Note: The following op-ed appeared in the Ritzville Adams County Journal and other Eastern Washington weeklies the week of June 22, 2025.
Sen. Leonard Christian, R-Spokane Valley.
By the time this piece sees print, I certainly hope Travis Decker is behind bars.
For the last several weeks, he has been pursued by law enforcement authorities across rugged North-Central Washington in one of the biggest manhunts in state history.
On May 30, the divorced father picked up his three daughters for a scheduled three-hour visitation. The girls were found deceased three days later in a campground near Leavenworth, their arms zip-tied and with plastic bags over their heads.
What makes this tragedy especially appalling is that it could easily have been prevented. A state policy based on dogma and nonsense is dooming vulnerable children to misery and even death, and I am afraid this is no isolated case.
The Keeping Families Together Act was among the spate of laws passed by majority Democrats in 2021 following the George Floyd riots. Like our state’s experiments in drug-law non-enforcement and defunding the police, this law confuses leniency with compassion.
It is driven by the idea that people of color are “over-represented” in interventions by the state agency responsible for protecting children, and that we are being too judgmental about drug addiction, homelessness, poverty and mental illness.
Under this law, the Department of Children, Youth and Families can remove children from their parents only when harm appears imminent. An issue like a miserable home environment or fentanyl-in-the-house is no longer sufficient.
The agency boasts that removals are down 28%.
The Decker case shows us what’s wrong with that.
There was a forest of red flags. Decker’s ex-wife became alarmed at his deteriorating mental condition and went to court seeking visitation restrictions. The court nixed overnight visits and required that he keep the kids in the Wenatchee area.
But it stopped short of requiring supervised visits or ending them entirely. Nor did it follow up when Decker refused to sign the new parenting plan and blew off court-ordered counseling for mental health, domestic violence and anger management.
Because harm was not imminent, none of this was sufficient to bring Child Protective Services into the picture. Surely Decker’s failure to comply with court orders should have set off alarms. Surely none of this would have happened if the court had ordered supervision.
We can go on forever about what should have happened but didn’t, and the only good thing about this case is that it is so horrific we cannot avoid talking about it in next year’s legislative session.
We have seen a steady increase in the number of suspicious child deaths and near-death incidents since the law was changed, from 28 in 2020 to 27 in just the first quarter of this year. About a third of these cases involve kids accidentally ingesting their parents’ drugs, usually fentanyl.
We’ve had several such incidents in Spokane County this year. DCYF tells us this is because of the explosion of fentanyl on our streets, among other factors, yet it doggedly refuses to see any connection with a policy forcing children to remain in homes where hard drugs are being used.
Part of the problem is the reluctance of my majority colleagues to hold addicts accountable for their behavior. Proposals to criminalize exposing children to fentanyl have been shot down session after session.
But this issue is broader than that, encompassing mental health and conditions within the home. As lead Republican on the Senate Human Services Committee, I look forward to working with members who believe children’s protection should come first.
At the very least, we should amend the law to make clear that non-compliance with court orders should impact custodial rights. We should be concerned with an agency management that tells us it “remains committed” to reducing the numbers of children it places in foster care, as if this is its goal, not the protection of children. And we should be dismayed that it took a case like this one to make this issue a top state concern.
– Sen. Leonard Christian, R-Spokane Valley, represents the 4th Legislative District and is the ranking Republican member on the Senate Human Services Committee.