Kinsleigh’s Law: A Bipartisan Promise to Protect Indiana’s Children

By Maya Mukherjee

Kinsleigh Welty was 5 years old.

Her mother frequently confined her to a closet and fed her very little. By the time Kinsleigh was found unresponsive in her Indianapolis home in 2024, she was extremely malnourished, and she died as a result of that severe neglect. Today, her mother is serving a life sentence without parole.

There were warning signs. In 2018, Kinsleigh’s mother was arrested on a child neglect charge, and her children were placed in foster care before being returned to her. Yet when the Department of Child Services later looked into Kinsleigh’s case, it was closed after a phone call, one in which her mother said Kinsleigh was OK.

That was allowed because of a holdover from the COVID-19 pandemic: a policy that let DCS close cases without an in-person visit.

“This family has just continued to be failed over and over again,” said state Rep. Victoria Garcia Wilburn, a Democrat. “And unfortunately, Kinsleigh’s not the only child that has been a victim in all of this.”

Indiana lawmakers resolved that Kinsleigh’s story would not happen again. Garcia Wilburn, along with state Reps. Alex Burton, a Democrat, and Julie McGuire and Lori Goss-Reaves, both Republicans, introduced Kinsleigh’s Law, a bipartisan bill requiring DCS to conduct an in-person assessment before closing an active and substantiated investigation.

After Kinsleigh’s death, Garcia Wilburn met with the Family and Social Services Administration. Officials told her the virtual case-closure policy could simply be removed from the agency’s manual.

That wasn’t enough. A manual can be rewritten. Garcia Wilburn wanted a safeguard no future administration could quietly reverse.

“One thing that I could not compromise was leaving it up to an agency that is at the whim of whoever is in the governor’s office,” she said. “And so it was very clear that this needed to be a law to allow justice, because this should have never happened to Kinsleigh.”

Goss-Reaves, a co-author of the bill and a social worker, had worked with Garcia Wilburn on child-safety legislation before. She told Future Caucus that she had a poster made for her office bearing the faces of Kinsleigh and other Indiana children who died from abuse and neglect, “so that every day when I came to work at the Statehouse, their faces would be the first thing that I saw when I went to my desk. Children are precious. They are a gift that we must take care of.”

Protecting children proved to be common ground. The bill passed both chambers of the Indiana Legislature without a single vote against it.

“Children deserve to be taken care of, to be loved and nurtured, and to be safe,” Goss-Reaves said. “I think that all of us can agree that it is a priority, and so it’s very easy to work together.”

Gov. Mike Braun signed Kinsleigh’s Law in May. In the room for the ceremonial signing were Kinsleigh’s grandparents, who had raised concerns about her well-being before she died.

“Justice was served both in the courtroom and at the governor’s desk,” Garcia Wilburn said. “This brings them great comfort that no child has to sacrifice their life in order for the laws on the books to change anymore.”

Garcia Wilburn is urging other states to comb through their own child-services manuals and make sure virtual case closures aren’t allowed.

“Sometimes, in good faith, we do these things in emergencies, and we forget that they exist in policy somewhere,” she said. “This is a good reminder that regularly meeting with state agencies is crucial and important, and to have a transparent relationship among lawmakers and agencies is vital to protect citizens.”

Kinsleigh’s Law took a failure of agency procedure and turned it into a rare bipartisan agreement. Its Democratic and Republican sponsors shared one goal: a child’s safety should never hinge on a policy that can change with the next administration.

The law cannot undo what happened to Kinsleigh. But lawmakers hope the changes made in her name will keep another child from falling through the same gap.

“Whose responsibility is it to protect children?” Goss-Reaves said. “I think it’s the responsibility of all of us. And as lawmakers, we have a role to play.”