FamilyCourtChronicles.com

Patricia Bryant-Kelly:

Response to

Visitation Decision

 

...and Website Manifesto

 

 

By Glenn Campbell

PO Box 30303, Las Vegas, NV 89173

702-812-0400

 

Version 1.02 — October 20, 2005

 

 

 

 

 

On September 16, I made a request for a single one-hour visit with the child I raised for most of her life and her new foster parents. On October 6, this request was denied by her caseworker.  I am writing not simply to protest this decision. I am writing to declare a mission.

My request was the culmination of a 7-year odyssey through the child welfare system that began in 1998 when I took a tiny 1-month-old infant in my hands at Child Haven.  The birth mother already had an extensive history of child abuse, and the path for this child seemed clear:  My wife and I would adopt her, perhaps within a year.

Obviously, that was not the way it worked out.  Due to a combination of factors, including official neglect, the case turned into an incredible foster care ordeal.  For me, it became an epic journey that has not ended and probably never will.

 

MY BACKGROUND

 

To understand the context of my visitation request, you need to know a few things about both my history and the child's.

To start, I would like to provide some general information about my past, which may be useful for understanding my current intentions and style.  My background may not seem relevant at first, but it will have significance later.

Before I came to Las Vegas, I was a self-appointed "anti-secrecy activist" in Central Nevada. In 1993, I moved to Rachel, the closest town to a mysterious Air Force base that the government did not acknowledge. "Area 51," at the time, was little known outside Nevada and the fringe subcultures of UFO and aircraft watchers. I saw the base as a philosophical challenge—regardless of what it may contain—and I took it upon myself to study it, repackage it and make it palatable to the mainstream media.

Although I was curious about UFOs, I had a greater interest in humanity. In my publicity campaign, I emphasized the more earthly issues of government secrecy, environmental abuse, land-use policy and worker rights. Even if the base was secret, there was plenty that we knew around its edges, and I began systematically collecting and publishing this information. Eventually I put together a website similar to the one I am now creating for the Family Court. It took a year of background work before I attracted attention in the general-interest media—a short article in The Wall Street Journal. Once the story was thus legitimized and no longer "fringe," nearly every major media outlet came to Rachel, culminating in a 2-hour broadcast by Larry King "live from Area 51."

Area 51 was my graduate school where I learned public relations, combat journalism, political activism, website development and Nevada law. As the unofficial information officer for the secret base, I dealt with every form of major and minor media. Oprah and Jerry Springer never came to Area 51, but just about everyone else did, and I was their guide and local liaison. In the course of one of these tours, I was arrested for trying to prevent a sheriff’s deputy from seizing an NBC news crew’s videotape. (I pushed down the door locks of the vehicle we were in.) Over the next year, I defended myself in Justice Court and pursued my own appeal in District Court, and in the process I learned the skills of legal reasoning, research and writing.

As my interest in Area 51 waned, I took on a new project that was far more challenging: I became a family man. I married the woman who managed my office in Rachel and became a father to her four kids. In the process, I joined a remarkably dysfunctional extended family that was no stranger to Family Services. It was only after the wedding that I understood the full scope of what I had taken on. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, childhood sexual abuse and mental illness were the norm in this family. The history of this family was marked by one senseless tragedy after another, most of them self-inflicted. No family member, in any branch, had ever graduated from high school, and no marriage had ever lasted. My wife herself was far from stable and was not capable of the kind of reciprocal relationship that I had expected from my own family background. Rather than being repelled however, I regarded these circumstances as another fascinating exploration. 

Eventually, this experience lead to my current website project. Area 51 and Clark County Family Services may not seem like a logical match. I never planned for the aliens to drop me in the Family Court building, but the more I understand where I have landed and why, the more I feel called to a mission.  If there is a God, He must have drawn me to Las Vegas and afflicted upon me the worst of all parental nightmares just so I would achieve my best potential.

PATRICIA'S CASE

My vector from Area 51 to Family Services passed through a child known to the state as Patricia Bryant-Kelly.  The section below is a summary of Patricia's history, as previously described in my earlier report (released to DFS on Apr. 27). It is provided here for the benefit of readers who have not yet read that report.

In January 1998, I moved my family to Las Vegas, in part to escape some of our dysfunctional relatives but finding only more of them. In March 1998, we got a call from my wife’s drug-addicted cousin begging us to take her two young children, a newborn girl and 4-year-old boy, who had been taken into custody by CPS. We agreed, perhaps naively, bringing the number of children in our house to six. This was the beginning of a further stage in my education: Now, I learned about both the child welfare system and the methamphetamine subculture, not to mention the skills of managing and supporting a gargantuan family when one of the parents isn’t wholly functional.

Since my wife was often confined to bed with vague illnesses, I was both the Mom and Dad most of the time. Most meaningful to me was raising a tiny creature, the infant Patricia, who was little more than a worm at first but who slowly opened up to the world. I changed most of the diapers, prepared most of her meals and taught her most of her basic skills. I will never forget the first trick I taught her: I looked into her eyes and shook my head, “No, no, no,” and then she shook her head, “No, no, no.” It was like the magical first contact with an alien race.

We had some great caseworkers in the beginning. Nita Lee and Margie Baird stand out. (Nita was there when I changed my first diaper.) We were told at the time that the cousin was already one of the state’s worst child neglect offenders and that the likelihood of her getting the children back was low. Nonetheless, she managed to complete her case plan, and the kids were returned to her about a year and a half after we took them in. As soon as the case was closed, however, the mother fell immediately into drug use, and the kids were taken back into custody.

The birth mother had three children now, and we could not take them all, so we took only “our” child, Patricia, who we had raised from birth and had the closest bond with. Again, we were told that after so many failures by the birth mother, reunification was unlikely.

Unfortunately, we got a new caseworker, Shari Sanchez. I won’t mince words here: Shari was a non-responsive, disinterested bureaucrat who might have made an adequate employee at the DMV but who didn’t give a damn about the children or families in her care. She was pleasant when we saw her, but we rarely did. Shari almost never returned phone calls, came to our home only 2-3 times a year, sometimes arranged home visits and didn't show up and seemed to have no interest in our concerns or problems as foster parents. Under Shari’s apathetic management the children were reunited with their birth mother for a second time, following what I regarded as a very questionable and long-delayed completion of another case plan. Once again, the case was closed, and the mother immediately fell back into drug use.

When the children came back into custody for the third time, a new law was in place to allow the state to proceed immediately to termination without having to offer the parent a case plan. We took Patricia back and felt certain that she was permanently “ours”. Unfortunately, the caseworker was again Shari Sanchez, who did almost nothing on the case for months—make that years. Termination proceeded at a glacial pace, and when it was finally completed, preparing the case for adoption took even longer. We were not too upset by the delays at first because Patricia seemed a permanent part of our family now and we didn’t mind receiving the foster care subsidy every month.

Patricia grew into a healthy, happy girl, with no signs of effects from the drugs she was exposed to in the womb.  She was well-behaved, highly intelligent, adventurous and well-regarded by her teachers.  She was very well traveled for a 5-year-old, having been with her family to the beach and mountains on both coasts, canoed on many rivers, slept on a beach on Maui, explored caves in New Hampshire, sledded in Colorado.... but now we are talking about my own sentimental memories. Patricia was the only one of our 5+ children who called me "Daddy," and the only one with whom I had that special unspoken bond that starts with changing diapers and ends... usually never. In her world, however, she was just a normal girl in a normal family with lots of siblings and neighborhood friends and with no more worries or concerns than other 5-year-olds.

In the background, however, I was entering the third essential phase of my post-graduate education: mental illness. My wife’s sanity was deteriorating in a way that is difficult to describe if you have not witnessed it. Although she has never been formally diagnosed or treated, my conclusion is Borderline Personality Disorder.

BPD is a deficit of emotional regulation, perhaps involving chemical imbalances in the most primitive parts of the brain. The victims have little control over their feelings and ride an emotional roller coaster of highs and lows with little stability in-between.  Every frustration, no matter how small, is a cause for anger, tears or recrimination. Any routine problem is regarded as epic or insurmountable. Jealousy and paranoia, once they begin, feed on themselves and know no bounds. I think of BPD as a lack of emotional circuit breakers: Once a strong emotion begins, it can't stop.  Borderlines can function fairly normally under relaxed circumstances but tend to break down quickly under stress and can experience transient psychotic episodes.

My wife was nearly crippled by stresses that most people take in stride.  Even saying the wrong word could set her off, and she would start yelling and couldn't stop. These episodes become more frequent and severe over time.  In October 2003, as the preparations for Patricia's adoption dragged on, my wife entered a psychotic period when she felt that I was having affairs with multiple women, stealing money from her, controlling her computer, bugging our house, trying secretly to kill her, and trying to abduct our daughter Patricia. She barricaded me out of our house, which I was an equal owner of.  She replaced the doorknob with a flat deadbolt, taped paper over all of the windows and stacked furniture up against them to keep me out.  She stayed up all night trying to protect the house, and her vigilance to my potential intrusions became more and more frantic.  She even bought a new computer to protect her from the "spyware" she thought I had planted in the old one.  (Of course, my alleged intrusions invaded the new computer as well.)

This was a very frightening period in which I felt powerless. Although most of my wife’s paranoia was directed at me, I worried that 5-year-old Patricia, sequestered in the house with her, was in danger from my wife’s bad decisions. The police came to our house, called once by my wife and twice by me. They affirmed my right to enter my own home.  I then changed the door lock to one that we both had a key to, but she changed it back and continued to barricade me out. In spite of her intense anger and paranoia, the police could do nothing to hospitalize my wife since she did not meet the strict criteria of “danger to self or others.”

At one point, I took Patricia away from the house, against my wife’s wishes, to the home of what I thought was a sympathetic relative: my wife’s mother. She was also a licensed foster parent and had seemed as concerned as I about my wife’s disintegrating condition and Patricia’s well-being. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law—herself a former victim of childhood sexual abuse—then changed her position and began repeating my wife’s claims that I was a danger to Patricia. My taking the child from our house to my mother-in-law's house became “The Great Abduction” and was cited later as evidence of my sinister intent to steal or harm the child. My wife “abducted” Patricia back to our house and doubled the barricades on the doors and windows.

In spite of my profound distrust of Patricia’s caseworker, Ms. Sanchez, I felt that I had no choice but to report the situation to her. I was an equal partner in the foster license, and I knew that I was responsible to report problems in the home. Shari had not visited us in months, and since it was nearly impossible to reach her by phone, I wrote her a letter describing the very dire circumstances at our house and asking that she temporarily take Patricia away for "respite care" and that she require both my wife and I to attend counseling. I hand-delivered the letter to her at her office.

There was no reaction. When I handed the letter to Shari, via the receptionist, she showed no interest in its contents, and the nonverbal message I received was that I shouldn’t be visiting her at her office. After I left, I expected Shari to at least call me, but she never did.

A few days later, my wife’s psychosis broke, reverting to bedridden depression, and she let me back in the house. I then wrote another letter to Ms. Sanchez retracting my first one. At this point, I feared her reactions much more than I feared my wife’s. After years of dealing with Shari Sanchez, I knew that she didn’t care. I knew that she would never invest any effort in understanding what was wrong in our house or trying to find a solution, such as ordering us into counseling. I knew that she would simply ignore us until we became too irritating for her, and then she would take our daughter away forever.

Eventually, that is exactly what happened. Although there were a few calm periods, my wife’s paranoia remained essentially unchanged over the next two months. Her weight fell by 30%. She was not doing drugs, but she looked like it. I spent some nights at our house and other nights I had to sleep in the car, because even if she let me in she would not allow me to sleep. I pushed and cajoled her to come with me to a family counselor, eventually threatening her with divorce if she did not. She attended one session only, where she complained about me bitterly and hardly let myself or the therapist speak. After that, she felt that the therapist and I were conspiring against her, and she refused to go back. I then continued in “marriage counseling” alone, discussing with the therapist my wife’s illness and how to deal with it.

It took two months after my letter before Shari got around to home visits (which are supposed to happen every month). On her rounds, she talked first to my mother-in-law, who was experiencing a dementia of her own and now believed all the paranoid claims of my wife. She then talked to the foster mother of the third birth sibling, who went to the same church as my mother-in-law and repeated what she heard from her. Then, Shari talked to my wife. After hearing all of these apparently corroborating accounts of my abusive behavior (witnessed only by my wife), Shari Sanchez finally decided to act. She took Patricia away and instructed my wife to move out of the house to get away from me.

This began Patricia’s odyssey of careless and poisonous foster placements arranged by Ms. Sanchez. Even if my wife was deluded, she had cared about Patricia and was trying to protect her. Ms. Sanchez, however, did not care. Although there may have been some trauma while Patricia was sequestered with my wife, it appeared to me that Patricia saw it mostly as a game.  Her major trauma began after leaving our home. She was torn from her only real family and passed back and forth between foster parents who regarded her as a discipline problem.  One foster mother made her throw away the tattered baby blanket that she had held close since birth. On several occasions, she was allowed to see my wife and the siblings she grew up with, but only under very stressful arranged visits that were kept secret from me.  It was akin to visiting an inmate in prison, and it only made everyone more upset. Patricia had a father who had provided most of her care and with whom she had a strong bond, but she wasn't allowed to see me at all. She was told now that I was dangerous to her.

Do you wonder why she was a discipline problem?

When the caseworker took Patricia away, she told my wife to tell me that I could not see the child until I contacted her. The Catch-22 was that there was no way to contact Shari Sanchez. I tried calling her every day, but she never returned any of my messages. I finally hired a lawyer to try to get through to her. By going through the chain of command at DFS, the lawyer eventually managed to talk to Shari on the phone, but Shari would give her no information at all about the case. Shari told the lawyer that she was “not allowed” to call me but that she would answer the phone if I called her within a specific timeframe. I then called as required but never got through.

After 5-1/2 years of devotion to Patricia, I have not seen her since she was taken from our home in January 2004. I was not entitled to the courtesy of a returned phone call, and the lawyer informed me that under Nevada law, foster parents—unlike anyone else who has played a significant role in a child’s life—have no right to petition the Court for visitation.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

You may or may not believe the account I have just given, but supposing that it is true, what are the implications for DFS as a whole? The system is currently in desperate need of foster parents, preferably intelligent, educated ones with the resources and enthusiasm to deal with the many challenges involved. If my case became known to a potential foster parent, what would it tell them?

1) Foster parents are treated as worthless and expendable, not even worthy of a returned phone call. Caseworkers have no interest in their needs or concerns.

2) Caseworkers have no real interest in the well-being of the child; they just want as few problems and complications as possible.

3) The bond between foster parents and their children, no matter how well established, has no value to the system and can be disregarded at a caseworker's whim.

4) Once a child leaves the care of the foster parents, they have no right to see the child ever again.

5) When foster families have problems, their caseworker is nearly impossible to contact and disinterested when they do.

6) Caseworkers have no comprehension of mental illness, child psychology or the emotional needs of their clients.

7) If there is a problem in the household, a caseworker will not attempt to work with you to resolve it; they will simply take the child away.

8) When there is a conflict in the home, a caseworker will not bother to hear both sides of it but will believe the first story she hears.

9) Intelligent, literate and conscientious foster parents intimidate caseworkers, who regard them with suspicion.

10) Caseworkers will only visit the foster home 2-3 times a year.

11) Caseworkers will make appointments and not keep them.

12) Even when there are no barriers to TPR and adoption, the proceedings may drag on for years.

Given these conclusions, is there anyone of any education or means who would want to become a foster parent?

I understand that Shari Sanchez is now deceased, but the psychological scars of her actions live on—in Patricia and in the family she left behind. I don’t buy the argument that Shari’s caseload was so big that she couldn’t give our case the attention it deserved. I have seen Shari in a lot of different venues over the years, and she just didn’t care and didn't give much attention to any case. She talked and moved slowly, and nothing ever upset her. She had no emotional connection with us, and I doubt she had any connection with any of her other clients either.

If you argue that the system was overstretched and Shari so overworked she couldn’t keep up, then you have to consider this: By neglecting Patricia’s case at so many points in its history, she doubled or tripled the time Patricia was in custody, thus doubling or tripling the resources required from the State, which could have been used for other children. If Shari had acted in anything like a timely fashion, then the adoption would have been completed years ago. Any conflict in our household would have been a relatively simple matter for divorce court, not a complicated and expensive one for Family Services.

After observing other caseworkers appearing in court, I cannot say with confidence that there are no other Shari Sanchez’s in the system. What message does this convey to potential foster parents? It might happen to you.

MY REQUEST

After about a year of trying to work within the system, I started to apply some of my Area 51 skills.  I began visiting the Family Court as an observer, wrote several reports and started developing a website. I hired another lawyer to try to improved Patricia's situation, and this eventually lead to a child advocate attorney being appointed to her. (The child advocate also declined to return my calls, having gained all the information he needed by talking to my wife, my mother-in-law and the third foster parent.) I met Patricia’s new caseworker at court, tried to develop a rapport with her and tried to nudge her to pay more attention to Patricia's case.

In May 2005, after I appeared unexpectedly at Patricia's review hearing, Judge Hardcastle ordered a formal psychological evaluation of both myself and my now ex-wife, with an eye to our possible suitability as placements. By the time the evaluation was completed two months later, Patricia had already been placed in a new home. I have not been told the results of the evaluation, but I can guess them.

On Sept. 16, I emailed a visitation request to Patricia's current caseworker Helene Pierce. It said:

Dear Helene:

I hope that Patricia is adjusting well to her new home. I trust that her new parents have received the photos I sent.

I would now like to request a visit with Patricia and one or both of her new parents. The time and place are not important, but I would like about an hour to talk with them (by myself, not with [my ex-wife]). Although I certainly want to see Patricia, talking with her parents is the most important thing right now.

The overriding concern here is the long-term psychological well-being of the child -- not parental rights or even the immediate wishes of the child. A lot of damage has been done over the past two years, and this is the time to start healing.

In the past, [my ex-wife]'s relatives, the previous foster parents, the previous caseworker and even Patricia's lawyer have portrayed me as abusive and emotionally unstable, all without talking to me. By now, you have met me several times and have done a formal psychological evaluation, and I hope you can see that I am responsible, stable and concerned only with Patricia's best interests.

I think any psychologist would agree that it is important to reconnect Patricia with her past, especially since it was an overwhelmingly happy one (until [my ex-wife]'s breakdown). You told me that when you first interviewed the new foster parents you asked them if they were comfortable with Patricia remaining in contact with her past, and they were. The aim of my first meeting with them is to talk about how this should happen.

I continue to see [my ex-wife] almost every day, and she remains all but disabled -- pursuing conspiracies and hardly ever leaving her room. Because she can't comprehend Patricia's needs, reconnecting [my ex-wife] and Patricia is a difficult problem. Her kids, however, are healthy and well-adjusted, and I remain their acting parent in spite of the divorce. Having been raised with Patricia for the first five years of her life, they are her "siblings" much more than her birth siblings ever were, and I think we need to make an effort to keep them in contact with each other. Right now, I am asking only for a single one-hour visit. Hopefully, the foster parents and I can figure things out from there.

Glenn Campbell

Given my 5-1/2-year investment in Patricia, I did not feel that a single one-hour visit was much to ask.

The caseworker did not reply for three weeks, even after I left a voice message. After l spoke to the DFS Director about my request, Helene Pierce replied the following day (10/6):

Sorry for the delay. I was able to speak with Patricia and Mr. Leik last week. Patricia does not wish to see you and Mr. Leik, her attorney is in agreement.

Patricia is doing well in her new home and is looking forward to the adoption. Her issues are being dealt with in therapy and her ego growth has been tremendous.

 When I hear the caseworker say "Patricia doesn't want to see you," I am stunned for a moment. I was Patricia’s primary caregiver for her first 5-1/2 years—a very close and meaningful experience for both of us—and while she was with our family, she would have never expressed anything like this. After the sting wears off, however, the lawyer side of me kicks in. There is a lot to respond to in this short email, most of which has direct bearing on policies of the Department.

Issue #1: Determining What a Child Wants

 The first issue is obvious to any defense lawyer or psychologist: Patricia is 7 years old. How do we know what she wants? Under what circumstances were the questions asked? What were the agenda and ego investment of the person asking the questions? What is the child’s capability of putting her desires into words? Can a 7-year-old even be said to have stable desires?

Anyone who has dealt with 7-year-olds knows how adaptive they are: you can ask them the same question under different circumstances and get totally contradictory answers—even totally different views of reality. This is why such young children make poor witnesses in criminal trials. Almost every question you ask a child this young is a leading question. He will look at his questioner for nonverbal cues and will tend to give the answer that the questioner wants to hear.

In fact, I asked Mr. Leik the same thing immediately after the last court hearing: How can you determine what such a young child wants? He replied that he was very good at talking to kids and can figure it out.

You could write a book and conduct years of research on the preferences of children and when they can be considered stable and expressible. This is a fundamental problem of representing children in court, and Mr. Leik’s facile response suggests that he does not grasp the dilemma and has no significant background in child psychology.

I must also point out that Mr. Leik, like Ms. Sanchez, declined to return any of my phone calls and, early on, committed himself to a certain position about me without ever talking to me. Now that I have started to raise issues about his handling of the case, he has a very substantial ego investment in what Patricia “wants.”

Issue #2: “Desires of the Child” vs. “Best Interests of the Child”

DFS is not Disneyland. It is not in the business of giving children what they want, even if they can express it well. DFS’s only mandate under NRS (once we dispose of the parental preference) is to pursue the “best interests” of the child, which may be entirely different from what he says he wants. This is supported both by written statute and nearly every ruling by Judge Hardcastle. In his words, “We are not going to start doing what feels good because it feels good.” While it is nice to do what a child wants when possible, this is not the ultimate guiding force for caseworker decisions.

To put it more directly, to rely on a young child’s expressed wishes for something this important is an abdication of the caseworker’s responsibility to the child.

There is a very good reason why we do not obey the desires of children: Because they are children. They have not yet formed a stable view of their own self-interest, and they do not have the judgment to protect themselves from the complexities of the world. If their desires were an accurate indicator of what was good for them, then they wouldn't need parents or protection from the state. We could shut down Child Haven and just let the kids follow their "heart's desire."

 I have seen this several times in other cases: When a case gets messy, like this one is, the caseworker reverts to reporting what the child "wants" or "doesn't want" and then bases her decisions upon it. In all of these cases, I observe, what the child supposedly wants happens to coincide with what is easiest for the caseworker.

Issue #3: The Role of the CAP Program.

This caseworker seems to want to defer to the CAP attorney as though he was an authority. I sense that this is an attempt to pass the responsibility for a difficult quandary to someone else—a person, in this case, who seems to have no trouble determining what the child wants and can state it with absolute certainty.

Even if Mr. Leik has the perfect clairvoyance to know what Patricia wants, the question remains whether the caseworker has any legal grounds for consulting him at all. The mandate of the CAP program is to represent the child’s desires, not his best interests. Legally, when you talk to Mr. Leik, you are talking to a 7-year-old. He may be able to “translate” the 7-year-old’s language into grown-up language, but he is still representing the whims of a child.

A CAP is not a CASA, who is concerned with the “best interests” of the child, and I have grave misgivings about a CAP being appointed to a child this young. It was a fill-in judge, Amy Mastin, who appointed a CAP in this case, and I wonder whether Hardcastle would have done the same.

Appointed attorneys may be appropriate for older children with a stable self-image, but assigning them to younger children seems redundant at best. A CAP is only required to have a law degree, not training in child psychology. For determining the intent of a child, they aren't necessarily an improvement over the caseworkers, who are supposed to be trained in this field. A CAP may give an older child an emotional sense that he is being “heard” and can help enforce treatment plans and other decisions that have already been made, but in cases like this one, a CAP seems inappropriate.

Issue #4: “Happiness” and “Therapy” are not a replacement for “Responsibility”

I am pleased that the caseworker believes that Patricia is happy and is looking forward to the adoption. I am also pleased that the caseworker thinks Patricia is doing well in therapy. Both of these statements contribute to my confidence that Patricia has finally found a good home where she can be happy and healthy and not be pummeled by the twisted agendas of adults. I have no desire to disrupt this placement or to upset Patricia emotionally.

The fact remains, however, that Patricia has been left with a psychological time bomb. She was taken from her basically happy home under very traumatic circumstances, and I suspect that the “cover story” she has been given to explain this event is going to hold less and less water as time goes on. In her previous placements, Patricia was told that she was taken from the home because her father was trying to abduct or hurt her. How is she going to react when she starts exploring her past (or Googles her own name on the internet) and discovers this wasn’t true? When she finds that she has been lied to about the fundamental facts of her life, isn’t she going to rebel against her new parents, big time?

Adults spend a lot of time and money in psychotherapy working out the traumas of their childhood. Isn’t it much more cost-efficient to work out these problems in childhood shortly after they happen? I believe that Patricia has a right to make peace with her past right now, even if the wounds are still fresh.

If the family she grew up with has problems, as ours does, she has a right to see them for herself. If she has been told inaccurate things about the circumstances of her removal, she has a right to have these misconceptions corrected. She has a right to be connected with the brothers and sisters she grew up with, not in some barbaric office visit but in relaxed circumstances that are sustainable over time. Arranging this may be challenging now, but it is a lot less costly than years of therapy in adulthood.

You can’t just throw away the first 5-1/2 years of a child’s life and pretend it didn’t happen. It simply isn’t possible. It might have been easier if the first 5-1/2 years were abusive and unhappy, but they were not. A happy early childhood makes the problem much more difficult. The parents she lost were not drug addicts or abusers. They were dedicated parents who were deprived of all access to their daughter through the ineptitude of one caseworker and the failure of her employers to adequately supervise her. In her emotional universe, it is like her parents disappeared on a trip to the grocery store, but their bodies have never been found and there has never been a funeral.

A HYPOTHETICAL SCENARIO

To decide what we should be doing now in Patricia’s case, we should figure out how the situation would have been handled by a competent caseworker. What would have happened if the same situation was dealt with by, say, Nita Lee or Margie Baird? Once we work this out, then we can backtrack and try to figure out how to undo the damage of Shari Sanchez.

First of all, there would have been no DFS involvement when the breakdown occurred, because the adoption would have been completed years before. When there were problems between my wife and I, the custody of Patricia would have been settled definitively and relatively quickly in divorce court.

Suppose we fast-forward, however, to the point just before the breakdown. What would have happened if a competent caseworker had stepped in then?

First of all, my letter to the caseworker would have resulted in immediate action. If the problems in our house were significant enough for me to write a letter and hand-deliver it to the caseworker, this would seem to a sensible person to be a cause for alarm. The competent caseworker would have actually read the letter, which is an uncertain assumption in Shari’s case. If my letter said that my wife had barricaded herself in her house with the state’s foster child claiming that I am trying to kill her and steal the child, isn’t this a cause for concern, whether true or not? Shouldn’t the caseworker investigate immediately?

The competent caseworker would have promptly visited the house, found a very upset woman who was indeed barricaded inside and making a lot of hysterical claims. The caseworker would have immediately taken the child out of this volatile situation. Then she would have done something that Shari Sanchez was never capable of: She would have sat down with each of the parties and tried to figure out what is going on.

Maybe the caseworker would have had some knowledge of psychology and mental illness (Isn’t it required?) and could have made a thumbnail judgment of who was sane and who wasn’t. She probably would have found me calm and rational (pretty much as you read me right now). She would have found my wife agitated and confused, and making a lot of paranoid charges. This caseworker might have been the only person in the world who could have ordered my wife to see a psychiatrist. Happening back in November 2003, this might have had a dramatic effect on the unfolding of events and whether my wife received any treatment at all (which has not yet happened).

In all likelihood, the caseworker might have ordered a psychological evaluation of both my wife and I, as Judge Hardcastle eventually ordered in 16 months later.

In all likelihood, knowing what I do about my wife’s disease, we probably would have never got Patricia back, but the way she was placed in a new home would have been dramatically different. If the caseworker had actually talked to me, I think I could have relieved her concerns and dispelled my wife’s claims immediately, and there would not have been a need for secrecy and the absurd and tragic efforts to protect Patricia from me. It is possible that Patricia would have ended up in the same new adoptive home where she is now, but it would have happened with my blessing and maybe even my wife’s, and we might have been able to transition Patricia to the new home without trauma. In all likelihood, there would have been some sort of understanding on visitation.

What we probably would have ended up with was a sort of “open adoption,” where the child is adopted by a new family but can freely interact with her past. To reverse the damage of Shari Sanchez, I think this is what we should work toward now.

FOSTER PARENT RIGHTS

One thing I have learned from my legal research is that foster parents in Nevada have absolutely no rights. I was disturbed to find I have no legal ability to seek a visitation with my child no matter how many years I have had her or how strong our bond is. A Nevada law allows anyone else who has had a significant role in a child's life to petition the court for visitation, but due to an exception in that law, foster parents have no right to be involved in a child’s life after the child leaves their care.

This is bad news, both for foster parents and for DFS. How is DFS going to recruit new foster parents if they know how badly the law and caseworkers will treat them?

This issue is too important to wait for the next legislative session. I propose that if DFS wants to recruit intelligent, high-quality foster parents, it needs to come up with some rights for them very fast. Even if they have no formal rights under Nevada law, they can still be given “pseudo rights” by the Department. These pseudo rights could be written down in a "Foster Parent Bill of Rights," and there could be an administrative avenue for appeal if these rights are violated.

The exact rights would have to be worked out, but they might include the right to have the social worker return phone calls within two business days, the right to reasonable visitation with one’s former foster child for as long as the child is in State custody, the right to see the caseworker at least once a month, etc. The Bill of Rights could address most of the concerns that I raised in the third section of this report.

If these rights are violated, the foster parent would still have no legal recourse, but they could have a phone number to call within the Department. The person at the other end of the line would have the power to document the complaint and seek a resolution. Caseworkers who repeatedly violate the Bill of Rights could be flagged for further attention.

In my case, every conceivable right that should be accorded to foster parents was violated, and I have no recourse under the law. If this case has been mishandled in the past, there ought to be a remedy for it within the Department. If there is no internal avenue for appeal and remedy, then I and other frustrated foster parents will be forced to pursue our grievances by other means.

MY FAMILY SITUATION

Since Patricia left our home, my focus has been on my remaining children. I filed for divorce in 2004, but this is still my family, and I continue to see them every day.

Although the two remaining children are not biologically mine, I still regard myself as their father, since their “real” dads are non-functional and often incarcerated. I pay the mortgage, health insurance and the essentials of food and clothing to keep the kids housed and fed—even while trying not to remove my ex wife’s motivation to work. If I did not pay the major bills, I know that the kids would be homeless, because my ex is not stable enough provide for them.

For my ex-wife, life is a continuous emotional roller coaster. Although her mood may change from day to day, her overall condition has remained essentially unchanged since Patricia was taken. Here mind is such a mess of conflicting emotions that she can hardly get anything done, no matter how great the external pressure.  However, her two kids who are still at home, now 12 and 16, have matured tremendously since Patricia left. I can now talk with them intelligently about Mom’s condition, and they are my partners in dealing with her. In essence, I am a single parent, raising two kids “remotely,” via phone calls and one or two visits a day, as we all contend with a sick family member.

My ex-wife still spends most of her time in bed, surrounded by piles of unpaid bills, paperwork from the now-finalized divorce, her laptop computer and many photos of Patricia. She has made collages and artwork from some of the photos, and her grief over the loss of her daughter never seems to diminish. She obsesses over things she has no control over and can’t seem to focus on things she can change. She pursues “research” on the internet, trying to get to the bottom of my conspiracies against her. On some days, she tries to call me dozens of times, even though I rarely answer during the day. She leaves the same repeated threats on my voicemail: She is going to take me back to court to amend the divorce, report me to the IRS for my secret business dealings, and file a restraining order against me for my emotional cruelty. Sometimes, she writes poetry about Patricia and emails it to me on my cellphone.

In the evening, I visit the house. I chat with the kids and their neighborhood friends, who hang out at our house in large numbers since there is little supervision there. I find out what they are up to and what they need from me. Then I go upstairs to see my ex-wife in her bed. I sit on the side of the bed and listen to her complaints against me, which have a strangely reassuring broken-record quality to them. I have stolen everything she has, robbed her of her dignity, devastated her feelings and refused to help her become more independent. Whenever we talk about Patricia, my ex becomes very agitated and blames me for everything that happened. Sometimes, I hold her while she is complaining about me. “No one gives a shit about me,” she weeps as I rock her back and forth. I try my best to focus her on something real and changeable, but I am not usually effective. Then I kiss her on the forehead and go away.

PROPOSED RESOLUTION

I acknowledge that there is good reason for Patricia to not be with her original foster family. Neither my ex-wife nor I have the stability or resources to care for her. There is no way that either of us can get our foster license back, so placement isn't an issue. However, this does not remove the responsibility of the Department to undo the psychological damage left by Shari Sanchez.

If my wife or I had contributed the sperm or egg for this child, the state would have bent over backwards to deal with us. Instead, we were only the child's emotional parents, having raised her from birth. This is worthless under the law and apparently meaningless to caseworkers. This is a problem that needs to be remedied.  Even if foster parents have no rights, they should have pseudo-rights conforming to a higher morality than the law, and when these rights are violated, there ought to be a pseudo-remedy—an informal accommodation that repairs the damage and allows all parties to get on with their lives.

Patricia’s current caseworker says that her “issues are being dealt with in therapy and her ego growth has been tremendous.” This is great! It means she is strong enough now to deal with her old family and all its problems.

Patricia certainly wasn’t a child with “ego issues” when she was with us. She was very strong, confident, creative and independent. Her need for therapy arises from the traumas that were imposed on her after she left our home. One can visit a therapist’s office for years, but ultimately all problems between people have to be resolved outside the office.

If the handling of the case by Nita Lee or Margie Baird would have resulted in a more-or-less open adoption, then this should be our current goal. I don’t know exactly how this should be done, and I am not qualified to say. The person who should manage this process should be Patricia’s therapist. The first step could be for the therapist to meet with me, my ex-wife and our kids. From that point, the therapist can develop her own plan for how to “normalize” the relationship between the two families. The therapist should be instructed on the end goal—a psychologically "open" adoption—but how this goal is achieved should be up to their professional discretion. If the therapist found that my ex-wife or I needed therapy of our own, she would have the power to require it.

I am aware that Patricia’s adoption is fast approaching, but I believe that it would be irresponsible for the Department or Court to allow it to proceed until this issue has been resolved. The county should not knowingly leave an adoptive family with a psychological time bomb, any more than it would release a child with an untreated medical condition. For the long-term welfare of the child, there has to be a resolution before the adoption takes place.

We want a resolution for everyone—one that allows all parties to move on with their lives without buried trauma. The alternative—no resolution—is simply not acceptable.

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