Jury Awards $29 Million Against Oregon's Child Welfare Agency Over a Hotline Call That Went Nowhere, but a State Damages Cap Cuts It to $4.2 Million

In 2017, a two-year-old boy was brought to an emergency room near Mount Hood showing signs of suboxone poisoning, a reaction to exposure to a prescription opioid-treatment medication that has no business being anywhere a toddler can reach it. A social worker in the emergency room noticed inconsistencies in the mother's account of what had happened and called Oregon's Child Abuse Hotline, which is operated by the Department of Human Services and exists to route reports like this one into an investigation.

The case built by the child's attorneys turned on what happened during that call and afterward. Oregon law and DHS's own procedures require caseworkers to take specific investigative steps when a hotline report like this one comes in: checking for prior reports, looking into the people around the child, and screening the household for known risk. The plaintiffs argued DHS staff skipped those steps. Had a caseworker done the required check, the case presented at trial argued, they would have learned that the mother was in the middle of a custody dispute and was in a relationship with a partner who had a documented history of child abuse. Instead, the hotline report did not lead to the kind of investigation that might have kept the child out of that home, and he was returned to it.

Nine days later, the same child was hospitalized again, this time with severe injuries and hypothermia. The abuse he suffered in that window left him with a traumatic brain injury and quadriplegia. Now approaching ten years old, he cannot walk, speak, or use his arms, and he requires a feeding tube to eat. His medical expenses to date total approximately $12.5 million, a figure that reflects a decade of intensive medical and custodial care and does not include what his care will cost for the rest of his life.

The family, represented by Rebecca Roe and Chen-Chen Jiang of Schroeter Goldmark & Bender along with Scott Kocher of Forum Law Group, sued the state of Oregon over DHS's handling of the hotline call. The Oregon Department of Justice defended the case on the state's behalf. In January 2026, after trial in Multnomah County Circuit Court, the jury agreed with the family's theory of what DHS had failed to do and returned a verdict of $29 million, a figure sized to the extraordinary scope of a lifetime of care for a child who cannot move or speak on his own.

That verdict is not what the family will collect. Oregon caps damages recoverable against public bodies and their employees under the state's tort claims act, and that cap applies regardless of how a jury values a case. Here it cut the recovery from $29 million to $4.2 million, a reduction of roughly 85 percent. The gap between what the jury found the injury worth and what state law allows the family to receive is itself part of the story: Oregon's public-body damages cap, set by the legislature rather than by any court examining this child's specific injuries, is the reason a $29 million jury verdict becomes a $4.2 million payment.