Tyler DeLeon. Sirita Sotelo. Justice and Raiden Robinson.

Those are the children whose deaths rank among the most conspicuous in recent years in the Washington state Department of Child Protective Services’ case files.

Sirita’s stepmother is serving a prison term for manslaughter after confessing that she beat the 4-year-old girl to death because she wet her pants.

Tyler’s adoptive mother has been charged in Stevens County with second-degree murder in connection with his death by dehydration on his 7th birthday.

Sixteen-month-old Justice’s and 6-week-old Raiden’s mother was charged with second-degree murder in King County. The children had been found dead of dehydration and malnutrition in their Kent home where the mother slept surrounded by hundreds of empty beer cans.

Those highly publicized cases have provided state social service providers with plenty of attention and embarrassment, but they do not convey the full magnitude of the problem.

In 2004, according to the 2005 annual report by the state Office of the Family and Children’s Ombudsman, the agency reviewed 87 unexpected deaths of children. Forty-four of them had open cases with the Department of Family and Child Services at the time.

Medical examiners and coroners concluded that 11 of the 87 fatalities were homicides (all but one by a caregiver) and 10 were suicides. Forty-six were deemed natural, medical or accidental, and the type of death in 20 cases was undetermined.

Treated as impersonal data, rather than individual tragedies, those numbers aren’t necessarily startling in a state of nearly 6 million people. But there is reason to believe that the data are understated.

Neil J. Hochstadt, director of the Behavioral Sciences Department at La Rabida Children’s Hospital in Chicago, says it’s hard to get accurate information on the role of abuse and neglect in child fatalities. Consequently, he wrote in the July/August 2006 issue of Child Welfare, such statistics “are considered substantially underestimated.”

Hochstadt cites a North Carolina study, for example, that found child homicides caused by abuse were underreported by 58.7 percent.

What’s needed, Hochstadt argues, is a structure of local review teams, composed of people with different specialties and representing different agencies, to study every unexpected child death in a community. The scrutiny and expertise such teams would bring to the job would overcome much of the ambiguity that is now blamed for complicating investigations and determinations of death, leading to inconclusive findings.

For several years, Washington state had such a structure, operating under the state Department of Health. Three years ago, however, it was a victim of budget cuts, leaving local districts to carry through on their own if at all. Some counties have followed through, some have not, but a comprehensive statewide statistical picture is missing.

In several of the 87 fatalities studied in Washington in 2004, says Families and Children Ombudsman Mary Meinig, her office found that abuse or neglect clearly contributed to children’s deaths that coroners had attributed to SIDS or “unidentified infant death.”

Meinig has called for the state to restore the uniform statewide review of child deaths. The information they produce would help officials and agencies identify patterns and devise appropriate responses. That’s a worthy task for the state to undertake, and Meinig’s plea should not go unheeded.