Judge: Wendrow family can continue its lawsuit over dismissed child abuse accusations -Michigan

By L.L. Brasier and John Wisely

An Oakland County family can continue its lawsuit against officials who took the children away and jailed the parents on charges of sexually assaulting their severely autistic daughter, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Julian and Thal Wendrow and their two teenage children are suing Oakland County, the Michigan Department of Human Services and Walled Lake Consolidated Schools in U.S. District Court.

Julian Wendrow was arrested in December 2007 and remained jailed for 80 days. Thal Wendrow was placed on an electronic tether, and their children were sent to foster care for months before prosecutors dropped the case in 2008.

The case against the Wendrows was based solely on statements their mute and autistic daughter, then 14, was said to have made using a widely debunked communication method called facilitated communication. The child's hands were guided by a trained aide using the method, but studies show it's the aide usually doing the typing.

The Wendrows filed suit in 2008. Many of the claims against prosecutors were dismissed because they are protected under governmental immunity.

Last year, the defendants asked that all the claims be dismissed. On Tuesday, Judge John Corbett O'Meara agreed to dismiss the parents' and brother's claims that they were treated unfairly because of their affiliation with the disabled girl. O'Meara concluded only the girl has standing to sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

O'Meara let stand a defamation claim against former Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca, who sought the criminal charges and then publicly said after he left office that the Wendrows were guilty even though the case was dropped.

Oakland County Corporation Counsel Judith Cunningham said Tuesday that most of the claims against the county were dismissed. "We are nudging toward victory," she said.

O'Meara scheduled a trial on the remaining claims for June.

Sarah Prescott, an attorney for the Wendrows, said she disagreed with the judge's decision to dismiss the family's disability claims but is happy the girl's claim can be presented to a jury.

"To say that she can go forward against all these defendants is the heart of the case," Prescott said. "The quicker we can get to the courthouse steps, the better."

In his ruling, O'Meara also let stand several claims against the Walled Lake school district, which first reported the allegations, because the facilitated communication occurred at the school where the autistic girl attended classes. According to depositions, school officials knew the communication method was suspect.

Lawyers for the district did not return a message seeking comment on Tuesday's ruling. The Michigan Attorney General's Office, which is defending the state social workers involved, declined to comment.

West Bloomfield and its police department, also named in the suit, settled with the family for $1.8 million in 2011.

O'Meara refused to dismiss a claim against a state worker who is accused of violating the Wendrow children's rights when she took the girl for a gynecological exam that found no evidence of abuse. The worker also drove the couple's 13-year-old son to the police station, where he was interrogated for two hours.

Source http://www.freep.com/article/20120328/NEWS03/203280380/Judge-Oakland-County-family-can-continue-its-lawsuit-over-dismissed-child-abuse-accusations?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cp

Ramsey, Dakota counties at odds over case of 8-year-old beaten at school by mom

By Emily Gurnon

Socorro Eaton's daughter deserved a beating, Eaton believed. And it didn't matter that the girl's entire second-grade class in St. Paul was there to see it.

But within hours, her 8-year-old daughter had been placed in emergency foster care. Child protection in Dakota County, where the family lived, followed up. Two weeks later, she was returned to her mother. Three weeks after that, she was removed again and remains away from her mother's home, living with her father.

Eaton was convicted Thursday in Ramsey County District Court of malicious punishment of a child and will be sentenced Dec. 14.

But her daughter's future is less certain - and the actions of Dakota County staff raise questions about how safe she will be.

"I really am concerned about this child," said Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Yasmin Mullings, speaking at a July 20 pretrial hearing.

"This is unusual in that these are the types of behavior that (usually) occur inside the home only," Mullings said. "That this behavior happened in a school and in such a blatant way leaves me (with) extreme concern of what is happening in the home."

She noted that only when the girl was punched in the classroom June 14 did child protection get involved.

After the school incident, the child told police and a doctor that her mother had hit her with a belt on more than one occasion. She had telltale parallel welts on her back.

On the witness stand last week, Eaton denied using a belt to hit any of her four children - including a 10- year-old daughter and twin 4-year-olds, who were temporarily removed from Eaton's home after the school incident.

Eaton's attorney, Leah Morgan, said that child protection workers were giving Eaton high marks for her work with them on improving her parenting skills since the incident. They believe the girl - whose first initial is J. - should go home, Morgan said.

But Ramsey County District Judge Margaret Marrinan denied a defense motion Thursday that the no-contact order be lifted.

FACTORS IN REMOVING CHILDREN

Marrinan explained Friday.

Eaton struck her child in front of a teacher and 19 other children, the judge said. She was constantly agitated in court, shaking her head and mouthing things. And she has failed to check in weekly with the agency overseeing her conditional release from jail.

"Add that to these other factors and it does not give me a lot of confidence about how this child would be treated (at home)," the judge said.

Removing a child from his or her home is complicated, and workers must weigh several factors. State law requires that "reasonable efforts" be made to "eliminate the need for removal and to reunite the child with the child's family at the earliest possible time ..."

An exception is made when a parent "has subjected a child to egregious harm." What happened to J. does not appear to constitute egregious harm as defined by state law.

Sharon Madsen, a spokeswoman for Dakota County, said officials there could not comment, because the case involved confidential information.

'SAFETY NET' IN PLACE

Two Ramsey County court hearings in July in the criminal case shed light on decisions made by child protection - and why the judge and prosecutor were so critical of those moves.

The incident at Bruce Vento Elementary School took place on the last day of school, June 14.

A Dakota County social worker, Susan Boreland, conducted an investigation and, within a week, wrote a letter stating she believed no assault or injury occurred and that the no-contact order should be lifted, prosecutor Mullings said in the July 20 hearing.

Boreland also decided to place J. with her father, who has an extensive criminal record that includes convictions for kidnapping, domestic assault, drug possession and providing false information to police.

J. remains in her father's custody, the girl said during her mother's trial this past week.

Based on the initial child-protection investigation and information from the social worker, Ramsey County District Judge George Stephenson canceled the no-contact order in Eaton's case June 30, and J. returned home.

Defense attorney Morgan told the judge that child protection had been working to put a "safety net" in place for J.

Eaton had been cooperating with child protection, she said. The girl provided "the names of her sister and her best friend, all of whom live nearby and can come over to help at any time," Morgan said. And Dakota County assigned J. a guardian ad litem to represent her interests. The guardian ad item, Jake Trotzky-Sirr, gave J. his card and said she could call him if she were ever afraid.

JUDGE WEIGHS IN

In the meantime, another child protection worker, Betsy Dantoft, had taken over the case in early July. During the second of her two visits to the family's home, J. was not present. The mother said things were fine.

Marrinan was appalled.

"The daughter should have been there," the judge said at the July 20 hearing. "I think that's extremely sloppy work by something that calls itself child protection....

"I'm familiar with how Ramsey County handles things, but Dakota County is like another country, frankly."

She also speculated on how much help a young child would get from a business card.

"I'm not impressed with the fact that a guardian ad litem gives his card to an 8-year-old kid and says, 'If you have problems, give me a call,' " she said.

She ordered July 20 that the no-contact order be reinstated.

Another hearing was set for July 29.

Dantoft testified at that hearing that she had spoken with J. four times - twice privately - and visited the family twice, including the one occasion when J. was not there.

Her mother told the child protection worker that J. was at a sleepover and could be called to come home. Not necessary, Dantoft told Eaton.

"I guess at this point in time, I don't feel that there is a need for the no-contact order," the child protection worker testified. "(J.) has really shared that she feels safe with her mom and is very confused about what's going on and would like to return to her mom's home."

Mullings, the prosecutor, was not satisfied.

"What we have is, at most, a cursory (review), where the child protection worker comes in and makes an assessment largely based upon self-reporting (by the mother)," Mullings said.

She noted that J. has a "documented history of not speaking up," having never told anyone about the beatings before one was witnessed at the school.

Marrinan ordered July 29 that Eaton could have supervised visits with her daughter.

'SYSTEM FAILING YOU'

Morgan, Eaton's defense attorney, said Friday that she has been cooperative with child protection "since Day One" and taken all the required steps, including parenting classes, counseling with her daughter and supervised visits with J.

Dakota County continues to recommend that J. be returned home. But "none of that favorable information was allowed into the criminal case," Morgan said.

Marrinan told Eaton on July 20 not to lose hope.

"This is a question of the system failing you and your daughter," the judge said. "We're going to just see that (Dakota County) follow(s) through with what they're supposed to do."

Source http://www.twincities.com/ci_19229865

South Dakota Kidnaps Indian Children and Sticks Them in White Foster Homes

by: Meteor Blades
Wed Oct 26, 2011 at 14:59:32 PM PDT

If you find typos here, it's because my hands are trembling in fury over the keyboard as I write this. That comes from reading Part 1 of National Public Radio's three-part report on yet another round of cultural genocide against the Indians of South Dakota. What it amounts to is state-sanctioned kidnapping. I hope that you'll take action to help bring an end to the continuing effort to separate Indian children from their families. Here are the bullet points from the kick-ass investigation Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters put together over 12 months:

• A 2005 study found that 32 states are, in various ways, failing to comply with the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed that law in 1978 after a century of federal policy had forcibly removed tens of thousands of American Indian children from their families and sent them off to abusive boarding schools.

• Under the law, social services agencies are supposed to place Indian children they remove from troubled homes into Indian foster-care homes. But that requirement is being ignored. And in South Dakota, more than 700 Indian children are removed from their families each year, often under questionable circumstances. Over the years, state records show, only 13 percent of these children have gone to Indian foster parents.

• Anecdotal evidence indicates that foster-care homes licensed to Indians are ignored by the state's social services agency when placing children removed from their families.

• Some children are taken for legitimate reasons, but most are removed because of "neglect," a fuzzy definition that often is arrived at because of a failure of the mostly non-Indian social-service workers to understand Indian culture. "[E]ven Native American children who grow up to become foster care success stories, living happy, productive lives, say the loss of their culture and identities leaves a deep hole they spend years trying hopelessly to fill," NPR reports.

• While Indian children make up less than 15 percent of the state's population, they are more than half the children in foster care. South Dakota receives thousands of dollars from the feds for every child it takes from a family, and typically gets more money if a child is Indian.

• South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugard once headed a group that was a major recipient of federal money provided for foster children. As lieutenant governor, he was on the group's payroll when it received tens of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, a "highly unusual relationship."

Meteor Blades :: South Dakota Kidnaps Indian Children and Sticks Them in White Foster Homes

"It enrages me," says Crow Creek tribal council member Peter Lengkeek. "We're very tight-knit families and cousins are disappearing. Family members are disappearing."

The Crow Creek tribe has lost more than 33 children in recent years. The reservation only has 1,400 people. Last year Lengkeek asked social service officials to tell him where the children were and who they were placed with.
Seven months later, he received a list. Lengkeek says every single child was placed in a white foster home.

He says if the state had its way, "we'd still be playing cowboys and Indians. I couldn't imagine what they tell these kids about where they come from and who they are."
"It's kidnapping," he says. "That's how we see it."

Except for the obvious reasons, many people may wonder why this matters so much to Indians, why it arouses our fury more intensely than just about any other conflict between Indians and non-Indians in today's world. That's because the foster-care program contains a powerful echo. Our rage arises out of a history that is, for many of us, devastatingly personal.

For instance, among Indians who participate in the Daily Kos group Native American Netroots, at least four of us have relatives who were yanked away from their families and sent to boarding schools (aji: great-grandmother; me, grandmother and great-aunt; navajo: mother; cacamp: grandparents, parents and himself).

Some went to government-run schools; others were taken in by church operations, Catholics and Mormons being among the prominent proponents of this approach to "civilizing" us.

In addition to being physically abused and treated as sexual prey in many cases, children in the boarding schools had their language, culture and religion yanked away. That wasn't collateral damage. It was the whole point. The concept behind the boarding schools, more than 150 of them by 1900, was "Kill the Indian...save the man," as noted in an 1892 Denver speech by Col. Richard H Pratt, founder of the U.S. Training and Industrial School at Carlisle Barracks, Pa. In short, demolish Indians by literally stealing their children.

Here's cacamp - Carter Camp - giving the short version of his boarding school story:

I was a repeat run-away same as my Mom, so I didn't graduate until I was 19. Mom never did because her Dad hid her from the agent after the first time. In my parents' day the schools were run like military academies where the kids marched in formation and drilled like soldiers. They had disciplinarians and jails and ran farms, which the students worked on to feed themselves. Those were the bad old days. By the time I got there, they were more benevolent but still strict about erasing our cultures. We still had to work on the farm two hours a day and more if we got in trouble.

The Navajo had it especially rough since they were forcefully rounded up like my parents were and taken up [to] Kansas, far from home, while the rest of us were sent by our parents because of poverty. We were high school age; so were the Navajo but they hadn't gone to any school before and most spoke no English so they had "special ed" and were segregated in different dorms. Funny thing though, we met and became friends with students from all over and later on became tribal leaders and American Indian Movement leaders who knew each other and could work together for things like tribal sovereignty.

Back then the Bureau of Indian Affairs agent stole the kids and ran roughshod over the parents and tribe. Today it's the State and the welfare system that is doing the same thing. We call our lost children "Lost Birds" after the baby girl who survived [the] Wounded Knee [massacre of 1890] and was adopted out to a white family but finally (recently) came home to her people to be buried again at Wounded Knee.

Each year we have "lost birds" coming home who have turned 18 and come seeking their families and yearning to learn their culture. Many times they don't even know who to ask for and sometimes they're quite old, grown up and with their own children looking for a connection to their past. Winter Rabbit reminded me of such a lost one. The majority of the stolen kids know their families and come home ASAP, so we have a large population of Indian kids who were brought up outside the tribe and have now come home. They almost all have stories of abuse. Only a few were lucky enough to find love and stability. Most are passed around in the system and bounce from foster home to foster home. This has been going on so long that thousands of lost ones are out there from every nation in America. It needs to stop.

Aji tells the story of her great-grandmother:

[My mom's grandmother] died without ever knowing who or what she was; it's taken a lot of work, years later, to piece her "self" together. Initially, the family thought she was of Scots descent, not realizing that the Scottish surname was that of her by-then-widowed mother's second husband. Her adoptive name was English. There is no record of what her traditional name (or any surname) might have been; they were more interested in covering up the very fact of adoption than anything else.

In the 1870s, the Catholic Church in Michigan was very invested in saving Indian children from an alleged "epidemic" of illness. What they were really doing was stealing kids and farming them out as fast as they could to reliably Catholic families who would ... "save the [wo]man by killing the Indian." No one knows how many were lost to white families via church theft. Hundreds, at a minimum. Probably thousands over the course of one generation alone. But one day in the late 1870s, a good white Catholic couple of English extraction left their home and traveled to the rez for two months, and came back bearing their new little Indian "papoose," promptly given a white name and identity, with never a reference to be made to the adoption, much less from where.

Ironically, when she married, her husband ran his father's logging business, and during the summer months, he traveled around the state; in his absence, she ran the business for him. She hired and fired - you guessed it - Indian laborers, some of whom were undoubtedly relatives, but neither side ever knew it. She died thinking that 1) she was English, and 2) she was the lineal descendant of those English "parents." To this day, I'm not sure how they explained the differences in coloring - probably via the "Gasp! That's not discussed in polite company" method.

Also ironically, after her adoption, her new parents went on to have nine biological children of their own. You'd've thought they could've been a little less greedy about acquiring someone else's child as a possession.

Nobody is suggesting that the foster-case system in South Dakota is treating Indian children the way the boarding schools did back, in Carter's words, in the "bad old days." Or that children are being snatched in quite the same way that the churches did decades ago. But many of today's Indian foster-kids are still losing their culture and the connection to their heritage.

Take the case of Janice Howe, one of the grandmothers that the NPR team focused on. Her four grandchildren, the children of her daughter Erin Yellow Robe, wound up in foster care despite the 1978 law.

Except rarely, that law requires that Indian children be placed with relatives, a tribal member or at the very least, another American Indian. And it requires states to do all they can to first keep a family together through services and programs. Surely, a grandmother qualifies.

But nothing Howe did over 18 months brought her grandchildren back until she told the Crow Creek tribal council that they were about to be put up for adoption. The council passed a resolution warning the state that if the Yellow Robe children were not returned, it would be charged with kidnapping and prosecuted. Nobody thought this would work, but it did.

"Antoinette came in and said 'Grandma, Grandma. We get to stay! We get to stay!'" ...
Howe thinks the babies were treated well. But Rashauna and Antoinette left a size 10 and came back a size smaller. Howe says they hoard food under their pillows and hide under the bed when a car pulls up.

"I feel like they were traumatized so much," Howe says.

The children don't remember their native dance, something Howe says is especially important for Antoinette, the oldest.

"We go to sweats," Howe says. "We have ceremonies at certain times a year. She's got to be getting ready to learn these things that she has to do in order to become a young lady. They took a year and a half away from us. How are we going to get that back?"

Among other tasks, Danny Sheehan works for the Lakota People's law office. He has about 150 case files on removals.

"These are all the different people who had their kids taken away from their entire families. ... Not one of them has had their children left with a relative of any kind."
He hopes one day he can sue. ...

"Maybe if we devoted all our resources to a particular case and said, look, we're going to land on you like a ton of bricks [social services] and make you give this one kid back and sue you and do everything else, they would probably just turn the kid loose," he says. "But it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't stop them from doing it a hundred times again."

But why should lawsuits be necessary? There is a law against what's being done. It's just not being enforced. A good deal of the reason for that is because the centuries-long efforts to make Indians disappear, to make us invisible, has succeeded. Our political clout in such matters, even in places where we can still be found in substantial numbers, is next to zero. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act appears to us to be just another ignored bit of paper, like hundreds of treaties, and nobody official is doing squat about it. When it comes to invisible Indians who enforces the enforcers?

South Dakota Kidnaps Indian Children and Sticks Them in White Foster Homes | comments

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
by: navajo @ Thu Oct 27, 2011 at 14:35:43 PM CDT
[ Parent ]

-I'm really furious and disgusted with this guy:

Ten years ago, this group was in financial trouble. For several years, tax records show, it was losing money. Then in 2002, a former banker named Dennis Daugaard joined the team. He became the group's chief operating officer. A year later, he was promoted to executive director. And things began to change.

The money the group was getting from the state doubled under his leadership. Children's Home grew financially to seven times its size. It added two new facilities.

State records show it seized on a big opportunity. The state began outsourcing much of its work, such as training foster care parents and examining potential foster homes. Children's Home got almost every one of those contracts.

The group paid Daugaard $115,000 a year. But that wasn't his only job. He was also the state's lieutenant governor - and a rising star in state politics.

The seven years Daugaard spent at Children's Home - and his ability to turn the place around - were prominent features of his successful 2010 bid for governor.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richard Wexler wrote:

Sometimes I think the Nebraska child welfare system exists just to make everyone else look good. South Dakota tears apart families at the third highest rate in the nation; Nebraska is second worst (Wyoming is #1). The proportion of Native American children in foster care in South Dakota is four times their proportion in the general population, in Nebraska it's closer to seven times higher. Both states are among the ten worst when it comes to using the worst form of placement, group homes and institutions.

A culture of contempt for poor, minority families is deeply embedded in child welfare in much of the nation. That does enormous harm to children when they are torn from everyone they know and love - and it overloads child welfare systems so workers have less time to find children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their parents. Sadly, Nebraska and South Dakota are prime examples. Fortunately, there are many good people in child welfare systems trying to change this, and some states, such as Maine, Alabama and Illinois have made significant progress. Details are on our website.

Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org

Thu Oct 27 07:56:46 2011

Richard Wexler wrote:

It's not just Indian children who are desperate to go home. Many children who "age out" of foster care head right back to their parents. Even when they can't live together, many former foster children maintain ties to their parents or other relatives.

Consider the results of a study of infants born with cocaine in their systems: One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the actual physical development of the infants was better when they were left in their own homes. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. That doesn't mean we can leave children with addicts - it does mean that drug treatment for the parent almost always is a better first choice than foster care for the child. And of course, many children are taken from parents whose only crime is poverty.

None of this means no child ever should be taken away. But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But America has prescribed mega-doses of foster care, even when there are far better ways to keep children safe.

Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org
Thu Oct 27 07:53:47 2011

Source http://www.nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1114/south-dakota-kidnaps-indian-children-and-sticks-them-in-white-foster-homes