What happened to you in a Washington state placement was not okay.

A caseworker drove you somewhere. Maybe a cottage in North Seattle. Maybe a ranch outside Centralia, or a farmhouse up in Pend Oreille County, or a foster home in Pierce County. The roofs were different; the one who picked them wasn't. The State of Washington (DSHS back then, DCYF since July 2018) chose the place, licensed it, and was the one who was supposed to go check on it. The State has now paid tens of millions of dollars over what happened inside some of those placements, a Spokane County jury added a $42 million verdict in 2025, and a complaint over Cobb Center is pending in King County. If the State placed you as a child and an adult there crossed a line, this is about you, whichever roof it was.

WatchingSeptember 2026: the King County complaint over Cobb Center (A.G. v. Children's Home Society of Washington and the State, filed November 1, 2023) is pending with no case number printed on the public copy; the Washington Supreme Court ordered DCYF on April 30, 2026 to hand over its foster-home files to former foster children who sue. The questions below work for anyone, any placement.

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This applies to you no matter what

It was a private home, not a State building. That's the point. Cobb Center belonged to the Children's Home Society; the Kiwanis home to a service club; J Bar D to a company. The State licensed each one and sent you there anyway, and the State is who has been paying.
It was the '70s or '80s and you figure that's too long ago. Not necessarily. J Bar D: the twelve men the State paid $16.95 million in 2023 had been there from the late 1970s up to 1984. Kiwanis: claims there go back as far as 1971.
You told a caseworker, or your foster mother, or a judge, and nothing came of it. In the Cobb Center complaint, in the Kiwanis reporting, in the Pierce County foster case, that is the pattern the records describe: reports made, reports not acted on.
You don't have a name. A face, a cottage letter, the job the man did. The complaints already on file were written by people who were nine and ten years old at the time.
Your file calls you a runaway, a behavior problem, a kid moved from placement to placement. None of that changes what the State owed you.
You're asking for a brother, a partner, a grown child who can't ask yet. Reach out anyway.

Washington foster care and group home lawsuits: what the public record says, and when

None of this is ours. It comes from a filed complaint, from court judgments and settlements the State itself paid, from a Washington Supreme Court opinion and from the reporters who covered them, and every line links to where we found it. Where a complaint is the source it is an allegation, the State has not admitted anything, and we say so. One thing said plainly, because this page covers a whole system: the records below name Cobb Center and the Children's Home Society's North Seattle home, the Kiwanis Vocational Home, Toutle River Boys Ranch, J Bar D and Reynolds Creek, and a Pierce County foster home. Boys Village, Jessie Dyslin Boys Ranch, Secret Harbor and the foster homes generally are on the quiz because the same State licensed them and placed children there in those years; no separate court record on any of them is cited here.

August 20, 2005

Two Child Protective Services licensing investigations, in 1997 and 1998, had already found that a counselor at the Children's Home Society's residential home for at-risk children in North Seattle abused two children connected to the home. The Society fired him and, as the Seattle Times later wrote, 'a state investigation cleared the home of wrongdoing.' That counselor was Kenneth Mark Bell. He was 38 when the Times ran this story, and the day before, in King County Superior Court, he had pleaded guilty to rape of a child, one count in the first degree and one in the second. At least three children, the court documents said, 12 to 15 years old, in the mid-1990s. The Times does not use the name Cobb Center. The 2023 complaint below does. Seattle Times.

October 28, 2022

The Daily News in Longview reported that nine people who had been at the Toutle River Boys Ranch as teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s would receive $5 million in a settlement with the State's Department of Children, Youth and Families. The Daily News (Longview).

December 2022

The Chronicle in Centralia tallied the Kiwanis Vocational Home cases: more than 70 former residents had come forward over abuse at the Centralia boys' home between 1971 and its closure in 1994; cash settlements totaled just over $77.3 million, of which DSHS, the agency that licensed the home, had paid just over $36.3 million and the Kiwanis insurers just over $41 million. The paper had earlier identified dozens of assault and abuse reports made to Kiwanis and to DSHS that were never forwarded to local law enforcement. The Chronicle.

November 1, 2023

Four weeks into a Thurston County trial, on the day before closing arguments, the State agreed to pay $16.95 million to twelve men who had lived, at ages 10 to 15, at the J Bar D Boys Ranch near Ione and its affiliate Reynolds Creek Boys Ranch near Cusick, in Pend Oreille County, from the late 1970s until the State pulled the contracts in December 1984. The Spokesman-Review recounted what came before: a sheriff asking the governor's office to investigate in 1981, a judge's special inquiry in 1984 that found widespread abuse, and a retired DSHS regional administrator's words about the way the ranch was run: 'It ran contrary to everything an agency responsible for children should be paying attention to.' The Spokesman-Review.

November 1, 2023

The same day, a complaint signed by Darrell Cochran and Patrick Brown was filed in King County Superior Court: A.G. v. Children's Home Society of Washington, Cobb Center; the State of Washington, DSHS, Child Protective Services and DCYF; and Does 1 to 5. The plaintiff, born in June 1987, was placed at Cobb Center, a State-licensed group home for boys in Seattle, at about age ten, from roughly 1997 to 1999, and alleges he was repeatedly sexually abused by staff there. The complaint alleges the State 'knew about the dangers that Children's Home presented to youths, but it still sent children there anyway,' and that its licensing investigations were 'cursory investigations, if any.' It pleads negligence, gross negligence and related counts, and that sixty days had passed since a standard tort claim was presented to the State. The case number is blank on the copy counsel posted, and these are allegations; neither defendant has admitted anything. A.G. complaint (posted by plaintiff's counsel).

September 10, 2025

Washington State Standard reported that a Spokane County Superior Court jury, after a nearly month-long trial, had returned a $42 million verdict at the end of August for Jessica Hilton, and that the judge had made it official. The jury found the State negligent for failing to protect her from years of childhood sexual abuse in the 1990s by a stepfather with a 1990 child-rape conviction: 70 percent of the fault to Child Protective Services, now DCYF, 30 percent to the Department of Corrections. Hers was not a placement case; she stayed in her mother's home while the agencies held the reports. The agencies said they were 'reviewing the jury's decision and evaluating our legal options.' The same story put the State's tort payouts at about $500 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, up from $72 million in 2018, child welfare cases driving much of the rise. Washington State Standard.

September 30, 2025

The Seattle Times reported the State would pay $9 million to Ashley Miller, 34, who sued in 2023 alleging she was sexually assaulted and abused from age five to twelve by her foster parent's live-in boyfriend in a Pierce County foster home, and that DSHS knew the man was a convicted felon, skipped the background check its own social worker had written up in 2003, and went 500 days without a visit. DCYF settled in early September to avoid a Pierce County jury. A DCYF spokesperson told the paper that nearly 90 percent of the child abuse claims against the agency concern conduct before DCYF existed, and the state's budget office estimated legal claims against the State would top $542 million in fiscal 2026. Seattle Times.

April 30, 2026

The Washington Supreme Court, unanimous, in J.M.I. v. State (No. 104167-5), told DCYF it must turn over its child welfare files, the foster-home vetting records, the abuse complaints, the case notes, to five former foster children suing the State over placements in abusive licensed foster homes. The privilege the State claimed does not apply, the court held, because 'judicial proceedings involving allegations that the State negligently failed to fulfill its duties to a foster child are proceedings directly concerned with the State's administration of its foster care program.' The trial courts' orders compelling disclosure were affirmed. Washington Supreme Court opinion.

We checked this on September 15, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from April 30, 2026. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible in a Washington foster care or group home lawsuit

The State of Washington. Not the cottage, not the ranch, not the foster mother first: the State. Its child welfare agency was DSHS until July 1, 2018, when the Department of Children, Youth, and Families took the work over, and the two names are pleaded together because the duty is the same. The State took a child out of one home and chose the next one. It licensed the group home, contracted with the ranch, approved the foster parents, and was supposed to investigate when a report came in. The theory in plain words is negligent placement and negligent supervision: the complaints and the settled cases say the State sent children to places it had reason to distrust, and left them there after it was told. The State answers for that under its own law, RCW 4.92.090, 'to the same extent as if it were a private person.' The operator, where one still exists, is named beside it, as the Children's Home Society is in the Cobb Center complaint.

Three things about a public defendant a lawyer will walk you through. First, there is a claim form: a standard tort claim goes to the State's Office of Risk Management before any suit is filed, and the suit waits sixty days. Second, there is no cap on what a jury can award; the Washington Supreme Court struck the State's damages cap in 1989, which is how a $42 million verdict stands. Third, Washington does not award punitive damages, against anyone, unless a statute says so, and none does here. So the case is about what happened to you, not about punishing the agency.

Individual staff and foster parents are named where they can be. Kenneth Bell pleaded guilty in 2005; the man in the Pierce County foster home pleaded guilty to other crimes and was never convicted of assaulting the child there. Most of the people already in these cases never got a criminal case at all, and a civil claim does not need one. Your case does not depend on knowing a name.

Your deadline: the Washington statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse in a state placement

Washington runs three clocks on this, not one; the statute is RCW 4.16.340. Three years from the act; or three years from when you discovered, or reasonably should have, that an injury was caused by it; or three years from when you discovered that the act caused the particular injury you are suing over. Whichever is latest. None of them starts while you are a child; the statute holds all three until you turn eighteen. That's the reason the questions ask when you were born. Born in 2006 or later and the simplest route, three years from your eighteenth birthday, may still be open by itself. 2005? Then it comes down to which month. Born earlier, that first clock has run, and what is left is the discovery route, which the courts read by what you yourself understood and when; the statute says a parent's or guardian's knowledge is not held against the child, and the Supreme Court settled in 1999 that these clocks govern the negligence claim against the institution, not just the claim against the abuser. That is the route the Kiwanis, J Bar D and Toutle River claimants took for conduct from the 1970s and 1980s, and the State paid on it. The State also argues the other side, case by case; in a 2024 Tacoma group-home settlement it raised the deadline as a defense and paid without admitting anything. Which reading wins turns on your own dates. A lawyer decides that, in one call, and it costs nothing.

Because the defendant is the State, there is a step before the courthouse. A standard tort claim is presented to the Office of Risk Management in the Department of Enterprise Services (RCW 4.92.100), the suit cannot be filed until sixty calendar days have passed (RCW 4.92.110), and the limitations clock stops while those sixty days run. The Cobb Center complaint pleads exactly that. It is paperwork a lawyer handles, not a reason to wait.

Two things you may have read that don't apply here. Washington did drop the time limit on childhood sexual abuse in 2024, true, except the change starts at June 6, 2024 and reaches forward only; anything in a placement before that date stays on the three clocks above. And no, Washington hasn't opened a look-back window for old claims the way California and New York did. There's been a bill. It hasn't passed, and nobody should be telling you it's coming. The law is the statute above, read against your birth year and your discovery. Nobody can promise how a court reads it. The people the State has already paid are the proof it can be read your way.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You never told anyone. Neither had most of the seventy-plus Kiwanis men, some for forty years.
You were only there a few weeks, between placements. The duty was the same for a week as for a year.
You were five, six, seven. The Cobb Center reports the plaintiff's lawyer summarizes involve children as young as five.
It was another kid, older, and the staff knew. The claim is about what the adults did with what they knew.
Your records are gone, or the State says it can't find them. Since April 30, 2026 the State has to produce its own files to a former foster child who sues.
You live in Oregon, Idaho, anywhere. The claim is against Washington and is filed here; you don't have to live here.

Facilities covered

Six places the records on this page actually name, then the rest of the system. Cobb Center, the Children's Home Society of Washington's three cottages for boys at 65th and 33rd in North Seattle, open from 1974, in the record to 1999, boys of about six to fourteen, wards of the State; it has a page of its own on this site, /cobb-center-survivors. The Kiwanis Vocational Home in Centralia, 1971 to 1994. J Bar D Boys Ranch near Ione and Reynolds Creek Boys Ranch near Cusick, Pend Oreille County, late 1970s to December 1984. Toutle River Boys Ranch, the 1980s and 1990s. A licensed foster home in Pierce County, 1990s to 2003. Then the places on the quiz because the same State licensed them and filled them: the Boys Village group homes in Ellensburg and Seattle, where the plaintiffs' firm announced a $10.5 million State settlement for four men in August 2024; Jessie Dyslin Boys Ranch in Tacoma, where the State settled one claim for $150,000 in 2024 without admitting liability; Secret Harbor School on Cypress Island, 1949 to 2008, mostly State wards, with two dozen suits against the operator still headed for trial; and every other licensed foster home, receiving home and group home DSHS or DCYF ever sent a child to. Somewhere not listed? The questions still work. Answer them and say where.

Questions people are asking

Can I sue the State of Washington for abuse in foster care or a group home?

People have, and the State has paid: $16.95 million to twelve J Bar D men in 2023, $36.3 million of the Kiwanis settlements, $9 million to a former Pierce County foster child in 2025. Whether you can turns on your dates, your birth year and when you connected what happened to what it did to you, which is what the questions above sort out. A tort claim form goes to the State first, then sixty days, then the suit.

Has anyone been criminally charged over Cobb Center?

A former Children's Home Society counselor, Kenneth Bell, pleaded guilty in King County in 2005 to two counts of rape of a child over conduct in the mid-1990s at the Society's North Seattle home. The 2023 civil complaint names Cobb Center and the State and is pending; nobody has been charged in connection with that complaint as far as the public record shows, and we won't tell you otherwise.

Did the State of Washington settle the foster care abuse lawsuits?

Some, one at a time. There is no global settlement and no claims program. Each case the State has resolved was its own: J Bar D in 2023, Toutle River in 2022, the Pierce County foster case in September 2025. Others are pending, Cobb Center among them, and the Supreme Court's April 2026 ruling on DCYF's files applies to all of them. Nothing here promises the State will settle yours.

What is the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse in Washington?

Short version: three years, but the statute (RCW 4.16.340) gives you three different places to start counting, and you take the latest. The act. The day you discovered the injury. The day you discovered the act was what caused it. And nothing runs while you're under eighteen. Abuse on or after June 6, 2024? No time limit. A look-back window for older claims, the kind other states opened? Washington doesn't have one. The deadline section above walks through it.

How much does a foster care abuse lawyer cost?

Here, nothing. Every case is on contingency. The lawyer is paid only out of what is recovered, and if nothing is recovered you owe nothing. Not for the call, not for the review, not for the case.

Who sees your form

Kerim Eravci · Survivor Advocate · Not a lawyer

I was a victim, and I waited. Not because I didn't know what happened to me (I knew every day), but because I'd decided it was over, mine to carry, nobody's business. When I finally went looking for a lawyer, the answer came back in two words I'd never thought about: statute of limitations. My time had run out while I was busy getting through it.

What that has cost me since is a long story, and I'll tell you the whole thing in private, if you want it. The short version is the reason my name is on this page: I'm here to help people do what I wish I'd done, which is find out where you stand while the door's still open.

I'm not a lawyer. I read what you send, I call you once, on your terms, and nothing gets filed unless you say so. Ask sooner than I did.

Kerim Eravci is not an attorney. He's a survivor.

What happens next. Three steps, nothing more until you say so.

You answer 6 questions. Nothing is filed. Nothing starts.
A survivor calls you, once. Not a robot, not a call center. Someone who has been where you are.
You decide. You find out your options. If you want to stop there, you stop there.

How this works

ME2 Survivors Alliance protects the heart. Licensed WA attorneys do the legal work. We are not lawyers and we don't pretend to be.

You never pay a dollar

Every case is on contingency. There is no charge for the call, the review, or the case. The firm is paid only out of a recovery, and if there is no recovery you owe nothing.