In Oregon, there is a place where chil- dren die at more than three times the statewide average. A place where ba- sic protections, such as seat belt use for kids, are ignored. A place where children die anonymously in a secre- tive welfare system. A state deaths database helped us find it. But it took more than a year of report- ing by our team, including reporters Kim Christensen and Julie Sullivan and photographer Rob Finch, to under- stand why the deaths continued with no public outcry, and why public offi- cials were not being held accountable.
The place is the Warm Springs Reser- vation, where the U.S. government forced three tribes to relocate in the 19th cen- tury. Today, about 3,800 people live on the 1,000 square mile reservation in the central Oregon desert. About half the residents are age 19 or under. As with many reservations, poverty is a big problem, and Warm Springs offi- cials say their community struggles with the loss of history and culture and with a continuing tide of fractured families, alcohol abuse and domestic violence.
We soon found, however, that many people in Warm Springs did not see their circumstances as hopeless. Instead, they shared stories of tragedy and loss to show many child deaths could have been prevented and that tribal leaders had too often turned a blind eye to the problem. By operating successful businesses, the Warm Springs tribes have been more pros- perous than tribes at other reservations. Many people pointed us to reforms tribal leaders have declined to take, even though they have proven to save children's lives elsewhere.
What's more, we found the secrecy surrounding tribal government includ- ing a censored newspaper - meant that those leaders had never been held accountable. Here is what we found: Traffic accidents killed kids more than any other cause, but only four of 10 Warm Springs infants and toddlers are properly belted in. Tribal police sporadi- cally enforced seat belt and child re- straint laws and ranked the problem as a low priority.
Five children had died violently af- ter the tribal welfare system allowed them to remain with dangerous adults. The cases included two un- solved child killings that Warm Springs residents had not been told about until our series appeared. The tribes' adolescent alcohol and drug programs fail at twice the rate of other programs in Oregon, and tribal leaders have ignored counselors' pleas for improvements that have been proven to work on other reservations.
The tribal council has cut programs that help children even as it has con- tinued to spend $147,000 annually on a luxury skybox at Portland's Rose Garden sports arena. The response to the series, "A Place Where Children Die," was swift. (You can read the series online at www.oregonlive.com/ special/warmsprings). Shaken by our findings, tribal leaders launched a "top to bottom" review of tribal programs to reduce child death rates and are examining every child death case, something they had not done before.
They also ordered police to follow a zero- tolerance policy for anyone allowing a child to ride unsecured in a car. Meanwhile, the U.S. Indian Health Ser- vice took the extraordinary step of form- ing its own watchdog team to make sure tribal child-welfare officials acted quickly on neglect and abuse complaints. The story began in the summer of 2000, when 4-year-old Andres Saragos died of heat exhaustion after his tribal court-appointed guardian locked him in a car for nine hours under a pounding July sun.
The Oregonian's investiga- tion at the time, written by Courtenay Thompson, found the Warm Springs child welfare authorities sometimes ig- nored reports of neglect and abuse. Two years later, the newspaper de- cided to go back to see if tribal lead- ers' promises to improve child welfare had been fulfilled. At the outset, I wanted to find out just how deadly a place Warm Springs was for kids. The task seemed impossible.
Tribal records are confidential and not sub- ject to any state or federal disclosure laws. That meant the traditional report- ing avenues, such as court files, po- lice reports and budget records, were closed to us. We soon found this veil of secrecy isn't just for outsiders; the se- crecy works against members of the Warm Springs tribes, too. Even parents who had lost kids to violent deaths had been kept in the dark by tribal police.
After a lot of phone calls, I discovered the state of Oregon kept a database of every death in the state going back more than 20 years. State officials had always refused the newspaper's requests for the data, citing confidentiality concerns. I eventually won access to the data - about 700,000 records of Oregon deaths over a 20-year period - by ne- gotiating a way to obscure the exact dates of death, allowing the decedents to remain anonymous.
In turn we got key details, such as how old they were, how they died and where they lived, including county and ZIP code. The ZIP code was key: The entire Warm Springs reservation has a unique ZIP. So we could calculate with precision, how many Warm Springs children had died and what had killed them. But were the death rates high? I used Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel to calculate and compare mor- tality rates for Warm Springs kids ages 19 and under to those across Oregon.
I did it the same way state and federal officials set mortality rates: by calcu- lating the number of deaths per 100,000 residents. (For exact methods on calculating mor- tality rates and making sure they are sta- tistically sound, I used formulas pub- lished each year by the state of Oregon's Center for Health Statistics and Vital Records. You can find a straightforward explanation of how the formulas work in the appendix of the center's annual re- ports, located at www.dhs.state.or.us/ publichealth/chs/vol2.cfm.) To calculate a death rate, you need the number of deaths within a certain age group, and population for the same age group, for a specific period of time.
The database gave us the number of deaths. I obtained population data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder (http://factfinder.census.gov) Web site. Using Excel, I lined up the number of Oregon children's deaths by ZIP codes and counties with the populations. When I ran the numbers, no place in Oregon had a child death rate that came close to that in Warm Springs. We had to take special care, because the U.S.
Census Bureau typically undercounts residents of Indian reservations. Warm Springs of- ficials said their own counts of the res- ervation population showed that the U.S. Census usually missed between 10 percent and 15 percent of residents. To be safe, we increased the Census tally of Warm Springs by 25 percent twice the estimated undercount. This adjustment lowered the mortality rate for Warm Springs.
But it didn't matter: Even with this conservative population estimate, we found that Warm Springs children die at a rate 3.4 times those in Oregon. We could now call Warm Springs the deadliest place for kids in Oregon. But my reporting had shown that, tragi- cally, mortality rates for Native Ameri- can children are higher than those for the United States as a whole. I worked with Indian Health Service statisticians for a year and found Warm Springs' child mortality rates were nearly double those for Native Americans nationwide.
I ran my calculations past state vital records officials and IHS statisticians to make sure they were statistically sound. The numbers checked out. To understand why child death rates were so high at Warm Springs, we catalogued 20 years' worth of the tribal newspaper, the Spilyay Tymoo, for key players, major events and deaths. Again, I used Excel to organize the in- formation by name, age of death, cause of death and other key informa- tion we gleaned from obituaries.
We also collected documents wherever we could: the tribes' grant proposals to; state and federal agencies; state alco- hol treatment reports on Warm Springs; and state police highway death investi- gations. We obtained the approval of parents to release children's medical records, which often included police and autopsy reports. The most important reporting we did was spending time with the people of Warm Springs.
We conducted more than 300 interviews with people in Warm Springs, including teachers, physicians, fire and rescue crews, po- lice officers, and tribal judges and pros- ecutors. Rather than finding a closed society, we found people eager to talk about their lives and their struggles to keep kids safe. Many shared stories of their lives and tragedies faced by their families. Warm Springs residents allowed us to observe elk hunts, sacred ceremonies, school activities and fu- nerals, and even take part in a tradi- tional sweat lodge ritual.
We found there was no substitute for the time we devoted: The people at Warm Springs opened up when they saw we wanted to shed light on the solutions that had been ignored by tribal leaders. Their stories - not the data - became the heart of our series. Contact Brent Walth by e-mail at brentwalth@news.oregonian.com