Social worker who tried to save baby Phoenix honored as ‘Child Protector of Year’

Matthew Kraft’s voice shook as he accepted the “Child Protector of the Year Award” during a San Jose luncheon Friday.

“It’s actually really difficult for me to accept this award,” the Santa Clara County social worker said, “given what came before it, and the tragedy that led to it.”

Kraft had tried to save Baby Phoenix Castro, sounding the alarm that the infant wouldn’t be safe going home from the hospital with her drug-abusing parents. They had done little to regain two older children, who been taken away after being “severely neglected,” and Kraft wrote a dire letter to his superiors that Phoenix could die if sent home from the hospital after her birth in February 2023.

Leaders of the county’s child welfare agency, however, then newly-committed to a policy that would prove more focused on keeping families together than keeping children safe, essentially ignored Kraft’s warning. Three months later, Phoenix died of a fentanyl overdose. Her mother, Emily De La Cerda, died of a fentanyl overdose months later. Her father, David Castro, is facing felony child endangerment charges.

Kraft’s warnings before Phoenix died and the lack of accountability by the leaders of the Department of Family and Children’s Services — brought to light by The Mercury News beginning in late 2023 — helped lead to an overhaul of the agency, which is still underway, and the ultimate resignation in late December of its director, Damion Wright.

At special hearings organized by Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas and her former colleague Cindy Chavez, Kraft and dozens of colleagues demanded reforms and a rebalancing of a system that left too many children in dangerous homes.

“He symbolized, as far as I’m concerned, the profiles in courage at the agency who are willing to speak to power to express their concerns about the safety of children,” said Steve Baron, a member of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council, the county commission that honored Kraft.

The county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services had shifted its policies in 2021, when then-agency Director Dan Little, who has since been promoted to lead the county’s Department of Social Services, sent an email to the staff. It explained that in the interests of “healing the historical underlying disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system,” that social workers would work with county lawyers “to prevent the need for removal of children from their homes.”

Instead, the letter said, they would focus on healing families with services like parenting classes and drug treatment programs.

What one of two state investigations would determine over the past two years, however, was that “social workers have been taught to be fearful of removing children from their homes, even when there is a safety risk, because the county may be sued, or children may be placed in an unfit foster home,” a July 2024 report found.

The state investigations also found that in more than half the cases they reviewed, between July 2022 and March 2024, no safety plans were created for parents that could have helped keep children safe.

Over the past year, the county’s child welfare agency has made numerous changes, including subjecting parents of babies born with drugs in their system, like baby Phoenix, to “rigorous investigations” and social workers have undergone new training to better implement and monitor safety plans for families where children are allowed to remain in their homes.

Ever since Phoenix’s death, Kraft has been plagued with nightmares “of me screaming or crying,” he said, “and no one hearing.” And with Little and Wright taking little responsibility for the policies that played a role in Phoenix’s death, Kraft says he has felt an excruciating burden of guilt over whether he could have done more.

“I don’t like feeling this strongly about it this long after,” Kraft said, “but I do.”

Responding to a request from Supervisor Sylvia Arenas to reflect on his failures in leadership over baby Phoenix’s death, Little last October wrote in a letter that he and the agency’s leadership team should have ensured that “that staff were laser focused on effective safety planning and monitoring” and that they should have ensured “in all cases where families were unable to keep their child safe, removal of the child must occur.”

Kraft sought a desk job with the county in which he wouldn’t have to work with children, and recently was named the LGBT coordinator for teenagers aging out of the child welfare system.

Baron, the retired director of the county’s Family Court Services, was also honored Friday with the “angel award” as a “fierce advocate for the safety of children” for his more than 20 years of service to children. He, too, was choked up on stage.

“I’m accepting this award in memory of the child, Phoenix Castro, whose name and lessons learned from her for shortened life will never be forgotten in this county,” he said.

He thanked those who help vulnerable children — from social workers and public health nurses to law enforcement and domestic violence victim advocates — for their work to “transform the traumatic tragedy of Phoenix Castro into meaningful, constructive and durable change” to “focus on child safety at every stage in the process and in all of our work.”

Alex Lesniak, a social worker and union steward, said that many social workers still have ambiguous feelings about what it took for Kraft to be honored Friday.

“But I also think it’s important that people can see that speaking up, stepping up is the right thing to do,” Lesniak said. “And I really hope that this is more about the department and the county listening to social workers and when they bring these strong concerns up, to take them seriously and not to focus so much on liability, but instead on what are we actually doing to keep children and families safe — because the reason that we’re here honoring him is because how that process went wrong, and how do we not let this happen again.”