Report details final months of kids killed in East Salinas home.

In their short and pain-filled lives, Shaun and Delylah Tara made it onto the radar screens of the child welfare system multiple times, in multiple counties.

But what child welfare workers saw never rose to the level that the system could yank the kids from either place. Not in the chaotic home of their mother, who had to seek a restraining order against their father because he allegedly beat her, and not in the chaotic home of Tami Joy Huntsman, a cousin who took the children and their 9-year-old half-sister in after their mother was struck and killed by a car and their father returned to prison.

The malnourished children grew increasingly thin under Huntsman’s care. They had lice and insect bites. Huntsman’s home was cluttered and smelly and infested with fleas and lice, and cockroaches ran the walls even in daylight. The children were often left unsupervised.

One of the children reported being struck with a belt by an older member of the household. That person’s name is redacted in 140 pages of documents released by the Monterey County Department of Social Services in response to a Public Records Act request, but we believe it’s Gonzalo Curiel, Huntsman’s teenage companion.

When child welfare workers asked Huntsman about the belt, she assured them she didn’t know about it, didn’t approve and that it would stop.

Over the months detailed in those pages, county social services received five “referrals,” or reports that something was wrong in the home, and made dozens of attempts to check the children and intervene. In some of those visits, they succeeded in talking to Huntsman and offering her assistance. Social workers also talked to the children to ask if they were eating regularly and going to school. They asked if they were afraid.

The kids called Huntsman Aunt Tami, and they said Aunt Tami never hit them.

In the first four referrals, Social Services found allegations of general neglect inconclusive. Fleas, lice, roaches and clutter, too many mouths to feed and not enough food – hallmarks of poverty, and poverty isn’t a crime.

“There appeared to be no imminent safety threats at this time,” one report reads. In the absence of an imminent threat, there’s no mechanism for removing the kids from a home.

For two-and-a-half hours on Feb. 23, I talked to county Social Services Director Elliott Robinson about the documents, released along with a report from the state Department of Social Services on how the county department performed. The state found instances of reporting deficiencies and inadequate follow through, but also found the county outperforms other state social service agencies in how quickly it responds and reports.

Something went terribly awry in the home in September, but nobody is sure what. Between the end of August and end of September, social workers tried to contact Huntsman eight times, but she either didn’t answer the door or didn’t return messages left on her voicemail. A letter sent to her went unanswered.

There’s a growing sense of foreboding in that, because as we now know, the battered bodies of 3-year-old Delylah and 7-year-old Shaun were found in December, stuffed into bins and dumped in a storage unit. The 9-year-old was found, beaten and starved, in a car in Plumas County. Huntsman and Curiel have been charged with murdering the younger children and abusing the older one.

It’s the fifth referral, Robinson says, that’s the biggest problem. “What we did right was the investigative work of the social worker,” Robinson says. “The effort to follow through was right and the social work was strong, What we did wrong was [handling] the fifth referral and we need to put into place a system to prevent that.”

In that instance, Oct. 16, it was alleged that one of the children was being zip-tied to a bed and that Huntsman was having a sexual relationship with Curiel, then a minor. Social Services requested Salinas police conduct a health and welfare check that night, but nobody answered when police went to the home.

Neither social workers nor police had contact with the family again, until the bodies were found.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com. or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan