Welcome to Rumbel Strip Vermont. I'm Erica Heilman. On the afternoon of Friday, August 7th, 2015,

Lara Sobel, caseworker at the Department of Children and Families, was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barry, Vermont.

She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the

month before. In the aftermath of this killing there was a

rash of truly disturbing commentary in social media from people expressing

sympathy with Lara's killer. People who look on DCF case workers as homewreckers, baby snatchers.

But there's a whole different contingent that believes DCF doesn't intervene in families enough.

In 2014, there was a string of child deaths in Vermont, children in families involved with DCF.

These deaths prompted intense anger

and at least four investigations into the department.

DCF flares up in the news, then the news subsides.

We hear from the governor, we hear from the DCF commissioner, from legislators and journalists

and commentators, but the people we never hear from legislators and

the journalists are the people we never hear from

are the people who actually do the work.

And this is by design.

The work that DCF caseworkers do is intensely private, and in order to protect the privacy of parents and children,

caseworkers are not allowed to talk publicly about their cases.

And in a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable

problems in our state. These are the problems and the stories that DCF

caseworkers live with every day. In this show you'll hear from three DCF

caseworkers from three different areas of Vermont.

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