A 10-year-old girl named Marissa Kennedy and a four-year-old girl named Kendall Chick,

died within three months of each other in Maine last winter, both as a result of child abuse,

according to law enforcement.

Both of those girls have been placed in Maine's foster care system.

The Maine Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Child and Family Services,

in the agency's own words,

seeks safety, well-being, and permanent homes for children, working with professionalism,

and respecting the dignity of all families. The agency says they work to keep children safe

and to guide families in creating safe homes for children. Clearly, this wasn't the case

at least twice last winter.

So locally in Maine, there's been intense media focus on DHS over the last few months. The

governor has been weighing in. The state's legislature has snapped into action in the last few weeks,

but those deaths, those of Marissa Kennedy and Kendall Chick, were not the first, but only the most recent,

over the last 20 years in Maine, in cases where that office has come under scrutiny.

And in 2011, that office became involved with Ayla Reynolds, two months before she disappeared

and was never seen again.

This is Frozen Truth episode 11.

I'm Scott Fuller.

Writer Terilyn Simpson is my guest on this episode.

She was the author of an article covering the state's involvement

with the Aila Reynolds' disappearance, entitled The Taking of Aila Reynolds. You can find a link

to that article in the show notes for this episode at frozen truthpodcast.com. I extensively

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