Social worker Brad Van Vranken saved children from neglect and abuse

Brad Van Vranken, a social worker who rescued hundreds of Sedgwick County children from filth, neglect, beatings and death, died in Wichita on Wednesday.

Social workers and prosecutors say the loss to local children from his death is almost incalculable.

“Hundreds of people are probably alive today because of Brad,” said Sherry Chapman, a former state investigator who teaches social work at Wichita State University.

Besides the lives saved, he helped rescue hundreds more children from neglect and abuse, from homes where children with matted hair consume not nearly enough calories and grow up without being taught even the first rudiments of language, Chapman and prosecutors said.

“Because of Brad, hundreds of children got adopted,” said Karen Countryman-Roswurm, a social worker who combats human trafficking from a center at Wichita State University. “Because of Brad, hundreds more got good foster care. He was one of the great heroes in our community.”

Mr. Van Vranken, 57, died of bleeding caused by brain tumors that he didn’t realize he had, his family said.

A punctual man, he had failed to report for work on Sept. 23. Prosecutors in Sedgwick County’s juvenile court say they went to his home, peered through a window, saw him slumped in a chair and called police.

Police and EMS rescuers broke down a door to get in and took him to Wesley Medical Center, where a doctor found two inoperable tumors. He was sent home to hospice care and died there a week later, said his brother, Darryl Smutz.

Mr. Van Vranken worked for the Kansas Department for Children and Families as that agency’s liaison with prosecutors working child-in-need-of-care cases. That department’s chief, Secretary Phyllis Gilmore, issued a statement on Friday: “He touched many lives in his time with the agency, but none more than the children he helped. He saved countless children from further abuse and neglect. He took great pride and satisfaction in his work and genuinely cared for those he served.”

He started his career with the state agency as a front-line investigator, going into many homes where children were reported abused or neglected.

“He was getting burned out in his field but stuck with it because he wanted to help children,” Smutz said. “He felt in a lot of ways like he was doing a thankless job but knew he was doing some good.”

Chapman met and mentored Mr. Van Vranken 19 years ago, just before he began those rescues. The man who would set the standard for how the state could save children wanted no part of child rescues then, Chapman said.

He was a reluctant student, required to perform real-life social work with Chapman and others to complete his senior year at WSU.

Chapman’s unit, part of what was then called the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, investigated child abuse and neglect within homes involving mental illness.

“He’d worked in the hospitality industry for years but hurt his back,” she said. “He had to change careers, so he chose social work but wanted to work with older people. There were no openings for that then. He was really reluctant to take up this work with children. It can horrify people; it’s not for everybody.”

But what he saw as an investigator shocked him and turned his life in a new direction, Chapman said. The guy who would never become a father became a passionate guardian angel to a generation of abused children, Countryman-Roswurm said.

“He was my best friend but Brad had a lot of best friends,” said Annie Vice, a social worker in Wichita. “He always made his friends know he was totally into whatever they were saying and what was going on in their world; doing this enriched his own life.”

That warmth with people made him also a formidable investigator when lives were at stake, Chapman said. He learned how to gently draw out crucial evidence during home visit interviews with reluctant witnesses. With other social workers as burned out and overworked as he was, he’d crack jokes, buck people up and cheer them while they completed investigations.

He seized upon how paperwork can save lives. Chapman watched him shape hundreds of voluminous state-required reports into the legal evidence that judges evaluated when deciding whether to assign children them to state custody.

Mr. Van Vranken helped save more lives after he transferred to juvenile court, where he worked for the Department for Children and Families but at a desk alongside prosecutors examining police and agency child reports.

“He did phenomenal work with the clock always ticking,” said Ron Paschal, the deputy district attorney who supervises the juvenile division prosecutors. “The work is really hard, the paperwork – the enormous amount of details – plus you’ve got a lot of well-intentioned people coming at complex cases from different philosophies – lawyers, police, social workers, judges.

“There are rare days in court where there are no child cases,” Paschal said. “But then eight or nine come at once.”

“He was a master who knew all the spokes of that wheel and made it work within that 72-hour deadline set by the state to decide a case. My lawyers would walk in here early in the morning, and there stood Brad already there, with all this information ready to go about what to do.”

Mr. Van Vranken taught a generation of younger social workers in Wichita how to do that paperwork right, Paschal said.

He taught them how to keep their heads while under stress.

“Just having him gone the last few days, his lack of presence here in juvenile court is huge,” Paschal said.

“It’s not the same now.

“And I don’t know what we can do about that.”

A memorial service for Mr. Van Vranken will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at College Hill United Methodist Church, 2930 E. First St.

This story was originally published October 2, 2015 at 6:56 PM with the headline "Social worker Brad Van Vranken saved children from neglect and abuse."