As more parents complain against Child Protective Services, one
case worker emerges to give a closer look at an agency that has the
power to ruin lives or make them whole.
Imagine you and your spouse are working like mad to care for
your growing family of three children, and because of a horrible
bath-time accident that scalds and injures the youngest, all of
them are taken away and placed in foster homes. Social workers
won’t give them back until you say your husband
”
did it on purpose.
”
Or imagine your meth-snorting spouse takes your newborn in his
arms and starts clubbing you. His mother calls CPS; they take away
all three of the children and consider giving custody to him
– even though you’re clean and he’s still using.
As more parents complain against Child Protective Services, one case worker emerges to give a closer look at an agency that has the power to ruin lives or make them whole.
Imagine you and your spouse are working like mad to care for your growing family of three children, and because of a horrible bath-time accident that scalds and injures the youngest, all of them are taken away and placed in foster homes. Social workers won’t give them back until you say your husband “did it on purpose.”
Or imagine your meth-snorting spouse takes your newborn in his arms and starts clubbing you. His mother calls CPS; they take away all three of the children and consider giving custody to him – even though you’re clean and he’s still using.
These are some of the alleged stories that emerged after The Sunday Pinnacle ran an article in October titled “A state-sanctioned nightmare,” the story of Molly and Nathan Fort of Hollister who successfully sued San Benito County and its Child Protective Services for $1.2 million. The agency had ripped the Fort family apart for seven years based on a false claim of molestation against the father, Nathan Fort, made by his wife’s father. The Forts’ daughter drifted in the foster care system for five years before a federal appeals court finally restored her to her parents.
Following publication of the story, nearly a dozen parents contacted The Pinnacle to talk about their ordeals with Child Protective Services, both in San Benito and Santa Clara counties. Some of the stories were eerily similar to the Forts. Like the Forts, these parents are embroiled in the CPS bureaucracy and fighting to either regain custody of their children or to ensure their children’s safety. As each parent summed up his or her story, each was visibly distraught and choked with tears.
The response to the article is alarming because it could signal that the Forts’ ordeal with CPS might not have been an isolated incident. A major difference between these more recent cases and the Forts’ is that they are ongoing, but the parents involved feel they are at a dead-end with the agency that controls their lives and those of their children. They are so desperate to regain their children they are willing to risk possible retaliation from their case workers, judges, prosecuting attorneys or even estranged family members in order to get their stories told.
The most glaring common denominator among these cases is the catch-phrase “admit-to-get,” coined by Donny Cox, the Fort family attorney from Southern California who specializes in fighting CPS cases. Admit-to-get is when CPS workers promise to give children back to a parent if he or she will testify in court against the other parent, or admit to wrongdoing themselves. The results are usually devastating to the family, and often land one of the parents in jail, which, in turn, causes even more economic and emotional hardship on all family members.
Steve Pierce, deputy director for San Benito CPS, adamantly denies the existence of such a policy.
“That’s not our policy,” Pierce said. “The idea is repugnant. I’ve heard about it – attorneys opposing us assert we have such a policy. And that’s not true.”
It is important to realize that CPS social workers are not allowed to publicly discuss clients’ cases, so the following scenarios are only the parents’ side of the stories. However, The Pinnacle interviewed a case worker at Child Protective Services – with the stipulation that the county she presently works for not be revealed, except to say that it is in “the Central Coast region.” “Ellen Smith,” as she is called in this article, has worked as a CPS social worker for 11 years, has a master’s degree in psychology and is intimately familiar with CPS in San Benito as well as Santa Clara counties.
Smith provided a close-up look at the inner workings of an agency whose employees fall into two schools of thought on child welfare: those who want to work with a family to restore stability and those who do not feel a second chance is justified no matter what the circumstances. The latter philosophy falls into the admit-to-get category.
“There is the social worker who believes ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ that the kid belongs with the family,” Smith said. “Does a screw-up make a parent a bad parent? Most of the clients who come to the attention of CPS are not trying to hurt their kid. These parents are stressed, they’re usually poor, they’re addicts, they’ve had poor parenting themselves. The other philosophy is that a child should never go home if that parent is not willing to admit that they did something wrong to the child because they’re likely to do it again. But there’s nothing to support that.”
The names of the children in this article have been changed to protect them.
It’s called “an accident”
Monique Herrera is the first to admit she’s made some bad choices in men. The Morgan Hill mother of four, now in her mid-20s, bore three children with two former spouses. The first husband abandoned Herrera and her daughter and the second, with whom she had two sons, became increasingly violent and beat her in February 1999. He was arrested that night but resurfaced in Herrera’s home half a year later, when he promptly started battering her again. They divorced and he went absentee as well.
Along came Joe Gaeta in early 2002, a man markedly different from the last two who had been in Herrera’s life. Gaeta had a young daughter from a previous marriage, and after he moved in with Herrera he soon bonded with Herrera’s daughter and two sons, aged 7 and 18 months. Herrera and Gaeta became engaged and were on the verge of buying a large family home in San Jose when their world fell apart.
Herrera recently had landed a job as a park ranger/security guard for Bonfante Gardens. The couple had decided for the time being that she would work and he would be a stay-at-home dad. Herrera’s mother, Minnie Rocha, was going to move in with them soon, so it would be a manageable arrangement.
On the evening of May 17, 2003, Herrera was working at the theme park while Gaeta had his hands full feeding and washing the three children. He had called the two older ones in from the playground, gave them their baths and started preparing their dinner. It was then bath time for the youngest, “Jacob,” who was 18 months-old at the time. The baby needed a bath often because he loved to rub his food in his hair.
“I had to wash him three or four times a day,” laughed Gaeta, in an interview at the family apartment in Morgan Hill. “You should see him eat spaghetti.”
Gaeta said he started the tub water going, at the regular mild temperature, placed Jacob inside the tub in a standing position and told the oldest boy, who was 7, to “watch the water” while he ran to the kitchen to make sure dinner wasn’t burning. Of course, it was the mistake of Gaeta’s life.
Gaeta was gone from the bathroom, it is estimated by doctors and attorneys, for about four minutes. When he returned, Jacob was still standing in the tub but trembling. The older boy had turned up the hot water valve, not realizing the consequences. Gaeta scooped Jacob out of the tub and immediately called Herrera at her job, then rushed Jacob to St. Louise Hospital. Throughout it all, Jacob never cried. It was a year later when a doctor discovered that the child had a “delayed response syndrome,” thus, he rarely cried.
Jacob was treated for second and third degree burns from just above his ankles to his feet. While the surgeon and the admitting nurse indicated in hospital paperwork that the incident was simply a horrific accident, it didn’t stop hospital officials from calling CPS, a routine procedure when a badly injured child comes into the ER.
Later, Jacob was transferred to Valley Medical Center where Christine Albin declared the case child abuse, but Herrera says Albin never spoke to her, Gaeta or anyone else in the family about the incident. At the time, Albin was head of pediatrics at Valley Med.
“Dr. Albin has been the county’s expert for years and has worked on hundreds of cases,” said Robert Powell, the family’s San Jose attorney. Ironically, David Kaufman, then head of Valley Med’s burn unit, gave testimony favorable to Powell’s clients.
Sleepless nights
Sandra LaFuente, a case worker from Santa Clara’s Gilroy satellite office for the county’s Department of Child Protective Services, was assigned the Herrera-Gaeta case and decided that all the children should be removed from the home and put in the foster care system. The case then became a classic “admit-to-get” scenario. CPS told Herrera that she would not get her children back unless she “admitted” that Gaeta burned Jacob intentionally.
“How could she ‘admit’ to that? She wasn’t even there at the time of the incident!” Powell said.
Powell had worked with attorney Donny Cox on the Fort family case in Hollister, and says the Herrera-Gaeta case is equally outrageous. He had Gaeta take a polygraph, or lie detector test, which the young father passed brilliantly, the attorney said.
“Neither the county counsel nor the attorney assigned by the court to represent the children cared one iota that Joe Gaeta passed the test,” Powell said. “They pursued the matter relentlessly.”
Powell’s experts had Gaeta re-create the bathroom scene in the apartment from which the family had since moved while the new tenants were there, creating clouds of steam so dense they set off the smoke detector. It was later determined that the landlords of the apartment building had the hot water heaters set illegally high, at 135 degrees, when the legal limit is 130 degrees.
“When Dr. Albin was presented with the polygraph report, she made no response whatsoever,” Powell said. Exasperated, he added, “Look, he made a mistake. Monique had finally found the right guy. He was stable, he was there for them. This is just horrific.”
Herrera held out a year without her children, adamantly denying that her fiance purposely harmed Jacob. She wrote a lengthy letter detailing her case to the Santa Clara County Grand Jury on Nov. 9, 2003, but she never received a response from the 19-member group, which serves as a community watchdog over local government affairs. In the end, she couldn’t bear the thought of her children living in a foster home in Hollister where, she said, “they slept on the floor of a laundry room and ate bologna sandwiches for dinner.” In mid-2004 Herrera and Gaeta agreed that it was better for him to do jail time for a crime he didn’t commit rather than break up the entire family. Herrera capitulated to the authorities and said she told them what they wanted to hear.
“I said, ‘He did it! He’s a bastard! He burned my son!'” Herrera said. “I learned the CPS game and I turned it on them. You have to fight fire with fire.”
Gaeta did five months in jail and was released only a week ago. He has already taken a job at the Wal-Mart Superstore in Gilroy. But Jacob, now 4, was never restored to the family. The child is now permanently in the CPS foster care system. Herrera said she has been told Jacob has fully recovered, but he still receives skin grafts on his shins because he is growing.
Inside the family’s new Morgan Hill apartment, a shrine to Jacob graces a prominently displayed cabinet. Photos, toys and mementos remind the family of happier days. On the living room floor Grandmother Rocha plays with the newest member of the family, a child Gaeta and Herrera had together. CPS had taken him from Herrera when he was only 29 days old.
“I’ve heard of many times when families’ children get hurt,” Rocha said. “They won’t take them to the hospital because they don’t want them taken away.”
“They tried breaking this family up, but they can’t,” Gaeta said.
Though none of the family is allowed to see Jacob now, they still have birthdays for him and put up a Christmas stocking for the child in his absence. They keep a toy doll that was once Jacob’s on the couch – it still has the baby’s spittle on it and they never wash it.
It’s a family haunted.
“The last day we saw [Jacob] and I told him he wasn’t coming home, the look in his face … I’ll never forget the look in his face,” Rocha said. “He was so hurt.” She broke down in uncontrollable sobbing.
Herrera, while strong-willed and still angry at the system, soon followed suit.
“I said, ‘don’t forget me,'” Herrera choked on her tears. “He … just looked at the floor. All the hope he had was gone.
“I will always fight for my son until he’s home,” she added. “I shake as I tell you this because my emotion is so intense, so deep. I live with it every day. How can these people (CPS) sleep at night?”
Gaeta went outside, lit a cigarette, and looked toward the horizon over the tiny enclosed front porch.
An agency in crisis
CPS insider Smith said she disapproves of the admit-to-get policy that many CPS social workers throughout the south Bay Area and San Benito County use, and believes that those who subscribe to it are under the mistaken notion that it is a policy encouraged in the CPS statutes. It’s not, she says, nor is it sanctioned under California or federal law.
“I don’t know how it got started,” said Smith, a CPS caseworker for 11 years. “It must have started years ago because I walked into that and I questioned it. It makes no sense to me. There is nothing in the law that says you have to admit to anything.”
Smith said admit-to-get is prevalent in both San Benito and Santa Clara, but that the two counties also employ social workers who truly want to keep families together.
A major difference between the two counties is that San Benito has only 10 case workers, whereas Santa Clara has 250 to 300 case workers, though responsibilities differ among staff and programs, according to Ken Borelli, Deputy Director of Santa Clara’s CPS. Smith is quick to say that the problem is not that there are enough caseworkers in San Benito, but rather, not enough support staff or foster homes. San Benito case workers have to wear multiple hats by supervising weekly parental visits, doing their own clerical work and driving miles out of county to foster homes. Santa Clara, Smith said, has multiple resources, including a fleet of clerks who generate legal documents for the case workers. Monterey, she said, has resources similar to Santa Clara’s.
Pierce echoed the need for foster homes.
“There are currently only seven licensed foster homes in San Benito County,” Pierce said. “We want the kids in this community to be able to stay in this community.”
Another problem, Smith believes, is that San Benito’s overall director for Health and Human Services, Kathy Flores, is a keen grant-getter who is spread across much of the county’s bureaucracy. Flores is at the helm of a vast family of agencies, including the county’s welfare program, migrant labor housing, the Community Workforce and Development Department – and CPS – which, combined, get the lion’s share of San Benito’s nondiscretionary funding via the state.
“I think CPS, in general, is in crisis,” Smith said. “San Benito is in crisis because the director does not understand CPS. When your focus is on money you push social workers to the point where they’re stretched like a rubber band. There are some good people there. But when people get anxious and pushed and scared they start making mistakes. They work vast amounts of overtime and things go by the wayside. It becomes an impossible job. It can lead to bad decisions and bad judgments.”
Dr. Norma Sparks, director of Santa Clara’s Department of Social Services was not available for comment. Ken Borelli, the Deputy Director of Child Protective Services in Santa Clara called back just before press time to say that he has never heard of “admit-to-get.”
“Admit-to-get?” Borelli said. “I’ve never heard of that before.”
Nor has he ever heard of such a policy, he added.
“No, no, no. I don’t think we would get into that type of a bargaining situation,” Borelli said. “Plus, it would be investigated by law enforcement and emergency response. You go based on the facts, and prior history. There’s history (of child abuse) in certain families.”
Borelli said the Emergency Services arm of his agency receives nearly 20,000 calls a year alleging child abuse in the county.
“CPS isn’t going around looking for cases,” Borelli said.
So how does a case like Herrera-Gaeta happen in Santa Clara County? Social workers, in general, are stretched thin, Smith said. In 1998 the state Department of Social Services conducted a study to determine if overworked case workers could still do an effective job. The study concluded they couldn’t, and recommended mandated caseloads drop from the 1986 standard of 26 families to 15 families per case worker.
Subsequent state administrations have refused to implement the recommendations because of budget pinches.
“In 1986 we didn’t have the complexities of this kind of poverty, the designer drugs, childhood mental illness, two parents working – yet the mandates are increasing every year,” Smith said.
It doesn’t explain why Sonoma County, which Smith says is nearly devoid of an admit-to-get policy, has such a successful CPS system. Sonoma, according to Smith, has nearly 400 volunteer cases – that is, cases in which parents actually seek out the services of the agency.
“Their philosophy is children belong with their family and we need to help them stay together,” Smith said.
So there’s no denying that the admit-to-get policy is a factor in the most egregiously managed CPS cases, such as what happened to Herrera and her family.
“There needs to be some integrity in who you hire,” Smith said. “There’re bad cops, there’re bad social workers. There’s always bad apples in every profession, and parents don’t always do what they are supposed to do.”
No overseeing
In Santa Clara, Smith said, another systemic problem is what she called “rubber stamp judges.”
“Judges have to make decisions on the facts,” Smith said. “Just assuming a parent is a liar or a cheat and just because a social worker might be better educated (than the parent) doesn’t mean the state is in the right. But they work under the collar of authority. And sometimes they lie.”
One part of San Benito’s system that works, Smith believes, is Judge Harry Tobias, who handles most of the juvenile dependency cases once they get to court. Some parents with grievances against CPS believe Tobias is unfair. But a judge’s decision is as good as the information he or she gets, Smith offered.
It is important to note that juvenile dependency court cases are closed to the public, as are the court records.
“I think Tobias is a great judge,” Smith said. “He’s fair, he listens to all sides, even though there were times I disagreed with him. Judges are the referees.”
Tobias was not available for comment.
Pierce explained that in child dependency cases, the burden of proof is much lower than it is in criminal cases.
“For criminal cases it’s beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “For us, it starts out as a ‘preponderance of the evidence,’ the lowest standard, then it has to become ‘clear and convincing evidence.’ So it’s somewhere between the criminal court standard and the civil court standard.
“I think that’s a situation a lot of parents don’t understand,” Pierce added.
Pinpointing how CPS is overseen is difficult. Aside from ultimately abiding by a judge’s decision, the agencies seem to operate without interference from state regulators, though some cases have caught the attention of the flagship agency in Sacramento.
Shirley Washington, a spokeswoman from the state Department of Social Services, said each county CPS office must abide by state and federal laws and regulations.
“We don’t have the authority to go in and question their decision-making because everything they do is predicated on the law,” Washington said. “But we do work with the counties and if we receive a complaint about an action they’ve taken, we will go in to investigate.”
Robert Fort, however, said the investigation he requested from the state DSS on his son’s case in Hollister – the Nathan and Molly Fort case – bore no results.
“We went to Sacramento and had them come down to investigate it. They white-washed it,” Fort said. “There’s no accountability to CPS. It’s all gamesmanship.”
Washington couldn’t say how many complaints, if any, her department has received about CPS in this area or if they’ve ever investigated the CPS of either county.
“We get a gazillion complaints about everything,” she said, and most of those complaints about alleged child abuse or daycare facilities.
Doing the right thing
Erica Munoz of Hollister is doing everything in her power to get her children back from the CPS system. Every day of the week, she attends a battery of meetings: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, substance abuse seminars, counseling from county mental health experts, even church outreach programs. She began attending the meetings almost three months ago to enhance her chances of regaining custody of her three children, aged 7 months, 3 years and 8 years.
She found out being clean and sober suits her.
“I like going!” Munoz said.
But there was a time not long ago when Munoz, a dental assistant in her 20s, was doing methamphetamine, or crank, and claims her estranged spouse got her addicted. They had been together 11 years, but hadn’t married.
“He got me doing meth after the (last) baby,” Munoz said.
“More than 70 percent of our cases involve meth,” Pierce said, again addressing CPS cases in general. “In most of our cases, because of the nature of addiction, we have to make them stop using, and that’s when they do anything they can not to have to quit. They go kicking and screaming.”
On Sept. 21, 2005, Munoz and the ex-live-in who fathered her children got into an argument. Munoz said he was high on crank that night. She wasn’t, for a very good reason.
“I couldn’t find it,” she said. “The last time I had done it was on the 19th (two days before the incident). It proves again that everything happens for a reason.”
When the argument escalated, says Munoz, her ex picked up the toddler and hit Munoz in the face as he held the baby. After the police came and arrested both of them, the children were placed in foster homes for two months before being allowed to live with Munoz’ aunt. Munoz was charged with child endangerment.
A week after getting released from jail, Munoz started her self-imposed rehabilitation.
At first the children were sent to live with the father’s mother, the one who called the police that night. But the grandmother changed her mind. Munoz begged CPS workers to allow the kids to live with her own mother, but they denied the request because her mother lives in the same apartment complex that Munoz lives in.
Now the father is fighting Munoz for eventual custody of the children. She carries the restraining order she finally obtained against him everywhere – just in case he makes good on his threats toward her.
“He wants custody to hurt me,” she said. “And he’s still doing meth, and nobody is testing him.”
As her case progressed through the system, Munoz said CPS case workers wanted her to admit to hitting her ex that fateful night. Her mother-in-law told authorities, both CPS workers and the police, that Munoz hit her son with the baby in his arms and that her son did nothing wrong. But Munoz said police had found inconsistencies in his mother’s story, and have the photos to prove it. That night, they snapped a photo of Munoz sporting a fat bruised lip.
So far, Munoz has refused to admit she hit him – because it’s a lie, she said.
“I think they’re starting to see the truth,” said Munoz, tears streaming down her face. “But I don’t have my kids. How can they think they’re God?”
The mother-in-law was subpoenaed in court and though the full upshot of that hearing is not clear and closed to the public, as all juvenile dependency cases are, charges of child endangerment against Munoz were dropped about a month ago. But Munoz feels CPS is keeping her in the dark.
“I’m doing all the meetings on my own,” Munoz said. “They (CPS) don’t give straight answers. They haven’t given me a case plan, and I ask them, ‘What can I do to help my case?’ There’s nothing.”
Pierce could not comment on any case, but offered, “If a parent were in a situation like that, I would not mind if that parent would call me. I could explain how things work.”
Perfection is in eye of the beholder
CPS worker Smith said she has heard on many occasions the same remark from anguished parents that Herrera had asked rhetorically: “How can these people sleep at night?”
“Why are we abusing our power to make someone say something they shouldn’t have to say?” said Smith. “As a social worker I’m concerned with a child’s safety in the home. But there’s nothing in the code that says a parent has to admit to anything.”
Are there many social workers who implement the admit-to-get policy?
“Of course! But there’s a lot of social workers who don’t believe in that. Others justify what they’re doing and anytime you do that, something is not right.
“I can safely say that every case I’ve worked I’ve returned children back home within six weeks,” Smith added. “I go to sleep at night because I know I have to live with my conscience.”
“Of course, not everyone does the right thing when they’re supposed to do the right thing,” Pierce said. “It’s awfully hard to show the good things we do here and refute the false claims people make. That’s a tragedy because we’re trying to do a service to the community. We’re never going to be perfect, but we’re going to strive to be perfect.”
