http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-mi-boysdeath-lawsui,0,7027514.story

The mother, Rebecca Jasinski of Saginaw County, lost her son Nicholas Braman, who was one of the victims of a murder-suicide engineered by his abusive father, Oliver Braman. The father killed himself, his wife and his son Nicholas by carbon monoxide poisoning about three years ago. 

In her lawsuit, filed in federal court in Grand Rapids, Jasinski charges that her son’s life could have been saved if Michigan officials had taken the boy away from his father’s home in Montcalm County.  

The murder-suicide happened about a month after the Montcalm County prosecutor’s office recommended that the state remove Nicholas from his father’s home. And just a few days before the deaths, Braman didn’t appear in court to be sentenced for child abuse charges. He had been convicted of putting a cattle prod to his two other sons to punish them.

I think that transgression alone should have made Michigan child welfare workers rescue Nicholas from his sick father’s home. And in fact the Michigan Department of Human Services’s watchdog group, the Office of Children’s Ombudsman, determined that the state should have taken Nicholas once Braman was convicted of abusing the other siblings.

The negligence suit names seven people, present or past employees of the department and its Child Protective Services unit, and asks for unspecified damages greater than $75,000. That’s the threshold for a civil case to be heard in federal court.