A Sacramento County jury on Friday awarded a former resident of a troubled Davis children’s group home $7.5 million in punitive damages, three days after awarding another $4.55 million for severe neglect the child endured by the home’s caregivers.
Plaintiff’s attorney Sean R. Laird said jurors in the civil action delivered a unanimous finding that EMQ FamiliesFirst Inc. engaged in malice, fraud and/or oppression as it found the company guilty of three counts: fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence.
EMQ FamiliesFirst provided housing, education and mental-health treatment to children ages 6 to 15 in Davis until allegations of frequent runaways and criminal activity — which generated more than 500 calls for police service over a six-month period — arose in 2013, ultimately leading to the facility’s closure.
A representative of the Campbell-based agency, which has since changed its name to Uplift Family Services, could not be reached for comment.
Last week’s verdicts culminate a six-week trial in Sacramento Superior Court, where Laird alleged that the boy, identified in court documents as “John Doe,” was physically and sexually assaulted while a resident of the 2100 Fifth St. group home in 2012 and 2013, starting when he was 11 years old.
Witnesses testified that multiple children were sexually assaulted over a two-month period after being allowed to walk off campus unsupervised, and that EMQ FamiliesFirst directors ignored subsequent orders from the state Department of Social Services to increase staffing levels.
In May 2013, Laird said, police responded to a citizen call of children fighting at a local park and identified the plaintiff, then 12, as part of the group.
FamiliesFirst employees were notified but indicated they were too short-staffed to retrieve the children, despite regulations requiring adequate staff to provide 24-hour care and supervision.
“The facility did nothing to notify the boy’s parents that their child was once again unsupervised off-campus in exceedingly dangerous circumstances,” Laird said.
“The boy’s father, a firefighter, and the boy’s mother, a nurse, would have been to Davis in a heartbeat had they known. They lived less than an hour away. They were never called.”
Laird also alleged that EMQ FamiliesFirst failed to provide the boy with the weekly individualized therapy he was supposed to receive and repeatedly was placed in the facility’s restrictive “quiet room,” even though it caused him additional distress.
“Though scheduled to ‘graduate’ the program and come home with just wraparound services, the boy never fully recovered and has never returned home,” Laird said.