Two Ex-DCS Caseworkers Faked Visits to Hoosier Kids. Their Combined Jail Time: 14 Days.

The Ripley County Courthouse in Versailles, Indiana, where former DCS case manager Todd Click's forgery case was prosecuted. Photo by Warren LeMay via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

A month ago, Indiana's Inspector General said a child-welfare caseworker who fakes records “puts children at risk and undermines the integrity of the entire child welfare system — and that cannot stand without severe consequences.” The caseworker in that case, the office's own release noted, had been sentenced to four days in jail.

On Tuesday a second one was sentenced. Todd Click, a former family case manager in the Department of Child Services' Ripley County office, pleaded guilty to forgery for signing parents' and caregivers' names to DCS forms they never signed. A Ripley County court gave him 910 days and suspended 900 of them to probation, with credit for time already served, the Inspector General's office announced Thursday. That leaves 10 days of jail on paper. If he gets through probation clean, he can ask the judge to knock the felony down to a misdemeanor.

Add the two together and two former state employees who invented contact with Hoosier children are looking at 14 days of jail time between them.

Forms that can decide whether a child goes home

Investigators say Click logged home visits and family contacts in the state's case system that never happened and forged signatures on required forms. The Inspector General's count is at least 10 falsified case entries and at least seven forged forms, touching five Ripley County families and 11 children. When the charges were first filed in 2024, FOX59 reported from court documents that several of those cases involved reports of alleged child abuse or sexual abuse of children, and that the forged paperwork included forms that can decide whether a child is removed from a home.

He was originally charged with Level 6 felony counts of official misconduct and forgery, plus a charge of falsifying child abuse or neglect records; FOX59 listed the last as a misdemeanor count of obstructing a child abuse assessment. Under the plea deal, everything but the forgery count was dismissed, per the Inspector General and Eagle Country 99.3. Those dismissed counts are now allegations the state chose not to prove.

The case came to light only after Click had already left. DCS flagged problems in his records and referred them to the Inspector General in spring 2024, about a month after he resigned, WRTV reported. FOX59 reported at the time that the Rushville man was also working as a parole officer. The public filings reviewed by the Hoosier Enquirer don't say who employed him in that role or whether he still holds it.

The Marion County case that came first

Sylvia Mbilo Mundala worked as a DCS family case manager from February 2021 to August 2024. Investigators found she recorded required face-to-face visits with children and families that did not take place; family members, cell phone location data, photos, and text messages all contradicted her entries, according to the Inspector General. She pleaded guilty in Marion Superior Court to official misconduct, a Level 6 felony, which was entered as a Class A misdemeanor under her plea deal, and a records-falsification charge was dismissed. On Aug. 4, Judge Helen W. Marchal sentenced her to 365 days, suspended to four days served and 180 days of probation, plus a reform education program.

That was the case the Inspector General said could not stand without severe consequences.

Credit where it's due, and the questions left over

The Inspector General's office and DCS deserve credit for catching both cases and pushing them to conviction instead of letting a resignation make the problem disappear. Too many agencies settle for a quiet exit. Inspector General Jared Prentice said of the Click case that forging parents' signatures “is a serious breach of duty and trust” and that “Hoosier families should expect nothing less” than investigations and accountability.

But punishment is set in county courtrooms, and the numbers coming out of them don't match the words coming out of Indianapolis. A home visit is the one moment the state actually lays eyes on a child it has been told may be in danger. A caseworker who writes down a visit that never happened has taken that moment away, and a forged signature can put a parent's name on a decision the parent never saw.

Nothing in the public releases says whether DCS went back through every family on Click's and Mundala's caseloads, or whether any child turned out to need help that the fake entries papered over. Nothing explains why the Ripley County deal dropped every count but one and still leaves the door open to a misdemeanor. Until someone in Indianapolis or Versailles fills in that record, what Hoosier parents have to go on is two sentences that, added together, come to two weeks.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.