The 911 call came from the 11th floor of a Maryland hotel.
“I have no idea what happened,” the caregiver says.
“Is she breathing?” the operator asks.
“No,” the aide says, describing the 16-year-old girl under her supervision. “And she’s cold.”
The episode laid bare the dangers of Maryland’s practice of housing foster children — among the state’s most vulnerable residents — in hotel rooms.
Kanaiyah Ward had a history of depression, psychiatric hospitalizations and at least one suicide attempt. Social workers hired a contractor to stay with her while still granting her some small measures of freedom and privacy. Kanaiyah was allowed to sleep alone in the bedroom of the hotel suite, with hourly checks, and she could travel to and from school by herself.
Her death on Sept. 22, 2025 — after seven weeks in the hotel — was ruled a suicide from an overdose of allergy medicine commonly known as Benadryl. Kanaiyah swallowed an estimated 300 pink pills from a 365-count bottle found at the foot of her bed.
The tragedy led to a ban on placing foster children in hotels along with further reforms known as Kanaiyah’s Law, and, most recently, a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Kanaiyah’s mother. The litigation names 14 defendants, including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, other government officials, social workers, the contractor hired to supervise her and the hotel where she stayed.
Meanwhile, in a state with nearly 4,000 children in foster care, the broader struggle to find safe housing for children with the most complex needs continues.
Last week, in a federal courtroom in Baltimore, lawyers representing children who spent weeks or months languishing in hospital inpatient and emergency rooms sought class-action status in an effort to stop that practice.
“Those children do not belong in the hospital,” Mitchell Mirviss told U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox.
Maryland’s foster care problems go back decades. Children have been routinely boarded in hotels, social workers’ office buildings and hospitals or sent to facilities out of state.
Since taking office in 2023, Moore’s administration has worked to expand housing options such as therapeutic group homes, saying such measures were necessary before a ban on hotel and other unlicensed stays would be feasible. And they made progress, cutting back the number of kids in hotels from 59 as of late September 2023 to 18 the week Kanaiyah died in 2025. A month later, they issued an order to remove all foster children from hotels, and by the end of November 2025, all of them had been moved out. As of last week, seven foster children remained stuck in hospital rooms past their discharge date, according to state officials, because social workers hadn’t been able to house them.
“We’re definitely concerned that number will go up, given the fundamental problem — the lack of an array of sufficient licensed placement options — hasn’t gone away,” said Leslie Seid Margolis, an attorney with Disability Rights Maryland working with Mirviss on the hospitals case.
Lawyers for Kanaiyah’s mother say that the state’s efforts to reduce hotel stays was too late for their client and that those efforts show officials knew they were dangerous.
“Her death was not an unforeseeable tragedy,” the lawsuit stated. “It was the predictable consequence of placing a visibly vulnerable, chronically suicidal minor in an unsafe, unmodified, and wholly unsuitable environment after years of audited, litigated, and documented warnings that this precise outcome would occur.”
Moore’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit. The state Department of Human Services pointed to its broader reform efforts. “We remain committed to strengthening and reforming child welfare in Maryland and will not rest until every child in our state is safe, thriving in a permanent home, and surrounded by a loving family,” spokeswoman Lilly Price said.
The Department of Human Services director at the time of Kanaiyah’s death, Rafael López, could not be reached for comment about the lawsuit. But he spoke about Kanaiyah last year.
“My heart is broken over this death,” he said as he addressed state legislators. “And I ask myself every single day, ‘If we had moved differently and faster on any number of issues, would this precious life still be alive?’”
Years of struggle
Kanaiyah’s mental health and behavioral struggles went back years. When she was 10, according to Department of Human Services records, social workers discussed therapy and medication with her family. Three years later, her mother, Brooke Ward, turned to the state’s foster care system.
“Kanaiyah was my only child, and I couldn’t take care of her as a parent and with her condition,” Ward told reporters recently from the office of one of her attorneys.
Social workers in Prince George’s County placed her in group homes and treatment facilities. In 2024, after making threats to harm herself and others, Kanaiyah spent 10 days in a psychiatric hospital, according to her mother’s lawsuit. That started a stretch in and out of psychiatric confinement, including one stay for more than two months, according to the lawsuit.
When she was out, the state sometimes hired private contractors to provide one-on-one supervision at various locations. By summer 2025, Kanaiyah was living in a Baltimore residential treatment program until social workers were given three days’ notice she would be discharged, according to Human Services records. The move put her above one of the system’s largest cracks: She was not in clinical crisis, which would have qualified her for emergency hospitalization, according to Human Services records, but her behavioral history made other residential programs wary of accepting her.
The state turned to one of its long-standing fallbacks: hiring a caregiver and booking a hotel room. Kanaiyah moved into a suite at the Residence Inn on Aug. 4, 2025, supervised by a rotation of caregivers from Fenwick Behavioral Services. The company knew of Kanaiyah’s health challenges, having been hired to supervise her at least four times before.
The attentiveness of Fenwick’s care at the hotel remains in dispute. It’s shaping up as a legal battle between attorneys for the firm’s owner, Eric Fenwick, who said he has been made into a scapegoat, and attorneys for Kanaiyah’s mother, who allege Fenwick and his company were negligent. Among other factors, they accuse the caregiver of failing to check on Kanaiyah for more than four hours before she was found not breathing.
Late last year, state officials also were critical of Fenwick’s care. Human Services released its investigation of Kanaiyah’s death, which found “credible evidence” of neglect by three unnamed Fenwick employees. It cited a staffing shortage that led to one employee working 48 consecutive hours before Kanaiyah’s death and faulted the company for failing to ensure her medications were locked away.
Fenwick appealed, yielding a two-day hearing in July before Maryland Administrative Law Judge Sha’Donna Osborne. Her subsequent 29-page ruling described the absence of a pill lockbox as “certainly concerning.” But on balance, Osborne exonerated Fenwick and his company.
She stressed that the fatal drug, Benadryl, was not prescribed to Kanaiyah and that she could have obtained it on her own. Nor was there any indication Fenwick or his employees knew she had it. Osborne also found that the caregiver made her required hourly checks on the morning Kanaiyah was discovered dead.
“The cause of Kanaiyah’s death was the Benadryl,” Osborne wrote. “There was no credible evidence before me that the appellant failed to provide proper care and attention because of an extended shift, or that this extended shift change resulted in Kanaiyah overdosing.”
Eric Fenwick said the state’s investigation of him last year — before the administrative law judge’s finding — was incomplete.
“These false accusations destroyed my name, the business I built over the last eight years, the jobs of the 70 people who worked for me,” Fenwick said in a statement released through his attorney, Billy Murphy. “I understand that the death of any child makes people look for answers and for someone to blame. Unfortunately, they blamed me and my company without doing their due diligence.”
Murphy said that the lawsuit’s accounting of his client’s actions is false and that “we will certainly address that in the near future.”
Filed on Oct. 20, the lawsuit could quickly involve dozens of lawyers and thousands of pages of documents. One of Ward’s attorneys, DeMaurice Smith, said Fenwick would eventually be placed under oath, “where he can juxtapose the impact to his reputation against a death of a juvenile in his care.”
“Kanaiyah’s death was, in the broadest sense, the consequence of a broken foster care system,” he added, “one that failed one of its most vulnerable children when she needed protection most.”
The post Md. teen’s hotel death exposed broken foster care system, lawyers say appeared first on Washington Post.
