A Broward sheriff's child protective investigator allegedly wrote up fake reports about the children she was supposed to check up on.
Police say that, instead of going to the homes of the five children assigned to her, she merely asked the parents to send her pics of the kids to her cel lphone, then used that as evidence that the kids were a-OK to file her paperwork.
According to authorities, Sandra Marti, 57, has been submitting the fake records since December of 2011.
Marti was cruising along with her fake reports up until June of this year, when one of the children's mothers called the BSO about it.
The reason the mother called was that she had lost Marti's number, so couldn't send her a pic of the child.
BSO's Public Corruption Unit was prompted to investigate and saw that Marti, who had worked at her job for nine years, had been filing reports of seeing this particular child in person.
Investigators took a sworn statement from the child's mother, who told them that Marti never met with the child but just asked for cell-phone pics instead.
Digging deeper, investigators discovered a report from January 2012 of another child she was supposed to meet in person but had asked the mother for a pic.
This led to more evidence of Marti's falsifying multiple reports.
The scenario repeated itself in December 2012 with a 7-year-old girl who Marti was supposed to visit at Croissant Park Elementary school in Fort Lauderdale on Dec. 13, the report said.The school's assistant vice principal, Nicole Dumont, said she had no record of a child protective investigator visiting the child at that time.
Marti allegedly also asked the girl's mother, Venus Chin Jaux Kong, to send a cellphone snapshot of her other child, a 2-year-old girl. Kong, in a sworn statement, said she did as instructed.
On Tuesday, Marti was arrested and charged with multiple counts of falsifying reports. She posted a $5,000 bond Wednesday.
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