Harger: A 9-year-old lived in a tent while his mother smoked fentanyl next to him. WA lawmakers just voted to keep the law exactly as it is
Mar 5, 2026, 5:31 AM
A photo of the tent the 9-year-old boy was living in with his mother along Aurora Avenue in Seattle. (Photo courtesy of Seattle's Morning News)
(Photo courtesy of Seattle's Morning News)
About three months ago, I stood outside a tent a few blocks off Aurora Avenue in North Seattle. Inside was a 9-year-old boy. His mother was a fentanyl addict working as a prostitute on Aurora. She made him wait in the bushes while men came to the tent.
The neighbors had been calling CPS and SPD for months. The caseworkers and the cops told me the same thing: their hands were tied. The law required imminent physical harm before anyone could remove him. They couldn’t have missed all the fentanyl foil squares next to the rat feces and bottles of urine in the tent.
We later found out the mother was smoking fentanyl inside the tent while her son was in there with her.
Still not enough. He stayed in the tent.
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WA child welfare critical incidents have risen three years in a row
I think about that boy a lot. I think about him when I read that through the first nine months of 2025, there were 57 critical incidents, deaths, and near-deaths inside Washington’s child welfare system. More than half involved opioids. The year before it was 49. The year before that, lower still.
The number goes up every year. Every single year.
Republican lawmakers tried to change the law Saturday night. Democrats blocked it
Last Saturday night, Republican Representatives Travis Couture and Josh Penner stood on the floor of the Washington State House and tried one more time to fix it. Couture has been fighting this fight for years. This session, his standalone bills never got a committee hearing. He tried to force floor votes on three separate bills, including one written by a Democrat. All blocked on procedural grounds. Saturday’s budget amendment was the last card he had.
Representative Penner read aloud from state investigative reports. Case after case. Babies. Toddlers. Fentanyl residue on the floor. Parents face down on the couch. Some of those children didn’t make it.
He was asking for one change. One update to the legal standard that determines when a child can be removed from a home where hard drugs are present. The ask was simple: smoking fentanyl next to your kid should qualify as a reason to step in.
A Seattle Democrat called reports about dead children ‘lurid Republican talking points’
While Representative Penner was reading those reports on the House floor, Seattle Democratic Representative Julia Reed was live-posting on Bluesky. She wrote that the Republican amendments were a chance to “air grievances, conspiracy theories, and try to force us into disingenuous roll call votes they can clip to make us look bad.”
She complained about having to listen to what she called “the most lurid Republican talking points you could imagine.”
Lurid Republican talking points. That’s what she called reports about dead children.
When the vote came, every Republican voted yes. The Democratic majority said no.
Speaker Jinkins says the trend is shrinking. The numbers say otherwise
Speaker Laurie Jinkins said this week that Democrats and Republicans “share a very strong interest in child welfare and child safety.” She also said critical incidents have “shrunk dramatically” since their last fix.
There were 49 critical incidents in all of 2024. In just the first nine months of 2025, there were 57. The trend isn’t shrinking. It’s accelerating.
Seven Democrats crossed the aisle. It wasn’t enough
I want to highlight the seven Democrats who crossed the aisle: Representatives Mari Leavitt, Dave Paul, Kristine Reeves, Adison Richards, Clyde Shavers, Joe Timmons, and Amy Walen. Good for all of them.
The amendment failed anyway, 49 to 44.
The majority party has watched the number of children dying in this system go up three years in a row. They’ve had chances to fix it. The bills didn’t get hearings. The floor votes got blocked. They couldn’t even agree that a mother hotboxing fentanyl in a tent with her child is worth a time-out.
The session ends on March 12 — a week from today. And nothing is going to change. Representative Reed was worried about roll-call votes that could be clipped to make Democrats look bad.
Here’s the thing. You don’t look bad because of the clip. You look bad because of the vote.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
