ILL-SUITED

IS THE wrongful-death lawsuit against DHS by the "parents" of Danieal Kelly the most jaw-dropping, what-the-bleep outrage imaginable, even in a town as tough as this one?

We thought so . . . until we found out that over the past 16 years, 93 parties have preceded the Kellys in suits against DHS, mostly filed by parents and guardians. Thirteen of those cases have been related to deaths of children.

The city has paid out nearly $4 million in these suits. The tiny solace in this number is the relatively small amount that represents for each case. But still.

We are scratching our heads a bit over how to interpret these facts: Do these suits speak to just how troubled DHS has been, for a long time?

Or does it speak to something fundamentally wrong with families that have been so ill-equipped to care for their own children to prompt DHS involvement, only to lay the blame for their failures on someone else?

Or is it even worse: that some parents will neglect or ignore their children until they see a way to make money from them?

Without the detail of the cases, it's hard to know. We suspect that if we knew the answer, we'd feel even sicker to our stomachs than we did when we heard about the Kellys' lawsuit so soon after reading the D.A.'s grand-jury report detailing the horrific truth of how little worth Danieal had to her parents while she was still alive. *