Arizona recently lost five children as a result of abuse. Children whose suffering, burns, broken bones, ripped off toenails, black eyes, food deprivation and rape had been reported, but whose cries for help never led to protection.
14-year-old Emily Pike. 16-year-old Zariah Dodd. 10-year-old Rebekah Baptiste. Two infants, a boy and girl, allegedly murdered by their own fathers. Five young lives stolen. Five futures erased.
Emily’s story is particularly haunting. She was a Native American resident of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation with a deep interest in art and plans to go to college. Instead, she was placed in a group home, more than 100 miles away from her home, by Tribal Social Services after reporting being sexually assaulted. A suspect was never arrested, the case was dropped, and Emily was removed from her home.
There are reports that Emily tried running away from the group home four times before she want missing, and on one occasion body camera footage of her pleading with officers not to take her back. She can be heard crying, “It’s not my home! They are punishing me!” and begging to go to her grandmother’s.
Emily’s dismembered remains were found off U.S. 60 near Globe on Feb. 14, 2025. As yet, no suspect has been identified.
Her death forces us to ask the most painful of questions: Would Emily still be alive if she had never been taken from her home in the first place? Did we fail to give her family the resources they needed to stay together? And once she entered the system, why wasn’t she protected in the placement meant to keep her safe?
Recently, Arizona lawmakers and advocates took those questions head-on in a Senate oversight committee. State Sen. Carine Werner asked attendees to leave the session with concrete steps to improve communication between tribes, law enforcement and the Department of Child Safety, and to explore ways to keep children safe when they run away from group homes.
The conversation led to consensus around several promising reforms:
Memorandums of Understanding between DCS and all tribes
Child-specific packets containing critical information that can be shared with police if a child runs away from a group home
Quarterly meetings between DCS and tribal leaders to strengthen trust and accountability
Regular visits from law enforcement to group homes, so children see officers as allies, not threats
Increased funding for group homes, which are stretched thin
Urgent concerns also were raised about the high rates of sexual assault and substance abuse in tribal communities, highlighting the need for culturally responsive solutions and accountability. Sen. Werner closed the session by promising to review progress at the next oversight meeting, determined to “chip away at the big list of issues in front of us.”
These are critical steps, but they are just the beginning. To truly protect Arizona’s children, we must also address systemic failures. Arizona’s child welfare system too often reacts after tragedy instead of preventing it. Reports pile up, but investigations don’t launch. Families struggle in silence until they break. Relatives step up to care for children but are treated like second-class foster parents. And even when a child enters the system, legal and financial barriers keep cases lingering, leaving kids in limbo.
One of the clearest failures is that the bar for intervention is set far too high. Right now, unless a report shows immediate and severe danger, cases are often screened out, even when there are repeated warnings or troubling patterns. In practice, this means the system waits until children are seriously hurt before it acts. That threshold must be lowered. Credible suspicions and multiple reports should trigger protection, not dismissal.
At the same time, we must not wait for families to break apart before offering help. Prevention programs funded through federal tools like the Family First Prevention Services Act exist, but Arizona must use them more fully to expand parenting support, mental health services, and substance use treatment. These upstream investments save lives and reduce the need for children to enter foster care at all.
When children cannot remain safely with their parents, relatives are often the first to step in. Yet today in Arizona, a grandmother who takes in her grandchild often receives less support than a stranger would. That is not only unjust, it undermines one of the most natural and healing options for children. The kinship licensing reforms of 2023 must be fully implemented so families who step up are treated fairly.
Access to justice is also essential. Last year, the federal government made clear that Arizona can use Title IV-E funding to provide legal counsel to children and parents. Attorneys help move cases more quickly and reduce the time kids spend in foster care. We must make that standard practice.
And finally, we cannot overlook the lifelines that children’s advocacy centers and multidisciplinary teams provide in the aftermath of abuse. These centers are often the first safe space a child enters after trauma. Their survival should not depend on fluctuating federal dollars. Arizona can and should stabilize their funding.
If we combine these deeper reforms with the important steps already underway in the legislature, Arizona can begin to rebuild a child protection system that acts before tragedy, not after. When a child is failed, it is not just one tragedy. It is a reflection of the cracks in the very foundation of how we protect our most vulnerable. Emily. Zariah. Rebekah. Two unnamed infants who never had a chance.
Arizona lawmakers, the responsibility now lies with you. Lower the thresholds. Strengthen oversight. Support families before crisis. Fund kinship care. Ensure children have advocates in court. Stabilize our children’s advocacy centers.
The children we lost cannot be brought back. But we can honor them by refusing to let another report go unanswered.
Reform is not optional. In Arizona, it is a moral imperative.
Editor’s note: Michael Medoro is chief operating officer and chief of staff at Childhelp, a Scottsdale-based national nonprofit founded in 1959. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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