A 4-Year-Old Was Taken From Foster Care and Returned to His Father. A Year Later, He Was Found Buried Under the House.

Aiden Scott Bevins was four years old. According to charging documents filed in Grays Harbor County Superior Court, he had not been seen alive in more than a year when Aberdeen police, chasing an unrelated missing-child report, began asking where he was. On May 13, 2026, with help from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, investigators say they exhumed the boy’s remains from beneath a house — inside a plastic tote, wrapped in a garbage bag.

On June 8, 2026, prosecutors formally charged the boy’s father, Jacob Scott Bevins, 36, with homicide by abuse, first-degree assault of a child, failure to notify the coroner of human remains, and making a false statement to a public servant. He is presumed innocent. The charges allege he caused Aiden’s death between late March and August 2024 — meaning, if the dates hold, the child had been dead for the better part of two years before anyone in authority went looking for him.

But the fact that turns this from a private horror into a public accountability story is what came before the charges. Aiden, the couple who raised him from age one to three told KING 5, had spent nearly two years in their foster care because of concerns for his safety. They say they warned Child Protective Services more than once against sending him back. Washington’s child-welfare agency reunified him with his parents anyway. This happened in Grays Harbor County — the same county, and the same agency, behind the unsolved disappearance of 5-year-old Oakley Carlson.

• ~2 years — Aiden spent in foster care over safety concerns before the state returned him to his parents, the couple who fostered him told KING 5 · Source: KING 5, KOMO
• 4 charges — filed June 8, 2026: homicide by abuse, first-degree assault of a child, failure to notify the coroner of remains, false statement to a public servant · Source: KIRO 7, MyNorthwest, KOMO
• $750,000 — the bail set after a judge raised it from $150,000; the next hearing is June 11, 2026 · Source: KOMO News

The case did not begin as a homicide investigation. On May 12, 2026, Aberdeen police responded to a reported missing-child complaint — not about Aiden, but about his 6-year-old sister. Officers determined the girl was safe with her mother. In the course of that contact, according to charging documents, detectives could not account for Aiden’s whereabouts. His mother had been incarcerated and had not seen him in more than a year; she later told investigators that Jacob Bevins had assured her the boy was living with relatives in Idaho.

There were no relatives in Idaho. When detectives confronted Bevins and asked whether Aiden was safe, court records say, he shook his head no, then admitted the child had died and that he had buried him beneath the house. On May 13, with the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab assisting, investigators recovered Aiden’s remains. Bevins, who had three outstanding warrants at the time of his arrest — for motor vehicle theft, vehicle prowling, and reckless driving — was booked into the Grays Harbor County Jail.

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On June 8, 2026, the Grays Harbor County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office filed four counts against Bevins in Superior Court. The lead charge, homicide by abuse, is reserved under Washington law for a death caused under circumstances showing “extreme indifference to human life,” where the defendant has engaged in a pattern or practice of assault against a child. Prosecutors allege Bevins caused Aiden’s death between March 24 and August 1, 2024, and that he had been assaulting the boy since late 2023. We are not going to catalog the medical findings here; it is enough to say a child-abuse expert concluded the injuries were the result of force, and that they were not consistent with the accidental explanation Bevins is alleged to have offered.

The remaining counts describe what came after: failure to notify the coroner of human remains, and making a false statement to a public servant — the alleged story about Idaho. A judge initially set bail at $150,000, then raised it to $750,000 once the full scope of the charges was clear. Bevins’s next court appearance is set for June 11, 2026. Every allegation here is exactly that — an allegation. Bevins has not been convicted of anything, and the burden remains entirely with the state.

“He came into foster care because there were concerns for his safety, and he was returned.”

Magali Lopez, who fostered Aiden with her husband Gary, to KING 5 · paraphrased from her on-camera remarks

Gary and Magali Lopez told KING 5 they cared for Aiden from the time he was one until he was about three — nearly two years, after he was placed in foster care over concerns for his safety. They say they did not stay silent when the state moved to reunify him with his biological parents. They contacted Child Protective Services multiple times, they told reporters, to raise concerns about sending the boy back. He was returned anyway. “It shattered our world,” the couple said of learning what had happened to the child they had raised.

This is the part the public has a right to scrutinize. A foster family that knew the child, that had cared for him for two years, that flagged its concerns to the agency in writing and by phone — and the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) returned him to a home where, prosecutors now allege, he was beaten over a period of months and then killed. The question is not whether the agency had information. According to the people closest to the child, it did. The question is what it did with it.

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Aberdeen sits in Grays Harbor County, and Grays Harbor is not new to this. It is the county at the center of the Oakley Carlson case — the little girl who was a few years old when she vanished, whose biological parents remain persons of interest, and who was declared legally dead in July 2025. A state fatality review of that case found that over roughly eight years, fourteen calls were made to DCYF about that family. The review documented agency gaps: weak documentation, poor oversight of contracted assessments, insufficient training on family isolation and domestic-violence dynamics, and communication gaps with foster families. Oakley, too, had been returned from foster care to her biological parents.

And the broader numbers are moving the wrong way. Washington recorded a modern high in child-welfare deaths and near-deaths in 2025 — by one accounting, 22 children under DCYF supervision died and 35 more nearly died, with about half of the incidents tied to opioids. Critics in the Legislature blame the 2021 Keeping Families Together Act, which raised the legal bar for removing a child from a home to a showing of imminent physical harm and pushed the system toward reunification and kinship placement over foster care. The DCYF Oversight Board’s own 2025 annual report and a separate state audit flagging tens of millions in improper agency payments describe a system straining to keep track of the children in its care.

A line worth drawing clearly: nothing in the public record establishes that DCYF caused Aiden’s death, and Jacob Bevins is presumed innocent of every count until a jury says otherwise. The person charged with killing this child is his father, not a caseworker. If the dates in the charging documents are correct, the homicide occurred in 2024 — before the missing-sibling call that ultimately exposed it. No agency decision can be retroactively blamed for a death that allegedly already happened.

But accountability is not only about who struck the final blow. The foster parents say they told the state, repeatedly, that this child was not safe to send home. The state sent him home. Whether the agency had a defensible basis for that decision, what it knew, what it documented, and whether the policy framework it operates under made the wrong call the path of least resistance — those are legitimate public questions. In Washington, where child-welfare deaths hit a modern high in 2025, they are urgent ones. The presumption of innocence belongs to the defendant. It does not belong to a bureaucracy.

A child who spent half his short life in foster care for his own protection was returned to a home a foster family had begged the state to keep him out of, and then he disappeared for a year while the people responsible for him reported him as living elsewhere. Whatever a jury ultimately decides about Jacob Bevins, that sequence demands a public reckoning that does not wait for a verdict. Washington already runs a child-fatality review process; this case will trigger one. The test is whether the findings change anything — or whether they read, again, like the Oakley Carlson review: a careful catalog of gaps, followed by the next preventable death.

The specific questions are not hard to write down. When did DCYF reunify Aiden with his parents, and on what assessment? What did the Lopez family’s reports to CPS say, and how were they resolved? Was anyone checking on the boy after he went home? And does a system that, by its own oversight board’s account, is losing track of the children in its care — in a state that raised the bar for removing kids from dangerous homes — have any business calling a two-year placement “safe to end” when the people who knew the child best said otherwise? Those answers are owed to a four-year-old who is not here to ask for them.

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Last updated June 9, 2026