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When 10-year-old Geanna Bradley was beaten and starved to death in February, allegedly at the hands of her Wahiawa legal guardians, the story made the news for days and the community was justifiably outraged.

But what if I told you that there are stories just like that you have never heard about?

And that the reason you don’t know about them is the state, hiding behind confidentiality laws, keeps mum — especially about its own actions or lack of action before the child was killed?

On June 13, four months after Geanna died, emergency responders were called to a home somewhere on Oahu. There, they found a child aged 3 years and 11 months who weighed a mere 29 pounds. The average weight of a 4-year-old is 40 pounds.

This girl had bruises at different stages of healing on both lower legs, left thigh, back and trunk. The medical staff noted an adult-sized handprint bruise on her buttocks and a “massive” bruise on her left hip and abdomen. The Honolulu Police Department noted more bruises on her arm and ribs.

She was pronounced dead 18 minutes after being admitted to the hospital. In her short life, she had suffered from extreme pain and mental distress and exposure to domestic violence, a panel of experts later found. She didn’t get enough food, clothing, education, medical care or supervision. And she had been given dangerous drugs.

There were no press conferences or releases. In Geanna’s case, the legal guardians were arrested right away and officials talked to the media about what they had found. But HPD is still investigating this case and will say nothing. As far as the public knows, it never happened.

The only reason I know about it is that the Public First Law Center used Hawaii’s open records law to get a report by something called a multidisciplinary team. This is a group of experts — a pediatrician, psychologist, nurse and social workers — convened to review child abuse deaths and make recommendations to the state’s Child Welfare Services about how to avoid them.

The Department of Human Services provided a copy of the report to the law center, which shared it with me. But most of it is blacked out. So we don’t know where this happened, the identities of the mother, father or “mother’s partner” listed as a party in the report. We really don’t know anything at all except that she was bruised literally all over and malnourished and that she died.

DHS told the law center that it is required to keep confidential all child abuse records, except what it must release under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. This federal law requires disclosure of the age and gender of the child and the causes and circumstances of the death.

Most importantly, it’s meant to help the public understand the government’s actions in a child abuse death or near-death. Among the information states are supposed to release are earlier reports of child abuse and neglect, the results of any investigations and services the state provided to the child before the violence occurred.

The redacted report provided to Public First Law Center does include age and gender, and states the obvious causes of death, but says basically nothing about the circumstances.

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And what about the question with the greatest implications for fixing things so this does not happen again — was this child on the state’s radar before her death? The redacted report doesn’t clearly answer that.

Under “Type of Case,” one of the checked boxes is “Reabuse on an open (active) or closed case.”

But later the report states that the girl “was not receiving any services prior to her death.”

The logical conclusion is that the state did have an open case involving this family, but closed it before the girl was killed. I asked DHS if this were the case, of course, but the agency declined to say.

Who knows how many cases like this are out there?

I wrote about one last year: a 5-month-old baby who died on the Waianae Coast under bizarre circumstances. After the state provided me with the scantiest of information, I used police and medical examiner’s reports to fill out the details.

The baby was apparently drowned but there was no sign in the Makaha Valley apartment of how. The mother said “I fainted and then went walking. I could have been dreaming and then I came back and my baby was on the floor.”

These records showed that CWS was saying everything was fine even as the grandmother of the child who died reported that her daughter, the baby’s mother, was acting irrationally and had been increasingly isolated from her family.

That case got me thinking about what other states do to inform the public when a child dies of abuse or neglect. My far from exhaustive research found that California, Florida, Rhode Island, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Delaware, New Jersey and Colorado — unlike Hawaii — post such information on the internet.

DHS gave me three paragraphs on the death of the 5-month-old in Waianae, only because I asked for it. But Colorado, in a case I opened at random, posted seven pages on the internet about an abuse case that did not even involve a fatality. Among the copious, detailed information was an assessment of the state’s strengths and weaknesses in handing it.

Colorado law . The state’s general assembly emphasized “a need for agency transparency and accountability to the public” in child abuse cases “when the child or family has had previous involvement … with the state or county within three years prior to the incident.”

The Hawaii Legislature, which has done no oversight of these high-profile child abuse deaths, should pass such a law and put an end to the state’s silence.

And it should take a hard look at what went wrong in these horrific deaths and approve legislation to fix it.

As has become abundantly clear, DHS cannot or will not do it on its own.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .