BATON ROUGE - Louisiana's Department of Children and Family Services "took no action whatsoever" that would have prevented the death of a 2-year-old from a fentanyl overdose in 2022, the state Office of the Inspector General said in a report released Monday. 

The OIG report detailed what the state agency and law officers did prior to the death of Mitchell Robinson III. The child had been taken to the hospital twice before his death after being unable to breathe. He responded positively to Narcan, a drug intended to halt or bring someone back from a fentanyl overdose, but the staff at DCFS was unfamiliar with Narcan's medicinal use, the report says.

Read the full report here.

Additionally, the drug screening performed on Robinson did not test for synthetic opioids, which led to multiple negative drug screenings and lowered the priority of the child's case in DCFS' system. 

The negative drug screenings also meant the hospital was not required to contact law enforcement. 

Further, the report details how the caseworker initially assigned to Robinson was overworked and that the department failed to assist her with her caseload. In the "critical period" between Robinson's second hospital visit on June 17, 2022, and the day of his death on June 26, 2022, the caseworker said she was called out to multiple cases despite having scheduled days off and the state Juneteenth holiday, which closed most governmental offices. 

"There's a period of nine days after a confirmed fentanyl test for the little boy, where nothing was done," Inspector General Stephen Street said. "That nine-day period was, in our view, the most crucial part of this entire affair. And, unfortunately, he was brought in a third time nonresponsive and did not respond to Narcan and was declared dead."

In one case, the caseworker specified to the Inspector General's Office she worked until 3 a.m. and needed to be back at her desk at 8 a.m.. She ended up taking sick leave after working long-hour days for multiple days in a row and returned to work the day after Robinson's death. 

"This is just a situation where it's going to require a joint effort by the citizens, by the government and by these frontline caseworkers to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again," Street told WBRZ on Monday. "Or, at least that we do everything possible to try to prevent it."

Robinson's mother, Whitney Ard, remains in jail on murder charges and is scheduled for trial in April, almost two whole years later.