Tina McGarry Reporting
KFOR-TV
6:17 p.m. CDT, August 10, 2011
OKLAHOMA CITY -- A 5-year-old girl is dead and her father is in jail charged with the killing. Serenity Deal was in the state's custody, but living with her father on a trial basis when she was beaten to death.
Sean Brooks sits in jail charged with first-degree murder.
He has pleaded "not guilty."
Oklahoma House Speaker Kris Steele (R- Shawnee), says the Oklahoma Department of Human Services failed the little girl by leaving her in a risky environment.
DHS also admits procedures were not followed.
In a report released by DHS Wednesday, we learned DHS was called in to investigate on four different occasions, dating back to June 2009.
The first two investigations centered around Serenity's mom, Samantha Deal, who went to prison last month after being convicted of lewd or indecent acts with a child.
Investigations three and four charged Serenity's father, Sean Brooks, with child abuse.
After months of investigating, DHS found the charges unsubstantiated; a move now being questioned.
"But there's also a checks and balances to our system," DHS spokeswoman Sheree Powell said. "There's the court procedures, there's the child's attorney involved, a D.A. and a judge. Were they given complete and accurate information? Did they ask the appropriate questions that should've been asked in court? That's the checks and balanaces to our system."
Checks and balances that failed a little girl.
May 11, 2011, three weeks before her death, Serenity was placed with her father in a trial reunification.
"Our agency takes any threat of harm to children seriously," Powell said. "We have policies, training and procedures in place to keep children safe. Those were not followed and employees will be held accountable for not following policy."
Following Serenity's death in June, DHS suspended with pay four case workers.
Weeks later, one committed suicide.
After that another resigned.
Two remain on paid suspesion.
Sean Brooks is scheduled to go to court in October for a preliminary hearing.
Source: http://www.kfor.com/news/local/kfor-dhs-releases-report-child-abuse-death-20110810,0,1439465.story
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.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Little to No Trust for Guardian Ad Litems and Attorneys For the Children
We have come to the conclusion through our own experiences, case histories of other people going through the corrupt CPS circus and other reports that anyone who is going through a CPS A&N case should be cautious in regards to any guadian ad litem or child's attorney who has been appointed by the judge in your case.
On the surface, the idea of someone representing your child in a CPS case sounds good. You may even get a false sense of security that they will do the right thing by your child. Don't be fooled, in most every instance, they are in collusion with CPS.
They are a part of the scheme to take children. We have seen time and time again where the guardian ad litem or child's attorney is not only friends with the judge and some of the CPS workers but they also belong to the same "community" organizations and sometimes, they even donate money, services or their time to foster and adoption agencies. That should never be and it is a direct conflict of interest but that is how it often works.
These guardian ad litems or child's attorney spends very little time with the child to even know what would be in the child's best interest. They don't know the child at all. They know very little about anything except what they read in the reports they get from CPS. Can you say - biased reports?
The definition of a guardian ad litem - might be call the child's attorney because they are lawyers in some cases:
A person appointed only for the purposes of prosecuting or defending an action on behalf of another such as a child or mentally-challenged person. Also called ad litem. This right is usually granted to the child’s attorney.
A few things about immunity for guradian ad litems and attorneys for children (borrowed from https://protectingourchildrenfrombeingsold.wordpress.com/tag/guardian-ad-litems-can-be-sued/) :
Guardian ad litems and Appointed Counsel are not protected by immunity. In Wiederholt v Fisher, 485 N.W. 2d 442, 169 Wis. 2d 524 (1992) “In child custody matter, guardian ad litem does not represent child per se; rather, guardian ad litem’s statutory duty is to represent concept of child’s best interest.” When those guardian ad litems don’t bother to meet the minium standards – they become subject to liabilty. (Collins v Tabet, 111 N.M. 391,806 P 2nd 40 (N.M. 1990)
In other words when a Guardian ad litem just goes through the motions and does not really work the case they can and should be held liable. Most Guardians don’t work for the child, they work for Child Protection Services.
According to Bonds, 64, N.M. at 345,328 P. 2nd at 599 the appointment as guardian ad litem of a minor child is in the postion for the highest trust and no attorney should ever blindly enter in an appearance as guardian ad litem and allow a matter to proceed without a full and complete investigation into the facts and law so that his clinets will be fairly and competently represented and their rights fully and adequately protected and preserved….
Bonds proposed that a guardian ad litem holds a position of the highest trust and suggest that he or she is a fiduciary. Judge Donnelly compares the position of Guardian ad litem to that of a general guardian or conservator and is subject to liability to their wards for the harm resulting from ordinary negligence in the discharge of their duties. They are actually charged with a higher standard of care than are other people involved.
In Downs v Sawtelle, 574,F 2d 1 ( 1st Cir.1978) a federal judge in the Court of Appeals ruled that immunity was inappropriate for guardians because they are considered private parties and they are not confronted with the pressures of office, the decision making of the threat of liability facing governors or high level public officials.
According to J.W.F. v Schoolcraft, 763 P.2nd 1217 (Utah, 1987) A guardian ad litems job is to put themselves in the shoes of the child and look at the factors as the child would if he or she were old enough and their judgment was mature enough to make a decision.
On the surface, the idea of someone representing your child in a CPS case sounds good. You may even get a false sense of security that they will do the right thing by your child. Don't be fooled, in most every instance, they are in collusion with CPS.
They are a part of the scheme to take children. We have seen time and time again where the guardian ad litem or child's attorney is not only friends with the judge and some of the CPS workers but they also belong to the same "community" organizations and sometimes, they even donate money, services or their time to foster and adoption agencies. That should never be and it is a direct conflict of interest but that is how it often works.
These guardian ad litems or child's attorney spends very little time with the child to even know what would be in the child's best interest. They don't know the child at all. They know very little about anything except what they read in the reports they get from CPS. Can you say - biased reports?
The definition of a guardian ad litem - might be call the child's attorney because they are lawyers in some cases:
A person appointed only for the purposes of prosecuting or defending an action on behalf of another such as a child or mentally-challenged person. Also called ad litem. This right is usually granted to the child’s attorney.
A few things about immunity for guradian ad litems and attorneys for children (borrowed from https://protectingourchildrenfrombeingsold.wordpress.com/tag/guardian-ad-litems-can-be-sued/) :
Guardian ad litems and Appointed Counsel are not protected by immunity. In Wiederholt v Fisher, 485 N.W. 2d 442, 169 Wis. 2d 524 (1992) “In child custody matter, guardian ad litem does not represent child per se; rather, guardian ad litem’s statutory duty is to represent concept of child’s best interest.” When those guardian ad litems don’t bother to meet the minium standards – they become subject to liabilty. (Collins v Tabet, 111 N.M. 391,806 P 2nd 40 (N.M. 1990)
In other words when a Guardian ad litem just goes through the motions and does not really work the case they can and should be held liable. Most Guardians don’t work for the child, they work for Child Protection Services.
According to Bonds, 64, N.M. at 345,328 P. 2nd at 599 the appointment as guardian ad litem of a minor child is in the postion for the highest trust and no attorney should ever blindly enter in an appearance as guardian ad litem and allow a matter to proceed without a full and complete investigation into the facts and law so that his clinets will be fairly and competently represented and their rights fully and adequately protected and preserved….
Bonds proposed that a guardian ad litem holds a position of the highest trust and suggest that he or she is a fiduciary. Judge Donnelly compares the position of Guardian ad litem to that of a general guardian or conservator and is subject to liability to their wards for the harm resulting from ordinary negligence in the discharge of their duties. They are actually charged with a higher standard of care than are other people involved.
In Downs v Sawtelle, 574,F 2d 1 ( 1st Cir.1978) a federal judge in the Court of Appeals ruled that immunity was inappropriate for guardians because they are considered private parties and they are not confronted with the pressures of office, the decision making of the threat of liability facing governors or high level public officials.
According to J.W.F. v Schoolcraft, 763 P.2nd 1217 (Utah, 1987) A guardian ad litems job is to put themselves in the shoes of the child and look at the factors as the child would if he or she were old enough and their judgment was mature enough to make a decision.
Maine Couple Seeks Answers from DHHS After Losing Custody of Son
From MPN 08/08/2011 Reported By: Jay Field
Two Bangor lawyers are calling for more openness in the child protective proceedings run by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. The push for more transparency stems from a case in which a client of theirs---a woman struggling with severe mental illness---lost custody of her son.
In 2002, Eleanor Handler's life took a dark turn. She became severely depressed and entered a clinic in Boston to get treatment. Two years later, her illness flared again and she went back into the hospital. After one more hospitalization, in 2005, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services moved to take away her son on grounds that Handler was unwell and incompetent.
She got notice of what's called a jeporady hearing, where the state gathers information about whether a child is at risk in their parents custody. Handler, who was still in throes of mental illness, was told by state officials that she could waive her right to the hearing.
"By agreeing to a jeopardy order, you're agreeing that your child is in jeopardy if the child is with you or your husband," says Joseph Baldacci, one of Handler's lawyers. "She consented to it, despite the fact that it's our opinion that she lacked the mental capacity to provide a knowing, intelligent and voluntary waiver."
Waiving the right to this kind of hearing has serious consequences. The information that's gathered can be used against you down the line when a final decision is made. Handler eventually lost custody of her son David.
Then, the family's ordeal got even worse, prompting the Handlers to post a video on the internet.
"David, I'm your mom Ellie. David, I'm your dad Russ. David is, David is, David is, David is the very best. Yes, yes, yes. We love you, we miss you, we're looking for you every day," Eleanor and Russ Handler say in the video, sitting on a piano bench holding photos of their now 11-year-old son. finddavidstuarthandler.com
State and federal rules require that kids first be placed with relatives, if reunification with a parent isn't possible. David Handler's grandmother and some first cousins all tried, unsuccessfully, to get custody of the boy. Instead, David Handler was placed in foster care.
"We sought an ombudsmen's report that the Handler's themselves had requested in 2009, about whether the Department had violated federal and state policies concerning placing their child with kin," Baldacci says.
Baldacci says Eleanor Handler is doing better now. She and her husband want to find their son. But recently, the Handler's got some disturbing news: The U.S. Social Security Administration was trying to locate David Handler to pay out some money the boy was owed by the federal government. But the state of Maine told federal officials it had no record of the boy being in the foster care system.
"There are studies, empirical studies, that show, that the mental and emotional well being of a child is improved, when he is preserved some family connections, has some ties to the family that raised him," Baldacci says.
The state has refused to provide a copy of the ombudsmen's report to Baldacci. But the Handler's lawyer has submitted a Freedom of Access request to try to get a copy of the records.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services would not agree to an interview about the Handler case, citing client confidentiality rules.
Source: http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3478/ItemId/17532/Default.aspx
Two Bangor lawyers are calling for more openness in the child protective proceedings run by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. The push for more transparency stems from a case in which a client of theirs---a woman struggling with severe mental illness---lost custody of her son.
In 2002, Eleanor Handler's life took a dark turn. She became severely depressed and entered a clinic in Boston to get treatment. Two years later, her illness flared again and she went back into the hospital. After one more hospitalization, in 2005, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services moved to take away her son on grounds that Handler was unwell and incompetent.
She got notice of what's called a jeporady hearing, where the state gathers information about whether a child is at risk in their parents custody. Handler, who was still in throes of mental illness, was told by state officials that she could waive her right to the hearing.
"By agreeing to a jeopardy order, you're agreeing that your child is in jeopardy if the child is with you or your husband," says Joseph Baldacci, one of Handler's lawyers. "She consented to it, despite the fact that it's our opinion that she lacked the mental capacity to provide a knowing, intelligent and voluntary waiver."
Waiving the right to this kind of hearing has serious consequences. The information that's gathered can be used against you down the line when a final decision is made. Handler eventually lost custody of her son David.
Then, the family's ordeal got even worse, prompting the Handlers to post a video on the internet.
"David, I'm your mom Ellie. David, I'm your dad Russ. David is, David is, David is, David is the very best. Yes, yes, yes. We love you, we miss you, we're looking for you every day," Eleanor and Russ Handler say in the video, sitting on a piano bench holding photos of their now 11-year-old son. finddavidstuarthandler.com
State and federal rules require that kids first be placed with relatives, if reunification with a parent isn't possible. David Handler's grandmother and some first cousins all tried, unsuccessfully, to get custody of the boy. Instead, David Handler was placed in foster care.
"We sought an ombudsmen's report that the Handler's themselves had requested in 2009, about whether the Department had violated federal and state policies concerning placing their child with kin," Baldacci says.
Baldacci says Eleanor Handler is doing better now. She and her husband want to find their son. But recently, the Handler's got some disturbing news: The U.S. Social Security Administration was trying to locate David Handler to pay out some money the boy was owed by the federal government. But the state of Maine told federal officials it had no record of the boy being in the foster care system.
"There are studies, empirical studies, that show, that the mental and emotional well being of a child is improved, when he is preserved some family connections, has some ties to the family that raised him," Baldacci says.
The state has refused to provide a copy of the ombudsmen's report to Baldacci. But the Handler's lawyer has submitted a Freedom of Access request to try to get a copy of the records.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services would not agree to an interview about the Handler case, citing client confidentiality rules.
Source: http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3478/ItemId/17532/Default.aspx
Beware the Child Protectors by William Norman Grigg
When Salt Lake City police and caseworkers from the state Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) surrounded the home of Janet Adolf on June 4th, they were not responding to an accusation of child abuse or neglect. The armed raid had been staged to seize Mrs. Adolf’s eight-year-old daughter, who wasn’t at home — although her three terrified siblings were. According to Mrs. Adolf’s attorney Michael Humiston, the order had been issued because he had advised caseworkers of his intention to monitor their visits to Mrs. Adolf’s home in order "to protect Janet’s rights."
As the case is described by Humiston, Mrs. Adolf’s problems began when her eight-year-old daughter was "intimidated" into making allegations of sexual abuse. Although the family’s original caseworker, Kirk Soderquist, "tried to tell the court that there was no basis to the allegations," the youngster was removed from her home and temporarily placed in foster care; Soderquist was removed from the case and replaced with another caseworker.
"What Rights?"
After a month in a foster home, the child was returned to Mrs. Adolf and a second caseworker was assigned to make regular home visits. Humiston left a message with DCFS announcing his intention to "coordinate" the visits, so that he could be present to protect "the family’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights." According to Humiston, when this was explained to Judge Sharon McCully of Utah’s Third District Juvenile Court — who issued the order that led to the June 4th raid — she exclaimed, "What rights?"
Humiston, an attorney from Heber City, Utah, contends that the State of Utah has conducted "a systematic reign of terror." "By law, parents can be anonymously accused, and never get to face their accusers," observes Humiston. "There’s no right to a jury, no right to remain silent, and no that the parents are unfit."
In early March, Humiston filed a $500 million class-action suit against Utah Attorney General Janet Graham and several other state officials on behalf of five families whose children had been seized by the DCFS.
According to Humiston, the amount of damages sought in the lawsuit is equivalent to the amount of child welfare subsidies received by the state of Utah since 1994.
The situation described by Humiston is by no means unique to Utah. Across the United States, thousands of families have been ripped apart by citizen, teacher, or acquaintance — they enjoy none of the rights and immunities associated with due process. Acting in the "best interests of the child," social workers can terminate parental rights on a whim, and order police agencies to enforce those whimsical decisions at gunpoint. create a compulsory "home visitation" system, through which agents of the state will be able to subject parents to regular scrutiny — and determine for nearly a quarter of a century to create a national home visitation network. Should they succeed, armed raids similar to the one mounted against the home of Janet Adolf may become quite common.
"Village" Takeover
The "early childhood intervention program" — the Pre-natal and Early Infancy Project (PEIP). Christopher Caldwell of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, who covered the First Lady’s Senate campaign swing, explained that PEIP is a child abuse program that "involves sending social workers on regularly scheduled pre-emptive visits into the homes of children whose parents are deemed to put them ‘at risk’ of wrong parenting."
In her ghostwritten manifesto It Takes a Village, Mrs. Clinton gushes, "I cannot say enough in support of home visits" by government social workers. After all, she declares, "Keeping children healthy in body and mind is the family’s and the village’s first obligation," and in those "terrible times when authority we vest in government...." allowed abuse to occur," Mrs. Clinton contends that "social workers and courts should make decisions about terminating parental rights of abusive parents more quickly, rather than removing and returning abused children time and again." Government-authorized "home visitors" of the type extolled by the First Lady are authorized to pass judgment on the "adequacy" of parents, and to summon child protection workers should it be decided that the "village" must now "act in place" of inadequate parents.
Like most advocates of home visitation programs, Mrs. Clinton invokes the tragedy of child abuse to justify state intervention within the home. However, as the Physicians Resource Council (PRC), an affiliate of the Alabama Family Alliance, documents in a new study entitled The Parent Trainers, "most advocates of home visitation … clearly state that their goal is to institutionalize home visitation services for all new parents."
Deborah Daro, a former research director for Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA), candidly explained that the objective "is to bring home visitation services to all new parents." The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which was empanelled by George Bush in 1991, reached the same conclusion, calling for "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary neo-natal home visitation system" (which by strict definition could not be at once "universal" and "voluntary").
Home visitors — who are also called Family Support Workers (FSW) — serve three missions, according to the PCAA. First, "being a teacher is central" to the FSW’s mission. Second, "the home visitor is also a friend, adviser, and advocate for parents," and is responsible for helping forge links between the family and local "community service" gencies. "Finally," states the PCAA, "the home visitor is a monitor" who is expected to consultation sessions with CPS to review ‘high risk’ cases" and to take "appropriate actions … when abuse or neglect or imminent harm are suspected." One FSW explains that "because so many of our families are at risk of child abuse and neglect, our watchful eye can see the potential for danger before it becomes a real problem and do something about it."
In other words, home visitors/FSWs are the designated "watchful eyes" of the state within the home, empowered to "teach" parents, shepherd them into the suffocating embrace of the welfare state, and arrange for the seizure of children from parents deemed unsuitable. Furthermore, since enrollment in most home visitation programs begins with the birth of the child (and in some, enrollment begins before birth), the clear purpose is to make the state, by way of the home visitor, the custodian of first resort for the children involved. "We must remove the children from the crude influence of families," Soviet Communist Party educators were instructed at a conference in 1918.
"We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them." Dr. C. Henry Kempe, the most influential American advocate of home visitation programs, subscribed wholeheartedly to that concept.
Dr. Kempe was co-author of the ground-breaking 1968 book The Battered Child, which inaugurated the contemporary "war on child abuse."
Kempe’s work was cited as authoritative by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and by the American Academy of Pediatrics when it recommended in 1998 that pediatricians should "advocate at the local, state, and national levels for the funding … of quality home-visitation programs." Not surprisingly, Kempe also earned favorable mention in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. What makes Kempe’s influence troubling is the fact that he was an unabashed proponent of the totalitarian view that children are "state property," and that home visitation should be "a compulsory, universal service" imposed on American families. In a June 9, 1975 lecture to the Ambulatory Pediatric Association in Toronto, Dr. Hillary Clinton in her law journal writings and in It Takes a Village.
The the common-law maxim, "A man’s home is his castle," Kempe insisted that "all too often the child is a prisoner in its dungeon. It is a dungeon of constant anger, dislike, aggression, or even hatred."
While most people would acknowledge that such dismal, tragic circumstances do characterize the plight of a relatively small number of children in our country, Kempe insisted that the conditions he described were normative rather than exceptional, and thus justified a "limited intrusion into family privacy by society" in the form of "health visitors." Such visitors would be regarded as "fully capable of determining which children are at risk, whether they are thriving adequately or not doing well," and help to "form a bridge between these families and the health care system."
Regular the teacher, the school nurse, or the school nurse practitioner.
Kempe emphasized that the regime he described would not be limited to troubled families; rather, participation in the home "health visitor" program would be compulsory for all, "similar to the concept of compulsory, universal schooling": "It seems incomprehensible that we have compulsory education, with truancy laws to enforce attendance and, I might add, imprisonment of parents who deny their child an education, and yet we do not establish similar safeguards for the child’s very survival between birth and age 6."
Lethal Guardians acting as officers of the state, which is, after all, the most powerful instrument of organized coercion and lethal violence. Once again, Kempe’s priorities are in harmony with instructions given in 1918 to Soviet educators, who were told: "From the first days of their lives [Soviet children] will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
Kempe also emphasized that a stealthy, incremental approach would be necessary in order to construct a nationwide home visitation system. The program could begin in "any state, or any of our 3,362 counties," he told his audience in Toronto. Furthermore, he admonished advocates to be flexible enough to adjust their proposals to meet local conditions. "If it should turn out that local or state health departments are not very interested or are unwilling to undertake the health visitor program, there may be other approaches for its implementation," he observed. Pointing out that the state of Michigan had "placed the charge on the [state] Department of Education to assure that everyone is ‘educable,’" Kempe explained that this mandate "gives the Department the right to provide screening procedures and comprehensive health care to make every child school-ready."
The Clinton Administration’s Goals 2000 — which was an outgrowth of a national education agenda created by the Bush Administration in 1989 — provides millions of dollars in federal subsidies for state early-intervention programs, all of which are justified by the supposed need to ensure that children arrive at the doorstep of government schools "ready to learn."
State Property
According to Kempe, "those of us who are qualified to assess and correct the problems that produce child abuse and ‘failure to thrive’ should have explicitly described the child as the property of the state.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton provoked widespread criticism for her suggestion that children should have the right to "divorce" their parents — but, once again, she was merely building upon Dr. Kempe’s work. "When marriages fail, we have an institution called divorce, but between parent and child, divorce is not yet socially sanctioned," Kempe commented during his 1975 lecture. For parents deemed these families," Kempe declared. "When that fails, legal termination of parental rights should be attempted."
From Kempe’s perspective, parents exercise authority over their children only by the grace of the state, and the state has the right to revoke parental authority at any time: "Where the state is supreme, the particular problem is easily managed; in a dictatorship each child belongs to the whether one of our cherished democratic freedoms is the right to maim our own children."
Kempe offered this paean to totalitarianism, the world had not yet beheld the horrifying spectacle of the state-run orphanages in Communist Romania, in which thousands of children lived and died in unimaginable filth and squalor. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Transylvanian despot who ruled that the individual Romanian child "is the socialist property of the whole society."
Communist China’s child care policies are also in harmony with Kempe’s vision of the child as "state property." A Chinese population control womb, murdered through infanticide, or confined in state-run orphanages.
Steven W. Mosher, one of the world’s leading experts on Red China’s "one-child" policy, describes that nation’s government-run orphanages as "killing fields." Human Rights Watch-Asia reported in 1989 that Chinese orphanages have a mortality rate of at least 72 percent, with medical neglect and malnutrition the leading causes of death. Most of the children consigned to this hell are girls; an account recently smuggled out of China described a case in which a starving girl child, desperately seeking surcease from starvation, attempted to eat the flesh from her own arm. child care regime.
Foot in the Door
Dr. Kempe was the founding director of the Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Colorado. Kempe’s successor, Dr. Richard Krugman, served as chairman of President Bush’s U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which recommended "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary" home visitation system.
In 1985, the state of Hawaii enacted the "Healthy Start" program, a home visitation program that identifies "at risk" families through screening at birth. Healthy Start literature acknowledges that the program "evolved from the work of the Kempe program in Denver."
maltreatment … or maternal life skills, mental health, social support, or substance abuse."
Healthy Start officials, according to the PRC report The Parent Trainers, are now "screening over 52 percent of all new births in the state and provid[ing] services to roughly 20 percent of all newborns and their families."
In 1992, Hawaii’s Kempe-inspired Healthy Start program was used as the template for the Healthy Families America (HFA) initiative, which was created by Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA) in conjunction with the Freddie Mac Corporation and Ronald McDonald Charities. PCAA, it will be task force" promoting home visitation services under various program names. "In California," notes the PRC, "programs are called ‘Welcome Home Baby,’ Georgia’s program is known as ‘First Steps,’ Colorado’s ‘Bright Beginnings,’ Illinois’ ‘Good Beginnings,’ Massachusetts’ ‘Good Start,’ and Arkansas’ ‘New Beginnings’...."
To those state-level examples, a recent report published by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation (a major corporate supporter of home visitation programs) adds Missouri’s "Parents as Teachers" program; the "Nurse Home Visitation Program" — based on Elmira, New York’s PEIP program — which has been put in place in Memphis, Tennessee and Denver, Colorado, "and [is] now being replicated nationally"; Arkansas’ Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), "which seeks to prepare 3-year to 5-year-olds for kindergarten and first grade"; and the Comprehensive Child Development Program, "a five-year federal demonstration program that worked with poor families in 24 sites to promote malignant design of using home visitation programs as an incremental means of nationalizing children as "state property."
The PCAA reports that "Healthy Family" sites, under various names, are operating in 42 states and the District of Columbia. A recent survey by the organization found that one in five parents with children under the age of one received some type of home visitation service in 1997.
Furthermore, the organization’s effort to make home visitation universal received a tremendous boost in the federal budget for fiscal year 1999: The PCAA received $33 million through the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, and an additional $14 million for "research and data collection." The organization’s 42 state chapters also have access to Children’s Trust Funds, which are financed through surcharges on marriage licenses and birth certificates, fees for vanity license plates, and check-offs on individual state income tax returns.
In addition, the PCAA "was instrumental in the reauthorization of the Family Preservation and Support Services Program (renamed the Safe and Stable Families Program)," points out The Parent Trainers. Federal funding for that program, which totaled $275 million in fiscal year 1999, is projected to increase to $305 million by 2001 — and a large portion of that amount will be devoted to cultivating and expanding government home visitation efforts.
Testing for Child Abuse
In order to determine which newborn children are "at-risk" and thus qualify for home visitations, observes The Parent Trainers, state-based "Healthy Family" groups must "gain access to medical records of women who are pregnant or have just given birth. To complete this phase, HFA programs employ ‘Family Assessment Workers’ (FAWs) who will screen and assess mothers to determine their risk status." In some cases, an FAW "is designated as a temporary, volunteer employee of the hospital (when she is on hospital grounds) to allow her access to medical records. In other cases, a member of the hospital staff may agree to do the initial record screen and then make referrals to the FAW. Or, the FAW may not have access to medical records, but may be allowed to enter hospital rooms and administer ‘verbal screens’ by asking postpartum mothers directly to answer the questions on the 15-point initial screen."
The questions in the initial screening deal with the mother’s marital status and history, education, socio-economic status, family background, and Family Stress Checklist" (FSC) — ten open-ended, invasive questions presented to both parents. The FSC is supposedly designed to determine a parent’s propensity toward child abuse. On each question the parent receives a score from 0 (no risk) to 10 (highest risk). According to Hawaii’s high risk category, eligible for Healthy Start home visitor services." However, as The Parent Trainers points out, "A score of 25 … is fairly standard risk and in need of home visitation services."
Among typical FSC questions can be found inquiries regarding "harsh punishment"; PCAA literature emphasizes that spanking is considered a form of abuse. Having been "suspected of abuse" is another risk factor for a parent, as is being "in the midst of multiple crises or stresses," having "unrealistic expectations of the child’s behavior," or perceiving a child’s behavior as "difficult or provocative." Clearly the FSC is designed to define most — if not all — parents as placing their children "at risk." This is to be expected, given that the objective of "Healthy Start" and its offspring is a universal system — based on voluntary enrollment if possible, but employing coercion if necessary.
The FAWs charged with conducting "screenings" and arranging for home visitations are generally volunteers who may have had only a few days of training. No specialized academic background is required to become a FAW; a high school diploma or its equivalent is sufficient. (One PCAA survey found that one-quarter of all FAWs had no college training.) FAWs are encouraged to lure parents into visitation programs by offering bottles, breast pumps, or other helpful gifts to parents as a pretext for a post-hospital visit. "Comments made at a recent HFA national conference indicate ‘creative outreach’ may also include sending flowers to the reluctant mother on Mother’s Day, or even sending flowers to the mother of the mother, if it appears she is the source of resistance," observes The Parent Trainers. "It may also include taking the reluctant mother out to the beauty parlor if this may gain her confidence and make her feel obligated to participate in the program."
To illustrate the success of such tactics, an Arizona program reported that "90 percent of mothers offered the program accept HFA services." Furthermore, PCAA urges FAWs to make "persistent outreach efforts" for several months, if necessary, until reluctant families "have explicitly of the service." Should Kempe’s vision of compulsory home visitation to protect children be consummated, it stands to reason that rebellious parents would be the first to have their children taken from them — as the case of Janet Adolf’s family in Salt Lake City would seem to illustrate.
Levels of Involvement
As is almost always the case with any grand, malevolent scheme, the Kempe-inspired home visitation campaign makes malicious use of the worthy motives of otherwise decent people. Diana Lightfoot, director of the Physician’s Research Council and co-author of The Parent Trainers, explained to The New American: "There are three levels at which the home visitation scheme is working. At the first, most immediate level, we have the social workers or FAWs themselves, who usually have no agenda beyond doing what they consider to be the right thing — fighting child abuse, helping children get a good start, helping parents who may be overwhelmed. And of course, these are all very commendable motives."
At the second, intermediate level, continued Lightfoot, "we have the state departments of social services and other government officials who know means they employ. For a lot of state officials, the chief motivation is money; there is a lot of taxpayer money being thrown at the states by the federal government for these programs. At the top level we have the ideologues — the Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, and Donna Shalala types — who family."
Dr. Sam Watson, Lightfoot’s co-author, remarked to The New American that "Kempe, despite his reputation as a great humanitarian, praised country are the product of that same mindset as well. In some states, money from the state lottery is underwriting home visitation programs; in others it is money from the tobacco settlement. These sources of revenue have been a real windfall for advocates of home visitation."
"The seed of Kempe’s vision has been planted, it has been watered with taxpayer money," Lightfoot stated. "Whether it will grow to fruition depends upon the American public. It is vitally important that we educate families and parents about the dangers of home visitation programs, and the totalitarian nature of the vision behind those programs."
© Copyright 1999 American Opinion Publishing Incorporated
Source: http://jimcooper.biz/ptfw/resources/BewareTheChildProtectors.pdf
As the case is described by Humiston, Mrs. Adolf’s problems began when her eight-year-old daughter was "intimidated" into making allegations of sexual abuse. Although the family’s original caseworker, Kirk Soderquist, "tried to tell the court that there was no basis to the allegations," the youngster was removed from her home and temporarily placed in foster care; Soderquist was removed from the case and replaced with another caseworker.
"What Rights?"
After a month in a foster home, the child was returned to Mrs. Adolf and a second caseworker was assigned to make regular home visits. Humiston left a message with DCFS announcing his intention to "coordinate" the visits, so that he could be present to protect "the family’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights." According to Humiston, when this was explained to Judge Sharon McCully of Utah’s Third District Juvenile Court — who issued the order that led to the June 4th raid — she exclaimed, "What rights?"
Humiston, an attorney from Heber City, Utah, contends that the State of Utah has conducted "a systematic reign of terror." "By law, parents can be anonymously accused, and never get to face their accusers," observes Humiston. "There’s no right to a jury, no right to remain silent, and no that the parents are unfit."
In early March, Humiston filed a $500 million class-action suit against Utah Attorney General Janet Graham and several other state officials on behalf of five families whose children had been seized by the DCFS.
According to Humiston, the amount of damages sought in the lawsuit is equivalent to the amount of child welfare subsidies received by the state of Utah since 1994.
The situation described by Humiston is by no means unique to Utah. Across the United States, thousands of families have been ripped apart by citizen, teacher, or acquaintance — they enjoy none of the rights and immunities associated with due process. Acting in the "best interests of the child," social workers can terminate parental rights on a whim, and order police agencies to enforce those whimsical decisions at gunpoint. create a compulsory "home visitation" system, through which agents of the state will be able to subject parents to regular scrutiny — and determine for nearly a quarter of a century to create a national home visitation network. Should they succeed, armed raids similar to the one mounted against the home of Janet Adolf may become quite common.
"Village" Takeover
The "early childhood intervention program" — the Pre-natal and Early Infancy Project (PEIP). Christopher Caldwell of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, who covered the First Lady’s Senate campaign swing, explained that PEIP is a child abuse program that "involves sending social workers on regularly scheduled pre-emptive visits into the homes of children whose parents are deemed to put them ‘at risk’ of wrong parenting."
In her ghostwritten manifesto It Takes a Village, Mrs. Clinton gushes, "I cannot say enough in support of home visits" by government social workers. After all, she declares, "Keeping children healthy in body and mind is the family’s and the village’s first obligation," and in those "terrible times when authority we vest in government...." allowed abuse to occur," Mrs. Clinton contends that "social workers and courts should make decisions about terminating parental rights of abusive parents more quickly, rather than removing and returning abused children time and again." Government-authorized "home visitors" of the type extolled by the First Lady are authorized to pass judgment on the "adequacy" of parents, and to summon child protection workers should it be decided that the "village" must now "act in place" of inadequate parents.
Like most advocates of home visitation programs, Mrs. Clinton invokes the tragedy of child abuse to justify state intervention within the home. However, as the Physicians Resource Council (PRC), an affiliate of the Alabama Family Alliance, documents in a new study entitled The Parent Trainers, "most advocates of home visitation … clearly state that their goal is to institutionalize home visitation services for all new parents."
Deborah Daro, a former research director for Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA), candidly explained that the objective "is to bring home visitation services to all new parents." The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which was empanelled by George Bush in 1991, reached the same conclusion, calling for "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary neo-natal home visitation system" (which by strict definition could not be at once "universal" and "voluntary").
Home visitors — who are also called Family Support Workers (FSW) — serve three missions, according to the PCAA. First, "being a teacher is central" to the FSW’s mission. Second, "the home visitor is also a friend, adviser, and advocate for parents," and is responsible for helping forge links between the family and local "community service" gencies. "Finally," states the PCAA, "the home visitor is a monitor" who is expected to consultation sessions with CPS to review ‘high risk’ cases" and to take "appropriate actions … when abuse or neglect or imminent harm are suspected." One FSW explains that "because so many of our families are at risk of child abuse and neglect, our watchful eye can see the potential for danger before it becomes a real problem and do something about it."
In other words, home visitors/FSWs are the designated "watchful eyes" of the state within the home, empowered to "teach" parents, shepherd them into the suffocating embrace of the welfare state, and arrange for the seizure of children from parents deemed unsuitable. Furthermore, since enrollment in most home visitation programs begins with the birth of the child (and in some, enrollment begins before birth), the clear purpose is to make the state, by way of the home visitor, the custodian of first resort for the children involved. "We must remove the children from the crude influence of families," Soviet Communist Party educators were instructed at a conference in 1918.
"We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them." Dr. C. Henry Kempe, the most influential American advocate of home visitation programs, subscribed wholeheartedly to that concept.
Dr. Kempe was co-author of the ground-breaking 1968 book The Battered Child, which inaugurated the contemporary "war on child abuse."
Kempe’s work was cited as authoritative by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and by the American Academy of Pediatrics when it recommended in 1998 that pediatricians should "advocate at the local, state, and national levels for the funding … of quality home-visitation programs." Not surprisingly, Kempe also earned favorable mention in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. What makes Kempe’s influence troubling is the fact that he was an unabashed proponent of the totalitarian view that children are "state property," and that home visitation should be "a compulsory, universal service" imposed on American families. In a June 9, 1975 lecture to the Ambulatory Pediatric Association in Toronto, Dr. Hillary Clinton in her law journal writings and in It Takes a Village.
The the common-law maxim, "A man’s home is his castle," Kempe insisted that "all too often the child is a prisoner in its dungeon. It is a dungeon of constant anger, dislike, aggression, or even hatred."
While most people would acknowledge that such dismal, tragic circumstances do characterize the plight of a relatively small number of children in our country, Kempe insisted that the conditions he described were normative rather than exceptional, and thus justified a "limited intrusion into family privacy by society" in the form of "health visitors." Such visitors would be regarded as "fully capable of determining which children are at risk, whether they are thriving adequately or not doing well," and help to "form a bridge between these families and the health care system."
Regular the teacher, the school nurse, or the school nurse practitioner.
Kempe emphasized that the regime he described would not be limited to troubled families; rather, participation in the home "health visitor" program would be compulsory for all, "similar to the concept of compulsory, universal schooling": "It seems incomprehensible that we have compulsory education, with truancy laws to enforce attendance and, I might add, imprisonment of parents who deny their child an education, and yet we do not establish similar safeguards for the child’s very survival between birth and age 6."
Lethal Guardians acting as officers of the state, which is, after all, the most powerful instrument of organized coercion and lethal violence. Once again, Kempe’s priorities are in harmony with instructions given in 1918 to Soviet educators, who were told: "From the first days of their lives [Soviet children] will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
Kempe also emphasized that a stealthy, incremental approach would be necessary in order to construct a nationwide home visitation system. The program could begin in "any state, or any of our 3,362 counties," he told his audience in Toronto. Furthermore, he admonished advocates to be flexible enough to adjust their proposals to meet local conditions. "If it should turn out that local or state health departments are not very interested or are unwilling to undertake the health visitor program, there may be other approaches for its implementation," he observed. Pointing out that the state of Michigan had "placed the charge on the [state] Department of Education to assure that everyone is ‘educable,’" Kempe explained that this mandate "gives the Department the right to provide screening procedures and comprehensive health care to make every child school-ready."
The Clinton Administration’s Goals 2000 — which was an outgrowth of a national education agenda created by the Bush Administration in 1989 — provides millions of dollars in federal subsidies for state early-intervention programs, all of which are justified by the supposed need to ensure that children arrive at the doorstep of government schools "ready to learn."
State Property
According to Kempe, "those of us who are qualified to assess and correct the problems that produce child abuse and ‘failure to thrive’ should have explicitly described the child as the property of the state.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton provoked widespread criticism for her suggestion that children should have the right to "divorce" their parents — but, once again, she was merely building upon Dr. Kempe’s work. "When marriages fail, we have an institution called divorce, but between parent and child, divorce is not yet socially sanctioned," Kempe commented during his 1975 lecture. For parents deemed these families," Kempe declared. "When that fails, legal termination of parental rights should be attempted."
From Kempe’s perspective, parents exercise authority over their children only by the grace of the state, and the state has the right to revoke parental authority at any time: "Where the state is supreme, the particular problem is easily managed; in a dictatorship each child belongs to the whether one of our cherished democratic freedoms is the right to maim our own children."
Kempe offered this paean to totalitarianism, the world had not yet beheld the horrifying spectacle of the state-run orphanages in Communist Romania, in which thousands of children lived and died in unimaginable filth and squalor. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Transylvanian despot who ruled that the individual Romanian child "is the socialist property of the whole society."
Communist China’s child care policies are also in harmony with Kempe’s vision of the child as "state property." A Chinese population control womb, murdered through infanticide, or confined in state-run orphanages.
Steven W. Mosher, one of the world’s leading experts on Red China’s "one-child" policy, describes that nation’s government-run orphanages as "killing fields." Human Rights Watch-Asia reported in 1989 that Chinese orphanages have a mortality rate of at least 72 percent, with medical neglect and malnutrition the leading causes of death. Most of the children consigned to this hell are girls; an account recently smuggled out of China described a case in which a starving girl child, desperately seeking surcease from starvation, attempted to eat the flesh from her own arm. child care regime.
Foot in the Door
Dr. Kempe was the founding director of the Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Colorado. Kempe’s successor, Dr. Richard Krugman, served as chairman of President Bush’s U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which recommended "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary" home visitation system.
In 1985, the state of Hawaii enacted the "Healthy Start" program, a home visitation program that identifies "at risk" families through screening at birth. Healthy Start literature acknowledges that the program "evolved from the work of the Kempe program in Denver."
maltreatment … or maternal life skills, mental health, social support, or substance abuse."
Healthy Start officials, according to the PRC report The Parent Trainers, are now "screening over 52 percent of all new births in the state and provid[ing] services to roughly 20 percent of all newborns and their families."
In 1992, Hawaii’s Kempe-inspired Healthy Start program was used as the template for the Healthy Families America (HFA) initiative, which was created by Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA) in conjunction with the Freddie Mac Corporation and Ronald McDonald Charities. PCAA, it will be task force" promoting home visitation services under various program names. "In California," notes the PRC, "programs are called ‘Welcome Home Baby,’ Georgia’s program is known as ‘First Steps,’ Colorado’s ‘Bright Beginnings,’ Illinois’ ‘Good Beginnings,’ Massachusetts’ ‘Good Start,’ and Arkansas’ ‘New Beginnings’...."
To those state-level examples, a recent report published by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation (a major corporate supporter of home visitation programs) adds Missouri’s "Parents as Teachers" program; the "Nurse Home Visitation Program" — based on Elmira, New York’s PEIP program — which has been put in place in Memphis, Tennessee and Denver, Colorado, "and [is] now being replicated nationally"; Arkansas’ Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), "which seeks to prepare 3-year to 5-year-olds for kindergarten and first grade"; and the Comprehensive Child Development Program, "a five-year federal demonstration program that worked with poor families in 24 sites to promote malignant design of using home visitation programs as an incremental means of nationalizing children as "state property."
The PCAA reports that "Healthy Family" sites, under various names, are operating in 42 states and the District of Columbia. A recent survey by the organization found that one in five parents with children under the age of one received some type of home visitation service in 1997.
Furthermore, the organization’s effort to make home visitation universal received a tremendous boost in the federal budget for fiscal year 1999: The PCAA received $33 million through the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, and an additional $14 million for "research and data collection." The organization’s 42 state chapters also have access to Children’s Trust Funds, which are financed through surcharges on marriage licenses and birth certificates, fees for vanity license plates, and check-offs on individual state income tax returns.
In addition, the PCAA "was instrumental in the reauthorization of the Family Preservation and Support Services Program (renamed the Safe and Stable Families Program)," points out The Parent Trainers. Federal funding for that program, which totaled $275 million in fiscal year 1999, is projected to increase to $305 million by 2001 — and a large portion of that amount will be devoted to cultivating and expanding government home visitation efforts.
Testing for Child Abuse
In order to determine which newborn children are "at-risk" and thus qualify for home visitations, observes The Parent Trainers, state-based "Healthy Family" groups must "gain access to medical records of women who are pregnant or have just given birth. To complete this phase, HFA programs employ ‘Family Assessment Workers’ (FAWs) who will screen and assess mothers to determine their risk status." In some cases, an FAW "is designated as a temporary, volunteer employee of the hospital (when she is on hospital grounds) to allow her access to medical records. In other cases, a member of the hospital staff may agree to do the initial record screen and then make referrals to the FAW. Or, the FAW may not have access to medical records, but may be allowed to enter hospital rooms and administer ‘verbal screens’ by asking postpartum mothers directly to answer the questions on the 15-point initial screen."
The questions in the initial screening deal with the mother’s marital status and history, education, socio-economic status, family background, and Family Stress Checklist" (FSC) — ten open-ended, invasive questions presented to both parents. The FSC is supposedly designed to determine a parent’s propensity toward child abuse. On each question the parent receives a score from 0 (no risk) to 10 (highest risk). According to Hawaii’s high risk category, eligible for Healthy Start home visitor services." However, as The Parent Trainers points out, "A score of 25 … is fairly standard risk and in need of home visitation services."
Among typical FSC questions can be found inquiries regarding "harsh punishment"; PCAA literature emphasizes that spanking is considered a form of abuse. Having been "suspected of abuse" is another risk factor for a parent, as is being "in the midst of multiple crises or stresses," having "unrealistic expectations of the child’s behavior," or perceiving a child’s behavior as "difficult or provocative." Clearly the FSC is designed to define most — if not all — parents as placing their children "at risk." This is to be expected, given that the objective of "Healthy Start" and its offspring is a universal system — based on voluntary enrollment if possible, but employing coercion if necessary.
The FAWs charged with conducting "screenings" and arranging for home visitations are generally volunteers who may have had only a few days of training. No specialized academic background is required to become a FAW; a high school diploma or its equivalent is sufficient. (One PCAA survey found that one-quarter of all FAWs had no college training.) FAWs are encouraged to lure parents into visitation programs by offering bottles, breast pumps, or other helpful gifts to parents as a pretext for a post-hospital visit. "Comments made at a recent HFA national conference indicate ‘creative outreach’ may also include sending flowers to the reluctant mother on Mother’s Day, or even sending flowers to the mother of the mother, if it appears she is the source of resistance," observes The Parent Trainers. "It may also include taking the reluctant mother out to the beauty parlor if this may gain her confidence and make her feel obligated to participate in the program."
To illustrate the success of such tactics, an Arizona program reported that "90 percent of mothers offered the program accept HFA services." Furthermore, PCAA urges FAWs to make "persistent outreach efforts" for several months, if necessary, until reluctant families "have explicitly of the service." Should Kempe’s vision of compulsory home visitation to protect children be consummated, it stands to reason that rebellious parents would be the first to have their children taken from them — as the case of Janet Adolf’s family in Salt Lake City would seem to illustrate.
Levels of Involvement
As is almost always the case with any grand, malevolent scheme, the Kempe-inspired home visitation campaign makes malicious use of the worthy motives of otherwise decent people. Diana Lightfoot, director of the Physician’s Research Council and co-author of The Parent Trainers, explained to The New American: "There are three levels at which the home visitation scheme is working. At the first, most immediate level, we have the social workers or FAWs themselves, who usually have no agenda beyond doing what they consider to be the right thing — fighting child abuse, helping children get a good start, helping parents who may be overwhelmed. And of course, these are all very commendable motives."
At the second, intermediate level, continued Lightfoot, "we have the state departments of social services and other government officials who know means they employ. For a lot of state officials, the chief motivation is money; there is a lot of taxpayer money being thrown at the states by the federal government for these programs. At the top level we have the ideologues — the Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, and Donna Shalala types — who family."
Dr. Sam Watson, Lightfoot’s co-author, remarked to The New American that "Kempe, despite his reputation as a great humanitarian, praised country are the product of that same mindset as well. In some states, money from the state lottery is underwriting home visitation programs; in others it is money from the tobacco settlement. These sources of revenue have been a real windfall for advocates of home visitation."
"The seed of Kempe’s vision has been planted, it has been watered with taxpayer money," Lightfoot stated. "Whether it will grow to fruition depends upon the American public. It is vitally important that we educate families and parents about the dangers of home visitation programs, and the totalitarian nature of the vision behind those programs."
© Copyright 1999 American Opinion Publishing Incorporated
Source: http://jimcooper.biz/ptfw/resources/BewareTheChildProtectors.pdf
'Grammy' Tried To Save Child Who Died At Eight Weeks Old - Kaiden James Light
Deborah Conklin was a member of Kaiden's extended family and saw him nearly every day of his life. She called herself his "grammy" and is described as a family member in a state file of Kaiden's case.
Despite her concerns, as well as caseworkers' questions about a psychologist's report and a parent's troubled past, Kaiden was returned to the home where authorities say he was deliberately killed.
"Grammy loves you," she used to coo affectionately.
Now she visits a cold grave and promises that someone will be held accountable.
"Someone dropped the ball," she said.
When Kaiden was alive, Deborah would put him to sleep at night, calling him her little prince.
Now she says "night, night" to a Facebook account she set up for the infant. He has 184 followers who view photos of him, leave encouraging notes to Deborah and inquire about updates in the murder case against the woman who gave Kaiden life and then, police say, took it away.
Kaiden's heart stopped Oct. 5.
"They should've listened to me more," Deborah said of Children's Division caseworkers.
Deborah said -- and state documents support -- that she repeatedly asked caseworkers to step in.
Shocking in hindsight, her concerns are documented in caseworkers' reports filed a few weeks before the baby's death.
Social worker Isabella Escudero was investigating a report of abuse to Kaiden when Deborah spoke with her.
"Mrs. Conklin stopped me as I began to walk away and asked, 'Promise me you will not let this baby die.' "
Escudero responded: "(I) told her that it is the job of Children's Division to keep children safe to the best of our ability and to work with the parents to help provide for their children," a report of the encounter said.
Kaiden stayed with Deborah that night, Sept. 22, so caseworkers could continue to investigate the allegations. He remained in Deborah's care for 12 days while his mother, Tatianna Light, underwent a drug test and psychological evaluation.
There was no physical evidence of abuse. The drug test came back negative and the psychologist gave the verbal OK for Kaiden to be returned home.
He left Deborah's house that night, never to return. It was the last time Deborah saw him alive.
"I hear all the time that I have to let go of my anger. I can't, I tried very hard to protect him. I just wasn't loud enough," Deborah writes on Kaiden's Facebook page.
A spokeswoman with the Children's Division said the agency did all it could under the rules it is governed by.
"We must follow the law. The law requires that there must be evidence of abuse or neglect, or the child must be in imminent danger. Other than that, when we have concerns, all we can do is offer voluntary services," said Arleasha Mays, assistant communications director for the Department of Social Services.
She said Children's Division staff never found any evidence that would be enough to get Kaiden taken.
After a few weeks of investigation and despite documented concerns, Kaiden was returned to Tatianna Light the night of Oct. 4.
He would be dead before the next sunset.
There was no physical evidence of abuse. The drug test came back negative and the psychologist gave the verbal OK for Kaiden to be returned home.
He left Deborah's house that night, never to return. It was the last time Deborah saw him alive.
"I hear all the time that I have to let go of my anger. I can't, I tried very hard to protect him. I just wasn't loud enough," Deborah writes on Kaiden's Facebook page.
A spokeswoman with the Children's Division said the agency did all it could under the rules it is governed by.
"We must follow the law. The law requires that there must be evidence of abuse or neglect, or the child must be in imminent danger. Other than that, when we have concerns, all we can do is offer voluntary services," said Arleasha Mays, assistant communications director for the Department of Social Services.
She said Children's Division staff never found any evidence that would be enough to get Kaiden taken.
After a few weeks of investigation and despite documented concerns, Kaiden was returned to Tatianna Light the night of Oct. 4.
He would be dead before the next sunset.
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