(CNN) -- The adoptive father of three young children in Troy, Ohio, was charged Thursday with raping three of his adopted sons and prostituting his 10-year-old son out to two other men.
The man, 39, who CNN is not naming to protect the identity of the children, is in jail on rape charges along with Jason Zwick, 29, and Patrick Rieder, 31, according to Montgomery County Prosecutor spokesman Greg Flannagan.
"It's just shocking," Flannagan said.
Troy police said they impounded the father's truck and confiscated four laptops, a video camera and two wooden paddles from his home.
The man does not appear to have a past criminal record, had adopted three children and was in the process of adopting a fourth child who already lived with him, Police Capt. Chris Anderson said.
The children were three boys ages 9 through 12 and a 9-year-old girl, he said.
Anderson said the boy who was allegedly prostituted to Zwick and Rieder told authorities that he was afraid to talk because he didn't want to be taken away from his new brothers and sister.
On February 24, police said they received a call from the state's internet crimes task force saying the father had offered an undercover officer sex with a boy. The man was arrested that day, police said.
"I've seen a lot of bad things in 35 years of law enforcement," said Attorney General Mike DeWine. "But I've never seen anything like this."
He said authorities are now "trying to unravel what kind of background check was done."
The defendants' attorneys could not be immediately reached for comment.
Source http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/02/justice/ohio-man-child-prostitution/index.html?hpt=ju_c2
CPS corruption hurts and destroys families worldwide. Please use caution posting about CPS here or anyplace on the internet. For your protection, using your full, real name and precise location is not advised. CPS has eyes everywhere and CPS is notorious for taking what people say, twisting it, embellishing on it and then using it against them in CPS "investigations" and at court proceedings.
Showing posts with label adoption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adoption. Show all posts
Monday, March 5, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Parents suing over listing on child abuse index - California
A couple who cut locks of their daughter's hair as punishment for lying are suing an Orange County agency and social worker, saying they were not afforded due process.
By Christopher Goffard
A year after George and Bette McFetridge adopted a troubled teenage girl, the Irvine couple contends, her behavior grew increasingly disconcerting. She neglected her grades, kept company with grown men and ran away repeatedly.
On her camera, the Orange County deputy district attorney and his wife found a photograph of a pentagram, and of words written on pavement: "Torture." "Agony."
To punish her for lying about her whereabouts, Bette McFetridge took a pair of scissors and cut off locks of the girls' hair in early 2008 — a snip for each lie.
The "tough love" punishment led to an allegation of emotional abuse that a social worker deemed "inconclusive" but nevertheless landed the couple on the state's Child Abuse Central Index, where they remained for 11 months.
Now, the McFetridges are suing the Orange County Social Services Agency and Bridget Hannegan, the veteran social worker who handled their case. They allege their inclusion on the list damaged their reputations, stigmatizing them as child abusers, and that they were not afforded due process to fight the label.
Though George McFetridge is a county prosecutor, he is bringing the lawsuit as a private citizen and representing himself in court. In the suit, he alleges the social worker's confidential report about the case was forwarded to the district attorney's office, damaging his reputation, and that having his name on the abuse index impeded his attempt to become a court appointed special advocate.
In Orange County Superior Court on Friday, he told jurors that he used to prosecute child abuse cases in California and Nevada. "I have sent people to prison for child abuse," he said. Of himself and his wife, he added: "We are experienced, successful parents."
The girl, referred to in court only as "Holly," was 15 at the time of the hair-cutting incident. McFetridge said that his wife, concerned about their daughter's behavior, issued multiple warnings to tell the truth or risk punishment. After each lie, she cut another strand. "She cut a third strand, and then Holly started telling the truth," he told jurors. "We made a breakthrough."
He said he received a letter in April 2008 that he and his wife had been reported to the abuse index, but 12 weeks passed before he was able to see the social worker's report. He said the social worker falsely alleged the girl's hair was cut to within an inch of her scalp, leaving silver dollar-sized chunks missing.
The girl is now 18 and no longer living with the McFetridges, who acknowledge the adoption failed. "We're Facebook friends," Mr. McFetridge told jurors.
The couple is seeking $28,000 they spent to send the girl to a residential program, plus $1 a month for each month they spent on the abuse index.
Daniel Spradlin, attorney for the Social Services Agency and the social worker, told jurors the agency's actions were "reasonable and appropriate."
He described the girl as "a very emotionally troubled child," adding: "Nobody is saying Mr. and Mrs. McFetridge are bad people.… Maybe they did not appreciate how deep her troubles were." He said the girl believed herself a failure in her parents' eyes. "Mom wanted a daughter who was an avid reader," he said, which the girl was not.
Spradlin said Mrs. McFetridge grew resentful that the girl did not seem to appreciate the life they were trying to give her. He said the girl "had nothing" when they adopted her, but that her appearance — particularly her hair — was a large part of her identity.
"They used what the child's most precious possession was" to discipline her, he said.
The case is expected to continue next week.
Source http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0204-abuse-20120204,0,5961191.story
By Christopher Goffard
A year after George and Bette McFetridge adopted a troubled teenage girl, the Irvine couple contends, her behavior grew increasingly disconcerting. She neglected her grades, kept company with grown men and ran away repeatedly.
On her camera, the Orange County deputy district attorney and his wife found a photograph of a pentagram, and of words written on pavement: "Torture." "Agony."
To punish her for lying about her whereabouts, Bette McFetridge took a pair of scissors and cut off locks of the girls' hair in early 2008 — a snip for each lie.
The "tough love" punishment led to an allegation of emotional abuse that a social worker deemed "inconclusive" but nevertheless landed the couple on the state's Child Abuse Central Index, where they remained for 11 months.
Now, the McFetridges are suing the Orange County Social Services Agency and Bridget Hannegan, the veteran social worker who handled their case. They allege their inclusion on the list damaged their reputations, stigmatizing them as child abusers, and that they were not afforded due process to fight the label.
Though George McFetridge is a county prosecutor, he is bringing the lawsuit as a private citizen and representing himself in court. In the suit, he alleges the social worker's confidential report about the case was forwarded to the district attorney's office, damaging his reputation, and that having his name on the abuse index impeded his attempt to become a court appointed special advocate.
In Orange County Superior Court on Friday, he told jurors that he used to prosecute child abuse cases in California and Nevada. "I have sent people to prison for child abuse," he said. Of himself and his wife, he added: "We are experienced, successful parents."
The girl, referred to in court only as "Holly," was 15 at the time of the hair-cutting incident. McFetridge said that his wife, concerned about their daughter's behavior, issued multiple warnings to tell the truth or risk punishment. After each lie, she cut another strand. "She cut a third strand, and then Holly started telling the truth," he told jurors. "We made a breakthrough."
He said he received a letter in April 2008 that he and his wife had been reported to the abuse index, but 12 weeks passed before he was able to see the social worker's report. He said the social worker falsely alleged the girl's hair was cut to within an inch of her scalp, leaving silver dollar-sized chunks missing.
The girl is now 18 and no longer living with the McFetridges, who acknowledge the adoption failed. "We're Facebook friends," Mr. McFetridge told jurors.
The couple is seeking $28,000 they spent to send the girl to a residential program, plus $1 a month for each month they spent on the abuse index.
Daniel Spradlin, attorney for the Social Services Agency and the social worker, told jurors the agency's actions were "reasonable and appropriate."
He described the girl as "a very emotionally troubled child," adding: "Nobody is saying Mr. and Mrs. McFetridge are bad people.… Maybe they did not appreciate how deep her troubles were." He said the girl believed herself a failure in her parents' eyes. "Mom wanted a daughter who was an avid reader," he said, which the girl was not.
Spradlin said Mrs. McFetridge grew resentful that the girl did not seem to appreciate the life they were trying to give her. He said the girl "had nothing" when they adopted her, but that her appearance — particularly her hair — was a large part of her identity.
"They used what the child's most precious possession was" to discipline her, he said.
The case is expected to continue next week.
Source http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0204-abuse-20120204,0,5961191.story
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Kaylee Rice died despite 18 state investigations - Florida
CHRIS OLWELL
Editor’s note: This story is based on interviews with friends and family of Kaylee Rice, people involved in the juvenile dependency system, and hundreds of pages of records from the Department of Children and Families, Big Bend Community Based Care, criminal and civil court files, and law enforcement.
PANAMA CITY BEACH — Even as her life descended into a spiral of abuse and addiction, Courtney Coughlin was determined to keep her daughter, Kaylee Ann Rice.
Coughlin gave up two other kids for adoption, an older girl and a younger boy, and Kaylee was removed from her care by the state on more than one occasion. Still, Coughlin fought to keep Kaylee.
Once she succeeded, said one woman who knew Kaylee, the child never stood a chance.
Kaylee was airlifted to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in the hours after a July 11, 2011, car accident in Lynn Haven. She and mother Courtney Coughlin, a drug addict and ex-convict with a long criminal history, were not wearing seat belts. Coughlin’s facial muscles were pulled from her crushed skull, and she had missing teeth and limited vision in one eye.
Kaylee fared worse.
Twelve hours after the crash, an investigator with the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) filed a preliminary report of the findings of an investigation. The investigator interviewed only doctors; Kaylee was unconscious, father Ray Rice was in prison and her mother was in the hospital on her way to jail, where she would remain until she was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The investigator was there to assess the risk to Kaylee.
“The overall safety assessment at this time is low as it pertains to the parent/caregiver not having access for further abuse/neglect to the child. However, risk is increased due to the injuries Kaylee has sustained and her current condition may potentially be fatal.”
The report documented the 18th and final time DCF had investigated allegations Kaylee had been abused or neglected.
Coughlin and Rice met in the late ’90s when they were kicking around the beach, hanging out in clubs, partying and getting into drugs. Back then it was pot and valium; later it was meth and painkillers. They had dated about a month when Coughlin showed up with a small child, Rice remembered during an interview with The News Herald.
Both were more interested in partying than parenthood, and Coughlin decided to give her daughter up for adoption. The adoption was a strain on the relationship. Rice said he started thinking, “This chick might be crazy.”
She knew how to push his buttons, and “sometimes I would try to control her,” said Rice, who was arrested several times for domestic violence. “I’m not an angel by any means.”
Coughlin was pregnant again in December 1998 when she applied for a restraining order the day after one incident. She withdrew the request a week later.
“I lost one child, kind of, you know — that’s how I felt about it — and I was giving her something better,” Coughlin said in an interview. “… I wanted Kaylee to have both of her parents there, you know, just a normal upbringing. I wanted to give her everything I didn’t have.”
Six months later, on July 10, 1999, Kaylee Rice was born in a Bay County hospital to 21-year-old Rice and 23-year-old Coughlin. It was only a matter of months before the complaints to the police and the DCF began pouring in.
Both Rice and Coughlin were involved in a major meth manufacturing case in 2004 after Rice’s mother, Yurdanur “Sunny” Rice, took a trunk with a meth lab and more than 1,000 grams of meth oil to the dump at her son’s request. The meth had belonged to one of Ray Rice’s roommates. He had allowed the roommate to cook meth at his place, but he said he never cooked meth himself and court records support him.
He ended up in a federal prison. Coughlin, who was jittery and had fresh needle marks on her arms when police came, was not charged, but DCF again took custody of Kaylee, who began the least documented period of her short life.
Coughlin was arrested in December 2004 for aggravated assault for a road rage incident in which she allegedly pointed a gun at another driver. She entered a court-ordered rehab program, but quickly failed and ended up in prison.
Kaylee moved in with Charlene Hodge for the first time. The Hodges are a large Bonifay family made larger by the many children they have fostered over the years, but not too large to take Kaylee in 2004.
With the exception of a few months spent with another relative in Michigan, Kaylee spent the next year-and-a half with the Hodges.
“My family just considered her a part of our family,” Hodge said. “She just felt at home at our house.”
When she left the Hodges’ home, Kaylee moved in with Sunny Rice, who was appointed Kaylee’s caretaker in February 2007, about six months before Coughlin’s release from prison.
In December 2008, DCF received the first report regarding Kaylee in more than four years. Rice, then 71 years old, had fallen and broken her hip. She had been hospitalized and wouldn’t be capable of caring for herself, let alone a 9-year-old girl, for at least six months. Kaylee had been staying with various friends, mainly Sean and Melinda Hall.
The Halls didn’t mind looking after Kaylee, and Judge Elijah Smiley ordered Kaylee be placed with the family. Coughlin was allowed supervised visitation.
Coughlin was released from prison in August 2007. She was off drugs and determined to resume her life with the only child she had left.
She completed parenting courses, a mental health assessment, domestic violence awareness courses and substance abuse treatment. She paid child support. Her visits required supervision.
In May 2009, DCF developed a case plan with the stated goal of reuniting Coughlin and Kaylee. The law says that a child removed by the state cannot be returned until “the circumstances which caused the creation of the case plan have been significantly remedied to the extent that the well-being and safety of the child will not be endangered upon the child’s remaining with or being returned to the child’s parent.”
Big Bend Community Based Care, a private company that contracts with the state to monitor cases like Kaylee’s, cited federal and state laws when it refused to provide documents of Coughlin’s drug tests, but logs of in-home visits show Coughlin passed at least nine random drug tests before and after the reunion.
During an in-home visit at Sunny Rice’s by the case worker in July 2009, just before the reunion, the case worker noted in her report that Kaylee was “chippery and happy.” Kaylee said she wanted to live with her mother.
On Aug. 13, 2009, Judge James Fensom held a hearing to get an update on Coughlin’s progress. All drug tests were clean, and DCF recommended Kaylee’s reunification with her mother. Fensom called a brief recess and went into the hall to speak privately with Kaylee. When he returned, he ordered the reunification.
Rosemary Ring was Kaylee’s Sunday school teacher and a friend of Sunny Rice, who had hired a lawyer and tried to fight the reunification. She said she went to court with Sunny that day, and she was disappointed Fensom chose to put Kaylee with Coughlin instead of Sunny, who had taken the child to church, dance lessons and tennis lessons.
“Sunny was a good and moral person and she would have seen to K.K.’s care,” Ring said. “Courts don’t look at the moral aspect of it.”
Kaylee had been more or less born into the system. By her first birthday, Kaylee had been removed from home by child protection teams and returned. DCF had investigated allegations that Kaylee had been exposed to drugs or family violence five times before her second birthday, and investigators often found at least some indication the allegations were true.
Of course, just as often there was no evidence to support the allegations, the DCF is required to conduct investigations in any case, said Courtney Peel, operations manager for DCF in Bay County.
DCF has goals that at times seem to be in conflict. One is to protect children, and the other is to keep families together.
“It is, and I guess it should be, difficult to terminate a parent’s rights,” Fensom said.
A child must be in immediate danger for the DCF to take steps toward taking the child from the parents. Even then, DCF doesn’t have the authority to remove them; that decision must be made by a judge in a shelter hearing.
“Some judges are hesitant to work as a dependency judge because of the reality: some cases go bad,” said Fensom, who said Kaylee’s case isn’t the only one where a child has died as a result of abuse or neglect. It’s not even the most egregious — just the most public.
The work of a dependency court judge is difficult and emotional, Fensom said, because “everyone’s doing their best, then the case goes bad.”
After she won her daughter back, Coughlin remained under supervision of Big Bend Community Based Care. Case agents performed in-home visits for six months after the reunification to see Kaylee and ensure Coughlin was seeing to her needs. They also administered drug tests.
“She was doing extremely well, I thought,” Ray Rice said. “I was actually proud of her.”
Coughlin remembers exactly the day she relapsed. After seven years drug-free, four of which she spent in prison, she started taking painkillers May 14, 2010. It had been about three months since she had passed her final drug test and her case was closed. DCF no longer had the authority to compel a drug test.
She was despondent. Her girlfriend kicked her out of their apartment and Coughlin, who was almost immediately shooting up powerful narcotic painkillers, stole her checkbook on her way out the door. Within a month, she had attempted suicide and been committed.
“That’s what I want, for the suffering to stop,” Coughlin wrote in a suicide note to her ex-girlfriend. “I know that everyone will be better off with me out of their lives. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you. … I will never forgive myself for it coming to this.”
The day before she had allegedly stolen some painkillers from Sunny, and six months later the criminal charges were starting to stack up. She was arrested in February for grand theft and uttering a forged instrument for allegedly writing bad checks from her ex’s checkbook.
In March, Coughlin was arrested after she sold four oxycodone pills to a confidential police informant. Bob and Jacqui Coughlin, the grandparents who had raised Coughlin since childhood while her mother drank herself to death, let her sit in jail for two weeks, hoping she might sober up again.
During this period, Bob Coughlin and Charlene Hodge had several discussions about moving Kaylee back in with the Hodges. They both agreed it was best for Kaylee, and it was best to do it over the summer so she wouldn’t have to change schools mid-year, but Courtney Coughlin wouldn’t go for it.
“I had talked to Courtney several times in recent months about giving K.K. up, but she refused to consider it,” Bob Coughlin said. “We still knew we had to do something with her before too long.”
Hodge remembers a long conversation with the Coughlins just before Kaylee finished sixth grade. She didn’t go into details but she said she felt very strongly that Kaylee needed to come live with her again.
“Let’s just say that I kept talking to Kaylee and she was not a happy little girl. Her life was upside down,” Hodge said. “If they needed us, we would be there for them. A child’s security means everything.”
Everyone around Coughlin could tell she was falling apart. From his prison cell, Rice would call Kaylee and ask her if Coughlin was using. Kaylee said she wasn’t, but he felt she was either covering for her mother or didn’t know. He considered reporting Coughlin to DCF, but he didn’t.
“I knew Courtney was messing up. I knew she was on drugs,” he said. “I didn’t want Kaylee to be mad at me for taking her away.”
On July 11, Coughlin was trying to cash a check that wasn’t hers. Police came to the Lynn Haven bank and pinned her in, but she stomped the accelerator and took off. She made it less than a mile.
From the wreckage of the car, investigators recovered purses and checkbooks that belonged to other women. They also found needles and a blackened spoon that tested positive for narcotics.
Two days later at Sacred Heart, staff busied themselves making arrangements with Coughlin and Rice for permission to allow their daughter’s organs to be donated. Knowing Kaylee’s heart still beats in the chest of another child is a comfort to Rice.
“I know Kaylee would’ve wanted that because she was such a sweet girl,” he said.
He’s torn up that he wasn’t there for his little girl. He used to apologize to her over the phone from the prison until she’d forgive him.
“ ‘Daddy stop already; stop that. I forgive you,’ ” he remembered her as saying. “That meant a lot, especially now; I’m so glad that she said that.”
Momma Hodge, as Kaylee referred to her, went in to be with Kaylee while the rest of her family waited in the lobby.
“I just wanted to get to her and hold her hand and let her know that I was there,” Hodge said. “I was the only one with her.”
Doctors and nurses watched with tears in their eyes. For hours after the machines that had kept Kaylee alive were turned off, Hodge was there.
Source http://www.newsherald.com/news/state-99695-died-editor.html
Editor’s note: This story is based on interviews with friends and family of Kaylee Rice, people involved in the juvenile dependency system, and hundreds of pages of records from the Department of Children and Families, Big Bend Community Based Care, criminal and civil court files, and law enforcement.
PANAMA CITY BEACH — Even as her life descended into a spiral of abuse and addiction, Courtney Coughlin was determined to keep her daughter, Kaylee Ann Rice.
Coughlin gave up two other kids for adoption, an older girl and a younger boy, and Kaylee was removed from her care by the state on more than one occasion. Still, Coughlin fought to keep Kaylee.
Once she succeeded, said one woman who knew Kaylee, the child never stood a chance.
Kaylee was airlifted to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in the hours after a July 11, 2011, car accident in Lynn Haven. She and mother Courtney Coughlin, a drug addict and ex-convict with a long criminal history, were not wearing seat belts. Coughlin’s facial muscles were pulled from her crushed skull, and she had missing teeth and limited vision in one eye.
Kaylee fared worse.
Twelve hours after the crash, an investigator with the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) filed a preliminary report of the findings of an investigation. The investigator interviewed only doctors; Kaylee was unconscious, father Ray Rice was in prison and her mother was in the hospital on her way to jail, where she would remain until she was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The investigator was there to assess the risk to Kaylee.
“The overall safety assessment at this time is low as it pertains to the parent/caregiver not having access for further abuse/neglect to the child. However, risk is increased due to the injuries Kaylee has sustained and her current condition may potentially be fatal.”
The report documented the 18th and final time DCF had investigated allegations Kaylee had been abused or neglected.
Coughlin and Rice met in the late ’90s when they were kicking around the beach, hanging out in clubs, partying and getting into drugs. Back then it was pot and valium; later it was meth and painkillers. They had dated about a month when Coughlin showed up with a small child, Rice remembered during an interview with The News Herald.
Both were more interested in partying than parenthood, and Coughlin decided to give her daughter up for adoption. The adoption was a strain on the relationship. Rice said he started thinking, “This chick might be crazy.”
She knew how to push his buttons, and “sometimes I would try to control her,” said Rice, who was arrested several times for domestic violence. “I’m not an angel by any means.”
Coughlin was pregnant again in December 1998 when she applied for a restraining order the day after one incident. She withdrew the request a week later.
“I lost one child, kind of, you know — that’s how I felt about it — and I was giving her something better,” Coughlin said in an interview. “… I wanted Kaylee to have both of her parents there, you know, just a normal upbringing. I wanted to give her everything I didn’t have.”
Six months later, on July 10, 1999, Kaylee Rice was born in a Bay County hospital to 21-year-old Rice and 23-year-old Coughlin. It was only a matter of months before the complaints to the police and the DCF began pouring in.
Both Rice and Coughlin were involved in a major meth manufacturing case in 2004 after Rice’s mother, Yurdanur “Sunny” Rice, took a trunk with a meth lab and more than 1,000 grams of meth oil to the dump at her son’s request. The meth had belonged to one of Ray Rice’s roommates. He had allowed the roommate to cook meth at his place, but he said he never cooked meth himself and court records support him.
He ended up in a federal prison. Coughlin, who was jittery and had fresh needle marks on her arms when police came, was not charged, but DCF again took custody of Kaylee, who began the least documented period of her short life.
Coughlin was arrested in December 2004 for aggravated assault for a road rage incident in which she allegedly pointed a gun at another driver. She entered a court-ordered rehab program, but quickly failed and ended up in prison.
Kaylee moved in with Charlene Hodge for the first time. The Hodges are a large Bonifay family made larger by the many children they have fostered over the years, but not too large to take Kaylee in 2004.
With the exception of a few months spent with another relative in Michigan, Kaylee spent the next year-and-a half with the Hodges.
“My family just considered her a part of our family,” Hodge said. “She just felt at home at our house.”
When she left the Hodges’ home, Kaylee moved in with Sunny Rice, who was appointed Kaylee’s caretaker in February 2007, about six months before Coughlin’s release from prison.
In December 2008, DCF received the first report regarding Kaylee in more than four years. Rice, then 71 years old, had fallen and broken her hip. She had been hospitalized and wouldn’t be capable of caring for herself, let alone a 9-year-old girl, for at least six months. Kaylee had been staying with various friends, mainly Sean and Melinda Hall.
The Halls didn’t mind looking after Kaylee, and Judge Elijah Smiley ordered Kaylee be placed with the family. Coughlin was allowed supervised visitation.
Coughlin was released from prison in August 2007. She was off drugs and determined to resume her life with the only child she had left.
She completed parenting courses, a mental health assessment, domestic violence awareness courses and substance abuse treatment. She paid child support. Her visits required supervision.
In May 2009, DCF developed a case plan with the stated goal of reuniting Coughlin and Kaylee. The law says that a child removed by the state cannot be returned until “the circumstances which caused the creation of the case plan have been significantly remedied to the extent that the well-being and safety of the child will not be endangered upon the child’s remaining with or being returned to the child’s parent.”
Big Bend Community Based Care, a private company that contracts with the state to monitor cases like Kaylee’s, cited federal and state laws when it refused to provide documents of Coughlin’s drug tests, but logs of in-home visits show Coughlin passed at least nine random drug tests before and after the reunion.
During an in-home visit at Sunny Rice’s by the case worker in July 2009, just before the reunion, the case worker noted in her report that Kaylee was “chippery and happy.” Kaylee said she wanted to live with her mother.
On Aug. 13, 2009, Judge James Fensom held a hearing to get an update on Coughlin’s progress. All drug tests were clean, and DCF recommended Kaylee’s reunification with her mother. Fensom called a brief recess and went into the hall to speak privately with Kaylee. When he returned, he ordered the reunification.
Rosemary Ring was Kaylee’s Sunday school teacher and a friend of Sunny Rice, who had hired a lawyer and tried to fight the reunification. She said she went to court with Sunny that day, and she was disappointed Fensom chose to put Kaylee with Coughlin instead of Sunny, who had taken the child to church, dance lessons and tennis lessons.
“Sunny was a good and moral person and she would have seen to K.K.’s care,” Ring said. “Courts don’t look at the moral aspect of it.”
Kaylee had been more or less born into the system. By her first birthday, Kaylee had been removed from home by child protection teams and returned. DCF had investigated allegations that Kaylee had been exposed to drugs or family violence five times before her second birthday, and investigators often found at least some indication the allegations were true.
Of course, just as often there was no evidence to support the allegations, the DCF is required to conduct investigations in any case, said Courtney Peel, operations manager for DCF in Bay County.
DCF has goals that at times seem to be in conflict. One is to protect children, and the other is to keep families together.
“It is, and I guess it should be, difficult to terminate a parent’s rights,” Fensom said.
A child must be in immediate danger for the DCF to take steps toward taking the child from the parents. Even then, DCF doesn’t have the authority to remove them; that decision must be made by a judge in a shelter hearing.
“Some judges are hesitant to work as a dependency judge because of the reality: some cases go bad,” said Fensom, who said Kaylee’s case isn’t the only one where a child has died as a result of abuse or neglect. It’s not even the most egregious — just the most public.
The work of a dependency court judge is difficult and emotional, Fensom said, because “everyone’s doing their best, then the case goes bad.”
After she won her daughter back, Coughlin remained under supervision of Big Bend Community Based Care. Case agents performed in-home visits for six months after the reunification to see Kaylee and ensure Coughlin was seeing to her needs. They also administered drug tests.
“She was doing extremely well, I thought,” Ray Rice said. “I was actually proud of her.”
Coughlin remembers exactly the day she relapsed. After seven years drug-free, four of which she spent in prison, she started taking painkillers May 14, 2010. It had been about three months since she had passed her final drug test and her case was closed. DCF no longer had the authority to compel a drug test.
She was despondent. Her girlfriend kicked her out of their apartment and Coughlin, who was almost immediately shooting up powerful narcotic painkillers, stole her checkbook on her way out the door. Within a month, she had attempted suicide and been committed.
“That’s what I want, for the suffering to stop,” Coughlin wrote in a suicide note to her ex-girlfriend. “I know that everyone will be better off with me out of their lives. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you. … I will never forgive myself for it coming to this.”
The day before she had allegedly stolen some painkillers from Sunny, and six months later the criminal charges were starting to stack up. She was arrested in February for grand theft and uttering a forged instrument for allegedly writing bad checks from her ex’s checkbook.
In March, Coughlin was arrested after she sold four oxycodone pills to a confidential police informant. Bob and Jacqui Coughlin, the grandparents who had raised Coughlin since childhood while her mother drank herself to death, let her sit in jail for two weeks, hoping she might sober up again.
During this period, Bob Coughlin and Charlene Hodge had several discussions about moving Kaylee back in with the Hodges. They both agreed it was best for Kaylee, and it was best to do it over the summer so she wouldn’t have to change schools mid-year, but Courtney Coughlin wouldn’t go for it.
“I had talked to Courtney several times in recent months about giving K.K. up, but she refused to consider it,” Bob Coughlin said. “We still knew we had to do something with her before too long.”
Hodge remembers a long conversation with the Coughlins just before Kaylee finished sixth grade. She didn’t go into details but she said she felt very strongly that Kaylee needed to come live with her again.
“Let’s just say that I kept talking to Kaylee and she was not a happy little girl. Her life was upside down,” Hodge said. “If they needed us, we would be there for them. A child’s security means everything.”
Everyone around Coughlin could tell she was falling apart. From his prison cell, Rice would call Kaylee and ask her if Coughlin was using. Kaylee said she wasn’t, but he felt she was either covering for her mother or didn’t know. He considered reporting Coughlin to DCF, but he didn’t.
“I knew Courtney was messing up. I knew she was on drugs,” he said. “I didn’t want Kaylee to be mad at me for taking her away.”
On July 11, Coughlin was trying to cash a check that wasn’t hers. Police came to the Lynn Haven bank and pinned her in, but she stomped the accelerator and took off. She made it less than a mile.
From the wreckage of the car, investigators recovered purses and checkbooks that belonged to other women. They also found needles and a blackened spoon that tested positive for narcotics.
Two days later at Sacred Heart, staff busied themselves making arrangements with Coughlin and Rice for permission to allow their daughter’s organs to be donated. Knowing Kaylee’s heart still beats in the chest of another child is a comfort to Rice.
“I know Kaylee would’ve wanted that because she was such a sweet girl,” he said.
He’s torn up that he wasn’t there for his little girl. He used to apologize to her over the phone from the prison until she’d forgive him.
“ ‘Daddy stop already; stop that. I forgive you,’ ” he remembered her as saying. “That meant a lot, especially now; I’m so glad that she said that.”
Momma Hodge, as Kaylee referred to her, went in to be with Kaylee while the rest of her family waited in the lobby.
“I just wanted to get to her and hold her hand and let her know that I was there,” Hodge said. “I was the only one with her.”
Doctors and nurses watched with tears in their eyes. For hours after the machines that had kept Kaylee alive were turned off, Hodge was there.
Source http://www.newsherald.com/news/state-99695-died-editor.html
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Reasons unclear for fatal CPS decision to return a child to her parents
Blogger Note:
#CPS FAILURE
It is obvious that CPS does not know a good home or good parents from bad ones.
-----
By Brad Branan
Giovanni Melchor was just a year old when he drowned in the stagnant water of his family's backyard swimming pool in late 2006.
The family's single-story, purple-trimmed home in south Sacramento seemed well maintained on the outside. But inside, a neighbor said, the house was infested with roaches and city inspectors later cited Giovanni's father for an unsecured pool fence, the lack of a door closing off the garage from the pool, and a host of other health and safety code violations.
Not even three years later, Giovanni's sister, Yeinira, who had been removed from the home and then returned, was also dead, a victim of medical neglect by her parents.
Case files from Sacramento County Child Protective Services, recently obtained by The Bee, show how the 2-year-old girl died. Court records show that her parents, Jose Jaime Melchor, 35, and Elizabeth Melchor, 29, pleaded no contest to child endangerment charges in July and were deported this year.
What the records don't explain is how the agency made the decision to return the child to care that led to her death.
County officials say they cannot discuss the case or the records because of confidentiality laws.
But without documentation, evaluating the agency's actions is difficult, said Ed Howard, senior counsel at the Children's Advocacy Institute in San Diego, who reviewed Yeinira's file at the request of The Bee.
"If we take them at face value – that there is no documentation for reuniting this child with a very troubled family – then this is a fiasco," Howard said. "You can't do this job without documenting your reasons for making such a decision."
Specifically, CPS records for Yeinira do not show whether the agency conducted an assessment about the risk of returning her to the home – using what's called the Structured Decision Making tool – in violation of its own policies.
"In all of its reports, the (CPS) Oversight Committee has recommended comprehensive and consistent use of the tool," said Gina Roberson, co-chair of the committee. "It means social workers are using the best practices in trying to prevent child abuse."
The CPS Oversight Committee, echoing the complaints of experts and child welfare advocates, has repeatedly found the agency's social workers have made questionable decisions and serious errors in high-risk cases such as the Melchor's. That assessment was repeated in other reports this year, including one by the California State Auditor.
CPS released two sets of files on the Yeinira case. The first contained 12 pages and no information about the family's extensive record with CPS. The second, released after The Bee requested it under the California Public Records Act, had 124 pages.
County Health and Human Services Director Ann Edwards said the release of the incomplete file was unintentional. But neither set answers the questions about the fatal decision to return her to her parents.
A troubled history
The year Giovanni died, the Melchors were living in a working-class neighborhood on Center Parkway. They had five children.
Neighbors, attorneys and a social worker who had contact over the years with the Melchors, an immigrant family from Mexico, said the family needed help. They said Elizabeth Melchor seemed incapable of caring for her children and, according to court records, Jose Jaime Melchor physically abused his wife.
Five reports of alleged abuse or neglect involving the family were made to CPS prior to Yeinira's birth in July 2006, court records show.
Some of the reports involved the father, who allegedly had a drinking problem and abused his wife, according to court and CPS files. Other reports involved the mother, accused of hitting the children. Two of the reports were upheld by CPS.
Yeinira had a heart defect and a cleft palate that made feeding her difficult. Less than a month after she was born, CPS received another complaint, noting the mother wasn't learning how to take care of her fragile daughter. The child was still in the hospital and at risk of dehydration if not properly nourished.
Melchor "admits she is depressed and overwhelmed," according to an unidentified reporter quoted in the CPS case file. The mother and the father were refusing the training needed to feed Yeinira, according to the report. The source recommended placing Yeinira in a special foster home for her medical needs.
The complaint was upheld. CPS started monitoring the child, but allowed her to go home with her mother. Yvette Washington, a home visitation worker with the county's Birth and Beyond program, was assigned to counsel the family.
"She seemed withdrawn," Washington said of Elizabeth Melchor in an interview with The Bee.
Washington said she brought a public health nurse to the family's home to explain the risks of having a pool with stagnant water and a small and unsecured fence.
The mother didn't seem to take the matter seriously, Washington said, adding that she stopped providing service to the family in 2006 because Melchor was unreceptive.
Giovanni drowned in October that year. Melchor told police she was taking care of Yeinira, and left her other children unattended in the garage for about an hour, records show. Giovanni apparently wandered from the garage and into the pool.
Police found the missing garage door and the unsecured pool fence. Neither parent was charged. CPS also initially declined to take protective action, determining that an allegation of neglect was unfounded, court records show.
That reluctance befuddled some of the Melchors' neighbors.
Andrea Garcia, who lived next door to the family, said the Melchors were troubled. Her interactions with the family usually came when something went wrong, she said, such as when the children were left outside in diapers in cold weather.
The Garcias watched the other Melchor children while the parents dealt with the emergency of finding Giovanni in the pool.
Andrea Garcia said the children were filthy. She said she entered the Melchor home for clean clothes and saw cockroaches everywhere.
Her father, Jesus Garcia, said he had worried about the safety of the Melchor children under their mother's care."We never understood why CPS let her keep the kids," he said.
Taken away, brought back
Ten months after the drowning, the four Melchor children became dependents of the county as a result of abuse and neglect, court records show.
In Yeinira's case, her parents repeatedly failed to bring her to doctor's appointments, CPS records show. She missed eight appointments in seven months. Doctor's notes indicated a growing concern about her well-being.
In foster care, she had surgery for her ailments and had recovered well. But in May 2008, less than two months after her surgery, Yeinira returned to her parents' home, joining her siblings who had been reunited with them several months earlier.
To place a foster child back in a parent's home, CPS must convince a dependency court judge that the conditions that originally made the home unsafe had been fixed. For Yeinira, CPS needed to ensure the issues at home had been addressed, said Bill Grimm, senior counsel at the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, who reviewed the child's file at The Bee's request.
"Given all that was going on before, there was a pretty high threshold for them to resume care," Grimm said.
The lack of documentation calls the agency's decisions into question, said Grimm, adding that returning Yeinira home without doing a risk assessment would have been a serious error, if that's what happened.
Without care
After Yeinira returned, she did not see a doctor for about a year because the family didn't have insurance, her father told Sacramento police investigators in 2009.
During that time, Yeinira had a seizure, her mother told police. She said she put rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball and placed it under Yeinira's nose to revive her.
A couple of months later, Yeinira had another seizure. Yeinira "fell back, arched her back, and her feet twisted" as she fell onto concrete, her mother said, according to the investigative report. She again used rubbing alcohol and an onion to revive Yeinira.
The problem returned the next day, as Yeinira "fell forward, and her head hit the wall and her eyes went up," her mother said.
Again, Melchor turned to an onion and rubbing alcohol to revive her daughter. Her father was holding Yeinira in his lap when the mother noticed Yeinira wasn't breathing, she told investigators.
The father brought her to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, south Sacramento, minutes away from their home. Two days later, April 20, 2009, Yeinira died at Kaiser's Roseville hospital because of a lack of oxygen in the brain, an autopsy found.
The Coroner's Office said physical abuse also may have contributed to her death, noting that she'd had a broken arm and other recent injuries.
In court documents, Dr. Michael Myette of Kaiser said he could say with "95 percent to 99 percent certainty that if the parents had accessed care when she began seizing, she would still be alive."
One of the Melchors' attorneys, Lori Calvert, said the couple grew up without doctors and that Elizabeth Melchor had been taught to revive her mother, who also suffered from seizures, as she had revived Yeinira.
The Melchors faced a number of obstacles, their attorneys said. They were illiterate in their native Spanish, couldn't speak English and were poor.
The prosecutor handling their neglect case agreed and cited those factors when explaining to a judge why she sought approval for a plea agreement resulting in a two-year jail sentence for the Melchors, the lowest under sentencing guidelines.
The judge agreed to the sentencing recommendation. The Melchors had served about a year in jail awaiting trial and, with various credits, were released in July after pleading no contest to the charges. They were deported to Mexico shortly afterward, without any of their children. Their attorneys said the children were put up for adoption by the county.
Source http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/26/4145705/reasons-unclear-for-fatal-cps.html
#CPS FAILURE
It is obvious that CPS does not know a good home or good parents from bad ones.
-----
By Brad Branan
Giovanni Melchor was just a year old when he drowned in the stagnant water of his family's backyard swimming pool in late 2006.
The family's single-story, purple-trimmed home in south Sacramento seemed well maintained on the outside. But inside, a neighbor said, the house was infested with roaches and city inspectors later cited Giovanni's father for an unsecured pool fence, the lack of a door closing off the garage from the pool, and a host of other health and safety code violations.
Not even three years later, Giovanni's sister, Yeinira, who had been removed from the home and then returned, was also dead, a victim of medical neglect by her parents.
Case files from Sacramento County Child Protective Services, recently obtained by The Bee, show how the 2-year-old girl died. Court records show that her parents, Jose Jaime Melchor, 35, and Elizabeth Melchor, 29, pleaded no contest to child endangerment charges in July and were deported this year.
What the records don't explain is how the agency made the decision to return the child to care that led to her death.
County officials say they cannot discuss the case or the records because of confidentiality laws.
But without documentation, evaluating the agency's actions is difficult, said Ed Howard, senior counsel at the Children's Advocacy Institute in San Diego, who reviewed Yeinira's file at the request of The Bee.
"If we take them at face value – that there is no documentation for reuniting this child with a very troubled family – then this is a fiasco," Howard said. "You can't do this job without documenting your reasons for making such a decision."
Specifically, CPS records for Yeinira do not show whether the agency conducted an assessment about the risk of returning her to the home – using what's called the Structured Decision Making tool – in violation of its own policies.
"In all of its reports, the (CPS) Oversight Committee has recommended comprehensive and consistent use of the tool," said Gina Roberson, co-chair of the committee. "It means social workers are using the best practices in trying to prevent child abuse."
The CPS Oversight Committee, echoing the complaints of experts and child welfare advocates, has repeatedly found the agency's social workers have made questionable decisions and serious errors in high-risk cases such as the Melchor's. That assessment was repeated in other reports this year, including one by the California State Auditor.
CPS released two sets of files on the Yeinira case. The first contained 12 pages and no information about the family's extensive record with CPS. The second, released after The Bee requested it under the California Public Records Act, had 124 pages.
County Health and Human Services Director Ann Edwards said the release of the incomplete file was unintentional. But neither set answers the questions about the fatal decision to return her to her parents.
A troubled history
The year Giovanni died, the Melchors were living in a working-class neighborhood on Center Parkway. They had five children.
Neighbors, attorneys and a social worker who had contact over the years with the Melchors, an immigrant family from Mexico, said the family needed help. They said Elizabeth Melchor seemed incapable of caring for her children and, according to court records, Jose Jaime Melchor physically abused his wife.
Five reports of alleged abuse or neglect involving the family were made to CPS prior to Yeinira's birth in July 2006, court records show.
Some of the reports involved the father, who allegedly had a drinking problem and abused his wife, according to court and CPS files. Other reports involved the mother, accused of hitting the children. Two of the reports were upheld by CPS.
Yeinira had a heart defect and a cleft palate that made feeding her difficult. Less than a month after she was born, CPS received another complaint, noting the mother wasn't learning how to take care of her fragile daughter. The child was still in the hospital and at risk of dehydration if not properly nourished.
Melchor "admits she is depressed and overwhelmed," according to an unidentified reporter quoted in the CPS case file. The mother and the father were refusing the training needed to feed Yeinira, according to the report. The source recommended placing Yeinira in a special foster home for her medical needs.
The complaint was upheld. CPS started monitoring the child, but allowed her to go home with her mother. Yvette Washington, a home visitation worker with the county's Birth and Beyond program, was assigned to counsel the family.
"She seemed withdrawn," Washington said of Elizabeth Melchor in an interview with The Bee.
Washington said she brought a public health nurse to the family's home to explain the risks of having a pool with stagnant water and a small and unsecured fence.
The mother didn't seem to take the matter seriously, Washington said, adding that she stopped providing service to the family in 2006 because Melchor was unreceptive.
Giovanni drowned in October that year. Melchor told police she was taking care of Yeinira, and left her other children unattended in the garage for about an hour, records show. Giovanni apparently wandered from the garage and into the pool.
Police found the missing garage door and the unsecured pool fence. Neither parent was charged. CPS also initially declined to take protective action, determining that an allegation of neglect was unfounded, court records show.
That reluctance befuddled some of the Melchors' neighbors.
Andrea Garcia, who lived next door to the family, said the Melchors were troubled. Her interactions with the family usually came when something went wrong, she said, such as when the children were left outside in diapers in cold weather.
The Garcias watched the other Melchor children while the parents dealt with the emergency of finding Giovanni in the pool.
Andrea Garcia said the children were filthy. She said she entered the Melchor home for clean clothes and saw cockroaches everywhere.
Her father, Jesus Garcia, said he had worried about the safety of the Melchor children under their mother's care."We never understood why CPS let her keep the kids," he said.
Taken away, brought back
Ten months after the drowning, the four Melchor children became dependents of the county as a result of abuse and neglect, court records show.
In Yeinira's case, her parents repeatedly failed to bring her to doctor's appointments, CPS records show. She missed eight appointments in seven months. Doctor's notes indicated a growing concern about her well-being.
In foster care, she had surgery for her ailments and had recovered well. But in May 2008, less than two months after her surgery, Yeinira returned to her parents' home, joining her siblings who had been reunited with them several months earlier.
To place a foster child back in a parent's home, CPS must convince a dependency court judge that the conditions that originally made the home unsafe had been fixed. For Yeinira, CPS needed to ensure the issues at home had been addressed, said Bill Grimm, senior counsel at the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, who reviewed the child's file at The Bee's request.
"Given all that was going on before, there was a pretty high threshold for them to resume care," Grimm said.
The lack of documentation calls the agency's decisions into question, said Grimm, adding that returning Yeinira home without doing a risk assessment would have been a serious error, if that's what happened.
Without care
After Yeinira returned, she did not see a doctor for about a year because the family didn't have insurance, her father told Sacramento police investigators in 2009.
During that time, Yeinira had a seizure, her mother told police. She said she put rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball and placed it under Yeinira's nose to revive her.
A couple of months later, Yeinira had another seizure. Yeinira "fell back, arched her back, and her feet twisted" as she fell onto concrete, her mother said, according to the investigative report. She again used rubbing alcohol and an onion to revive Yeinira.
The problem returned the next day, as Yeinira "fell forward, and her head hit the wall and her eyes went up," her mother said.
Again, Melchor turned to an onion and rubbing alcohol to revive her daughter. Her father was holding Yeinira in his lap when the mother noticed Yeinira wasn't breathing, she told investigators.
The father brought her to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, south Sacramento, minutes away from their home. Two days later, April 20, 2009, Yeinira died at Kaiser's Roseville hospital because of a lack of oxygen in the brain, an autopsy found.
The Coroner's Office said physical abuse also may have contributed to her death, noting that she'd had a broken arm and other recent injuries.
In court documents, Dr. Michael Myette of Kaiser said he could say with "95 percent to 99 percent certainty that if the parents had accessed care when she began seizing, she would still be alive."
One of the Melchors' attorneys, Lori Calvert, said the couple grew up without doctors and that Elizabeth Melchor had been taught to revive her mother, who also suffered from seizures, as she had revived Yeinira.
The Melchors faced a number of obstacles, their attorneys said. They were illiterate in their native Spanish, couldn't speak English and were poor.
The prosecutor handling their neglect case agreed and cited those factors when explaining to a judge why she sought approval for a plea agreement resulting in a two-year jail sentence for the Melchors, the lowest under sentencing guidelines.
The judge agreed to the sentencing recommendation. The Melchors had served about a year in jail awaiting trial and, with various credits, were released in July after pleading no contest to the charges. They were deported to Mexico shortly afterward, without any of their children. Their attorneys said the children were put up for adoption by the county.
Source http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/26/4145705/reasons-unclear-for-fatal-cps.html
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
California courts redefining who counts as a parent
By Hudson Sangree
Even as the definition of family in America expands and shifts, California courts are trying to keep pace by redefining whom the law regards as parents.
Judges have moved beyond traditional notions of biology and adoption and have assigned parental rights to adults with no genetic or legal ties to kids.
In a recent Sacramento case, an appeals court said a woman who never adopted her ex-girlfriend's children was nevertheless their parent because she acted like one – providing for them financially, cleaning up after them when they got sick, and volunteering at their school.
"We're redefining what constitutes a family," said McGeorge School of Law Professor Larry Levine, an expert on sexual orientation and the law. "It's a whole new way of thinking about this."
In the Dec. 9 ruling, the Sacramento-based 3rd District Court of Appeal said the woman had a good reason for not adopting the children.
She was a colonel in the Air Force Reserve and was afraid of being expelled from the military if she violated the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in force at the time. The controversial policy, which began in 1993 and ended in September, barred openly gay men or lesbians from serving in the military.
Had the woman been open about her sexual orientation by forming a domestic partnership or adopting her girlfriend's children, it might have ended her military career.
The court referred to the woman and her former partner only by their initials: S.Y. and S.B. The Bee agreed to do the same to protect the privacy of the children.
"It was never even something we discussed about me participating in the adoption or formalizing the relationship," S.Y. said in an interview. "It was just a given because of 'don't ask, don't tell.' When it's something you can't do, you don't go there."
S.B. declined through her attorney to comment on the case.
Her lawyer, Elizabeth Niemi, said S.B. always planned to be the children's sole parent. She hadn't wanted S.Y. to jointly adopt the children, and S.Y. acknowledged that was true in trial testimony, she said.
"Neither party ever intended for S.Y. to have parental rights or obligations," Niemi said.
But the court said the adoptive mother's intentions weren't the deciding factor.
"Whether S.B intended for S.Y. to obtain legal rights with respect to the children is irrelevant where, as here, S.B. allowed and encouraged S.Y. to function as the children's second parent from birth, and S.Y. openly embraced the rights and obligations of being a parent," wrote acting Presiding Justice Cole Blease for the unanimous panel.
The three justices on the panel – including Justice George Nicholson and Justice Andrea Lynn Hoch – upheld a ruling by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Helena Gweon.
Experts said the case continues a trend in which courts have ruled that adults who aren't biological or adoptive parents can still be assigned parental rights and responsibilities.
The purpose: to promote the well-being of children and ensure their financial support, Levine said.
"The state has a great interest in having those who want the benefits of parenthood to take on the responsibilities and obligations that go with parenthood," he said. "That's true for straight and gay couples."
The string of cases that led to this month's ruling in S.Y. v. S.B. included the California Supreme Court's 2002 decision in a case involving a boy identified as Nicholas H. In that case, the court granted custody to a woman's former live-in boyfriend, who admitted he was not the boy's biological father but had acted as his father since birth.
The biological father was nowhere to be found.
Traditionally, adults not related by blood or adoption would have been deemed "legal strangers" to children, but things have changed, said Courtney Joslin, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, who specializes in family law and sexual orientation and the law.
In the recent case, "the court says you have to look at the reality of families' lives, and the most important inquiry is whether a person is actually functioning as a parent."
Deborah Wald, the lawyer who argued the case for S.Y. at the appellate level, said the decision was part of "a sea change that started with In re Nicholas H."
"What we've seen is that the courts are starting to look at parentage issues from a child's perspective, which is a very big shift. Before, children were treated more like property.
"Now the courts are starting to ask, 'Who do these children think their parents are?' It's a child-centered approach that relies on looking at behavior. Courts aren't willing to take children away from people whom they rely upon."
Niemi, the lawyer for S.B., took away a different lesson from the case.
"If you are a single parent, and there's not another parent somewhere," she said, "you have to be careful about who you allow to have a relationship with your kids."
Source http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/21/4136837/california-courts-redefining-who.html
Even as the definition of family in America expands and shifts, California courts are trying to keep pace by redefining whom the law regards as parents.
Judges have moved beyond traditional notions of biology and adoption and have assigned parental rights to adults with no genetic or legal ties to kids.
In a recent Sacramento case, an appeals court said a woman who never adopted her ex-girlfriend's children was nevertheless their parent because she acted like one – providing for them financially, cleaning up after them when they got sick, and volunteering at their school.
"We're redefining what constitutes a family," said McGeorge School of Law Professor Larry Levine, an expert on sexual orientation and the law. "It's a whole new way of thinking about this."
In the Dec. 9 ruling, the Sacramento-based 3rd District Court of Appeal said the woman had a good reason for not adopting the children.
She was a colonel in the Air Force Reserve and was afraid of being expelled from the military if she violated the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in force at the time. The controversial policy, which began in 1993 and ended in September, barred openly gay men or lesbians from serving in the military.
Had the woman been open about her sexual orientation by forming a domestic partnership or adopting her girlfriend's children, it might have ended her military career.
The court referred to the woman and her former partner only by their initials: S.Y. and S.B. The Bee agreed to do the same to protect the privacy of the children.
"It was never even something we discussed about me participating in the adoption or formalizing the relationship," S.Y. said in an interview. "It was just a given because of 'don't ask, don't tell.' When it's something you can't do, you don't go there."
S.B. declined through her attorney to comment on the case.
Her lawyer, Elizabeth Niemi, said S.B. always planned to be the children's sole parent. She hadn't wanted S.Y. to jointly adopt the children, and S.Y. acknowledged that was true in trial testimony, she said.
"Neither party ever intended for S.Y. to have parental rights or obligations," Niemi said.
But the court said the adoptive mother's intentions weren't the deciding factor.
"Whether S.B intended for S.Y. to obtain legal rights with respect to the children is irrelevant where, as here, S.B. allowed and encouraged S.Y. to function as the children's second parent from birth, and S.Y. openly embraced the rights and obligations of being a parent," wrote acting Presiding Justice Cole Blease for the unanimous panel.
The three justices on the panel – including Justice George Nicholson and Justice Andrea Lynn Hoch – upheld a ruling by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Helena Gweon.
Experts said the case continues a trend in which courts have ruled that adults who aren't biological or adoptive parents can still be assigned parental rights and responsibilities.
The purpose: to promote the well-being of children and ensure their financial support, Levine said.
"The state has a great interest in having those who want the benefits of parenthood to take on the responsibilities and obligations that go with parenthood," he said. "That's true for straight and gay couples."
The string of cases that led to this month's ruling in S.Y. v. S.B. included the California Supreme Court's 2002 decision in a case involving a boy identified as Nicholas H. In that case, the court granted custody to a woman's former live-in boyfriend, who admitted he was not the boy's biological father but had acted as his father since birth.
The biological father was nowhere to be found.
Traditionally, adults not related by blood or adoption would have been deemed "legal strangers" to children, but things have changed, said Courtney Joslin, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, who specializes in family law and sexual orientation and the law.
In the recent case, "the court says you have to look at the reality of families' lives, and the most important inquiry is whether a person is actually functioning as a parent."
Deborah Wald, the lawyer who argued the case for S.Y. at the appellate level, said the decision was part of "a sea change that started with In re Nicholas H."
"What we've seen is that the courts are starting to look at parentage issues from a child's perspective, which is a very big shift. Before, children were treated more like property.
"Now the courts are starting to ask, 'Who do these children think their parents are?' It's a child-centered approach that relies on looking at behavior. Courts aren't willing to take children away from people whom they rely upon."
Niemi, the lawyer for S.B., took away a different lesson from the case.
"If you are a single parent, and there's not another parent somewhere," she said, "you have to be careful about who you allow to have a relationship with your kids."
Source http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/21/4136837/california-courts-redefining-who.html
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Mother who won't give up faces prison - California
By JON CASSIDY
SANTA ANA – The state took Niveen Ismail's son and gave him to somebody else.
Now authorities are trying to lock her up, charging her with going too far to get him back.
Ismail, of Newport Beach, went to trial in Orange County Superior Court this week on a single charge of solicitation to kidnap - the result of a December 2009 meeting with a private investigator and an undercover police officer who was wearing a wire. The charge carries three years.
In the meantime, she is waging her own battle in federal court with civil rights lawsuits that question why California is the only state not to follow a Supreme Court ruling on how to terminate parental rights.
In the criminal case, the prosecution says Ismail asked the investigator to kidnap her then 7-year-old son, Anthony, from his foster family and take him to Mexico or France, where Ismail would pick him up and return to her native Egypt.
But in a videotape of the meeting played in court Thursday, Ismail never appeared to instruct anyone to kidnap her son, although the audio is garbled at times. A potential kidnapping plan is discussed, but Ismail says on tape at least seven times that she just wants to go with another plan: surveillance on her son's foster family in hopes of digging up or manufacturing dirt.
After she insists on Plan A – surveillance – the undercover officer encourages her to give him $2,000 to get a fake passport for Anthony, so that they can at least get started with Plan B, kidnapping, according to the tape. She agrees and emails him a photo of Anthony to use, but then backs out, agreeing only to give him $500 to start surveillance, according to the tape.
As she left that December meeting to go to the bank, she was arrested by Newport Beach police, who had been listening in, according to court records.
The meeting with the private investigator and undercover officer came just a few weeks after Ismail got word that the U.S. Supreme Court had denied her appeal of the legal proceedings that took her son away. (Later, in 2010 and 2011, she filed civil rights lawsuits against most of the agencies involved, which are pending.)
Deputy District Attorney Beth Costello said that Ismail "resorted to the illegal" after her appeals over the adoption case were exhausted.
Ismail's son was taken by the Orange County Social Services Agency in 2005 after she left him home alone, according to court records. Huntington Beach police found her preschool-age son alone in his crib after a neighbor heard him crying.
Social workers came in to take the boy. Ismail, a single mother, had gone to work even though her child care arrangement fell through that day, her attorney, Ann Cunningham said.
In supervised visits, Ismail failed to set boundaries – not giving Anthony time-outs, allowing him a cookie when he didn't finish his meal, social workers reported, court records said.
A fair-haired boy with almond eyes and a winsome smile, Anthony was placed with a "fost-adopt" family in Lake Forest, three months after he was taken from Ismail, and has been with them ever since.
In her lawsuit, Ismail accuses the social workers of deciding early on to adopt her son out to another family and thwart any chance at reunification by incessant fault-finding, such as:
She fed him a tuna fish sandwich during a bowling outing, and tuna got on the ball return.
Her toilet water was blue.
She ordered him an IHOP International Breakfast meal rather than something from the Kids Menu.
At Dave and Busters, on a mid-week afternoon, she allowed her son to use the men's room by himself, while she and a social worker waited by the door.
That last incident was cited by the judge in deciding to terminate reunification efforts, according to Ismail and Cunningham. Taking her son to an establishment with a bar was said to be evidence of bad judgment.
Ismail is arguing that the way California severs parental rights is unconstitutional.
In California, a parent's rights can be effectively terminated before anyone has to present "clear and convincing" evidence that they should be, according to a law journal article that she cites in her lawsuits.
The other 49 states follow a Supreme Court precedent that requires a court to find "clear and convincing evidence" of a parent's unfitness before terminating his or her rights. California follows a looser "preponderance of the evidence" standard. That means a mother loses her child if the court rules it's more likely than not she's a bad one.
The California Supreme Court has decided that the U.S. Supreme Court standard doesn't apply here. By the time a California court considers a mother's rights, they are outweighed by the child's bonds with a new family.
Ismail argues that point in her lawsuits, but first she has her kidnapping case, which continues on Monday.
In November 2009, Ismail called several private investigators, prosecutors allege. One of them, Robert Young, had a history as a police informant.
Young testified Thursday that Ismail approached him with a plan either to dig up dirt on the foster couple or to plant something incriminating. At the end of the meeting, she mentioned a Plan B: kidnapping her son and taking him abroad, he said. Young said he'd have to talk to his partner. Then he called the police, and set up another meeting with Ismail, bringing Newport Beach police officer Neal Schuster, who was posing as his partner.
On tape, the "investigators" say they'd be willing to help her get her son back.
"It's not like we haven't done stuff like this in the past," one says.
"Seriously, can you do Plan B," Ismail asks early on. "What if I ask you to fly him to Libya, or France," she asks later.
Otherwise, she continually steers the conversation back to Plan A, saying she'd need a few more weeks to decide about Plan B.
"I think we're going to go with the first one," Ismail tells him. "If A fails.... I was hoping to do A.... Go with A.... I was hoping A would work.... You don't think A would work?.... Maybe you can work on A for a couple weeks.... Why don't you think about Plan A first.... If you want B, that would take at least a month of preparation for me.... I'm really thinking I want to go with A.... We'll start off with A and if that doesn't work out for you.... A would be good.... I'm still debating what to do."
The prosecution needs to prove that kidnapping was actually requested, not just discussed, according to the state's jury instructions for the charge she is facing.
Source http://www.ocregister.com/news/ismail-330857-court-son.html
SANTA ANA – The state took Niveen Ismail's son and gave him to somebody else.
Now authorities are trying to lock her up, charging her with going too far to get him back.
Ismail, of Newport Beach, went to trial in Orange County Superior Court this week on a single charge of solicitation to kidnap - the result of a December 2009 meeting with a private investigator and an undercover police officer who was wearing a wire. The charge carries three years.
In the meantime, she is waging her own battle in federal court with civil rights lawsuits that question why California is the only state not to follow a Supreme Court ruling on how to terminate parental rights.
In the criminal case, the prosecution says Ismail asked the investigator to kidnap her then 7-year-old son, Anthony, from his foster family and take him to Mexico or France, where Ismail would pick him up and return to her native Egypt.
But in a videotape of the meeting played in court Thursday, Ismail never appeared to instruct anyone to kidnap her son, although the audio is garbled at times. A potential kidnapping plan is discussed, but Ismail says on tape at least seven times that she just wants to go with another plan: surveillance on her son's foster family in hopes of digging up or manufacturing dirt.
After she insists on Plan A – surveillance – the undercover officer encourages her to give him $2,000 to get a fake passport for Anthony, so that they can at least get started with Plan B, kidnapping, according to the tape. She agrees and emails him a photo of Anthony to use, but then backs out, agreeing only to give him $500 to start surveillance, according to the tape.
As she left that December meeting to go to the bank, she was arrested by Newport Beach police, who had been listening in, according to court records.
The meeting with the private investigator and undercover officer came just a few weeks after Ismail got word that the U.S. Supreme Court had denied her appeal of the legal proceedings that took her son away. (Later, in 2010 and 2011, she filed civil rights lawsuits against most of the agencies involved, which are pending.)
Deputy District Attorney Beth Costello said that Ismail "resorted to the illegal" after her appeals over the adoption case were exhausted.
Ismail's son was taken by the Orange County Social Services Agency in 2005 after she left him home alone, according to court records. Huntington Beach police found her preschool-age son alone in his crib after a neighbor heard him crying.
Social workers came in to take the boy. Ismail, a single mother, had gone to work even though her child care arrangement fell through that day, her attorney, Ann Cunningham said.
In supervised visits, Ismail failed to set boundaries – not giving Anthony time-outs, allowing him a cookie when he didn't finish his meal, social workers reported, court records said.
A fair-haired boy with almond eyes and a winsome smile, Anthony was placed with a "fost-adopt" family in Lake Forest, three months after he was taken from Ismail, and has been with them ever since.
In her lawsuit, Ismail accuses the social workers of deciding early on to adopt her son out to another family and thwart any chance at reunification by incessant fault-finding, such as:
She fed him a tuna fish sandwich during a bowling outing, and tuna got on the ball return.
Her toilet water was blue.
She ordered him an IHOP International Breakfast meal rather than something from the Kids Menu.
At Dave and Busters, on a mid-week afternoon, she allowed her son to use the men's room by himself, while she and a social worker waited by the door.
That last incident was cited by the judge in deciding to terminate reunification efforts, according to Ismail and Cunningham. Taking her son to an establishment with a bar was said to be evidence of bad judgment.
Ismail is arguing that the way California severs parental rights is unconstitutional.
In California, a parent's rights can be effectively terminated before anyone has to present "clear and convincing" evidence that they should be, according to a law journal article that she cites in her lawsuits.
The other 49 states follow a Supreme Court precedent that requires a court to find "clear and convincing evidence" of a parent's unfitness before terminating his or her rights. California follows a looser "preponderance of the evidence" standard. That means a mother loses her child if the court rules it's more likely than not she's a bad one.
The California Supreme Court has decided that the U.S. Supreme Court standard doesn't apply here. By the time a California court considers a mother's rights, they are outweighed by the child's bonds with a new family.
Ismail argues that point in her lawsuits, but first she has her kidnapping case, which continues on Monday.
In November 2009, Ismail called several private investigators, prosecutors allege. One of them, Robert Young, had a history as a police informant.
Young testified Thursday that Ismail approached him with a plan either to dig up dirt on the foster couple or to plant something incriminating. At the end of the meeting, she mentioned a Plan B: kidnapping her son and taking him abroad, he said. Young said he'd have to talk to his partner. Then he called the police, and set up another meeting with Ismail, bringing Newport Beach police officer Neal Schuster, who was posing as his partner.
On tape, the "investigators" say they'd be willing to help her get her son back.
"It's not like we haven't done stuff like this in the past," one says.
"Seriously, can you do Plan B," Ismail asks early on. "What if I ask you to fly him to Libya, or France," she asks later.
Otherwise, she continually steers the conversation back to Plan A, saying she'd need a few more weeks to decide about Plan B.
"I think we're going to go with the first one," Ismail tells him. "If A fails.... I was hoping to do A.... Go with A.... I was hoping A would work.... You don't think A would work?.... Maybe you can work on A for a couple weeks.... Why don't you think about Plan A first.... If you want B, that would take at least a month of preparation for me.... I'm really thinking I want to go with A.... We'll start off with A and if that doesn't work out for you.... A would be good.... I'm still debating what to do."
The prosecution needs to prove that kidnapping was actually requested, not just discussed, according to the state's jury instructions for the charge she is facing.
Source http://www.ocregister.com/news/ismail-330857-court-son.html
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Ohio AG calls for foster care review
Mike DeWine wants to know why kids are not being adopted or reunited with their families.
(Cincinnati) — Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine today called for a complete review of the foster care system in Ohio. DeWine's call for action was made at a Child Safety Summit he hosted in Cincinnati.
"I convened this child safety summit today, the first of many I intend to hold across Ohio, because we need to conduct a comprehensive, holistic review of the entire foster care system in this state," said Attorney General DeWine. "Too many of these children are languishing in foster care with no real hope of ever having a permanent loving home."
About 40 representatives from foster care agencies, law enforcement, advocacy groups, prosecutors' offices, and adoption agencies attended the summit, including Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, Rita Soronen of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, and Moira Weir, director of the Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services.
The Summit discussed several issues facing the foster care system, including recent deaths of foster children after being reunified with relatives.
According to data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, 33 children died (not necessarily from abuse or neglect) after being in foster care and being reunified with their biological parents from 2005-2010.
Hamilton County has had three deaths of foster children reunified with their biological parents in 2010. In the U.S. Senate, DeWine authored language in the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act clarifying laws that in issues of family reunification, the best interests of the child always have to come first.
However, DeWine noted today that his call for review is not limited to family reunification.
"There are children in the Ohio child welfare system who are dying, but there are also children dying who have been abused and neglected who have never been in foster care," said Attorney General DeWine. "There are also children in foster care who spend their entire lives in the system, never being adopted into a safe and loving home."
Many of Ohio's foster care children end up "aging out of foster care," DeWine noted. The percentage of children aging out in Ohio is greater than the national average of 11 percent in 2010. In 2009, Ohio emancipated 1,453 foster children, which represented 15 percent of the foster care population.
DeWine also noted the alarming amount of psychiatric medications apparently being prescribed to foster children. A recently released federal Government Accountability Office report said foster children can be prescribed these drugs at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the FDA, and many foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time.
Source http://www.wtam.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=122520&article=9493889
(Cincinnati) — Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine today called for a complete review of the foster care system in Ohio. DeWine's call for action was made at a Child Safety Summit he hosted in Cincinnati.
"I convened this child safety summit today, the first of many I intend to hold across Ohio, because we need to conduct a comprehensive, holistic review of the entire foster care system in this state," said Attorney General DeWine. "Too many of these children are languishing in foster care with no real hope of ever having a permanent loving home."
About 40 representatives from foster care agencies, law enforcement, advocacy groups, prosecutors' offices, and adoption agencies attended the summit, including Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, Rita Soronen of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, and Moira Weir, director of the Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services.
The Summit discussed several issues facing the foster care system, including recent deaths of foster children after being reunified with relatives.
According to data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, 33 children died (not necessarily from abuse or neglect) after being in foster care and being reunified with their biological parents from 2005-2010.
Hamilton County has had three deaths of foster children reunified with their biological parents in 2010. In the U.S. Senate, DeWine authored language in the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act clarifying laws that in issues of family reunification, the best interests of the child always have to come first.
However, DeWine noted today that his call for review is not limited to family reunification.
"There are children in the Ohio child welfare system who are dying, but there are also children dying who have been abused and neglected who have never been in foster care," said Attorney General DeWine. "There are also children in foster care who spend their entire lives in the system, never being adopted into a safe and loving home."
Many of Ohio's foster care children end up "aging out of foster care," DeWine noted. The percentage of children aging out in Ohio is greater than the national average of 11 percent in 2010. In 2009, Ohio emancipated 1,453 foster children, which represented 15 percent of the foster care population.
DeWine also noted the alarming amount of psychiatric medications apparently being prescribed to foster children. A recently released federal Government Accountability Office report said foster children can be prescribed these drugs at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the FDA, and many foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time.
Source http://www.wtam.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=122520&article=9493889
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Pre-Thanksgiving March Will Memorialize Iowa’s Lost Children
By Stephanie Woodard
In the days before Thanksgiving, mourners and protesters will participate in the Ninth Annual Memorial March to Honor Our Lost Children. The pilgrimage takes walkers from South Sioux City, Nebraska, over the Missouri river and into Sioux City, Iowa, where Native children have for years been swept up by the child-welfare system and even died in its custody. The route evokes the passage of Nebraska tribes, including Poncas, Omahas, Santees and Winnebagos, who came to the city looking for jobs after World War II, as did Sioux people from South Dakota and others.
“They were seeking a better life,” said Frank LaMere, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and executive director of Four Directions Community Center, in Sioux City, which is organizing the march. “But it didn’t work out that way.” The consequences have been devastating for the Native children of Sioux City, surrounding Woodbury County and Iowa as a whole, according to LaMere, who is a national leader in child-welfare and juvenile-justice issues. “If you’re a Native parent in this county, you’re many times more likely to lose your kids than a white parent. In recent years, three of our Native children—Hannah Thomas, Nathaniel Saunsoci-Mitchell and Larissa Starr-Red Owl—have died after being taken from their families. We march to remember them and all the children who have been separated from their families and communities.”
The march has changed lives. Several years ago, an Internet image of the march inspired a Native boy to stand his ground. “The child had acquiesced to adoption into a white home after years of being told, ‘your people have forgotten about you, your people are drunks and no-goods,’” said LaMere, who was present at a final adjudication in the case. Then one day, the boy was clicking around the web and saw a photograph of the march. “He was shocked. He told the court he’d been lied to. He said he saw hundreds of people looking for their lost children. ‘They were marching for me,’ the boy said. ‘They were looking for me.’ He balked at the adoption and was returned to his tribe.”
On another occasion, an adoptive family watching a television segment on the march happened to see a Native mother who’d lost her parental rights years before carrying a baby picture they recognized. “All excited, the adoptive mother called me and arranged to bring the child to be reunited with the birth mother,” recalled LaMere.
Events surrounding this year’s march—which is also supported by other local groups, including the Community Initiative for Native Children and Families, a coalition of government agencies and nonprofits—begin November 22 with a prayer gathering at 7 p.m. at the Marina Inn, in South Sioux City. The next morning, November 23, at 9 a.m., the marchers progress, rain or shine, into Sioux City, where they stop at the Woodbury County Courthouse and the Department of Human Services. In both places, strangers decide the fate of Native people, according to LaMere.
The reception at each building is expected to be different than it was nine years ago, when a sheriff tried to stop marchers from entering the courthouse, said LaMere. This year, the group will be welcomed and will have an opportunity to read a letter calling for a national investigation into non-compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act. “There are no grey areas in ICWA,” said LaMere. “But racist judges, attorneys, guardians ad litem and more are feeding the system, making money off our kids with their decisions.”
Two special guests during the event will include Cade and Jace Courtright, 14-year-old Rosebud Sioux twins who’ve just been reunited with their mother with the help of LaMere and Four Directions program director, Judy Yellowbank, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. Cade relies on a wheelchair, and Jace is blind, so LaMere suggested the twins meet the march at the Four Directions Community Center dinner that closes the event. However, the boys insisted on making the journey with the other marchers. “We’ll do whatever is necessary to make that happen,” said LaMere. “An elder once told us that the prayers of children are very powerful, more powerful than those of adults. Those boys’ presence during this time is a gift to us.”
Things are changing in Woodbury County, he added. “When it comes to Native child-welfare decisions, we have a place at the table now, along with the Department of Human Services. They even support our parenting and leadership programs. We can hold their feet to the fire on the issues, and no matter how heated the meetings get, we come away from them knowing we are going to move forward together, as collaborators. We in the Woodbury County Native community are winning the battle to keep our families together, one family, one child at a time.”
Recently, LaMere sat in on a meeting concerning an Omaha child. The judge announced that the tribe had intervened, and the child was going home. “Everyone’s jaws dropped, including mine. Hopefully, the good we see growing here will spread, and more of our children nationwide will be going—and staying—home.”
Source http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/11/20/pre-thanksgiving-march-will-memorialize-iowa%E2%80%99s-lost-children-63914
In the days before Thanksgiving, mourners and protesters will participate in the Ninth Annual Memorial March to Honor Our Lost Children. The pilgrimage takes walkers from South Sioux City, Nebraska, over the Missouri river and into Sioux City, Iowa, where Native children have for years been swept up by the child-welfare system and even died in its custody. The route evokes the passage of Nebraska tribes, including Poncas, Omahas, Santees and Winnebagos, who came to the city looking for jobs after World War II, as did Sioux people from South Dakota and others.
“They were seeking a better life,” said Frank LaMere, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and executive director of Four Directions Community Center, in Sioux City, which is organizing the march. “But it didn’t work out that way.” The consequences have been devastating for the Native children of Sioux City, surrounding Woodbury County and Iowa as a whole, according to LaMere, who is a national leader in child-welfare and juvenile-justice issues. “If you’re a Native parent in this county, you’re many times more likely to lose your kids than a white parent. In recent years, three of our Native children—Hannah Thomas, Nathaniel Saunsoci-Mitchell and Larissa Starr-Red Owl—have died after being taken from their families. We march to remember them and all the children who have been separated from their families and communities.”
The march has changed lives. Several years ago, an Internet image of the march inspired a Native boy to stand his ground. “The child had acquiesced to adoption into a white home after years of being told, ‘your people have forgotten about you, your people are drunks and no-goods,’” said LaMere, who was present at a final adjudication in the case. Then one day, the boy was clicking around the web and saw a photograph of the march. “He was shocked. He told the court he’d been lied to. He said he saw hundreds of people looking for their lost children. ‘They were marching for me,’ the boy said. ‘They were looking for me.’ He balked at the adoption and was returned to his tribe.”
On another occasion, an adoptive family watching a television segment on the march happened to see a Native mother who’d lost her parental rights years before carrying a baby picture they recognized. “All excited, the adoptive mother called me and arranged to bring the child to be reunited with the birth mother,” recalled LaMere.
Events surrounding this year’s march—which is also supported by other local groups, including the Community Initiative for Native Children and Families, a coalition of government agencies and nonprofits—begin November 22 with a prayer gathering at 7 p.m. at the Marina Inn, in South Sioux City. The next morning, November 23, at 9 a.m., the marchers progress, rain or shine, into Sioux City, where they stop at the Woodbury County Courthouse and the Department of Human Services. In both places, strangers decide the fate of Native people, according to LaMere.
The reception at each building is expected to be different than it was nine years ago, when a sheriff tried to stop marchers from entering the courthouse, said LaMere. This year, the group will be welcomed and will have an opportunity to read a letter calling for a national investigation into non-compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act. “There are no grey areas in ICWA,” said LaMere. “But racist judges, attorneys, guardians ad litem and more are feeding the system, making money off our kids with their decisions.”
Two special guests during the event will include Cade and Jace Courtright, 14-year-old Rosebud Sioux twins who’ve just been reunited with their mother with the help of LaMere and Four Directions program director, Judy Yellowbank, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. Cade relies on a wheelchair, and Jace is blind, so LaMere suggested the twins meet the march at the Four Directions Community Center dinner that closes the event. However, the boys insisted on making the journey with the other marchers. “We’ll do whatever is necessary to make that happen,” said LaMere. “An elder once told us that the prayers of children are very powerful, more powerful than those of adults. Those boys’ presence during this time is a gift to us.”
Things are changing in Woodbury County, he added. “When it comes to Native child-welfare decisions, we have a place at the table now, along with the Department of Human Services. They even support our parenting and leadership programs. We can hold their feet to the fire on the issues, and no matter how heated the meetings get, we come away from them knowing we are going to move forward together, as collaborators. We in the Woodbury County Native community are winning the battle to keep our families together, one family, one child at a time.”
Recently, LaMere sat in on a meeting concerning an Omaha child. The judge announced that the tribe had intervened, and the child was going home. “Everyone’s jaws dropped, including mine. Hopefully, the good we see growing here will spread, and more of our children nationwide will be going—and staying—home.”
Source http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/11/20/pre-thanksgiving-march-will-memorialize-iowa%E2%80%99s-lost-children-63914
Monday, November 14, 2011
Judge who freed Jerry Sandusky was Second Mile volunteer
Meanwhile, CEO of former coach Sandusky's youth charity resigns
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Can Adoption Lead to Child Abuse?
By Lisa Belkin
I have not been able to get four-year-old Sean Paddock, or 11-year-old Hanna Williams, or 7-year-old Lydia Schatz out of my mind. As Erik Eckholm reported in the New York Times yesterday, and Anderson Cooper discussed on CNN, most recently last week, the three children all died within the past five years, and they had several chilling factors in common.
Each of their deaths were brutal and agonizing: Sean suffocated; Hana, who was found lying naked in the muddy yard, died of hypothermia and malnutrition; Lydia showed signs of a brutal beating. In each case, one or both of their parents has been charged with their murder.
And in each case, those parents are said to have essentially punished their children to death, allegedly because they believed it was God's will. They are said to have been guided by the book To Train Up A Child, by Michael and Debi Pearl, which advocates beating children with rubber tubing, leaving them outside in the cold, and witholding food for days at a time in keeping with Biblical teachings. (No, I am not linking to it, out of sympathy with those who are petitioning sites like Amazon not to sell this particular book, which does not directly advocate the level of abuse that killed these children, but that appears to have been misinterpreted and misused by at least some of the parents who stand accused.)
Much attention has been paid to the religious pieces of a this tale. Less noted is that each of these children joined these families through adoption. Sean was born in the US, as were his five adopted siblings. Hana was from Ethiopia, as was her adopted brother (their parents had six biological children as well), and Lydia was from Liberia (there were two other adopted siblings among the family's nine children.)
Is this merely grisly coincidence? Or is there something about the adoption dynamic that makes violent abuse more likely?
One possibility is that adoptive children -- particularly those who spend their earliest years in an orphanage or shuttling from one foster caregiver to the next -- are more likely to suffer reactive attachment disorder, which are essentially the inability not only to bond, but to feel. The effects are not just psychological, but also physical, with evidence these children can have elevated levels of the hormone cortisol, which increases their tolerance for pain. Some speculate that spanking a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder can spiral out of control quickly, because it takes abusive levels of pain before the child actually feels it and responds.
This cycle is the talk of a handful of adoptive parenting websites, and, in particular, it has been discussed often on Why Not Train a Child, which is dedicated to warning parents about the dangers of the Pearls' book. There an anonymous commenter there, who describes him or herself as knowing the parents of Hana Williams personally, speculates:
Initially, I think their intentions for adopting were "good" (although I am uncomfortable with the idea of adopting children solely because you are religiously motivated to "rescue" them). I don't think they adopted Hana and her brother so that they could have some children to torture and abuse. However, I believe they made a huge assumption that these kids would respond to their methods just like their own biological children did. They expected Hana and her little brother to assimilate into their family, and most likely ignored their culture, how they had grown up (customs, beliefs, etc), and most importantly, the trauma that Hana and her brother had gone through in their childhoods. These kids just weren't acting like their biological children. Instead of taking a step back and getting professional help, they decided that they would continue to follow the Pearl method, but continued to up the ante, because these kids were NOT succumbing to being "broken".
Adoption can save a child and create a family. It can also come with complications that biological parents are far less likely to face. All children are vulnerable, but adopted children are more so, because the very fact of their adoption tells of a shakier start in life. They deserve more of our protection. In at least three cases they did not receive it.
Source http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/adoption-spanking-childabuse_b_1081617.html
I have not been able to get four-year-old Sean Paddock, or 11-year-old Hanna Williams, or 7-year-old Lydia Schatz out of my mind. As Erik Eckholm reported in the New York Times yesterday, and Anderson Cooper discussed on CNN, most recently last week, the three children all died within the past five years, and they had several chilling factors in common.
Each of their deaths were brutal and agonizing: Sean suffocated; Hana, who was found lying naked in the muddy yard, died of hypothermia and malnutrition; Lydia showed signs of a brutal beating. In each case, one or both of their parents has been charged with their murder.
And in each case, those parents are said to have essentially punished their children to death, allegedly because they believed it was God's will. They are said to have been guided by the book To Train Up A Child, by Michael and Debi Pearl, which advocates beating children with rubber tubing, leaving them outside in the cold, and witholding food for days at a time in keeping with Biblical teachings. (No, I am not linking to it, out of sympathy with those who are petitioning sites like Amazon not to sell this particular book, which does not directly advocate the level of abuse that killed these children, but that appears to have been misinterpreted and misused by at least some of the parents who stand accused.)
Much attention has been paid to the religious pieces of a this tale. Less noted is that each of these children joined these families through adoption. Sean was born in the US, as were his five adopted siblings. Hana was from Ethiopia, as was her adopted brother (their parents had six biological children as well), and Lydia was from Liberia (there were two other adopted siblings among the family's nine children.)
Is this merely grisly coincidence? Or is there something about the adoption dynamic that makes violent abuse more likely?
One possibility is that adoptive children -- particularly those who spend their earliest years in an orphanage or shuttling from one foster caregiver to the next -- are more likely to suffer reactive attachment disorder, which are essentially the inability not only to bond, but to feel. The effects are not just psychological, but also physical, with evidence these children can have elevated levels of the hormone cortisol, which increases their tolerance for pain. Some speculate that spanking a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder can spiral out of control quickly, because it takes abusive levels of pain before the child actually feels it and responds.
This cycle is the talk of a handful of adoptive parenting websites, and, in particular, it has been discussed often on Why Not Train a Child, which is dedicated to warning parents about the dangers of the Pearls' book. There an anonymous commenter there, who describes him or herself as knowing the parents of Hana Williams personally, speculates:
Initially, I think their intentions for adopting were "good" (although I am uncomfortable with the idea of adopting children solely because you are religiously motivated to "rescue" them). I don't think they adopted Hana and her brother so that they could have some children to torture and abuse. However, I believe they made a huge assumption that these kids would respond to their methods just like their own biological children did. They expected Hana and her little brother to assimilate into their family, and most likely ignored their culture, how they had grown up (customs, beliefs, etc), and most importantly, the trauma that Hana and her brother had gone through in their childhoods. These kids just weren't acting like their biological children. Instead of taking a step back and getting professional help, they decided that they would continue to follow the Pearl method, but continued to up the ante, because these kids were NOT succumbing to being "broken".
Adoption can save a child and create a family. It can also come with complications that biological parents are far less likely to face. All children are vulnerable, but adopted children are more so, because the very fact of their adoption tells of a shakier start in life. They deserve more of our protection. In at least three cases they did not receive it.
Source http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/adoption-spanking-childabuse_b_1081617.html
Monday, October 31, 2011
Title IV-D Federal Funding and ZERO Accountability
Blog authors note:
The below talks about federal money and divorcing parents. The same scenario accounts for IV-E funding involving children who are removed by CPS.
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Various Fathers, Mothers, and former father-PI's have told me that for every child placed in Foster Care, the States receive between $4,000-6,000 (per month) that the child remains under the State's foster care / Replacement Parent Protection Plan #1 (RPPP-1). The States also receive a similar amount for each child placed in adoption, or RPPP-2. And since the Majority of the Money that the State receives from the Feds does NOT go to the Replacement Parent, but rather to the State, there is a Financial Incentive for the States to place as many children as possible in one of their two Replacement Parent Protection Plans: and for this reason, THAT is exactly what is going on -- in Many cases -- with little or no justification.
My understanding is that the States receive from two-thirds to three-fourths of the Money, and the other 1/3 to 1/4 goes to RPPP-1 or RPPP-2. Therefore, the more children who are taken away from their parents, the More Money the States receive to feed their growing Monster.
See the Links below for more on how Title IV-D Federal Funding of Child Support Services, Child Protective Services, and Family Courts has turned a natural tendency to obtain More Money and Power and what it can purchase for me and my family, into a Nightmare for Divorcing Parents: and especially those who Don't Want to share the Kids, but instead to nitpick and lie about the other parent and seek Sole Legal Custody. This has given birth to Monster-Gov: with an insatiable appetite for More Children and Parents, and All their Assets: and a Free for All for state and private licensed "clinical" social workers, Family Law attorneys, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and last but not least, State and local budgets.
Go to this link, http://www.earthage.org/familycourtcrooks/title_iv-d-federal-funding.htm, and there are several other links that explain all of this very well.
The below talks about federal money and divorcing parents. The same scenario accounts for IV-E funding involving children who are removed by CPS.
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Various Fathers, Mothers, and former father-PI's have told me that for every child placed in Foster Care, the States receive between $4,000-6,000 (per month) that the child remains under the State's foster care / Replacement Parent Protection Plan #1 (RPPP-1). The States also receive a similar amount for each child placed in adoption, or RPPP-2. And since the Majority of the Money that the State receives from the Feds does NOT go to the Replacement Parent, but rather to the State, there is a Financial Incentive for the States to place as many children as possible in one of their two Replacement Parent Protection Plans: and for this reason, THAT is exactly what is going on -- in Many cases -- with little or no justification.
My understanding is that the States receive from two-thirds to three-fourths of the Money, and the other 1/3 to 1/4 goes to RPPP-1 or RPPP-2. Therefore, the more children who are taken away from their parents, the More Money the States receive to feed their growing Monster.
See the Links below for more on how Title IV-D Federal Funding of Child Support Services, Child Protective Services, and Family Courts has turned a natural tendency to obtain More Money and Power and what it can purchase for me and my family, into a Nightmare for Divorcing Parents: and especially those who Don't Want to share the Kids, but instead to nitpick and lie about the other parent and seek Sole Legal Custody. This has given birth to Monster-Gov: with an insatiable appetite for More Children and Parents, and All their Assets: and a Free for All for state and private licensed "clinical" social workers, Family Law attorneys, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and last but not least, State and local budgets.
Go to this link, http://www.earthage.org/familycourtcrooks/title_iv-d-federal-funding.htm, and there are several other links that explain all of this very well.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Minnesota - High court: State, not tribe, must preside over adoption
Decision reverses two earlier orders favoring White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Parents' rights had been terminated.
Article by: ABBY SIMONS, Star Tribune
Updated: October 26, 2011 - 9:27 PM
Adoption proceedings for an Indian child whose parents' rights were terminated must take place within state courts, not tribal courts, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered Wednesday.
In the 4-2 decision, the court reversed two earlier orders granting the White Earth Band of Ojibwe permission to handle the child's adoption within its tribal court.
In its order, the Supreme Court reasoned that under the Indian Child Welfare Act, tribal authority is limited to foster care placement and termination of parental rights -- not adoptive placement.
The child in question, identified in court documents as L.S., is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. The mother is white, and the couple's five older children have all been removed from parental care or have had their parental rights terminated. According to documents, neither parent lived on the White Earth Reservation.
After parental rights were terminated, a Fillmore County judge granted the White Earth Band of Ojibwe permission to transfer pre-adoption proceedings to its tribal court under the rules of the Indian Child Welfare Act. A guardian ad litem for the child objected, but the Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in favor of the tribe.
In its reversal, the Supreme Court said there is no language in the federal law granting tribes jurisdiction over adoptive placement proceedings for children not living on the reservation. Because the language in the law was ambiguous, the court reasoned that adoptive proceedings should be excluded, not included.
The court also reasoned that the White Earth tribal court also lacked jurisdiction over the termination of parental rights because the mother was not a member of the tribe and the child did not live on the reservation.
The case will now return to Fillmore County District Court, where a guardian ad litem will be re-appointed and pre-adoptive placement will take place under state jurisdiction.
In his dissent, Justice Paul H. Anderson wrote that there is no language in the law that prevents transfer of pre-adoptive and adoptive placement proceedings to a tribal court in cases involving Indian children who do not live on or are not from their tribe's reservation. In light of the law, which is meant to favor tribes, the omission should instead be interpreted as granting the tribe permission to preside over the child's adoption.
Source http://m.startribune.com/local/?id=132640213
Article by: ABBY SIMONS, Star Tribune
Updated: October 26, 2011 - 9:27 PM
Adoption proceedings for an Indian child whose parents' rights were terminated must take place within state courts, not tribal courts, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered Wednesday.
In the 4-2 decision, the court reversed two earlier orders granting the White Earth Band of Ojibwe permission to handle the child's adoption within its tribal court.
In its order, the Supreme Court reasoned that under the Indian Child Welfare Act, tribal authority is limited to foster care placement and termination of parental rights -- not adoptive placement.
The child in question, identified in court documents as L.S., is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. The mother is white, and the couple's five older children have all been removed from parental care or have had their parental rights terminated. According to documents, neither parent lived on the White Earth Reservation.
After parental rights were terminated, a Fillmore County judge granted the White Earth Band of Ojibwe permission to transfer pre-adoption proceedings to its tribal court under the rules of the Indian Child Welfare Act. A guardian ad litem for the child objected, but the Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in favor of the tribe.
In its reversal, the Supreme Court said there is no language in the federal law granting tribes jurisdiction over adoptive placement proceedings for children not living on the reservation. Because the language in the law was ambiguous, the court reasoned that adoptive proceedings should be excluded, not included.
The court also reasoned that the White Earth tribal court also lacked jurisdiction over the termination of parental rights because the mother was not a member of the tribe and the child did not live on the reservation.
The case will now return to Fillmore County District Court, where a guardian ad litem will be re-appointed and pre-adoptive placement will take place under state jurisdiction.
In his dissent, Justice Paul H. Anderson wrote that there is no language in the law that prevents transfer of pre-adoptive and adoptive placement proceedings to a tribal court in cases involving Indian children who do not live on or are not from their tribe's reservation. In light of the law, which is meant to favor tribes, the omission should instead be interpreted as granting the tribe permission to preside over the child's adoption.
Source http://m.startribune.com/local/?id=132640213
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Guatemalan Court Order Rattles Foreign Adoption Community
Adam Martin Aug 19, 2011
The story about a young, missing Guatemalan girl whose mother searched for her for five years and eventually found she had been adopted by a couple in Missouri has been floating around for a couple of years now. But the latest news is that the mother, Loyda Rodriguez Morales, has essentially won her case. CNN reported on Monday that the Guatemalan government had ordered the girl returned, and that because it was considered a case of human trafficking, would call Interpol to enforce the order if the adoptive parents didn't comply. According to Erin Seigal, a fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University who's been covering the case closely, that's an unprecedented move in the world of international adoptions.
And as Metafilter noted, the case has been "rocking the adoption world." On forums such as guatadopt.com, members have been debating the case for years. On Thursday, a screed from a user named LauraLyn blasted the way the Monahans had handled the case.
They were offered mediation, and this could have happened in Guatemala or in Liberty. Instead they dug in their heels to hold on to 'their daughter', refused communication, and forced a torturous court process. They claim to want 'to protect' 'Karen Abagail' from 'further trauma'. This is so hard to believe when they have traumatically turned the lives of so many people upside down to keep what does not belong to them. Perhaps other adopted children from Guatemala today are asking: Are my adoptive parents like the Monahans?
But another, Grey, was quick to defend the Monahans' right to privacy and due process.
They have been branded as complicit in fraud, without (to my eyes, at least) facts and evidence. They were faced with a very uncertain situation, and a clear threat (via email) that the little girl they were seeking to adopt could be harmed if they did not continue with the process. Labeling them as accomplices to human trafficking given the nature of their situation is more than unfair; it’s slander.
As an Aug. 12 report in the Houston Chronicle pointed out, "SURVIVORS Foundation, the human rights group representing the birth mother, does not allege the Monahans knew anything about a kidnapping."
On the site Poundpuplegacy, one commenter named Kerry pointed to the power imbalance between birth mother and the adoptive parents.
Let's pretend the mother whose child was kidnapped was a white American. Let's pretend the person who adopted through corrupt adoption facilitators were dark foreigners, and the adoption agency was not affiliated with any agency within the USA. What sort of media attention would this case get, then? What would public outcry sound like after more got news of the story?
Color and economics aside, this is a woman's issue. The adoption industry is slowly but surely pitting woman against woman and as far as I'm concerned educated women who know a thing or two about the plights of (other) women treated like sub-humans need to stand up and NOT TURN THEIR BACKS to the corruption that takes place within the child placement industry.
At the very least, the case seems to be a shocking reminder within the adoption community that while the end goal of adoption is to create loving families, it sometimes begins with tearing other families apart. Unsurprisingly, many comments focused on the benefit the child would have growing up in America, versus returning to Guatemala. Kerry's response was thoughtful: "Have we entered an era where those who support adoption believe no original mother living in a poor region is fit to parent her own child chosen by corrupt child brokers?"
Adoption has been a tumultuous issue for the U.S. and Guatemala over the last few years. Guatemala closed its doors to U.S. adoptions in 2008 because of rampant fraud. They were reopened in 2009, but not without controversy. According to an Aug. 6 Associated Press story, that's what happened with the girl, who was adopted under the name Karen Abigail López GarcÃa, but whose real name is Anyeli Liseth Hernandez Rodriguez, according to a website set up to help search for her. Her mother claims she was snatched from her arms in 2006. The court ordered the PGN, the Guatemalan equivalent of the attorney general's office, to work with the U.S. embassy on retrieving the girl, who has been living with Timothy and Jennifer Monahan in Missouri since 2007. The Monahans have two months from the July 29 order to return the girl, under the latest order from the Guatemalen court.
Source: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/08/guatemalan-court-order-rattles-foreign-adoption-community/41514/
The story about a young, missing Guatemalan girl whose mother searched for her for five years and eventually found she had been adopted by a couple in Missouri has been floating around for a couple of years now. But the latest news is that the mother, Loyda Rodriguez Morales, has essentially won her case. CNN reported on Monday that the Guatemalan government had ordered the girl returned, and that because it was considered a case of human trafficking, would call Interpol to enforce the order if the adoptive parents didn't comply. According to Erin Seigal, a fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University who's been covering the case closely, that's an unprecedented move in the world of international adoptions.
And as Metafilter noted, the case has been "rocking the adoption world." On forums such as guatadopt.com, members have been debating the case for years. On Thursday, a screed from a user named LauraLyn blasted the way the Monahans had handled the case.
They were offered mediation, and this could have happened in Guatemala or in Liberty. Instead they dug in their heels to hold on to 'their daughter', refused communication, and forced a torturous court process. They claim to want 'to protect' 'Karen Abagail' from 'further trauma'. This is so hard to believe when they have traumatically turned the lives of so many people upside down to keep what does not belong to them. Perhaps other adopted children from Guatemala today are asking: Are my adoptive parents like the Monahans?
But another, Grey, was quick to defend the Monahans' right to privacy and due process.
They have been branded as complicit in fraud, without (to my eyes, at least) facts and evidence. They were faced with a very uncertain situation, and a clear threat (via email) that the little girl they were seeking to adopt could be harmed if they did not continue with the process. Labeling them as accomplices to human trafficking given the nature of their situation is more than unfair; it’s slander.
As an Aug. 12 report in the Houston Chronicle pointed out, "SURVIVORS Foundation, the human rights group representing the birth mother, does not allege the Monahans knew anything about a kidnapping."
On the site Poundpuplegacy, one commenter named Kerry pointed to the power imbalance between birth mother and the adoptive parents.
Let's pretend the mother whose child was kidnapped was a white American. Let's pretend the person who adopted through corrupt adoption facilitators were dark foreigners, and the adoption agency was not affiliated with any agency within the USA. What sort of media attention would this case get, then? What would public outcry sound like after more got news of the story?
Color and economics aside, this is a woman's issue. The adoption industry is slowly but surely pitting woman against woman and as far as I'm concerned educated women who know a thing or two about the plights of (other) women treated like sub-humans need to stand up and NOT TURN THEIR BACKS to the corruption that takes place within the child placement industry.
At the very least, the case seems to be a shocking reminder within the adoption community that while the end goal of adoption is to create loving families, it sometimes begins with tearing other families apart. Unsurprisingly, many comments focused on the benefit the child would have growing up in America, versus returning to Guatemala. Kerry's response was thoughtful: "Have we entered an era where those who support adoption believe no original mother living in a poor region is fit to parent her own child chosen by corrupt child brokers?"
Adoption has been a tumultuous issue for the U.S. and Guatemala over the last few years. Guatemala closed its doors to U.S. adoptions in 2008 because of rampant fraud. They were reopened in 2009, but not without controversy. According to an Aug. 6 Associated Press story, that's what happened with the girl, who was adopted under the name Karen Abigail López GarcÃa, but whose real name is Anyeli Liseth Hernandez Rodriguez, according to a website set up to help search for her. Her mother claims she was snatched from her arms in 2006. The court ordered the PGN, the Guatemalan equivalent of the attorney general's office, to work with the U.S. embassy on retrieving the girl, who has been living with Timothy and Jennifer Monahan in Missouri since 2007. The Monahans have two months from the July 29 order to return the girl, under the latest order from the Guatemalen court.
Source: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/08/guatemalan-court-order-rattles-foreign-adoption-community/41514/
Friday, August 12, 2011
Adoption, Thow Away Kids, Money and CPS
When adoption goes wrong
Giving up custody to get kids the mental health care they need
By Patrick Yeagle
Wally and Dawne Busch of Petersburg eagerly adopted their son Alan at the age of two in 2000, knowing that they would be in for some challenging times. They knew that Alan, now 13, had been abused by his biological mother, and they weren’t surprised when, around the time he hit puberty, he began to develop severe emotional and behavioral issues, which often manifest in violent outbursts, threatening Alan’s safety and that of everyone around him.
He threatened to kill other children at school, threatened to hurt the couple’s other children, mutilated his own body and talked often about killing himself. But the Buschs say their most troubling challenge hasn’t been Alan’s behavior. It has been trying to help their son in an environment that they say pushes families to give up custody of children to the state in return for mental health services.
The Buschs adopted Alan and his sister, Stephanie, with assurances from DCFS that the state would pay for the children’s medical needs, including mental health care. Despite counseling and therapy, Alan’s behavior became too dangerous for the family to keep him in their home, according to Wally Busch, so in October 2010 the family had Alan committed to a short-term psychiatric hospital with plans to send him to a long-term residential care facility at his psychiatrist’s recommendation. Lacking the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for Alan’s treatment, the Buschs approached DCFS about paying for long-term care, but the agency declined.
After Alan spent a week in the psychiatric hospital, the Buschs received a call saying he was ready to come home – that he was no longer a danger to himself or others. Fearing for the safety of their family and of Alan himself, the Buschs took their attorney’s advice and decided not to pick Alan up from the psychiatric hospital. DCFS charged them with neglect, classifying the Buschs’ choice as a “psychiatric lockout.”
The neglect charge against the Buschs was dismissed in court, but their choice to not bring Alan back home essentially meant they had given up custody of Alan to the state. He remains in state custody at a residential treatment facility, though the Buschs retain parental rights such as visitation.
Custody relinquishment
The Buschs’ story is typical of a situation called custody relinquishment. It involves an adoptive family becoming overwhelmed by the challenges of a mentally ill or emotionally disturbed child. Usually after trying several methods of counseling and therapy that don’t seem to work, the family decides that expensive long-term residential care is the only option left, but securing funding from the state proves difficult or impossible. The family then decides the only option to secure treatment for the child is leaving him or her in the hands of the state. The decision to “lock out” a child usually comes at the suggestion of a family’s attorney, psychiatrist, or even a state agency, but it often results in the family losing custody of the child.
It’s difficult to tell how many custody relinquishments happen each year, but statistics on psychiatric lockout seem to indicate a worsening problem. Screening, Assessment and Support Services (SASS), a division of the Illinois Department of Human Services, says in an internal report that the number of psychiatric lockouts statewide more than tripled from 30 in 2003 to 104 in 2010. The Community and Residential Services Authority (CRSA), a state agency which guides parents through the maze of child welfare services when they have trouble, indicates in its 2009 and 2010 annual reports that custody relinquishment happens frequently enough to be a significant concern.
“Parents who attempt to access services through lockout in many instances end up relinquishing guardianship to the state and are often treated systemically as abusive or neglectful parents,” CRSA notes in its 2009 report. “CRSA staff do not believe that lockout is an effective mechanism for service planning and the CRSA board has long believed that parents should not be forced to give up guardianship and parental rights to their children simply to get their service needs met.”
The reports note that “referral to CRSA often implies a breakdown or a gap somewhere in the state service system.” CRSA cases increased from 355 in 2009 to 374 in 2010, with about half of cases from both years coming from families seeking residential care for a child with severe emotional disturbances or behavioral disorders. Of CRSA’s 355 cases in 2009, 32 came from Sangamon County.
John Schornagel, executive director of CRSA, which is based in Springfield, says custody relinquishment cases are the ones that “fall through the cracks” between the services offered by the half-dozen child-serving state agencies, including those that provide post-adoption services.
“I wish lockouts didn’t happen,” Schornagel says. “As a group of agencies and as a state, we need to find a solution to custody relinquishment. Certainly, DCFS has a good clinical division, and they’re capable of handling adopted kids who are at risk for adoption disruption. But for parents to have to go through the living hell of abandoning their kids to the system simply to get their mental health needs met is just the wrong way to go. There must be a better way.”
Schornagel says that of the more than 10,000 cases CRSA has handled in its 26-year existence, only 44 have required the CRSA board to step in and issue non-binding recommendations to resolve a conflict between state agencies and adoptive parents seeking services. Most cases get resolved before they get to the psychiatric lockout stage, Schornagel says, adding that many conflicts can be resolved if parents contact his agency for help securing services before a psychiatric lockout ever becomes an option.
CRSA reports identify other issues that hinder families’ efforts to obtain state services for mentally ill or emotionally disturbed children, including a lack of services available in a geographic area, state agencies deflecting clients to other agencies, ever-changing diagnostic criteria that require constant changes to services and programs, and the inability of schools to pay for appropriate educational plans for children with special needs.
Schornagel says the custody relinquishment problem is largely the result of changes made to DCFS in the 1990s because of a federal court order that required DCFS to put foster children into permanent homes within two years of entering the foster care system. He says “disrupting adoptions” will continue as long as there is such a short time frame for getting kids into permanent homes, combined with parents who “aren’t fully prepared and trained for the clinical kinds of challenges they’re going to face” when adopting.
Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, says the majority of adoptions do not result in custody relinquishment. He notes that Illinois had nearly 52,000 children in its foster care system in 1997, but that number has been reduced to fewer than 17,000 currently, mainly due to increased efforts to place foster children into permanent adoptive homes. About 26,800 children in Illinois receive a monthly adoption subsidy from the state, which Marlowe says is probably the best available estimate of currently adopted kids in Illinois – excluding adoptions done through private agencies.
About 99 percent of adoptions remain stable after two years, with 95 percent remaining stable after five years, according to a DCFS report.
Speaking generally and not about any specific case, Marlowe says long-term residential treatment like that sought by the Buschs is usually reserved for only the most mentally ill children. DCFS received 75 requests for residential placements in 2009, he says, and only seven of those cases received approval from DCFS director Erwin McEwen.
Many of the problems exhibited by adopted kids are common to all kids, Marlowe notes.
“Adoptive families are not the only families that struggle when kids move into adolescence, and many of the behaviors we associate with mental health conditions are very common among adolescents, including issues of sexuality, identity and attachment,” Marlowe says. “It can be too easy at times to perceive an adolescent’s struggle with maturity to be indicative of mental health conditions. Often, even when elements of mental health conditions are present, the more effective solution is therapy and intervention which involves the entire family. … Families often don’t want to hear that the entire family needs to be a part of the solution.”
Addressing the charge of neglect that often follows a psychiatric lockout, Marlowe says DCFS procedures call for an automatic neglect charge after any lockout, but the charge is usually only upheld if “the family is not engaged in coming up with a solution” for the child to return.
Schornagel says the proactive solution to custody relinquishment would be better community-based support services like intensive therapy and counseling in a child’s own community. Community-based services keep children in a familiar environment – usually their own home – while costing the state less money than residential treatment and pre-empting many of the problems that lead to psychiatric lockouts.
While many state agencies are working to establish more community-based services, Schornagel says that process requires diverting money away from things like residential care, which deals with kids who are already in crisis.
“My perception, from where I sit, is that community-based services aren’t available in the quantity or the quality that are necessary to maintain a lot of these kids, and that’s why it all breaks down,” Schornagel says. “All of the agencies that I’ve worked with have been, over the years, trying to back away from residential placement and take some of the money they were spending on residential care and redirect that to community-based programs. It’s a slow process of moving the money from the back end to the front end, and I think we’re in the middle of that.”
Marlowe says more community-based services are a big part of the solution, but families must also be prepared for the challenges they will face when adopting.
“All of us in the field believe that if we build a stronger safety net, we will be seeing fewer family crises,” Marlowe says. “The system as a whole is trying to move from a mode of reacting to crisis to a more preventative approach. But not every family’s problems can be solved by Dr. Phil in 60 minutes like on Oprah. Growing into a mature, healthy adult is a process that requires support from family at every turn.”
Too little, too late
But for families already in crisis, it’s too late to build a stronger safety net. In 1998, James and Toni Hoy of Ingleside, Ill., adopted a two-year-old son named Daniel. He displayed developmental delays, had been abused by his biological parents, and had been born under the influence of drugs and alcohol. As Daniel grew older, he began to display violent and aggressive behavior, which became dangerous enough that Toni Hoy says she didn’t feel safe in her own home.
The Hoys tried several methods of therapy and counseling for Daniel, but nothing seemed to work. The final straw was when Daniel, then 13, pulled a knife on one of the Hoys’ other children and threw another child down some stairs.
In 2007, they approached the Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) about paying for $180,000-per-year residential treatment the family could not afford. The state declined to pay.
Denied funding for treatment they felt Daniel truly needed, the Hoys chose not to pick him up from the psychiatric hospital. Like the Buschs, they faced a charge of neglect for their psychiatric lockout, and their son became a ward of the state, which eventually placed him in a residential treatment facility.
The Hoys eventually got the neglect charge dropped, but it remained in the State Central Registry of abuse and neglect findings. They sued DHS and HFS to obtain funding for Daniel’s residential care, settling their case in July 2011 with an agreement that the agencies would pay for Daniel’s treatment while not admitting any fault. The Hoys also regained custody of Daniel, who is now 16 and was recently transferred from residential care to a juvenile detention center for assaulting a teacher and damaging a car.
While the Hoy case doesn’t set a precedent for other cases because it was settled before a court ruling, Toni Hoy says she has advised several other families in similar situations, and their case may serve as a catalyst for an upcoming class-action lawsuit.
The Collins Law Firm in Naperville, which represented the Hoys in their case, is examining similar cases to construct a class-action suit that could force changes in how the state handles psychiatric lockouts, custody relinquishment and residential care. Attorney Aaron Rapier at Collins says that suit is still in the planning stages and will not be pursued until later, to avoid jeopardizing the Hoys’ settlement.
In the meantime, John Schornagel at CRSA says the state’s financial woes limit the speed at which agencies can move from reacting to crises toward preventing them.
“State agencies have all been cut back on a variety of services – administration and direct services – and a lot of the nonprofits that do the heavy lifting are in trouble because the state isn’t paying their bills in some instances and they’re cutting back on services they provide to the community,” he says. “It makes being proactive more and more difficult. … I don’t think there’s any bad guys here. The agencies are doing what they can to do a better job with a very, very challenging population. I think they’re beginning to win the war, but there’s always casualties.”
Source article http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-8964-when-adoption-goes-wrong.html
Giving up custody to get kids the mental health care they need
By Patrick Yeagle
Wally and Dawne Busch of Petersburg eagerly adopted their son Alan at the age of two in 2000, knowing that they would be in for some challenging times. They knew that Alan, now 13, had been abused by his biological mother, and they weren’t surprised when, around the time he hit puberty, he began to develop severe emotional and behavioral issues, which often manifest in violent outbursts, threatening Alan’s safety and that of everyone around him.
He threatened to kill other children at school, threatened to hurt the couple’s other children, mutilated his own body and talked often about killing himself. But the Buschs say their most troubling challenge hasn’t been Alan’s behavior. It has been trying to help their son in an environment that they say pushes families to give up custody of children to the state in return for mental health services.
The Buschs adopted Alan and his sister, Stephanie, with assurances from DCFS that the state would pay for the children’s medical needs, including mental health care. Despite counseling and therapy, Alan’s behavior became too dangerous for the family to keep him in their home, according to Wally Busch, so in October 2010 the family had Alan committed to a short-term psychiatric hospital with plans to send him to a long-term residential care facility at his psychiatrist’s recommendation. Lacking the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for Alan’s treatment, the Buschs approached DCFS about paying for long-term care, but the agency declined.
After Alan spent a week in the psychiatric hospital, the Buschs received a call saying he was ready to come home – that he was no longer a danger to himself or others. Fearing for the safety of their family and of Alan himself, the Buschs took their attorney’s advice and decided not to pick Alan up from the psychiatric hospital. DCFS charged them with neglect, classifying the Buschs’ choice as a “psychiatric lockout.”
The neglect charge against the Buschs was dismissed in court, but their choice to not bring Alan back home essentially meant they had given up custody of Alan to the state. He remains in state custody at a residential treatment facility, though the Buschs retain parental rights such as visitation.
Custody relinquishment
The Buschs’ story is typical of a situation called custody relinquishment. It involves an adoptive family becoming overwhelmed by the challenges of a mentally ill or emotionally disturbed child. Usually after trying several methods of counseling and therapy that don’t seem to work, the family decides that expensive long-term residential care is the only option left, but securing funding from the state proves difficult or impossible. The family then decides the only option to secure treatment for the child is leaving him or her in the hands of the state. The decision to “lock out” a child usually comes at the suggestion of a family’s attorney, psychiatrist, or even a state agency, but it often results in the family losing custody of the child.
It’s difficult to tell how many custody relinquishments happen each year, but statistics on psychiatric lockout seem to indicate a worsening problem. Screening, Assessment and Support Services (SASS), a division of the Illinois Department of Human Services, says in an internal report that the number of psychiatric lockouts statewide more than tripled from 30 in 2003 to 104 in 2010. The Community and Residential Services Authority (CRSA), a state agency which guides parents through the maze of child welfare services when they have trouble, indicates in its 2009 and 2010 annual reports that custody relinquishment happens frequently enough to be a significant concern.
“Parents who attempt to access services through lockout in many instances end up relinquishing guardianship to the state and are often treated systemically as abusive or neglectful parents,” CRSA notes in its 2009 report. “CRSA staff do not believe that lockout is an effective mechanism for service planning and the CRSA board has long believed that parents should not be forced to give up guardianship and parental rights to their children simply to get their service needs met.”
The reports note that “referral to CRSA often implies a breakdown or a gap somewhere in the state service system.” CRSA cases increased from 355 in 2009 to 374 in 2010, with about half of cases from both years coming from families seeking residential care for a child with severe emotional disturbances or behavioral disorders. Of CRSA’s 355 cases in 2009, 32 came from Sangamon County.
John Schornagel, executive director of CRSA, which is based in Springfield, says custody relinquishment cases are the ones that “fall through the cracks” between the services offered by the half-dozen child-serving state agencies, including those that provide post-adoption services.
“I wish lockouts didn’t happen,” Schornagel says. “As a group of agencies and as a state, we need to find a solution to custody relinquishment. Certainly, DCFS has a good clinical division, and they’re capable of handling adopted kids who are at risk for adoption disruption. But for parents to have to go through the living hell of abandoning their kids to the system simply to get their mental health needs met is just the wrong way to go. There must be a better way.”
Schornagel says that of the more than 10,000 cases CRSA has handled in its 26-year existence, only 44 have required the CRSA board to step in and issue non-binding recommendations to resolve a conflict between state agencies and adoptive parents seeking services. Most cases get resolved before they get to the psychiatric lockout stage, Schornagel says, adding that many conflicts can be resolved if parents contact his agency for help securing services before a psychiatric lockout ever becomes an option.
CRSA reports identify other issues that hinder families’ efforts to obtain state services for mentally ill or emotionally disturbed children, including a lack of services available in a geographic area, state agencies deflecting clients to other agencies, ever-changing diagnostic criteria that require constant changes to services and programs, and the inability of schools to pay for appropriate educational plans for children with special needs.
Schornagel says the custody relinquishment problem is largely the result of changes made to DCFS in the 1990s because of a federal court order that required DCFS to put foster children into permanent homes within two years of entering the foster care system. He says “disrupting adoptions” will continue as long as there is such a short time frame for getting kids into permanent homes, combined with parents who “aren’t fully prepared and trained for the clinical kinds of challenges they’re going to face” when adopting.
Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, says the majority of adoptions do not result in custody relinquishment. He notes that Illinois had nearly 52,000 children in its foster care system in 1997, but that number has been reduced to fewer than 17,000 currently, mainly due to increased efforts to place foster children into permanent adoptive homes. About 26,800 children in Illinois receive a monthly adoption subsidy from the state, which Marlowe says is probably the best available estimate of currently adopted kids in Illinois – excluding adoptions done through private agencies.
About 99 percent of adoptions remain stable after two years, with 95 percent remaining stable after five years, according to a DCFS report.
Speaking generally and not about any specific case, Marlowe says long-term residential treatment like that sought by the Buschs is usually reserved for only the most mentally ill children. DCFS received 75 requests for residential placements in 2009, he says, and only seven of those cases received approval from DCFS director Erwin McEwen.
Many of the problems exhibited by adopted kids are common to all kids, Marlowe notes.
“Adoptive families are not the only families that struggle when kids move into adolescence, and many of the behaviors we associate with mental health conditions are very common among adolescents, including issues of sexuality, identity and attachment,” Marlowe says. “It can be too easy at times to perceive an adolescent’s struggle with maturity to be indicative of mental health conditions. Often, even when elements of mental health conditions are present, the more effective solution is therapy and intervention which involves the entire family. … Families often don’t want to hear that the entire family needs to be a part of the solution.”
Addressing the charge of neglect that often follows a psychiatric lockout, Marlowe says DCFS procedures call for an automatic neglect charge after any lockout, but the charge is usually only upheld if “the family is not engaged in coming up with a solution” for the child to return.
Schornagel says the proactive solution to custody relinquishment would be better community-based support services like intensive therapy and counseling in a child’s own community. Community-based services keep children in a familiar environment – usually their own home – while costing the state less money than residential treatment and pre-empting many of the problems that lead to psychiatric lockouts.
While many state agencies are working to establish more community-based services, Schornagel says that process requires diverting money away from things like residential care, which deals with kids who are already in crisis.
“My perception, from where I sit, is that community-based services aren’t available in the quantity or the quality that are necessary to maintain a lot of these kids, and that’s why it all breaks down,” Schornagel says. “All of the agencies that I’ve worked with have been, over the years, trying to back away from residential placement and take some of the money they were spending on residential care and redirect that to community-based programs. It’s a slow process of moving the money from the back end to the front end, and I think we’re in the middle of that.”
Marlowe says more community-based services are a big part of the solution, but families must also be prepared for the challenges they will face when adopting.
“All of us in the field believe that if we build a stronger safety net, we will be seeing fewer family crises,” Marlowe says. “The system as a whole is trying to move from a mode of reacting to crisis to a more preventative approach. But not every family’s problems can be solved by Dr. Phil in 60 minutes like on Oprah. Growing into a mature, healthy adult is a process that requires support from family at every turn.”
Too little, too late
But for families already in crisis, it’s too late to build a stronger safety net. In 1998, James and Toni Hoy of Ingleside, Ill., adopted a two-year-old son named Daniel. He displayed developmental delays, had been abused by his biological parents, and had been born under the influence of drugs and alcohol. As Daniel grew older, he began to display violent and aggressive behavior, which became dangerous enough that Toni Hoy says she didn’t feel safe in her own home.
The Hoys tried several methods of therapy and counseling for Daniel, but nothing seemed to work. The final straw was when Daniel, then 13, pulled a knife on one of the Hoys’ other children and threw another child down some stairs.
In 2007, they approached the Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) about paying for $180,000-per-year residential treatment the family could not afford. The state declined to pay.
Denied funding for treatment they felt Daniel truly needed, the Hoys chose not to pick him up from the psychiatric hospital. Like the Buschs, they faced a charge of neglect for their psychiatric lockout, and their son became a ward of the state, which eventually placed him in a residential treatment facility.
The Hoys eventually got the neglect charge dropped, but it remained in the State Central Registry of abuse and neglect findings. They sued DHS and HFS to obtain funding for Daniel’s residential care, settling their case in July 2011 with an agreement that the agencies would pay for Daniel’s treatment while not admitting any fault. The Hoys also regained custody of Daniel, who is now 16 and was recently transferred from residential care to a juvenile detention center for assaulting a teacher and damaging a car.
While the Hoy case doesn’t set a precedent for other cases because it was settled before a court ruling, Toni Hoy says she has advised several other families in similar situations, and their case may serve as a catalyst for an upcoming class-action lawsuit.
The Collins Law Firm in Naperville, which represented the Hoys in their case, is examining similar cases to construct a class-action suit that could force changes in how the state handles psychiatric lockouts, custody relinquishment and residential care. Attorney Aaron Rapier at Collins says that suit is still in the planning stages and will not be pursued until later, to avoid jeopardizing the Hoys’ settlement.
In the meantime, John Schornagel at CRSA says the state’s financial woes limit the speed at which agencies can move from reacting to crises toward preventing them.
“State agencies have all been cut back on a variety of services – administration and direct services – and a lot of the nonprofits that do the heavy lifting are in trouble because the state isn’t paying their bills in some instances and they’re cutting back on services they provide to the community,” he says. “It makes being proactive more and more difficult. … I don’t think there’s any bad guys here. The agencies are doing what they can to do a better job with a very, very challenging population. I think they’re beginning to win the war, but there’s always casualties.”
Source article http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-8964-when-adoption-goes-wrong.html
Saturday, August 6, 2011
The Racial and Class Disparities Within Family Unification
Those who aren’t as fortunate to be aided by their community lose their children to an already inundated foster care system. The foster care system is designed to be a temporary solution for children until a permanent placement can be made. Yet statistics from 2009 indicate that there are more than 423,000 children in foster care—some who have been waiting years to be reunified with their families or to be adopted.
Most of the children who face this outcome are African American. Disproportionately, African American children constitute 30 percent of those in foster care despite composing only 15 percent of all children in the United States. According to a report by Jessica Arons, black children are not only four times more likely than white children to be in the child welfare system but are also more prone to languish in foster care for years due to lower rates of adoption and family reunification.
Click here to read the entire story.
Most of the children who face this outcome are African American. Disproportionately, African American children constitute 30 percent of those in foster care despite composing only 15 percent of all children in the United States. According to a report by Jessica Arons, black children are not only four times more likely than white children to be in the child welfare system but are also more prone to languish in foster care for years due to lower rates of adoption and family reunification.
Click here to read the entire story.
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