Kansas will pay $US1 million ($1.5 million) to settle a lawsuit over a seven-year-old boy’s murder in 2015 alleging that the state’s child welfare agency should have removed him from an abusive home before he was starved and tortured and his body was fed to pigs.
Governor Laura Kelly and top leaders of the Kansas Legislature approved the settlement during a brief public meeting on Tuesday after conferring with state Attorney General Kris Kobach’s top deputy in private for 30 minutes.
The lawsuit was filed in 2017 in Wyandotte County in the Kansas City area by the boy’s mother, maternal grandmother and adult sister, and a district court trial was scheduled for April 2025.
The boy, Adrian Jones, was living with his father, Michael Jones, and his stepmother, Heather Jones, in Kansas City, Kansas, when he died. Both are serving 25 years-to-life prison sentences for his murder, and authorities said the boy was beaten and locked naked in a shower stall for months as a closed-circuit surveillance camera recorded his deteriorating condition.
The Kansas Department for Children and Families received reports that Adrian was being abused several years before his death, but its last physical contact with him was almost four years before his death, according to more than 2000 pages of records released in 2017 by the agency.
The records showed that the three of them moved frequently between communities in Kansas and Missouri.
“This has been a long journey for Adrian’s family,” said Matt Birch, a lawyer representing the family members. “The most important thing for the family was to hopefully make a change and make this less likely to happen in the future.”
Adrian’s remains were found in November 2015 in a pigsty on his father and stepmother’s rental property after officers responded to a domestic violence call. Heather Jones accused Michael Jones of beating and choking her, according to affidavits and search warrants later released by authorities.
According to court records the Joneses used increasingly severe methods to control the boy’s behaviour, including strapping him to an inversion table, handcuffing him and shocking him with a device called a Zap Enforcer. He also suffered from “extreme starvation,” court records said.
