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The Mililani grandmother was worried. She had seen her grandchildren at a Valentine’s Day party in Waianae and couldn’t shake the notion that they looked too skinny.

It wasn’t the first time the idea had crossed her mind. As far back as May 2023, she had noted how thin they were.

“That was the first time I noticed my two older grandsons eating a lot,” she said. “They were just scarfing down food.”

By the time of the party on Oahu’s Westside, it no longer seemed like their skinniness could be explained away by growth spurts, illness or other causes.

“I couldn’t sleep at night,” she said, asking not to be named to protect her other children.

A few days later, she called her daughter, Janae Perez, the mother of the two boys and two girls. Perez said the older kids were at school.

That made no sense to the grandmother because she had recently discovered in a roundabout way that the two boys had been taken out of school months earlier. Why would her daughter lie, she wondered.

So she said she called Child Welfare Services, the state operation in charge of protecting children from abuse and neglect.

Despite the grandmother’s efforts, four months later one of the grandkids, Sarai, was dead. The almost 4-year-old was covered with bruises. She weighed 29 pounds and had been starved and neglected, according to the report by child abuse experts that I cited in a column last month.

My column focused on how the Department of Human Services, which oversees CWS, would say almost nothing about this child’s death, including whether CWS had received earlier reports of abuse and neglect. That’s despite the fact that the state is required by federal law to disclose such information.

Now the grandmother and another family member have answered one question that DHS refused to: Yes, CWS had been warned. But for reasons that we still don’t know, the agency did not prevent Sarai’s death.

“I did see something. I did say something,” Sarai’s grandmother said. “But the problem is that it didn’t matter. It didn’t work because no one listened.”

After the column ran, I was contacted by Tiffany Texeira, a relative of the family. She hosted the Valentine’s Day party. Texeira had been close to Perez, Sarai’s mother. She connected me with Perez’s mother, the grandmother.

Together, the two women filled in some of the blanks in that heavily redacted report I got via the Public First Law Center. Written by a panel of child abuse experts, it included details of Sarai’s death and it might even have addressed what CWS knew beforehand. It’s so heavily redacted, though, that it’s impossible to tell.

Many questions remain.

Texeira, like Sarai’s grandmother, said she noticed that Perez’s children looked skinny at the Valentine’s Day party. She offered them instant noodles, and said that between them they ate five cups.

She talked to the grandmother about it, she said, and they agreed the grandmother would be the one to call CWS. Texeira figured that if Perez and her partner discovered that the grandmother made the call and got mad about it, at least Texeira — who had always been close to Perez — would still have an open line of communication and be able to check on the children.

I sent emails to publicly available addresses for Perez and her partner and got no response.

The grandmother said she called the CWS hotline on Feb. 17. A little more than two weeks later, Perez sent Texeira a text saying CWS’s investigation was over.

In the texts, which Texeira shared with me, Texeira offered to bring over a Costco chicken to help with a meal. Perez responded, “We have a bunch of chicken noodle soup we have to much food. Oh I forgot my mom said I don’t feed the kids.”

Perez sent a photo of a shelf full of soup and other canned food.

“Oh you can let her know btw because I’ve blocked her on everything that the case was closed for her invalid accusations to Cws.”

Around this same time, a CWS social worker came to the grandmother’s house to check on a complaint to the child abuse hotline that the grandmother was abusing and neglecting her own minor children. She suspects Perez and her partner reported her as retribution for reporting them.

The CWS social worker quickly concluded those allegations were baseless, the grandmother said. But the grandmother took advantage of the social worker’s presence to plead for CWS action.

“I told her multiple times, please, please, please check on my grandkids,” she said.

The social worker said she would come back the following month to close out the case against the grandmother. When she didn’t, the grandmother said she called to find out what was going on.

The social worker finally came in May, and the grandmother said she repeated her request that someone check on her grandkids. The social worker told her to call the hotline again, which the grandmother said she did at the end of May.

“By that time, I just cried,” she said. “I just said, ‘Look, I am the grandmother and I’m calling because I’m worried about my grandchildren’s safety …

“I basically laid it out on the line. I told them everything I thought. ‘I don’t know if they’re starving them. I don’t know what’s going on. But something is not right.'”

She went away for a couple of weeks. Then, in the middle of June, she got a phone call from the man the family believed was Sarai’s biological father.

Sarai, he said, was dead.

The report by the multidisciplinary team found that Sarai was severely underweight. Her injuries included an adult-sized handprint bruise on her buttocks. The panel wrote that she suffered from extreme pain and exposure to domestic violence, and was deprived of food, clothing, education, medical care or supervision.

Today, the three other children are in foster care, the grandmother said. HPD says the case is being investigated, but would not discuss it further. So far no one has been charged.

The grandmother, meanwhile, said it’s been hard to get any information from CWS about the whereabouts of the surviving children or anything else about what happened.

“Reading your article,” she said, “was the first information I got.”