PROVIDENCE — The state began to fail “David T.” as soon as he entered foster care at age 2, according to a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed by the state child advocate last week.

Despite “clear indications” that David had been sexually abused while in his mother’s care, the state Department of Children, Youth and Families failed to ensure he received a sexual-abuse evaluation or appropriate treatment, the suit claims.

The state did find a foster mother for David, and he grew extremely close to “Mommy Mary” over the next two years. But when she was unable to continue caring for him, the state sent David to a shelter at age 4.

After three months in the shelter, David was sent to Michigan to live with an aunt who expressed interest in adopting him. But the aunt ran into “housing problems and other difficulties,” and the state ended up bringing David back to the shelter.

“When he arrived there, he refused to get out of the car and pleaded with the caseworker to bring him back to ‘Mommy Mary,’ ” the suit states. “Shelter staff approached the car and told 4-year-old David, ‘The rules here have not changed.’ David silently got out of the care and walked into the shelter.”

He would never live in a home again.

David is one of 10 young plaintiffs whose pseudonyms are on the U.S. District Court lawsuit that State Child Advocate Jametta O. Alston filed against Governor Carcieri and other state officials Thursday. Alston is pursing class-action status on behalf of the 3,000 children now in state custody, and the litigation is backed by a national watchdog group called Children’s Rights.

Carcieri issued a news release Friday, saying he was “extremely concerned” about the allegations but that some of the information in the lawsuit “may be outdated and fails to take into account the reforms that have been made under Department of Children, Youth and Families Director Patricia Martinez.” Carcieri said the state has given DCYF caseworkers greater flexibility in work schedules and is in the process of hiring 10 new caseworkers.

Martinez, who is named as a defendant, said Friday that the state may pursue criminal charges and other disciplinary action against any state workers, foster parents and foster homes that failed to protect children from the abuse alleged in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit says another aunt expressed interest in caring for David, but DCYF failed to pursue that option, and his “emotional state” kept declining. When he was 6, the state put David in a psychiatric hospital for five months and then sent him to a residential treatment facility, where he was sexually abused by a roommate and began to wet his bed almost every night, the suit states.

In 2003, David was moved to another institution, where he was restrained by staff members 105 times over a three-month period. He stayed there three years, and, at age 10, the state declared David “too damaged for placement.”

The state did allow adoption recruitment staff to meet David in 2004, eight years after it registered him for adoption, but officials decided adoption would be inappropriate for him. In 2006, David moved to an out-of-state treatment facility where he “engaged in sexual self-mutilation” and gained more than 50 pounds.

Today, at age 13, David lives in an institution in Massachusetts, where he has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, mild mental retardation and “environmental influences, including his history of neglect and his multiple placements,” the suit states.

“David entered care when he was only 2 years old, and finding him a permanent, loving family was completely feasible,” the lawsuit says. Instead, “As a direct result of defendants’ actions and inactions, David has been and continues to be irreparably harmed.”

LISA GUILLETTE, executive director of the Rhode Island Foster Parents Association, said she cried while reading about David and the other foster children in the lawsuit.

“The summaries of the named plaintiffs and the types of failures they document are, to me, indicative of a systemic breakdown,” she said. “While we don’t usually see cases that horrible, we have seen a breakdown in staffing and oversight that could lead to those conditions.”

The lawsuit begins by recounting how a 3-year-old boy, Thomas “T.J.” Wright, was beaten to death in a foster home in Woonsocket in 2004. Guillette said, “I don’t want to see another T.J. Wright. I don’t want to see another child die, and we are in danger of that.”

The litigation is “long overdue,” Guillette said, praising Alston for being “courageous” enough to sue the governor who appointed her.

Guillette said the system’s problems have been developing over the course of successive administrations, and the goal of the litigation is to find solutions — not to point fingers. But, she said, the crisis has been mounting for years and it seemed to grow worse during this year’s budget crisis as the General Assembly cut funds and Carcieri talked about laying off 1,000 state workers. “We are not moving in the direction of solving problems,” she said.

“If people are outraged by this,” Guillette said, “they bear some responsibility because these are all our kids. We need people who are willing to serve as foster parents or as mentors or as CASA [Court Appointed Special Advocate] volunteers.”

Guillette’s association has a state contract to support foster parents and help them navigate the DCYF system. “We try to defend our work, but at some point the breakdowns in our system are not defensible,” she said.

THE LAWSUIT CITES data collected from states by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying that in five of the six years between 2000 and 2005, Rhode Island had “the single highest rate of substantiated child abuse or neglect occurring to children in foster care among all states that reported data.” And those rates “far exceeded benchmarks set by the federal government.”

In the 2004 federal fiscal year, 1.32 percent of foster children in Rhode Island were maltreated, which was twice the federal benchmark of 0.57 percent. In federal fiscal year 2005, the rate of maltreatment in Rhode Island rose to 1.59 percent, the suit says, and since then the federal benchmark has fallen to 0.32 percent.

Those numbers had apparently never been widely reported before in Rhode Island, but state officials certainly were aware of them because they provided the data to the federal government, said Susan Lambiase, associate director of Children’s Rights, a nonprofit legal organization based in New York City.

Lambiase noted Rhode Island’s abuse and neglect rates were so high that children in state foster care were more likely to be maltreated than children in the general population. “It’s outrageous,” she said. “They are getting removed from their parents because the state is saying their parents are unable to care for them, and then the state is even less able to care for them and is damaging them worse.”

The suit attributes that abuse and neglect to a variety of shortcomings in the child-welfare system. For example, the suit says, “DCYF assigns such large caseloads to its social workers that they are unable to make the regular face-to-face visits to plaintiff children that are essential to ensuring that these children are safe.”

Last year, Alston, the state child advocate, issued a report saying DCYF had failed to make some of the most important changes that a review panel called for after T.J. Wright’s death. Most significantly, she said the state had failed to hold caseloads to the recommended average of 14 families per caseworker. At that time, caseloads stood as high as 20.04 families per caseworker in the region of the state where T.J. died.

On Friday, Alston said the most recent figures from a couple of weeks ago show caseloads are still averaging 18 to 25 families, and she emphasized that families often have more than one child.

The lawsuit cited other problems, saying, “DCYF has so few foster homes that it places children in homes without licenses, depriving them of basic protections of foster parent background checks and training.” And, the suit says, “Instead of appropriately investigating and addressing abuse or neglect in foster placements, DCYF continues to rely on foster care settings known to pose a risk of harm to children.”

Guillette said the state could help retain and recruit foster parents by increasing payments for the room and board of foster children. She said Rhode Island’s “foster care board rates” are $14.39 per day for children from birth through age 3; $13.64 per day for age 4 to 11; and $15.79 per day for age 12 and above. By comparison, the rates in Massachusetts are $17.10, $17.96 and $18.59, and the rates in Connecticut are $24.85, $25.22 and $27.42, she said.

Each year, a bill is introduced to raise the rates in Rhode Island, and each year the bill dies in committee, Guillette said.

Guillette said those payments cover just a portion of child-care expenses, so people don’t get into foster care to “make a quick dime.” But increasing the rates would be especially helpful in retaining foster parents related to the children they care for, she said, citing the example of “a grandmother who’s retired, on fixed income, and her daughter develops a drug problem and she needs to step up to the plate to care for her grandchild.”

Lambiase, of Children’s Rights, said, “The bottom line is these are the most vulnerable, underprivileged children in your state. They don’t vote. They don’t have a strong, powerful lobby to protect their interests. They don’t even have their parents. The state is their parents, and the state is failing them.”

efitzpat@projo.com