She was his daughter.
There is a little more info in the below article. Apparently, they were in the process of adopting the children, though this article does still call Daniel an “adoptive father”.
https://www.oaoa.com/local-news/odessan-receives-18-years-in-young-girls-death/
Jayde and Jaylin’s biological mother relinquished her parental rights and designated the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services as managing conservator on Aug. 16, 2017, when Jaylin was 5 and Jayde 4. The department agreed to pursue adoption of the girls by the Schwarzs and the couple was named permanent managing conservators in November 2017.
At the time of Jaylin’s death, the couple were in the process of adopting the girls.
I guess “male permanent managing conservator in the process of adoption” is a bit of a mouthful.
And her younger sister was there with her when she died. Those poor little girls.
Not just there with her, she was being punished as well. She’s fortunate to have survived.
In many states, the foster system is badly governed, where foster parents are often running “puppy mills for kids” to get the money the state gives them for each head while neglecting to spend as much of that as possible on each and pocketing the stipends themselves. In other states, foster parents are closely vetted and supervised and the kids are clearly better off in foster care than with whoever their bio-parents were and whatever they did to have the state take the drastic measure of seizing their kids.
Can we guess which category Texas falls into?
Texas’s wider foster care system, while terrible, is being worked on. Compare,
First reported by The Texas Tribune last week, the 11-year-old boy, identified in court documents as O.R., died on Nov. 27, during a movie outing organized by the facility, which the state has permanently closed. He was one of 16 foster care children who died while in the state’s care between Nov. 2, 2023, to Feb. 5.
Contrast,
For two years now, the number of kids removed from their homes is down by around 50%.
The number of child deaths from abuse and neglect is also down for the third year in a row.
Carrie Wilcoxson, a former CPS investigator and current consultant for local families, said 2024 is the lowest she has ever seen at 99 child deaths.
~Max
Good news if true. But this bit:
Suggests that rather than repairing a broken foster system, they are simply winding it down.
Leaving more kids who should be removed to foster care still in the custody of their defective bio-parents. Rest assured nothing about the last two years has improved the quality or reduced the quantity of troubled bio-parents.
So net there’s probably more child harm going on, but now less of it can be blamed on state action. And the state inaction causing that harm increase is far more invisible and substantially impossible to track.
Now that’s freedumb for you.
If you stop testing, the number of cases will go down.
TFA does indicate some positive reforms to their system:
One of those was a law drafted in 2021 authored and sponsored by Rep. James Frank to change the legal definition of neglect.
The purpose was to weed out the very mild cases that could instead be solved by helping a family with financial or other resources, giving time to focus on more serious cases and not overwhelm the system.
… (later, in 2023)
For the first time, the law mandated training for investigators to provide available local resources to a family immediately, versus waiting three or four months for a case to transfer to the Family Based Safety Services department.
This seems like a positive reform - if there’s a situation where a family isn’t getting the financial help they qualify for when neglect is reported, get them those resources and services that may help their situation. And the CPS resources that are freed up by this can be dedicated to more difficult situations.
Though I would note that these CPS reforms aren’t part of the “foster care system” per se, and the main effect these changes would have on foster care is putting less kids into it.
And I would point one thing out:
Parents can have good days and bad days, parents generally want the best for their kids even if they don’t know how to get them that, and sometimes a little intervention can make a big difference in how a parent does the job and how the kid can turn out. The troubles that bio-parents have can be situational, and in some circumstances can be alleviated by the right kind of intervention at the right time. It seems to me (and by the evidence given in the story, take it with a grain of salt) that at least some of these reforms are the kinds that can have a positive impact, and they’re the sort of things we need to support as, at the very least, steps in the right direction.
A Greenville foster care facility linked to the death of an 11-year-old last November had a history of sexual misconduct and physical abuse, including organizing fights between children and restraining one boy so severely he was hospitalized, according to a federal report filed Tuesday.
See, the fact that there is a report and a news article means someone broke the first two rules of Fight Club. That’s why things went wrong.
My father likes to tell me that when he was in grade school, the nuns would give kids boxing gloves and send them outside to duke it out.
~Max
His nickname wasn’t Mad Max by any chance was it? 
No, but wow, today I learned there was a boxer called Mad Max who was killed in the ring.
~Max
Ouch. Sorry. I too had not known of that boxer and would never have knowingly tried to jest that your Dad was killed in a sporting accident. My sincere apologies if that was how you took it or that distressed you.
The intended joke was a play on the set-in-the-future dystopian Mel Gibson Mad Max / Thunderdome movie franchise versus the past dystopian madness of schools sending kids outdoors to duke it out, gloves or no. With the possibility that your Dad found he was good at that at school, a real berserker who earned the nickname Mad. And the third leg of the humor stool was the possibility that he was really a Max Senior and you were really a Max Junior.
It all made sense to me in the flash I made those connections. Explained out here and now, it was a pointless exercise in free-association. And no, I have not been drinking tonight.
Once again I’m sorry to have written such lameness in your direction.
Ah, I figured it was something about the movies but I’ve only seen the first one and didn’t make the connection.
~Max
Today I learned that Mad Max’s last name of Rockatansky was derived from Carl von Rokitansky, a pioneering 19th century pathologist.
George Miller, the director who conceived of and co-wrote Mad Max, was a medical doctor prior to being a filmmaker (and used income from his hospital residency to help fund the first film).
OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE NEWSOM
I’m gonna have to start a Pit thread just for him at this rate.
Lmao.
I wonder if he can get Trump on?
If I were Larry Elder I’d be waiting by the phone right now.
Newsom probably could debate Vance. He appears to have nothing better to do than argue with pseudonymous Twitter accounts all day.