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This story was co-published with the California Sunday Magazine.

On The morning of June 6, 2013, Davis Police Department squad cars rolled up to the group home at 2100 Fifth Street. More than a dozen officers in bulletproof vests made their way past the facilitys memorial planter bearing painted handprints of children. They were no strangers to the location.

For more than a year, officers had been grappling with problems at the home, one of Californias largest residential facilities for emotionally damaged kids. They had repeatedly returned runaways. They had coaxed suicidal teens off rooftops. There were reports of fights, drug use, children having sex with adults. In a single week in the spring, Davis police responded to 74 calls. On May 29, though, there had been a report of a different order: An 11-year-old girl at the home claimed that boys from the facility had raped her. Two boys had been arrested. After months of unraveling, the home had come undone.

Sule Anibaba worked as a counselor at the Davis home for five years, emerging both damaged and ashamed.

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Over the next several days, the campus began to empty out as parents turned up, searching for their children and for answers about what had happened to them. Social workers scrambled to find alternate placements, sending some kids to emergency shelters. Others remained in dormitory rooms, where police tracked them down to ask a long-overdue question: Do you feel safe? State officials opened the inevitable investigation, interrogating the staff and combing through records.

In the months leading up to the raid, neither the police nor the Department of Social Services, the state agency responsible for regulating group homes, had prevented the disaster at FamiliesFirst. They didnt step in that spring when there were reports of children living in a homeless encampment in a nearby park. They didnt intervene when a 9-year-old girl, new to the home, wound up half naked on the doorstep of a house in Davis and was later detoxed in a hospital emergency room. A Department of Social Services investigator visited the campus repeatedly in the weeks before the police raid, but the agency never curbed the turmoil.

The breakdown at FamiliesFirst has helped spur California to rethink how it cares for its most troubled children, a question that for decades has confounded not just the state but the country. A panel of experts, officials, care providers, and families has generated a raft of reforms it hopes will soon become law. Over the years, the places that used to be repositories for such childrenstate psychiatric hospitals and juvenile detention centershave been shuttered or scaled back, usually in the wake of their own scandals. Group homes, too, have increasingly been deemed a failed model, yet year after year vulnerable and volatile California children remain housed in them for lack of a better option.

The Davis facility, one of Californias roughly 1,000 group homes, closed for good in September 2013. Spelled out in police records and Department of Social Services files, in budgets and in the recollections of staffers, is the story of negligent stewardship and a state agencys flawed oversight. Its a story that continues to haunt those it touched.

Alex Barschat-Li spent the first days of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, California. Born on March 12, 1999, he experienced such severe breathing difficulties that his mother, Wendy, worried that he might not survive. She was 29, supporting herself and her husband on a medical assistants salary.

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