Internal review into U-M Hospital's handling of child porn case to be done in weeks

The university fired Jenson on Dec. 16, Fitzgerald said. He was arraigned the next day on four charges of possessing child sexually abusive material and faces a preliminary exam on Feb. 16.

The initial report of the images came to hospital officials from a resident physician who found the images on a thumb drive in May, according to records. Her supervisors, hospital security and the Office of the General Counsel reviewed the case before an employee with the Office of the General Counsel decided there was not enough evidence to bring the case to police, records show.

It wasn’t until November that police were informed of the case, when a member of the hospital’s security staff came forward, records show.

University officials have condemned the gap between the initial report and police involvement and the internal review is meant to take a look at the processes that took place once the resident physician first came forward, Fitzgerald said.

“They’ll be talking to various people in the offices involved to get an understanding of how this was handled and the processes involved,” Fitzgerald said, “and they’ll be looking at what can be made better.”

The Office of University Audits is commonly turned to in a number of different situations, Fitzgerald said. The auditors participate in a number of investigations, spanning from financial audits of the university’s athletic department to management consulting work to help make departments more efficient, Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald said there’s no deadline for the review to be finished, but it’s expected to be done in a matter of weeks.

“There is a clear sense of urgency for this,” he said.

“It’s hard to put an exact time frame on the work that remains to be done, but everyone understands it needs to be done swiftly.”

The auditors have already submitted some preliminary recommendations to the university, Fitzgerald said. Among them are developing a common set of guidelines for reporting security incidents throughout the university, consistent logging of all potential criminal activity in a reporting system shared by police and hospital security, joint training exercises and referring all computer forensic needs to university police.

When the internal review is finished, the university auditors will present their findings to Coleman and the university’s Board of Regents, which will make the report publicly available, Fitzgerald said.

Coleman spoke in December in the wake of the Penn State child abuse scandal about a task force the university is setting up to examine policies for recording, reporting and preventing sexual misconduct or abuse involving university employees and children, but that task force will not be involved in the review of Jenson’s case, Fitzgerald said.

“That’s a broader task force really designed to look at all university programs that include children and review safeguards in those programs,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a completely different look at things.”

Kyle Feldscher covers cops and courts for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at kylefeldscher@annarbor.com or you can follow him on Twitter.