A baffling system: A mom fights for her rights

When Jessica Edwards decided to take her two-year-old son to the emergency room last November, her abusive boyfriend vowed revenge. He’d do everything in his power to take her son away from her, along with their unborn child.
And he did.
The children are now in foster care and Edwards sees them twice a week for one hour each.
The story of Edwards, an attractive young woman with a wild adolescence, is not black and white. The argument to take her children away could be made either way in court.
But Edwards, 23, was robbed of her day in court because of a state law that gave her boyfriend, Quincy Hurst, the power to waive her right to a trial.
Edwards’ story provides a glimpse into how she lost her children in a system that she views as baffling and unfair.
Edwards came under the radar of the Department of Human Services (DHS) on November 27, after she reported the abuse of her two-year-old.
She had left her son, Samuel, home alone with Hurst while she went to a doctor’s appointment (she was seven months pregnant with Hurst’s child — Hurst is not the father of Samuel).
Upon returning, she discovered that Samuel was bruised and scratched in the head and neck area, with cuts on the inside of his mouth. His heels were bright red and appeared burned. Hurst told her that his two sons had “trompled” him, and that he’d fallen and hit his head, and that he’d also fallen in the bathtub.
Edwards immediately took Samuel to the emergency room, where she learned he had suffered a concussion. She called the Traverse City police, who contacted Child Protective Services (CPS), which is under the auspices of the DHS.
She gave the police permission to kick down the apartment door if they had to (they did). Hurst was charged with child abuse and jailed.

AFTERMATH
Following the incident, Ally Menzel, a CPS worker, met with Edwards, and suggested that she go to counseling. Edwards readily agreed because of her troubled childhood. Edwards also asked if she could get Samuel into counseling because he’d been hard to control after the abuse incident.
As it turns out, Edwards herself was now under the radar of CPS and her ability to parent now in question. The “suggested” counseling appointments were really mandatory, although Edwards said she was never told nor did she sign any document to that effect.
Edwards, who worked as a full-time attendant to a paraplegic woman, said she talked openly to Menzel about her childhood. She’d been brutally raped at the age of seven by a babysitter. While attending a Traverse City elementary school, she lived two lives — one as a high-achieving student and star basketball player, the other, living in an essentially motherless family, cooking and caring for her four younger sisters. At night she’d wear layers of clothes, hoping to fend off the sexual advances of her stepfather. She ran away at the age of 14 and began an odyssey of selling and taking drugs.
Edwards swore off drugs with her first pregnancy, but still kept the company of ex-cons, who were physically abusive to her.
Edwards missed two early counseling appointments because she was in the hospital delivering a baby. In early February, her car broke down, causing her to miss another. She once asked Menzel permission to miss another appointment, which was given, said her attorney, Melissa Whitman.
According to court records, Menzel had serious concerns about the company that Edwards was keeping. She told Edwards that she could no longer associate with Hurst, and alleged later that Hurst had been at the hospital during the baby’s delivery.
Edwards, in fact, had filed a personal protection order against Hurst after the abuse incident. She also filed an order with the hospital staff to not let him in her room. But Hurst was able to get in by giving the staff a false name, Whitman said.
Menzel also worried that Edwards was associating with an old boyfriend, Jeremiah Hicks, who had physically abused Edwards in the past and had served a prison term for breaking-and-entering and bodily harm and assault less than murder.
Menzel believed that Hicks posed a danger to Edwards’ children. Edwards said the relationship was not romantic, and thought it was acceptable, since Menzel had only mandated that she not live with Hicks.

KIDS TAKEN
On Valentine’s Day, shortly after Edwards had missed a counseling appointment, she received a phone call at 2:50 p.m. while driving her stepfather (not the abusive one), to a doctor’s appointment in Petoskey. She was told there was a court-ordered hearing at 3:30 to remove her children.
Edwards became angry, saying she couldn’t possibly get to the hearing in time. They were gone by the time she got back to Traverse City.
After the children were taken, Edwards hired attorneys Melissa Whitman and Rob Tubbs. They had never represented a client in this highly-specialized area of law, but took the case because she was sincere and the situation sounded truly outrageous, Whitman said.
On the morning of March 7, Hurst entered a plea of guilty for child abuse, but only after first insisting to the judge that it was Edwards, not himself, who abused Samuel. The judge asked him if he wanted to remove his guilty plea, and he said no. The judge then asked Edwards to provide input, which she did: “I said he needs to get some time for what he did, but regardless of how much time he gets, it won’t fix what happened.”
She was in tears.
Hurst was sentenced to 10 months in jail. After his sentencing, Menzel called Hurst at the jail to ask if he’d like to make any allegations against Edwards. He agreed, alleging that Edwards was a prostitute, sold drugs, regularly hit Samuel, and that Edwards, not he, was the one who abused Samuel.
Hurst’s allegations were presented at Edwards’ preliminary hearing that same day, shocking Whitman that Hurst was given any credibility.
The preliminary trial was one of the longest in the memory of Amanda Steele, the assistant Grand Traverse County prosecutor who handles neglect and abuse cases.
Steele argued that the children should be removed, citing Hurst’s allegations, along with Edwards’ association with an ex-convict and missing five counseling appointments.
Tubbs argued that Edwards had never hurt her children. There was no evidence that Hicks’ friendship posed a danger to her sons, and Edwards had solid excuses for missing the appointments. Edwards also believed the appointments were voluntary.
Edwards’ attorneys submitted a psychological evaluation that said she was a competent and loving parent; structure, assistance and therapy would likely improve her abilities.
“You want rehabilitation, but you also don’t want to punish people for their past,” Tubbs said later.

LOSS OF TRIAL
The next step in the case would have been a trial for which credible proof is required. But a trial never occurred. That’s because Steele sought out Hurst to enter a plea that stated that Jeremy, the baby, should remain out of his mother’s care and go under court jurisdiction.
Quincy’s plea allowed him to make good on his multiple threats of losing Jeremy, Whitman said.
Steele explained to the Express that state law, as well as case law, says that “hearsay” is admissible in a preliminary trial in family court. Additionally, state law and case law are clear that if one parent admits responsibility for abuse or neglect, the court can take jurisdiction over both parents.
“I am here to apply the law equally in all situations. That is what my job is,” said Steele, who declined to comment on this case due to confidentiality.
To avoid a trial over her right to keep the older child, Steele sought out Matthew Spidell, the biological father. He was in federal prison, and had only met Samuel once. At Steele’s request, Spidell also submitted a plea that Samuel should come under court jurisdiction.
Once the court takes jurisdiction of a child, the hearings never return to the question of whether CPS should have taken the children in the first place. Instead, they focus on the “dispositional” phase that considers the progress of the parent and children, their possible reunification or termination of parental rights.
Whitman protested in a March 26 court document that Steele had done an end-run by taking away Edwards’ right to defend herself. Hurst’s credibility was severely compromised because of his anger over Edwards calling the police and for her statement at his sentencing.
“Why do we as a society allow the perpetrator to grind his ax against the lawful parent?” she said later.
Whitman, outraged that her client would never get her day in court, later learned that not all county prosecutors take advantage of this state law.
In Leelanau County, for example, the family court typically imposes court jurisdiction if the *accused* parent admits to the allegations or if the allegations have been proved in a court hearing, said Leelanau County Prosecutor Joe Hubbell.
The exception would be if the children were in immediate crisis, he said.
Prosecutor Charlie Koop said the state law is written in order to err on the side of protecting the child.
“There is always the fear that if you don’t do enough, something will happen, and it will be splashed on the front page of the Detroit Free Press. Why didn’t protective services do this or that? I think that judges have that same fear. Is this the case that will go to hell? So they err on over-protection of the child.”
The death of a three-year-old in Kalkaska in early August, allegedly at the hands of a boyfriend, illustrates his point.

BIGGER PICTURE
Charlotte Allen is a Midland attorney who has championed both child and parental rights in abuse and neglect cases. She understands the argument to err on the side of over-protection, but she believes the DHS system is badly broken.
“It’s a terrible situation. You have kids who end up losing the non-offending parent, who end up completely without their family of origin. For the older kids, it’s just a tragedy. They are heartbroken. And it happens every day of the week.”
A “good” parent may lose her kids for the reason of “failure to protect,” she said.
“If a battered woman goes into a shelter, she might get her children taken away because she didn’t leave soon enough. Yet going into a shelter is the best indicator of trying to protect your children.”
Missing an appointment, no matter how good the reason, will always be used against a parent, she said.
“Sometimes the hurdles are impossible. They impose so many appointments in the course of a week, that a parent might lose her job trying to fulfill all of them. Yet they are required to have a job in order to keep their children. It’s a Catch-22.”
This issue of parental rights is wide-ranging.
“The state has to pay for an attorney if the parent can’t afford to. But that right doesn’t attach until after the initial removal hearing. A lot of times, the child is out of the home by the time a parent talks to an attorney and has already made admissions in court because they’re stressed, upset and desperate to keep the kids.”
Lack of counsel is a particular problem in the Family to Family Initiative, a well-meaning program that is substantially funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Parents are invited, along with teachers, extended family, and the caseworker to a “team decision making” meeting to resolve issues.
“It sounds nice, except in Michigan, it’s been implemented with the goal to remove the child. The parents don’t know that going in, and are likely to agree to removal before that pesky right to counsel attaches.”
“The “800-pound gorilla” is the profound lack of funding for DHS to support foster care, training, and long-term support for families, she said.
Doing what’s “best for kids” by removing them is sometimes not best, she said.
In the case of Edwards, her sons were split up and Samuel now appears to have developed an attachment disorder. Most egregiously, Samuel was likely sexually abused in a foster care home early on; the Traverse City police are now investigating.
And Edwards feels she barely knows baby Jeremy, who was taken away at three weeks old.
“I love him, I know he’s my kid, and that’s what keeps me going,” she said.

JESSICA’S MOVE:
Committed to getting her children back, Edwards and her attorneys agreed after the preliminary trial that she’d stay at a women’s shelter with her children to assure no contact with her ex-felon friend.
She agreed not to leave the shelter with her children unless accompanied by a Families First social worker. But a worker was unavailable, so Edwards was stuck at the shelter except for going to work and getting her kids to daycare.
The plan fell apart. Edwards was miserable sharing space with the shelter’s 28 children and their moms. She violated the agreement in June by taking Samuel to Meijer, while leaving her baby, Jeremy, at the center under the care of another mom. At that point, DHS took the children again.
Because Edwards was deeply upset by the initial foster care placement through Bethany Christian Services, her attorneys insisted that DHS switch to Child and Family Services, which it did.
During this ordeal, Whitman asked a pointed question of CPS: Why did Edwards lose her children, while Edwards’ mother has been allowed to keep her two daughters?
“It’s an issue because Jessica said her mom consistently tests positive for cocaine and methadone,” Whitman said. “She has told me that her mom is entirely unable to parent her two sisters, has lost her house, is being investigated for check fraud, leaves the girls for extended periods of time without supervision, and is constantly under the effects of drugs while with them. This finally caused one daughter to decide to leave her mother and live with a relative. The youngest daughter who is 11, continues to live in this terrible situation, while CPS does not seem to care despite multiple reports filed by myself and others.”
The DHS caseworker and supervisor were unable to comment due to reasons of confidentiality.
Edwards, who has never failed a drug test, now attends 90-day court reviews of her progress and hopes to get her children back in February.
“I learned to make healthier choices, but the system failed me. It was very unfair and cruel.”

The names of the children were changed to protect their identity.

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