Del. Pediatrician Case Total Breakdown

WILMINGTON, Del. - What went wrong in the case of a Delaware pediatrician accused of abusing more than a hundred patients? Everything did, we now know.

Dr. Earl Bradley was arrested last December on allegations of abuse dating back to the 1990s.

What's worse, investigators say red flags raised about Bradley went unnoticed and unreported.

On Monday, the Delaware Attorney General's Office released its report on what went wrong.

Fox 29's Dave Schratwieser reported the attorney generals' report says the system is broken and badly in need of repair. It points to widespread failures when it came to reporting Bradley's suspicious behavior with young female patients.

The failures go back to 1994 when Bradley was accused of touching a young child in Philadelphia. Delaware authorities knew about that, never did their own investigation and granted him a license to practice medicine anyway.

In 2005, when Delaware police investigated the doctor for allegations of touching a 3-year-old, state prosecutors decided there wasn't enough probable cause to prosecute. But the allegation was never reported to the state medical board in writing even though the law requires it.

And two doctors who had serious concerns about his actions never reported him to the state board of medical practice.

Even the hospital where he worked knew about allegations concerning the doctor and children but never reported them to the state board.

"We see defects in these statutes, and we see where some thing went wrong. But it's really asking too much of any statute, no matter how tight the reporting requirement is, to say, 'Gee, but for that phone call or but for that report, none of this ever would have happened," said Delaware Depute Attorney General Charles Butler said.

Bradley has been indicted on 500 counts of rape and other sexual assault offenses.. This case has been described as "the pedophilia case of the century" by some.

The doctor's own sister reported him to authorities, but that was never reported to the board of medical practice either.

Is anyone going to face charges for all these missteps? After five months of investigation, interviews with over 20 witnesses and a review of thousands of pages of documents, some of which authorities got with court orders, the answer is no.

The case is beyond the three-year statute of limitations for the civil charges that could have been brought here.

When asked if this was the perfect storm of things that could have gone wrong going wrong, Butler said, "I don't know that there's a system that you can draft or create that is sort of fool-proof and will catch 100 percent of the potential wrongdoers. So I'm not sure if I'd call this a perfect storm or just a fellow who found – just got through."

Finally, Attorney General Beau Biden's office and the state solicitor general have come up with more than 20 legal and procedural changes that should help prevent this from happening again.

The folks who put this report together will meet with the governor and state lawmakers soon to get these reforms acted on as quickly as possible, Schratwieser reported.