After deaths of 3 girls known to DCS last year, director says agency is moving in right direction

PHOENIX — The director of Arizona Department of Child Safety said her agency is working hard to prevent future tragedies after the deaths of three girls known to DCS last year.

“To contextualize some of this, these are horrible, horrible tragedies, but the best majority of what we do is really, really, really good work,” DCS Director Kathryn Ptak told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show on Thursday.

The agency has come under fire after the murders of 14-year-old Emily Pike, 16-year-old Zariah Dodd and 10-year-old Rebekah Baptiste.

“When you look statistically, we are moving in the right direction,” Ptak said. “Fatalities are actually down, both of children in our custody and families who have had history with us. … The number of children missing from care have been reduced by 40% since last September.”

Details about the three murdered girls known to DCS

Baptiste was found severely beaten and unconscious on July 27, 2025, in Holbrook. She died three days later at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. Her father and his girlfriend were arrested and accused of killing her, despite leaders at Baptiste’s school saying they filed a dozen abuse reports to DCS.

“As it relates to the Baptiste case, I’ve actually had a lot of conversations with the school and with their principal about how they share information with the department because we work in a system, right? And so we’re only as good as the information we receive,” Ptak said.

She added that DCS workers are people who are not infallible.

“We make the best decisions we can with the information we have,” Ptak said. “Law enforcement also did not find grounds to arrest the parents. The information that was being given wasn’t enough for us to take action.”

Pike, a 14-year-old member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, ran away from a Mesa group home last January. Her remains were found near Globe on Feb. 14, 2025. Those responsible for Pike’s murder have not been found.

“She was in one of our group homes; she was not in the custody of the department, and so we license all group homes in the state, but we don’t contract with all them,” Ptak said. “Other entities can contract, like the tribes or the federal government can contract with them to place children there.”

Like Pike, Dodd was living in a group home before she was murdered. Unlike Pike, she was in DCS custody.

Dodd was 22 weeks pregnant when she was murdered on July 5, 2025. Two men were arrested in connection with her murder — including Jurrell Davis, a 36-year-old man police identified as the father of her unborn daughter.

Three girls murdered: DCS director explains improvements being made

The murders of the three girls prompted calls for greater accountability and systemic improvements from leaders including Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republican state Sen. Carine Werner, who is writing legislation aimed at preventing further tragedies.

Ptak said DCS has been working closely with the DCS legislative oversight committee, which Werner is a part of.

“Because the decision-making made sense to the worker at the time, we debrief staff and we say, ‘What would have been helpful to you? What influenced your decision-making?'” Ptak said. “These findings are things that we presented to stakeholder groups, to the Legislature, and then the policymakers decide what changes need to be made.”

Werner has drafted three pieces of legislation to prevent future tragedies:

• Senate Bill 1127, which would require mandatory reporters to personally and immediately report suspected child abuse or neglect to the proper authorities and clarify when reports go to child safety officials versus law enforcement.
• Senate Bill 1172, which would require that if the department receives four or more abuse or neglect reports about the same caregiver within a year, the case must be assigned to a more experienced or specially trained investigator. It also requires the department to notify the court overseeing a child’s dependency case whenever the hotline receives a new allegation involving that child.
• Senate Bill 1174, which would require DCS hotline workers to pull up a child’s full history of prior calls, review all calls from the past 90 days, look back at the last three months of calls that didn’t meet reporting criteria and use that combined information when deciding whether a new allegation should be accepted as a formal DCS report.

Meanwhile, the agency is making internal changes, including reducing caseloads for DCS workers like those who investigated Baptiste’s family 12 times over 10 years.

“Most field supervisors have seven or eight director reports. We’re doing a pilot where they have five and seeing, ‘Are we getting better outcomes?'” Ptak explained. “One of the tools that we gave them right away after this (Baptiste’s death) happened was … a tracking tool that they can pull all of the cases that they’re supervising and it can show activity in the case.”

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