FOLLOW UP AND OUTCOME

This will be a very long post, but to anyone out there who has unjustly lost a child to CPS and the foster care system, I do this for you. 

In May of 2012 the dependency court placed my grandson with me and issued a "do not remove order."  Alot of things transpired between my last post and now.  I kept fighting with DCFS.  I kept going to the Court hearings.  I came into contact with Shawn McMillan, an attorney in San Diego, CA.  He is the attorney on the case that I am going to write about below.  I contacted Tim Donnelly of the California State Assembly who is very active in calling DCFS' practices into question.  I went through all kinds of changes, both mentally and physically.  It all took a toll. 

After many hearings and many reports written by lying social workers, both the foster workers and the adoption worker at the time, who had written a report in August of 2013 saying that I was a substance abuser, which I was not and have never been; saying that all of my adult children had been interviewed and were against the adoption, which was untrue also; and saying that I currently used marijuana, which was not true either, I took this report to my Kaiser therapist.  He took a look at it and said, "you have to write a rebuttal.  You can't let this stand."  So, I did.  I wrote a rebuttal and attached evidence from Kaiser Permanente that I was not a substance abuser, and attached a statement from my 30 year old son saying that he had never been interviewed and that he was not opposed to my adopting my grandson.  He even went on to say that: "he couldn't think of anyone better to adopt the child."  I offered DCFS the opportunity to take a sample of my hair for drug testing.  They declined. 

This adoption worker had worked on my home study at that point for three years possibly longer.  She would never deny my home study because there was no reason to deny my home study.  But because of this, the case could never move forward. 

I also subsequently wrote a letter to the supervisor of the adoption worker who had written the report in August of 2013 and attached certain pages of the case of Deanna Fogary-Hardwick v. County of Orange, 2010 Cal.App. Unpub. LEXIS 4436.  I stated in that letter to that supervisor that what had happened to Ms. Fogarty-Hardwick had also been my experience with this social worker.  I attached a copy of the lying report that was filed and my rebuttal with the supporting evidence showing that what she had written in the report was untrue. I will also mention that when the judge received my "rebuttal" she re-read the social worker's report, and then read my rebuttal and looked at the supporting evidence, took a deep breath and rolled her eyes.  I have come to know that these lying social workers are common, and it is expected that they lie all the time. 

The supervisor very shortly after getting my letter, wrote me a letter offering me a chance to have a second home study with a different social worker.  I asked that this case be taken outside of DCFS.  He allowed this and I've come to find that it was my legal right to do so.  I requested that Children's Bureau in Los Angeles do the home study.  I finally got a fair home study by someone that didn't have anything against me, didn't fabricate problems and issues that were "concerns" and reasons that I could not adopt my grandson. 

At this time, I am awaiting the finalization of the adoption of my grandson.  This could have gone a horribly different way if I had not been persistent, didn't spend tens of thousands of dollars in attorney's fees, didn't go to law school myself to learn more about law and civil rights, but then I may have never seen my grandson again and I would have never been able to live with that.