At that hearing, one of the older children mentioned the twins, but nothing else was said about them, records show.
And it was not until July 29, 2015 — 59 days after the initial complaint was lodged — that a Miami DCF investigator finally showed up at Dufrene’s home in Overtown. She saw Dufrene’s middle child, a 2-year-old girl, who “was neat and tidy” and “had no marks or bruises.”
While DCF Miami investigator Allison Skeete interviewed Dufrene and went into the home, her report makes no mention of Angela or her brother.
Dufrene and her boyfriend denied abusing the children. That very same day, the investigation was officially closed. A Broward Sheriff’s Office investigator found “no safety concerns for the children at this time,” according to a report.
Throughout the investigation, nobody indicated they knew Dufrene was facing eviction.
DCF has now concluded that the whole investigation was badly botched. Investigators in the Miami DCF office and at the Broward Sheriff’s Office, which conducts abuse probes under contract in that county, “did not appear to communicate with each other,” the report said. They did not follow up on leads, including one that, in hindsight, now appears chilling.
That June, an investigator knocked on the door of Dufrene’s mother in Homestead. Inside the home, she heard a baby crying. Nobody answered the door. “Contact was never made with anyone inside the home,” DCF’s analysis said, and the child abuse investigation was closed without anyone ever returning.
By the end of 2015, Dufrene had finally been booted from her Overtown apartment. The family did not appear on the DCF radar again until June 5, 2016, when the abuse hotline was told that one of her children had been sexually molested by her mother’s boyfriend, who denied the claim.
A DCF investigator visited Dufrene’s home to talk to her and the daughter. The case was closed that day “with the twins never being seen, assessed, or added to the investigation,” DCF later wrote.
That probe was ongoing on July 20 when someone called DCF to report that Dufrene’s kids, who were visiting their mother on the weekends, had no food where they were now living, a Little River apartment, and were being left alone in a hot hallway as punishment.
DCF investigator Latasha Legister arrived at the building, where the landlord confirmed that the refrigerator and pantry had no food. What he said next sent investigators and police officers scrambling: “He knew nothing about a
fifth child.”
When Legister interviewed Dufrene, she at first insisted she had only four children. Legister confronted her with birth certificates. Dufrene relented, insisting that Angela was with her birth father, a man named Henry Mathieu.
But almost immediately, Dufrene’s behavior was suspicious, DCF reports show. She gave Legister an incorrect phone number for the man, and pretended to call him as they drove around North Miami-Dade looking for his purported address.
After they returned to a DCF office building in Opa-locka, Dufrene then claimed Angela was in the care of Mathieu’s mother, who told investigators that was a lie.
When a mom’s lies unraveled and authorities realized the awful truth
