Miami DCF director retires
The Miami regional director for the Department of Children and Families is stepping down from her job.
By Carol Marbin Miller
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com
The top Miami administrator of the state Department of Children and Families is retiring from her post, DCF officials announced Tuesday.
Jacqui Colyer, with more than two decades of experience in social services, was praised for her “passion and commitment,” said DCF Secretary David Wilkins in an email to staff.
“Jacqui’s ties to the community, the faith that others have in her personal commitment and her pure focus on helping others is a model for us all,” said Wilkins, who said Colyer will continue to work with DCF in other roles.
Colyer, who was responsible for overseeing child welfare, mental health and elder abuse operations in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, will be replaced by Esther Jacobo.
Jacobo, a former Miami-Dade prosecutor, has been the department’s deputy director of children’s legal services. At the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, she was chief of domestic crimes.
Colyer was appointed to the DCF job in 2009 by former DCF Secretary George Sheldon.
In a 2009 interview with the Miami Herald, she shared the painful story of her own struggles to help a troubled child. She had adopted 14-year-old Lucious Delegal, who had a history of juvenile delinquency, and helped turned his life around. But at age 28, distraught over a breakup with his girlfriend, he committed suicide.
“I resolved that I would do my best to make sure that children who were in the system would have the opportunity to just live normal lives,” she told the Herald.
As DCF’s regional chief, Colyer sought to keep families together.
Her staff emphasized working with troubled families in their homes rather than improving parenting skills after children were removed.
During her tenure, the number of children removed from their parents and placed in licensed foster care dropped by 35 percent.
DCF also developed 400 community centers, such as medical clinics, where struggling families could apply for food stamps. The centers made it easier for the poor to seek help at locations close to home.
Colyer said the agency worked with Miami’s early learning coalition to improve the quality of licensed child care centers and provide better staff training in detecting and preventing child abuse.
This year, Colyer and her staff came under intense scrutiny and criticism for their handling of a case involving 10-year-old Nubia Barahona, who authorities say was killed by her adoptive parents.
Nubia was found dead in the bed of her adoptive father’s pickup truck in Palm Beach County on Feb. 14. Her twin brother, Victor, was discovered doused with deadly chemicals and slouched in the cab. He survived.
Jorge Barahona and his wife, Carmen, were each charged by Miami-Dade police with first-degree murder, child abuse and neglect in connection with Nubia’s death and a yearlong reign of terror they are accused of inflicting on the twins.
The two are awaiting trial in jail — Carmen in Miami, Jorge in West Palm Beach, where he also was accused of child abuse and attempted murder for the injuries to Victor.
Last month, a Miami-Dade grand jury report found that DCF caseworkers and investigators gave the Barahona couple a "pass" every time concerns were raised that the couple was abusing and neglecting their adopted children.
So trusting was a DCF investigator that, on Feb. 10, when the agency received a report that twins Victor and Nubia were being tied up and locked in a bathtub, she left the Barahona home without ever seeing the two children, the report said. She later wrote that the twins were at little risk of harm.
In the aftermath of Nubia’s death, two DCF workers were fired, one resigned and five others — including Colyer — were reprimanded for their handling of the Barahona case.
In the case of Colyer, the reprimand was not for any specific actions on her part, but because the mistakes came from an operation she oversees, according to DCF officials.
