Kansas child protection agency made a mistake. Then Evan Brewer was killed.

For more than a year, people reported to the state that 3-year-old Evan Brewer was suffering in a home of chronic methamphetamine users – that the mother’s boyfriend choked the child until he became unconscious.

The grim details appear in an inch-thick stack of records released by the Kansas Department for Children and Families to The Eagle just before 5 p.m. Friday.

DCF, which investigates reports of child abuse and neglect, kept collecting and compiling reports: that Evan’s mother was regularly high on meth, staying in bed and not feeding him real meals.

And most disturbing: alleging that she was not protecting Evan from her abusive live-in boyfriend, who dragged her by her hair and bragged about choking her and her son. The abuse reached the point that the boy had accidents – he feared walking to the bathroom in the morning because he would have to pass the adults’ bedroom.