Father describes hard lessons

Blogger Note:

This sounds all too familiar! It seems that every family that CPS touches, tells the same story. The only difference is in the names. The only good that ever comes of CPS involvement with a family is that they soon learn the truth about kangaroo courts and how our country is truly run. ? What Constitution ?
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Family dispute gone wrong leads to girls taken from home.

ELKHART — Victor Marquis remembers Sept. 13, 2007, as the day his disillusionment with his country began.

Marquis, a 47-year-old engineer whose two teenage daughters live with him, recalls that night in 2007 when they were taken away and mired in what he calls an unconstitutional system.

That night, Marquis says, the family was planning to attend an event that required wearing clothes that his older daughter, Victoria, resisted putting on.

Tensions between him and his now-ex-wife were already heading toward divorce, he says, and when 13-year-old Victoria refused to wear the outfit, Marquis became so angry he decided to spank the girl. His wife stepped in front of him to block him, he says, so he spanked his wife instead.

His then-wife ran downstairs and Marquis followed, he says, accidentally running into the girls’ stepmother and knocking her down some stairs.

Marquis says the woman was not injured and things calmed down, so he left to pick up his younger daughter. But when he returned, police were there.

The father was ultimately charged with felony domestic battery in front of a minor, which was reduced to a misdemeanor and led to a year’s probation.

But the incident also led to the girls being declared wards of the state, who spent almost 18 months in foster homes.

Marquis’ first attorney told him to agree with Child Protective Services that the children were in need of services and things would move more quickly; instead, he says, the situation became even more complicated.

Victoria, who is now 18, says one foster home had such a bad lice infestation that the girls suffered with the nits for six months. The other home, she says, housed other foster children who ate most of the available food, forcing the girls to appeal to a neighbor for sustenance.

Marquis says he attended individual and family therapy sessions, trying his best to comply with Department of Child Services wishes.

He attended anger management classes, he says, but they insisted that he admit to beating his wife.

“They wanted me to say, ‘I’m Victor Marquis, and I’m a batterer,’” he says. “I wasn’t a wife abuser. ... There were men in there who had beat their wives and still had their kids.”

The man running the program eventually testified that Marquis was in denial about what had happened, he says.

Even after he had hired a different attorney, Marquis says he wasn’t allowed to call his own witnesses, such as the girls’ mother, Sharon Marquis, to defend his parenting skills. Sharon had given him full custody long before the incident, she says, because of issues of her own.

Sharon Marquis and both girls say Victor has rarely lost his temper. But “I could have handled it differently, I admit,” he says now.

The judge stressed that it was against the law for him to tell anyone else about the case, he says, which added to the helplessness.

“They were feeling good about taking my kids away from me based on incorrect information, which I was never able to refute,” Marquis says.

“There’s no oversight,” he says, “and parents are minimized.”

Meanwhile, Victoria says that when she’d meet with her Court Appointed Special Advocate, what she told her was reported out of context in court.

She told the woman, “‘I miss my family,’” Victoria says. “‘My dad is a little crazy, but isn’t everybody a little crazy?’ She told the judge I said, ‘My dad is crazy.’ It was ridiculous. They didn’t really listen.”

The girls had to switch schools twice while living in the foster homes. Victoria says she’s less trusting — and more possessive of her things — than she used to be.

Her father is more bitter.

“This is not the country I grew up in,” Marquis says. “This is not the country I thought it was.”

Source http://www.wsbt.com/news/sbt-father-describes-hard-lessons-20120226,0,5201592.story