workers were involved," she said. "We had awareness of the situation. So yes, I do feel like that's a failure."
Seventy miles from where Serenity McKinney's body was found, another makeshift memorial marks another young child's death.
In June of this year, 8-month-old Miya Rudd was reported missing. The infant hadn't been seen in months and days later her body was found under a pile of debris, according to Kentucky State Police.
KSP Trooper Corey King described the police investigation as one that started by happenstance.
"This is one of those cases that started out as a drug investigation for us as an agency but turned into so much more," he said.
State police detectives were investigating a drug operation traced back to a house in Reynolds Station, Kentucky, and the people who lived inside. As detectives dug deeper, a piece of information concerned them: an infant was supposedly living in the house filled with dangerous, deadly drugs.
Authorities were able to locate Miya's parents and grandfather inside an Owensboro hotel with tons of drugs, but the child was nowhere to be found.
Further conversations revealed the family was already on CPS radar.
"Previous children had been removed from this house due to the inability of the caretakers but also the drugs that were involved,” King said.
Police also confirmed Miya was known to the state after an alarming test result raised red flags just days after she was born.
"Social services learned that the umbilical cord tested positive for methamphetamine about a week after her birth. And it was my understanding that social services had then, at that point, were working to remove this child and could not locate not only the child but the family as well,” King explained.
It’s still unclear when or why her parents were able to leave the hospital with the child.
KSP couldn't confirm what the effort to find the child looked like, only confirming the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) never called them for help. The cabinet would not answer WHAS11's questions about how or if they tried to find the baby, citing a pending investigation.
State police officials said it was police who escalated the search for the infant, eventually making a grim discovery.
“[The] lead investigator located a small infant very consistent to Miya Rudd, buried under a bunch of debris in the front part of the house,” King said.
Multiple family members were arrested on child neglect and drug charges. Miya Rudd's autopsy is still pending.
"I hope that the ones that fail these babies are held accountable,” Serenity McKinney’s grandmother, Melody Roller, said. "Accountability is a big thing."
Failures of the state
Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball said there were "all kinds of red flags" when shown the details of Serenity McKinney's death.
"What is going on here? This should never happen. This should never, never happen," she said. "Especially when social workers are actively involved in the situation. It's not like no one knew this. People were actively alerted in these situations."
Ball said she was already aware of the details of Miya Rudd case but was left with a lot of questions.
“Were social workers regularly going out there? [Miya's] siblings were removed, why wasn't this child removed?" Ball said. "I thought this is exactly the kind of situation that the Ombudsman’s Office is supposed to prevent.”
Accountability and answers in these deaths could start in the Kentucky Auditor’s Office, where there is an office for oversight that's supposed to identify problematic patterns or practices in CPS investigations. It’s called the Office of the Ombudsman.
But right now, that office is sitting in limbo.
"There's a database and that database is what the Ombudsman always uses to look at whatever the situation is, to investigate, to find out if social workers are doing what they're supposed to, to find out if they are going out and checking on these children. And that database is called iTwist. It has always been used by the Ombudsman staff, you really can't investigate unless you have access to this database,” Ball said. “The cabinet has taken the position that they're not allowing us to have access to that database anymore."
Ball said the cabinet has been holding the records hostage since the Office of the Ombudsman moved from under the cabinet itself to the auditor's office. That move was prompted by Kentucky lawmakers, who passed the law in 2023.
"[Lawmakers] looked at the structure and said it really doesn't make sense to have that office housed at CHFS because it's about accountability, it's about investigations, it's about corrective actions and if you are housed in the office," she said. "There's just a conflict there, you're not really an outsider that can look at things independently."
The move went into effect in July of this year. Ball hired an Ombudsman, who then hired staff members. They have offices in the same building as the auditor, but they are not currently investigating anything.
"We're right now at an impasse. We're pushing really, really hard to get some kind of resolution because the problem is as long as we are at this impasse the public is not being served,” Ball said.
With more than a year to work out the kinks, Ball said her office shouldn't still be waiting.
"I am very eager to make sure everything is in line, that this will not happen again," she added.
Ball said she need access to the iTwist database and filed a lawsuit in Franklin Circuit Court earlier this week asking a judge to force CHFS to give them access to the full database.
"I do think there are problems. We've already laid out red flags, we've already laid out horrible results that we know occurred," she explained. "So, I need to have more info and I need to be able to look into this and then we can make some changes."
Those changes would come too late to save Serenity or Miya, but Ball hopes it can prevent yet another tragic child death.
