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This story is part of "When Home is the Danger," a multi-part series on how Texas is leaving families without ongoing support or monitoring and children in dangerous homes.
Until the end of October, Susie Wilson drove every few weeks the 90 minutes south from Abilene to a tiny speck of a place called Trickham — a ghost of a town with a population last registered as 12.
“This is the first time I have made the trip by myself. Usually somebody is with me, but I figured I’d brave it,” Wilson said after emerging from her car one morning last fall.
Finding the place, two hours east of Waco, takes a good map and keen eyesight.
It boasts no post office or street lights — simply a highway, a church, a historic marker and this cemetery. Farmland surrounds the area on all sides. A herd of cows stood under shade trees along the fence line, finding respite from the summer sun.
Wilson walked between the dirt rows and patches of long grass before she spotted what she was looking for.
“She’s right there … the one with all the little thingies on it,” Wilson said pointing to a marker.
The 69-year-old bent down to clean a headstone flush with the earth. Stuffed animals — smeared with dirt from rain — and other bobbles and tokens like glass beads lined the stone.
This was where Wilson’s granddaughter, HardiQuinn Hill, was buried after the nine-year-old died — emaciated and bruised — from abuse and neglect.
For the past two years, Wilson and others have tried to move HardiQuinn’s body closer to her family because of the distance and because of the people who buried her here.
Hunched over the grave, Wilson quickly rearranged the glass beads to obscure the hyphenated name emblazoned on it. “HardiQuinn Hill-Anderson.”
“The last name that shows is Anderson. That is not her last name. She was never adopted. She was never anything,” Wilson said.
She gestured toward the plots next to Hardi’s.
“Anderson was the — this family name,” she said, “which is the family of one of her two murderers.”
Wilson’s daughter — and Hardi’s mother — Dawn Hill-Flesner, 49, and her girlfriend Jamie Anderson, 44, pleaded guilty to the capital murder of the child in 2023. They are currently serving life sentences.
Hardi was one of more than 1,200 Texas children who died from abuse or neglect between 2018 and 2023.
TPR’s review of those child abuse and neglect fatalities found a child welfare system so intent on reducing its contact with troubled families that children have often been left with violent, unstable, drug-abusing parents — while authorities closed cases and walked away.
Hardi was one of more than 400 children in that span of time who died despite her family being investigated by the child welfare system two or more times, and one of more than 300 who had been investigated within a year of their deaths.
She was also one of two dozen children who had been given an Alternative Response (AR) within two years of their deaths. Alternative Response is a less invasive state strategy to respond to allegations of abuse and neglect, focused on allowing kids to remain in homes safely.
Based on TPR's review, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) — the department responsible for investigating abuse and neglect allegations — failed repeatedly to remove the girl and her brother from a home where they were emotionally abused and physically neglected, including seeing their food intake regularly restricted.
That failure began in small town Texas.
HardiQuinn’s mother stayed with Wilson after splitting from her wife but then took the children and moved in with her girlfriend in Brownwood. Hill-Flesner, recently separated from her wife, had dated Anderson for about six months when they moved in together.
There, Wilson said, her daughter’s behavior changed, and the woman started isolating herself and her two children from the rest of the family. Wilson described Anderson as very controlling, ensuring she was in the room when her daughter spoke to her, cancelling plans the children had to spend at Wilson’s home, and ultimately barring the grandmother from the children.
Wilson said she was aghast at the home her grandchildren were staying in.
The home used the Western False-Front architectural style and looked like a tiny, decrepit, Old West saloon.
When she saw it, the house lacked water, electricity thoughout the home, central heat, a stove and a refrigerator. A toilet sat on the front porch when Wilson arrived the first time. Her daughter said Anderson was renovating the home. But Wilson said the foundation was cracked and uneven inside it.
According to the state fatality report, someone contacted DFPS about the state of the home and the safety of the children.
The Statewide Intake call center assigned it to Alternative Response.
“That’s a scary call … they did not do their job here,” said Lindsey Dionne, a family law attorney.
Alternative Responses evaluate families, can offer basic needs assistance and make service referrals, but the case workers do not make abuse or neglect determinations.
By contrast, an investigation can include interviews with teachers and doctors, home visits, possible drug testing and numerous other services.
Many parents' defense attorneys, like Dionne, prefer the less intrusive methods.
“The first thing I do as a defense attorney is ask the department, when they call … I ask them, 'Is this an alternative response case?' " she said. “Because what that tells me is they don't care, and they're not going to do anything to my clients.”
Proponents of this strategy argue that the one-size-fits-all approach of the traditional system of investigations can make things worse, causing undue stress on families and impinging the ability of parents to raise their kids. Addressing systemic poverty and the needs of families before children are abused and neglected should be the goal, advocates argue.
“Research indicates that AR leads to improvements in family engagement and subsequent reductions of children entering into foster care,” said the website for Court Appointed Special Advocates, a national nonprofit dealing directly with children in foster care.
For attorneys TPR consulted, like Dionne, who represent both youth and parents, AR is a double-edged sword. They support it when representing parents but worry about it when advocating for a child at risk of harm.
Dionne — who began her legal career working as an attorney for DFPS — said assigning HardiQuinn’s case to AR was wrong. These allegations were too severe for anything other than a full investigation.
“It blows my mind that they were like, ‘this is appropriate to do this way,’ ” she added.
Dionne described appropriate cases for AR ranging from ones where no danger is indicated and children are old enough to make an outcry of abuse or neglect to nuisance cases, of which the department receives thousands a year. For example, cases akin to one where a disgruntled neighbor called the department because a teenager was outside their house past 10 p.m.
HardiQuinn and her brother made no "outcries" of abuse or neglect when interviewed by the AR worker at a park near their home. Their mother was present. The state fatality report said the case was then closed after the state employee spoke with the landlord, who assured them all the issues raised about the house were resolved.
But that wasn't true, and the "landlord" was Jamie Anderson, Hill-Flesner's live-in girlfriend.
The fact that DFPS didn't document the full relationship between the so-called landlord and the children, or didn't know it, was very telling to Dionne.
"It tells me that they were looking to close this case," she said. "They did not want to get involved with this family."
TPR confirmed the worker never entered the home, and the case was closed.
“Policy would require seeing the home to assess safety,” said Marissa Gonzales, director of communications for DFPS, in a statement.
Gonzales declined to comment on HardiQuinn’s case directly, citing confidentiality.
Dionne said she was concerned that DFPS used Alternative Response just to close cases, especially in out-of-the-way communities.
University of Michigan Law Professor Frank Vandervort told TPR that Alternative Response has been misused as a strategy across the country.
“That has just become a dumping ground. And it's, frankly, a way to manipulate the statistics so that nobody really knows how severe the problems are,” he said.
The use of Alternative Response instead of more serious investigations of abuse and neglect in Texas grew by 50% between 2018 and 2023, growing to more than 40,000 cases a year.
“I think you should be worried about it,” he said of the growth.
The state has increasingly relied on Alternative Response as an overwhelmed system drowns in case backlogs and high turnover rates.
The practice, which is sometimes called Differential Response, is used in more than 20 states, and the federal government has embraced aspects of it through the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act.
The strategies have been increasingly popular as child welfare systems have been criticized for their disproportionate impact on Black families and systems that make due process difficult and obscure. AR is, in part, intended to decrease these inequities, but data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation called into question those claims.
Texans Care for Children, a nonprofit advocating for youth issues in the state, argued the transition has been positive: “During FY 2022, 90% (37,765 cases) of AR cases were resolved without needing further, more intrusive actions like a traditional investigation or family preservation case, since its statewide rollout in March 2021.”
DFPS declined to answer many of TPR’s questions about the use of AR, but said it uses a consistent set of policies and cases are evaluated with standardized criteria by several teams.
But Vandervort said there was little evidence Alternative Response works, pointing to research he and others have conducted nationally calling into question AR advocate claims. They found significant errors in how the programs are evaluated, the wide variation in how AR is conducted and the lack of data on child safety.
“Children are dying because of differential response,” he said. “They have so muddied the numbers that it's gotten very difficult to even figure out what's going on in cases.”
Yet even when HardiQuinn Hill’s case escalated beyond AR into formal investigations, the system continued to fail her.
In the summer of 2021, two formal investigations were launched into HardiQuinn’s family after neighbors and law enforcement made allegations against Anderson and Hill-Flesner. The investigations were later combined.
The first involved Tim Corley, a neighbor of the family, who called DFPS concerned that the home continued to have no plumbing, and the family was disposing its feces in a dumpster next to his house.
Last summer, Corley stood beside the empty lot where the house once stood — and where HardiQuinn died. It was demolished last May.
Corley said DFPS told him the family was fine after he called twice. But he didn’t think they did their jobs.
“I don't think they did. I think that girl would be alive if they had done it because what I saw I don't see how anybody could miss it,” he said.
Corley nearly came to tears at times as he described how he tried to drop food off at the home and how aggressive the women who lived there were when he did. He talked about the sadness he saw in the children during the infrequent times he spotted them outside the house.
He also described the smell. The stench of human feces extended well past the boundaries of the front door, “so bad it would knock you down,” he told TPR.
The second investigation was launched into the family after HardiQuinn’s mother abandoned the girl at midnight in the cemetery in Trickham, where she is now buried.
It wasn’t the first time, Wilson said, relaying what she was told by HardiQuinn’s surviving brother.
But that time, the girl started walking.
Wilson retraced in a car the route her granddaughter would have taken — crossing a highway and into a small street lined with four houses, the only houses within sight.
The then 8-year-old walked about half a mile in pitch black darkness looking for help.
Wilson pointed to two houses, unsure which her granddaughter went to. A woman emerged from one and introduced herself as Vickie Rice.
She told Wilson she found her granddaughter that night. HardiQuinn was very dirty and very hungry.
“She ate everything that we had. We had made her a sandwich, and she ate it and said she was still hungry,” she said. “And we made her hot dogs, and she ate those, and she drank about three glasses of milk. But she said she was hungry, and we fed her.”
Rice said the girl told her that her mother left her in the cemetery because she was being bad. But Hill-Flesner showed up at the house and told the homeowner that the family had been playing hide and seek.
DFPS refused to send someone out to Rice’s house that night.
The Coleman County Sheriff pushed to prosecute HardiQuinn’s mother for child abandonment. Hill-Flesner was put on probation.
Before the case was adjudicated, DFPS closed its case and walked away, offering no services despite finding Hill-Flesner had neglectfully supervised her daughter.
DFPS did not respond to TPR's written questions asking why it did not continue to monitor the family.
“The department dropped the ball in a way I was not expecting to see at this level. …This is pretty terrible,” Dionne said. “[The child] tells them what's going on, and they don't listen.”
And still no one pushed to go into the house in Brownwood.
“Nobody went to that house until that child passed away. Why didn't they walk through the front door before? They didn't do their job, and I don't care how many times they want to say they did. They did not do their job,” Wilson added.
Ultimately, the abusive couple kept DFPS out of their home by saying they worried about COVID-19. Investigators met on two different occasions, often more than a week after a complaint had been lodged, at a nearby park or outside the home for interviews.
Finally, the department allowed the family to submit a video of the inside of the home. The video was a fake, shot in a home adjacent to theirs and intended to mislead, according to court records.
Wilson said there was no way anyone could have mistaken the inside represented on the video with the dimensions of the home.
After HardiQuinn died, the women called the police.
What police found when they did enter the home was one filled with human and animal feces. Trash and urine covered the mattress that HardiQuinn and her brother shared. Locks were on food cabinets.
While upstairs, where the adults lived, was a clean and air conditioned room, stocked with food.
“The upstairs looked like a completely different house than the downstairs,” said an investigator in a court document.
Two years after her granddaughter died, Wilson stood over a freshly dug grave in a different cemetery near Abilene.
Her hand rested gently on the white three-quarters sized coffin holding the remains of her 9-year-old granddaughter.
“So tiny,” she said to the casket.
She bent down and whispered to the child’s remains: “I’m so sorry. It took so long.”
Then she turned around to face a group of family members who showed up on a weekday morning to re-inter the child away from the memory of her abuse.
“Thank you for bringing her home,” said Sarah Flesner, who helped raise the girl before she and Hill-Flesner split up and the woman was cut off from the children.
She walked over to Wilson. The two women embraced and wept.
“It’s ok,” Wison said. “She’s home.”
This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.
