Lawsuit: State Agency Ignored Red Flags Before Miami Mother Killed Children

After receiving a series of ominous 911 calls from Odette Joassaint, police arrived to find a horrific scene at her Little River apartment: the lifeless bodies of her children, three-year-old Jeffrey and five-year-old Laura, strangled in bed. Joassaint reportedly told the officers to take the children because she didn't "want them anymore." She admitted to tying them up and choking them with a thin red ribbon, saying she believed they were better off dead, according to police.

As Joassaint remains in state custody after a Miami court found her mentally incompetent to stand trial, Frantzy Belval, the children's father, has sued Florida's Department of Children and Families (DCF), accusing the agency of turning a blind eye to the increasingly dangerous household and leaving his son and daughter in Joassaint's care despite signs that she had violent tendencies, suffered delusions, and was behaving erratically.

The lawsuit claims that during a roughly five-year period in which DCF investigated Joassaint, the agency persistently ignored red flags that she was unstable. Child welfare agents received reports that she was "impulsive and violent" and could "harm the children." In one incident, she allegedly threatened to use Voodoo to retaliate against child protective services if they kept approaching her.

"Joassaint continued to go untreated for her mental health problems," the lawsuit alleges, "and DCF continued to turn a blind eye."

More than a dozen reports were made to the state's child abuse hotline about Joassaint's children over the years, according to a Miami Herald investigation, which helped bring the family's DCF case file to light.

Michael Levine, Belval's attorney, says the discovery process in the lawsuit will develop a more detailed picture of Joassaint's deterioration and how it was overlooked by the state agency.

"What's clear to us is something was terribly wrong in this house. There were two young children left in the care of someone who was not suitable to be caring for them," Levine tells New Times. "There were a ton of warning signs, and unfortunately those were not acted upon."

Belval also names Citrus Family Care Network, a nonprofit that manages DCF's child welfare cases in South Florida, as a defendant in the lawsuit.

In the aftermath of the April 2022 murders and the release of the family's case file, DCF issued a statement saying that the department has the "difficult responsibility of protecting Florida's children while only removing children from a home if a parent is unfit to care for their children or is likely to harm their children."

"In this case, DCF investigators were very involved with the family and recommended many services, but there was no history of physical child abuse to the two young children that would have led to their removal," the statement read.

DCF and Citrus declined to comment when reached by New Times about the lawsuit.

Joassaint, a native of Fond-des-Blancs in Haiti, came squarely on DCF's radar in November 2017 when she was charged with battery for biting Belval on the arm; according to the lawsuit, she was named the "primary aggressor" in a police report.

Belval got a restraining order and moved out of their shared home, but the two later reconciled and had a second child, Jeffrey, in February 2019. During Joassaint's pregnancy, Belval was arrested after being accused of punching her in the head. The charges were dropped, and the case was closed within a month of the arrest.

Months later, Joassaint moved into the Lotus House, a women's shelter in Miami, with her children.

By February 2020, according to the lawsuit, DCF should have been aware of Joassaint's lack of psychiatric evaluation and treatment. The agency received reports that the mother wasn't taking her psychiatric medication, was acting "bizarre and confused," and having delusional thoughts, according to DCF documents. The same month, the state agency investigated Joassaint after fielding a complaint that she might harm the children.

When Citrus tried to contact the Village, a local family crisis and treatment center, to coordinate services for Joassaint in March 2020, she refused.

"Despite the obvious signs of neglect exhibited by Joassaint towards her children, DCF, once again, did nothing to remove the children from Joassaint's care," the lawsuit claims.

In July 2021, DCF grew more concerned with Joassaint's parenting, citing her allegedly "violent and impulsive" behavior after receiving a complaint, agency records show. Child protective staff visited her home but noted the children did not appear to have bruises or injuries. The agency noted, "Odette says that she does not need services, nor do any of her children, and that she does not want to be bothered in connection with this report."

While investigators made attempts to interview her and her children to determine their safety in early 2022, Joassaint refused and shut the door on them. At the time, Joassaint was taking care of an older child from another relationship, a daughter of whom she had intermittent custody since 2020. According to DCF records, she "reported that the government messed up her child's brain with medications."

"Joassaint also threatened child protective investigators with Voodoo if they returned to Joassaint's home," the lawsuit alleges. "Despite DCF noting that Joassaint's behavior was 'highly concerning,' the department took no action to remove [the children] from Joassaint's care."

"DCF documents reveal that on February 14, 2022, Citrus remained involved in managing the Belval file and knew or should have known that Joassaint posed a danger to the children," the lawsuit claims.

Just weeks before the murders, Belval alleges, DCF reported that Joassaint was still resisting their efforts to investigate her family –– but instead of seeking a court order, investigators noted that Joassaint would receive a mental health evaluation at a later time due to her violent behavior.

"'Another time' would be too late," the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit says that the day after their murders, DCF obliviously entered a note for Joassaint's case stating that the toddlers were "in no present danger." On April 15, two days after the killing, a clinical coordinator with Citrus Health Network made a note in Joassaint's case to follow up to "see if the mother did a psych evaluation."

"Ironically, at the time of L.B. and J.B.'s death, DCF was still investigating Joassaint about an incident that was reported to the department three weeks prior," the lawsuit claims.

In the time leading up to the murders, Joassaint was taking care of the children on weekdays and Belval was seeing them on the weekends, according to Belval. DCF records show the agency looked into a March 2023 domestic dispute between the two parents that had allegedly turned violent.

In its prior statement, DCF pointed to its investigators' attempts to route Joassaint into support services, which she repeatedly resisted.

"You will find from these records that as DCF staff interacted with this family, they recommended many services that were ultimately refused, while those very services may have resulted in a much different outcome," DCF claimed.

According to the department, agents who visited Joassaint's home in the last three years did not observe injuries on the children that would indicate they were victims of abuse.

In May, Joassaint was found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial after undergoing a court-monitored psychiatric evaluation. She remains in the custody of DCF per court order.

Joassaint's children represented two of more than 230 child deaths in Florida last year, according to the Herald, which included incidents ranging from drownings to smothering incidents to shootings. In nearly half of those cases, the families, like Joassaint, had a history with the state's child welfare system.