A lawsuit between the family of young Adrian Jones and the state of Kansas is finally being settled after years of pending litigation.
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The suit alleged the state’s child service agency neglected to investigate his living conditions ahead of his murder.
Here’s the sad story: Adrian’s remains were found in a pigsty in November 2015. At the time, the 7-year-old lived with his father and stepmother, Michael and Heather Jones, in Kansas City, according to an Associated Press report. In a lawsuit filed by Adrian’s biological mother, grandmother and sister, they claim they made multiple reports to Kansas Department of Children and Families requesting social workers remove the boy from the home.
More than 2,000 pages of records related to the case showed the three relocated often between Kansas and Missouri, making it “difficult” for social workers to keep up with them, the report says. Missouri records showed Adrian’s family contacted both the police and social workers about the well-being of the boy after several visits, but to no avail.
The report says the agency’s last physical contact with Adrian was four years before he was killed.
Prosecutors revealed during the couple’s trial that the calls reported Adrian suffering repeated abuse and torture, including being forced to sleep outside, shocked with a stung gun and ultimately starved to death. Most of the boy’s health decline was recorded on surveillance.
The suit alleges that the most social workers did to address the concerns was to make the Joneses sign a paper agreeing to stop tormenting the child.
“As it turned out, that signed paper might as well have been A.J.’s death warrant,” the suit reads.
The suit insisted Adrian’s death was completely avoidable — if only the people entitled to help him performed a proper investigation. The Joneses were sent to prison for murder, and on Wednesday, the State of Kansas was ordered to pay Adrian’s family a big bag.
Read more from The Associated Press:
Gov. Laura Kelly and top leaders of the Kansas Legislature approved the settlement during a brief public meeting Tuesday after conferring with state Attorney General Kris Kobach’s top deputy in private for 30 minutes.
Kansas Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Kansas City-area Democrat and one of the lawmakers who approved the settlement, said Wednesday that she believes the state faced “a lot of liability” legally for what happened.
But Kelly told reporters Wednesday at the Statehouse that the issue wasn’t the potential damages in a lawsuit but the litigation distracting it from “the mission at hand” of improving the child welfare system.
“It really had to do with wanting to get that settled and not spend time litigating in courts for what could be definitely months, maybe even years,” she said.
The approval of the settlement explains that the state department will pay half of the settlement and a special state fund dealing with damages will cover the other half.
The state only approved $1 million out of the $25 million Adrian’s family sought in punitive damages.
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