BATON ROUGE - Gov. Edwards named Terri Ricks the new secretary of the state's Department of Children and Family Services. 

Ricks has been serving as interim Secretary since Marketa Walters stepped down in November. 

Walters' exit comes after months of scrutiny over a series of missteps at the agency this year, two of which involved children who died from drug overdoses just months apart.

The first came in June, when 2-year-old Mitchell Robinson III swallowed fentanyl at his mother's drug-filled home and died. More than a month later, the WBRZ Investigative Unit exposed that the toddler had nearly died from drug overdoses twice before in 2022 and that DCFS had been warned that the child was in danger at least three times prior to his death.

Less than a month later, WBRZ then uncovered that a foster parent being paid by the state was accused of sexually abusing multiple children left in his care. A grandmother of one of the children said she had filed complaints with DCFS about the squalor those children were living in, but the state left the kids with their foster father.

One-year-old J'ahrei Paul died on Oct. 31 after he suffered a drug overdose while in his father's care. WBRZ learned that the agency had been warned about the child's living conditions at least a week before he died. It also appeared that the agency had no idea that the boy's mother was locked up in a Texas jail at the time of the infant's death.