Geanna's father said he reported she'd been beaten by her foster mother, but the state kept her in the home and returned her there after she was inexplicably taken from another relative who wanted to adopt her.
It was October of 2017, and Ivy Hauck was learning the ways of the 3-year-old girl she planned to adopt.
Five months earlier, Hauck had welcomed the girl, Geanna Bradley, to the spacious brick house on a cul de sac in a suburb of Houston that she shared with her husband and three other girls.
Geanna was her niece — the daughter of her brother, Gerime Bradley. Gerime lived in Honolulu, and had been jailed for a probation violation.
The siblings discussed the possibility of Hauck adopting Geanna. Gerime was reluctant at first to give up his daughter, but believed it would be far better than Geanna’s foster care placement with a couple in Wahiawa. So he agreed.
Hauck found the girl to be remarkably loving and sweet. Geanna called her “mommy” almost immediately, with no prompting, and couldn’t get enough snuggling or hugging.
But after the first month or so, the girl they called Gigi started to have violent tantrums — kicking, spitting, hitting her own head. Geanna was seeing a counselor, but Hauck thought the sessions seemed rudimentary and pointless. Hauck, a nurse practitioner herself, wanted the girl to see a psychiatrist to get at the root causes of the tantrums, as well as an educational assessment.
So, she said, she asked Texas Child Protective Services, which had agreed to take on the case when Geanna arrived from Hawaii, if that would be possible.
Soon after, she said she got a call from Geanna’s caseworker in Honolulu. I don’t know what just happened, Hauck recalls the caseworker saying, but Texas told us we have 72 hours to bring her back to Hawaii.
“I was devastated,” Hauck said.
Hauck couldn’t have known it, but the removal would set in motion a series of events that would lead to Geanna’s death, six years later, allegedly at the hands of her legal guardians in Wahiawa.
Geanna’s death in January would become one of the most notorious cases of child abuse in recent Hawaii history, raising questions once again about Hawaii’s child welfare system and its actions in placing and overseeing a child in foster care.
And the family says there were signs, years before Geanna’s death, that the Blases were mistreating her — though the state denies hearing anything about that.
Hauck got the call that Geanna would have to return to Hawaii on a Thursday. She tried to make the best of her niece’s last days in Texas, which happened to be just before Geanna’s fourth birthday and Halloween. She bought her a Cinderella costume, complete with a scepter, and took her to a pumpkin patch.
At least, Hauck thought, she will be going back to people she knows. Before flying to Texas, Geanna had been placed with foster parents in Wahiawa — Thomas and Brandy Blas — and they had agreed to take her back.
When Gerime Bradley found out, he was speechless. He knew it probably meant that he would not see his daughter again, since he had agreed to give up his parental rights for the adoption by his sister.
And he was worried about the Blases. About a year earlier, he said, on his last visit with her at a play area, she had blurted out that her foster mother, Brandy Blas, had beaten her.
Bradley said he turned to the Catholic Charities caseworker supervising the visit and asked if he had heard what Geana said. He had.
“I repeated, ‘She beat you?'” Bradley recalls. The girl said yes, because she had peed in the car.
Bradley said he told the Child Welfare Services caseworker overseeing the case what Geanna had reported to him.
“She did everything she could to try to convince me not to file a report,” he said. She said she’d known the family for a long time and never heard of any problems. Kids make up stuff all the time, Bradley recalls the caseworker saying.
“She said she’d have to move Geanna and who knows if it wouldn’t happen again,” he said.
The caseworker, Deborah Yoshizumi, who retired soon after Geanna returned to Hawaii from Texas, declined to comment for this story, citing CWS’s strict rules about confidentiality in child welfare cases.
Bradley concluded that the caseworker never made a report, because Geanna stayed with the Blases — and returned to them after her five months in Texas. His mother, Ivy Bradley, recalls Gerime calling her in tears at the time to tell her about what Geanna had said.
The Department of Human Resources would not comment in detail about the accounts of Geanna’s biological family. But the department said that it never received a report of abuse or neglect about the Blases before Geanna’s death in January. Nor were there any reports of abuse or neglect of Geanna by anyone after the Blases became her legal guardians in 2018.
After Geanna’s return from Texas, she spent six more years with the Blases — until she died of starvation and abuse at the age of 10. The Blases and Brandy’s mother, Debra Geron, face second-degree murder charges.
For Gerime Bradley, Ivy Hauck and their extended families in Texas, Louisiana and Hawaii — many of whom had offered to take in Geanna — the details of her abuse have been almost unbearable to hear about. Hauck said she’s been in counseling, struggling with feelings of guilt. Was there something more she could have done?
Bradley said he only found out about his daughter’s death three weeks after it happened, when Honolulu detectives came to question him, as if he might have had something to do with it.
Only afterwards did they tell him she was dead. He said he couldn’t sleep or talk about it without crying for a week.
And now he’s left only with questions. Did no one — doctors, teachers, therapists — notice that Geanna was not OK?
“You can’t tell me that for seven years, there was no sign of anything wrong with my child,” he said.
This narrative of the events leading up to Geanna’s return to Hawaii and placement with the Blases is based on interviews with Bradley, Hauck and their mother — Ivy Bradley — who lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but closely followed what was happening to her granddaughter and says she had a bad feeling about her placement with the Blases.
Their accounts could not be independently verified because Family Court records regarding child welfare cases are considered confidential and officials involved say they are bound by law not to speak about them.
Geanna was the daughter of Bradley and Amy Hart, who did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story. Bradley was in his early 40s when Geanna was born — Hart in her early 30s.
According to Bradley, the family’s involvement with the child welfare system began in 2015. Bradley and Hart were no longer a couple, but they were sharing a large house not far from the Bishop Museum.
After an incident involving Hart’s newborn son, CWS got involved, Bradley said. The state knew that she also had a daughter, and six days later they came and took Geanna, he said.
“She loved to play, she loved to sing, she loved to dance,” he said. “She had a character like no one else.”
Bradley said he visited her and took steps to get her back, but there was always some catch. He said he passed a home inspection, but then was told that Geanna was having behavioral problems that needed to be addressed before he got her back.
He said he agreed to be evaluated by a counselor himself, but the evaluation kept getting delayed, and when it was finally completed it somehow was never considered by the court.
He had been put on probation in 2013 for stealing a moped. Shortly after his last visit with Geanna — the visit where he said she reported being beaten by Brandy Blas — “I messed up on probation and went to jail,” he said.
Worried about Geanna, he called his sister in Texas and they finally agreed that he would give up his parental rights so that Hauck could adopt the girl. At that point, she had been with the Blases for about a year.
Hauck started meeting with her on video. In May 2017, she and her husband came to Hawaii to get her.
Geanna arrived to a four-bedroom house in a Houston suburb that Hauck shared with her husband, two daughters and a step-daughter. Geanna shared a room with a bunk bed with the youngest girl.
The caseworker in Hawaii told Hauck that Geanna had shown signs of abuse and possible sexual abuse, but Hauck didn’t know the details.
“I wasn’t thinking the foster parents,” she said. “I had no clue where the abuse actually came from.”
At first, Geanna showed no signs that she’d been through anything traumatic. She sang all the time, and seemed to know the lyrics to every song. She loved Bruno Mars. When they were driving, and a song she liked came on the radio, she’d say, “Mommy, turn it up!”
After about a month, though, Geanna started having the tantrums. It usually started when she wet her pants. Or maybe she wanted to have her hair done a certain way, but there was no time for it before she had to go to school.
Though clearly intelligent, she also seemed to be behind educationally. She could recite the letters of the alphabet, but couldn’t recognize them.
Geanna still felt a connection to Hawaii. She would recite to Hauck how to get to the house of Hart, her biological mother. She referred to her parents in Hawaii as her “white mommy and Black daddy.” In Houston, she had a “Black mommy and a white daddy.”
She taught Hauck Hawaiian words. Sometimes, after a tantrum, she would tell Hauck that she was pau.
Brandy Blas would sometimes call to talk to Geanna, but the girl would often run off. Hauck didn’t make much of that. “I thought it was age-related,” she said. “She wanted to play. She never vocalized anything bad to me.”
But Hauck did have one conversation about her treatment in foster care. She said that Thomas Blas had told her that the girl’s tantrums were so bad that, during a birthday party for one of his biological children, he spanked her and spent the whole party holding her down in a car.
Hauck wanted to get to the bottom of what was causing the tantrums. She said she tried unsuccessfully to get Geanna’s counselor in Hawaii, who she believed had done a better job than the one in Texas, to send her case notes.
“I didn’t have all the history that I thought was necessary,” she said.
And then came her request for a higher level of intervention — and what she described as Texas’ sudden decision to send Geanna back to Hawaii.
Geanna’s biological family believes the Texas department, which had agreed to oversee the case, simply didn’t want to spend the money on a complicated case. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services did not respond to a question about what prompted the move. Nor did the Hawaii Department of Human Services.
Hauck said that she dreaded how Geanna would react to being taken away, but was surprised when it went well. Geanna had a photo album that included photos of Hart, her biological mother, and still felt connected to her. Hauck said she tried to explain that she would not be returning to Hart, but to the Blases.
At least, Hauck thought, she’d be going back to people she knew. And because Brandy Blas did not work outside the house, maybe she would have the time to spend with her to get her various needs taken care of.
In Louisiana, Geanna’s grandmother Ivy Bradley, a registered nurse, had strong misgivings about what was happening. Even though there was no physical evidence, “I had a feeling she was being abused in that house.”
The grandmother said she asked if she could take the girl. Other relatives were also willing, she said.
“They told me no, she had to return to Hawaii,” she said. “They didn’t say why … I just burst into tears.”
Hauck said she tried to maintain contact with Geanna, but the Blases would not respond. After she complained to the state, she said, the caseworker told her the Blases had told her that Hauck got to talk to Geanna all the time.
Eventually, she said, Thomas Blas told her that Geanna didn’t want to talk to her. He said that Geanna was fine, and told him she didn’t like Hauck or her husband, she said.
“That’s when I really got concerned,” Ivy Bradley said. She recalls telling her daughter “something’s not right. It’s a feeling I had with no evidence.”
Meanwhile, Gerime Bradley, now out of jail, couldn’t get any information. His parental rights had been severed and he had no standing.
The Blases and Geron are accused of keeping Geanna in a tiny area where she had only a box to sleep on. They bound her with duct tape and beat her, authorities say. She died from trauma, beatings, prolonged physical restraint, pneumonia and medical neglect, according to the Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office.
Ivy Bradley said she had a bad feeling when her son called one early evening in February.
“I looked at my phone and I just felt something was wrong,” she said. “He kept trying to get it out. When I realized what he was saying, it was like, Lord, all this time what was in my spirit was true. It’s been hard.”
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