A Child Dies, and Legal System Is Blamed : Violence: Social workers and family members say courts ignored numerous red flags in assigning custody of boy, 2.

Lance Helms was a sandy-haired little boy who loved Lambchop, pony rides and dress-up games. He could sing till his lungs were sore--just name the tune--and charm the blahs right out of strangers.

“When I grow up,” the 2 1/2-year-old liked to tell his family, “I’m going to be a dinosaur.”

But Lance died three weeks ago, beaten so badly that his internal organs ruptured and filled his body with blood. His father’s girlfriend has been charged with the murder.

The death of Lance Helms would be appalling enough if the story ended there. But what has enraged the boy’s extended family, and upset many in the child welfare and law enforcement community, is that the tragedy might have been prevented.

Since Lance was born a drug-addicted baby, county social workers had supervised his care and a court had dictated where he lived. In January, his case worker warned that the boy was at “substantial risk” of suffering serious injury if he was left in his father’s home, where the slaying occurred, according to records filed with the court. Yet a county dependency court judge, despite repeated warnings, gave custody of Lance to his father, records show.

“There is lots of anger on the part of law enforcement and child welfare workers toward the dependency court for not protecting this little boy,” said one top law enforcement official, who declined to be named. “This is not the first time this has happened, by any means.”

Besides focusing wrath on the court in Monterey Park, which was picketed this week by Lance’s family and child welfare groups, the Helms case has also raised questions about the willingness of the county’s lawyers to support their own social workers and about the merit of the ongoing “family preservation” movement, which seeks to keep children with their biological parents. The tumult comes on the heels of a nationwide study that found that the murder of children has reached crisis proportions.

“I fought for 2 1/2 years to keep him safe,” said the boy’s aunt, Ayn Helms. “But the court refused to listen. They were obsessed with placing him in an unsafe home.”

In a series of reports to the court over the last two years, social worker Kathleen Schormann and others in the county Department of Children’s Services portrayed a little boy’s life that, while troubled from the start, seemed so often to be within reach of salvation.

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Those reports, sealed from public view by privacy laws, were provided to The Times by the boy’s aunt and grandmother, who fought for custody of Lance. The judge and the lawyers involved in the matter declined to discuss the case, citing the state’s rigorous confidentiality laws surrounding child dependency.

According to the records:

Lance Helms was born Sept. 11, 1992, to a heroin-addicted mother, Karina Fuchs, and a father, David Helms, who was trying to kick his own heroin habit. A month after his birth, the child still experienced tremors as his tiny body withdrew from the drug. But David Helms, 30, had steady work at a furniture store in North Hollywood, and he told social workers that he was “willing to do whatever it takes” to get custody of his son.

While Helms completed a detoxification program, his sister, Ayn, was granted custody of the child. From the beginning, social workers said the 28-year-old department store manager provided a warm and loving atmosphere for Lance in her Silver Lake home. When the boy began to talk, he was soon calling Ayn “Mommy.” And there was no doubt that his birth mother wasn’t soon going to care for her son; she had been convicted of robbery and sent to state prison, where she remains.

When Lance was less than 6 months old, Richard D. Hughes, a “referee” appointed to oversee the case, ordered weekly supervised visits between David Helms and his son. Under court-ordered drug testing, Helms remained clean, although he did not always make his weekly visitation sessions with Lance, reports say.

As he pushed for more contact with his son, including unmonitored visits, his mother, Gail Helms, submitted a six-page statement to the dependency court detailing what she said was David Helms’ longstanding violence against his siblings and herself, his expulsion from high school, his discharge from the Army for larceny, and his problems with drugs. She included a copy of a restraining order she had obtained against him when he was 20.

“This is not an experiment,” Gail Helms wrote of the custody of her grandson. “I do not believe it will benefit the child to place his life and well-being in the hands of an immature, self-destructive man with a history of violent behavior and no values.”

David Helms, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, said in a telephone interview this week that his problems as a youth had been exaggerated by his mother and sister in an orchestrated campaign to keep his son away from him. “I’ve matured a lot,” he said. “For 2 1/2 years I was going to court to get custody of my son. I did everything they told me to.”

David Helms was granted his first unsupervised visits when Lance was 16 months old. He was allowed to meet with the boy once a week alone. But the boy’s aunt and grandmother complained that he would often return home with bumps, bruises and cuts. The father said the injuries were the result of accidents, often when the boy was in day care. He also claimed Lance was injured on occasion while in the grandmother’s care.

Despite the fact Helms was successfully passing drug tests and completing a battery of court-ordered counseling, parenting classes and therapy, his permanent custody claim was delayed after a psychological profile showed that he had some “antisocial traits” that included “the possibility of antisocial and even criminal behavior,” the county reports show.

Three times between August, 1994, and early this year, Lance’s social worker, Schormann, asked the judge to slow or stop the plan to place the boy with his father, at a North Hollywood studio apartment, where he would also live with his girlfriend, Eve Wingfield, and the couple’s 4-year-old son. Repeated injuries proved, at the very least, that the boy was poorly supervised, Schormann wrote in January.

Despite those concerns, Ernesto Rey, the attorney appointed by the court to represent the child, did not object to the placement and opposed placing Lance up for adoption. Ayn and Gail Helms are particularly angry with Rey, who they believe failed to heed the signs of possible abuse. Rey declined comment, citing confidentiality laws.

On Jan. 17, David Helms got his long-awaited wish--custody of his son. But the very next day, when Ayn came for her regular visit with her nephew, she found him with a severe black eye, records show. Schormann then submitted an adamant petition to the court for the boy’s removal from the home. She cited the “substantial risk” to the boy, either from his father or Wingfield.

Schormann declined to comment on the case but, according to two employees of the Department of Children’s Services, county lawyers began to pressure Schormann to drop the matter because they believed that referee Hughes would not grant the request, the employees said.

“The county counsel’s office will many times try to figure out what the judges want and then give it to them,” said Farrell, a social worker and union official, who has followed the case closely. “What we say is, ‘We don’t care if you lose--let’s at least address the issue and not placate the judge.’ ”

The county counsel’s office declined to discuss specifics of the case. But Larry Cory, supervisor of the 68 lawyers in the Children’s Services Division, said, “What you have been told is not accurate.” He said his office, if anything, has a reputation of being overly aggressive in its protection of children. “Whenever a child is in a situation of risk, our attorneys try their very hardest to protect that child,” Cory said.

But Farrell and the other Children’s Services Department employee, who requested anonymity, insisted that the county lawyers did not support them in the Helms case, and that in March the department finally dropped its petition to remove Lance from his father’s home.

Less than three weeks later, the toddler was dead.

Authorities said David Helms arrived home from work April 6 and found Lance terribly ill, lying on the sofa in the tiny apartment. Wingfield was the only adult who had been with the boy and thus she is being held responsible for his death, said the prosecutor in the case. The coroner’s office said death followed a massive blow to the stomach. Wingfield has pleaded not guilty to murder and two child abuse charges.

David Helms said in an interview that neither he nor Wingfield, had ever hit Lance. Although he doesn’t want to believe it, Helms said the facts now seem to point to Wingfield as his son’s attacker. “It’s hard to believe, but it doesn’t seem like anything else is possible,” he said.

Wingfield is being held in lieu of $1 million bail. Her lawyer said the case does not appear to be as simple as prosecutors say, and he plans to question the competency of the prosecution’s only apparent witness--Lance’s 4-year-old half brother.

The law enforcement official who was so troubled by the killing said it has become the subject of intense private discussion by many government officials. He complained that the increased training for police and social workers has not been matched by judges, who, he said, are often ill-prepared for their assignment to dependency cases.

But Michael Nash, the supervising judge of the dependency court in Monterey Park, said it would be unfair to judge a system that supervises 60,000 children on the basis of one case. “The terrible thing to acknowledge is that something is bound to go wrong in some of these cases,” Nash said. “I think we do a tremendous job and help thousands of people . . . but you are not going to have a perfect result in every one.”

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Forty protesters circled the front of the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park on Wednesday afternoon, with signs that blamed Hughes, now a commissioner of the court, and attorney Rey for Lance’s death.

Laura Hurtado, vice president of the nationwide organization Hear My Voice, said the case typifies what the group believes is a lack of attention by courts to child safety and a preoccupation with reuniting families.

“The courts see a child as being owned by the parents biologically,” Hurtado said. “We feel children are individuals, and they should be protected under the Constitution. Their rights are being ignored.”

Carole Shauffer, executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center, declined to make a blanket statement about dependency courts, but she said that in many cases, efforts to preserve biological families are successful. She added that the complaints by social workers in the Helms case about lack of support from their own lawyers are typical in California courts.

Farrell, the union representative for county social workers, said the case “epitomizes our frustration that we feel our recommendations are ignored.” He said the workers will push for a “community oversight board” or other device “to pull back the covers on the court and get some closer scrutiny.”

As for Ayn Helms, now 31, and her mother, Gail, there are a thousand thoughts of what might have been. Ayn totes three packed accordion binders, with the records of the case, wherever she goes. She visits Lance’s grave in Glendale every day, sometimes lying on the grass beside his plot, which still does not bear a marker.

In the bad moments, of which there are many, she thinks of what else she might have done. “I could have run with the baby, because I knew it wasn’t going well,” she said the other day, her voice breaking again. “If I had, maybe Lance would be alive. . . . But I just kept thinking, ‘Maybe someone will listen to me.’ ”