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By Glenn Campbell, Dec. 7, 2006
On this page, I am going to do something I have never done before: publicly declare a current Family Services worker incompetent.
The name of the worker is Lisa Ford. She is an investigator for Clark County Child Protective Services (CPS) in the sex abuse unit.
My judgment is based only on a single court hearing that I attended by chance on Sept. 21, 2006, but I don't make this charge lightly.
I know nothing more about Lisa Ford than what I heard from her own testimony and that of others during that hearing, but the case has deeply distressed me ever since. I have wondered how I should express my anger, and this morning I decided that I should just tell you what I believe, as simply and directly as I can.
Due to a shoddy investigation, Lisa Ford brought false sex charges against an innocent man. These charges were based on the distorted testimony of a four-year-old child, who was obviously coached by a third party. The charges were finally dismissed at the hearing I attended, but that doesn't change the fact that a family was unnecessarily put through a month of hell while the flimsy claims were resolved. Given the weakness of the evidence, the case should have never reached this stage, where the accused had to hire a lawyer and go through a trial. The fact that it went this far reflects, I believe, Ms. Ford's inability to grasp the most basic principles of her job.
I believe this woman is dangerous and unredeemable in her current capacity. She needs to be removed before she damages more families.
I walked into the hearing in Courtroom 15 mostly by chance. This was an "adjudicatory hearing" in a child abuse case involving two families. A man was accused of sexually abusing the four-year-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend. (The child may have been three at the time of the alleged abuse.) As a result, the child was temporary taken away from the girlfriend, while the man's son of about the same age was also taken away from him. The purpose of the hearing was to approve this action by Family Services and determine whether continued protection was needed.
Although no criminal charges were involved, this man was essentially on trial for child sexual abuse—a crime that would require a mandatory 20-year sentence in the criminal system. If the charges were proven in Family Court, then the man and his girlfriend would be forced to go through a year or more of intrusive government supervision, and criminal charges might possibly follow.
Unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to talk to the accused after court. Through the man's lawyer, I have asked to interview him, but he has not responded. Therefore, my sole information comes from the hearing itself and what I saw in the waiting area outside. (As a member of the public, I can attend most hearings, but I have no access to the documentation of the case.)
I was attracted to the hearing by something that I sensed in the waiting area. I saw what I thought was a nervous and very guilty looking man sitting outside the courtroom. Such impressions, of course, are not admissible in court, but they were enough to attract my attention and draw me into the courtroom. At the time I entered the courtroom, I had no knowledge of what the hearing was about.
It turns out that the nervous man was not the accused.
I entered the hearing after it had begun, at the beginning of the testimony of the first witness. It was a very small witness, the smallest I had ever seen. Her head barely poked above the podium on the witness stand. She was four years old. For convenience, I will call her "Rachel."
At the defense table about 20 feet from the girl was the man who was facing the charges. His expression was stoic, and I had no sense of guilt or innocence.
Rachel was extensively questioned by both the Deputy District Attorney, Ron Cordes, and the defense attorney, Michael Gowdey. The child was fidgety and obviously confused. To nearly every question she was asked, she replied "Yes," including this actual exchange...
Mr. Gowdey: "Rachel, do you know what a lie is?"
Rachel: "Yes."
Mr. Gowdey: "Are you lying now?"
Rachel: "Yes."
Clearly, no useful information could be obtained from this child as a direct witness.
She was then replaced on the stand by CPS investigator Lisa Ford, who testified about what the child had told her in a lengthy interview. Ford had a transcript of the interview in front of her, which she referred to frequently (and which I could not read, of course).
What emerged from Ford's testimony was a confused tale of vague sexual abuse which sounded ominous at first but had no stable detail to it. I can't go into the specifics without recounting the whole hearing, but the essence of the charge was that Rachel claimed that the man had "peed on her."
On the surface, this might be how a child experiences sexual abuse, where the "pee" is actually semen. To her credit, however, Ford asked a critical question: "What color was the pee?"
"Yellow," the child reportedly answered.
Semen isn't yellow. Yellow is the color of the only kind of pee the child would normally have known—real pee.
According to Ford, she showed the child anatomical charts of the human body, and the child reportedly pointed to the right areas to suggest sexual abuse. The specifics, however, were very murky. I couldn't imagine this very immature child giving Ford much more data than she gave the court. Nonetheless, Ford presented herself as an experienced professional, and perhaps she knew more about interviewing young children than the rest of us.
After Ford's testimony, I concluded that sexual abuse might have taken place, but there was no substantial evidence presented here to support the charge.
Then, the accused himself took the stand, followed by the girl's mother, and Ford's case utterly collapsed. Eventually, the D.A. himself stopped the hearing; all of the parties were called into the courtroom, and the judge (hearing master Frank Sullivan) dismissed the charges.
The most glaring problem was this: Although Lisa Ford had interviewed the child extensively, she made no significant attempt to interview the accused himself. If she had, then the case would have dissolved just like it did in court.
The story that emerged over the course of the hearing involved no sexual abuse, only an estranged husband with a grudge and a gullible investigator.
The nervous man who I saw in the waiting area was Rachel's natural father, who was still married to Rachel's mother, although they were no longer living together.
Rachel's mother was now living with her boyfriend, the accused. These two had been coworkers for a couple of years and were clearly committed to each other. Rachel's mother had not yet filed for divorce from her father only because she wanted to do it amicably and they could not agree on custody terms.
Rachel's father was the violent and jealous type. He had previously succeeded in getting his wife and the accused fired from their jobs, and now he had obviously coached Rachel to testify against his rival. It was he who made the complaint to CPS.
I don't believe that any testimony in this case was deliberately falsified. I don't think anybody lied. There were real incidents within the mother's household which Rachel reported to her father. The father then interpreted these incidents in the most sinister manner possible and fed them back to Rachel according to his own emotional needs. The father then made a report to CPS, and Rachel tried to repeat to the investigator what she thought was expected of her.
The core incident was this: Rachel, who at her age has no respect for closed doors, walked into the bathroom while the accused was urinating. The man told the child she should leave, and when the girl asked why, he grasped for a response and said, "Because you might get pee on you."
This event was later reported by the child to her father, who of course was looking for any sort of evidence against his rival. He interpreted the child's poorly expressed account as meaning that the accused had sexually abused the child in the bathroom. I assume that he proceeded to help the child "remember" the incident by asking her leading questions, to which she no doubt answered "Yes." He then called CPS.
Lisa Ford then came on the scene and apparently accepted the vague sexual abuse story that was jointly fabricated by Rachel and her father.
The case was a farce from the beginning, and it would have taken jaw-dropping stupidity for any investigator to fall for it. Lisa Ford, I am now convinced, has that stupidity.
Below is a sampling of what I believe went wrong in the case. There may be have been other investigators involved, but it appears to me that the errors were primarily Ford's.
The defects in this case were absolutely numbing. In essence, Ford became the stooge of the estranged husband, doing his will. The nightmare only ended when the evidence was presented to the court and the deputy D.A. himself, representing the state, stopped the hearing and essentially dropped the charges.
On the stand, Ford specified her past experience investigating sex abuse charges. I don't recall the exact numbers, but it was something like 8 years in Texas followed by 6 years in Nevada.
This begs the question: How many shattered lives has she left in her wake?
At this point, I don't pretend to be an impartial observer anymore. I am livid!
I have been sitting on this story for two and a half months. I wanted to interview the accused and write a long, disciplined article about the case (similar this one), but since I wasn't able to contact him, that option doesn't seem possible. Anyway, I am probably too angry to write a disciplined article.
I just want the world to know: This woman is incredibly dangerous. I know I don't have the whole story about this case, but I can see no possible excuse for how poorly it was handled. Even "high caseloads" and "lack of time" don't wash, because Ford seemed to have plenty of time to interview the child.
I am not going to sit quietly by as lives are damaged. Lisa Ford, I believe, has no business investigating sexual abuse complaints.
Child sexual abuse is a real phenomenon, but so is sexual abuse hysteria, and CPS ought to be protecting us from it, not perpetuating it.
—G.C.
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Vegas, NV 89173.
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