Former CPS employee accused of lying about children's safety

LARGO (FOX 13) - A Pinellas County Child Protective investigator is facing some serious charges after the sheriff says he lied about cases and left children in dangerous homes.

Steven Urban was a child protective investigator with the sheriff’s department.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri says in January another investigator was following up on one of his cases involving a kid in a home with a fight involving a knife. 

Gualtieri says the investigator noticed some red flags.

“The grandmother, who Urban wrote in a report he interviewed in November of 2017, ...had died three years earlier in 2014,” Gualtieri said during a news conference Thursday.  

The sheriff says Urban resigned in January after being called out on several lies.

Gualtieri says his deputies started going through all of his cases in 2017. Out of 142 cases, they say he falsified more than half – 75 of them.  

“In 29 of the 75 falsified cases Urban did absolutely no field work whatsoever,” Gualtieri said.  

Two of them the sheriffs said were so bad the children involved had to be removed from their homes.  

“He [Urban] documented that he saw children who were alleged victims of abuse abandonment or neglect, and verified their well-being when he never saw them or had no idea to their condition or their jeopardy,” Gualtieri said.

The sheriff says supervisors will now randomly check to confirm investigators actually speak with families involving alleged abuse.

Urban faces ten felony counts of falsifying documents.