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The father and paternal grandfather of a five-year-old girl who died in 2024 are suing the Indiana Department of Child Services for not doing more to prevent her abuse and death on the southwestside of Indianapolis.
Plaintiffs Brian Welty and Bradly Welty filed individual lawsuits late Thursday in Marion Superior Court. The lawsuits list the department and several of its case workers as defendants. Both men are also suing the child’s mother, the mother’s boyfriend, and the child’s maternal grandmother for negligence, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
“The DCS employees charged with protecting Kinsleigh offered neither aid nor care nor refuge to Kinsleigh when she needed it most. Only by determining what happened and why the people who were supposed to help instead failed Kinsleigh will we be able to answer the family’s questions and to help avoid these tragedies for families in the future,” said Gregory Laker, a partner at CohenMalad LLP who is representing Brian Welty.
Attorney Mark Sniderman with Sniderman Law is assisting in the case, and is representing Bradly Welty.
In response to the lawsuits, DCS sent The Indiana Lawyer the following statement:
“DCS is prohibited from disclosing confidential case information related to child protection proceedings. DCS family case managers navigate challenging circumstances and are tasked with making complex, critical decisions regarding child safety.”
The case stems from the death of five-year-old Kinsleigh Welty on April 9, 2024, after police were called to her home and found her in a “severely malnourished and emaciated state.”
According to court documents, Kinsleigh had been kept locked up in a closet for 20 hours a day in the five months leading up to her death. The lawuits allege the child had been abused, imprisoned, neglected, and starved by her mother, defendant Toni McClure.
At the time of her death, Kinsleigh weighed 21 pounds, which was significantly less than her weight at age two, court documents show. Medical professionals concluded that the clinical presentation at the time of her death showed evidence of neglect, starvation, and child torture, court documents state.
McClure, her boyfriend Ryan Smith, and Kinsleigh’s maternal grandmother, Tammy Halsey, have all been criminally charged in her death.
McClure has been charged with murder, criminal confinement and battery and is set to go to trial March 2. Smith faces three counts of neglect of a dependent and criminal confinement, and Halsey has been charged with neglect of a dependent, failure to report and neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury. Smith and Halsey are scheduled to go to trial next month.
The lawsuit says DCS failed to appropriately address the abuse on Kinsleigh despite multiple calls to her mother’s home for reports of neglect and abuse on her and her siblings in the months and years leading up to her death.
In May 2020, McClure was convicted of level 6 neglect of a dependent after Kinsleigh was found to be a victim of neglect in 2018 when she was just under one month old.
Kinsleigh went back and forth between living with her paternal grandfather and living in foster care from 2018 to 2021, when she was ultimately reunited with McClure.
During a welfare check in August 2021, Kinsleigh and her siblings were brought to the hospital for concerns of abuse and neglect, and a child in need of services petition was filed. While Kinsleigh was briefly put into the care of her grandfather, she was reunited with McClure in December 2021 after DCS failed to present a medical witness at an ensuing face-finding hearing, according to the lawsuits.
During a Friday morning press conference addressing e lawsuits, plaintiff Brian Welty said that when Kinsleigh came to live with him in 2021, she was bruised from head to toe, with handprint markings on her body from being forcibly held down. He said multiple patches of hair were missing from when they were ripped out.
“When she came to us, she was very sheltered. She did not want to have any interactions with anybody, and it took me a long time to have that full trust,” Welty said. “I believe this is when she actually felt love for the first time, was in my home.”
The lawsuits allege DCS made several errors between November 2023 and April 2024. According to court documents, DCS was called to the home six times in that period for Kinsleigh alone. Two other calls made during that time were for two of Kinsleigh’s siblings.
The lawsuits allege that, despite not making face-to-face contact with Kinsleigh, DCS case workers closed each of the cases on Kinsleigh as being unsubstantiated.
The plaintiffs in both lawsuits are seeking jury trials.
The cases are Brian Welty, Kinsleigh Welty, a Deceased Minor v. Indiana Department of Child Services, Ayanna Jones, Casey Stigall et al, 49D06-2511-CT-052871 and Bradly Welty v. Indiana Department of Child Services, Ayanna Jones, Casey Stigall et al, 49D06-2511-CT-052870.
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