Hi my name is Nikki. My 14 year old daughter flew to Columbia, SC from Dallas, TX to visit her aunt and paternal family on April 16, 2014. She got into trouble in school for trading her iPhone for cold medication and cigarettes on May 21st. On Thursday, May 22, she was taken into state custody and immediately placed in foster care.
Not My Children: A True Story of CPS and Government Funded Kidnappers
I received a text message on her aunt’s first court date stating, “Please call about Dominique Jackson.” I have placed my daughter in psychiatric care due to suicidal threats years ago but she has not had any issues since. This is my daughter, whom I have full custody, but I did not, and still have not, received a single phone call from DHS. They did not attempt to call a single family member pertaining to my daughters case either. Which to my understanding is breaking federal laws.
Her aunt says that all charges of negligence were dropped against her. Now they are placing her in a work camp! I have spoken to my daughter many times and she has told me that her case worker stated, “I don’t go chasing after grown folk. If you were my child, I would have already been up here raising hell, if your mom cares, she would have called the day you were taken into custody!”
I was not even aware until after the fact because I was not contacted. The DHS caseworker also told her aunt that she spoke with me and I said, “my daughter is not to live with any one but her aunt, and this is why she is in foster care.” I have NEVER spoken to DHS for fear they will twist my words and I will lose my temper, giving them an actual leg to stand on.
When I spoke with a man claiming to represent my daughter (court date) May 27th, he told me that I could “not come up there and bring her home. They will not release her to me.” I recorded the conversation. Now the caseworker said I could have taken her home that day! I can prove they have broken many federal laws.
They claimed they were worried about her mental state but if that is the case, why is she not in a psychiatric facility? Why is she in a foster home? I am trying to find a lawyer through legal aide but any direction you can point me in, I will be eternally grateful. This is my daughter and I want her home where she belongs right now. They are breaking the law and causing emotional stress on the entire family. Especially her little brother.
On Friday, May 2,2014 at 3:18 pm, I went to pick up my two older girls, ages 10 and 13 from middle school. A case worker from CPS was there holding my children, in the office. She never stated why I was there. I later read my paperwork and found allegations of “Neglect”. Neglect from what specifically was not ever clarified.
Pajama Girls
I figured I had nothing to hide so I told her some old story, of a domestic issue in 2006.
I was told that:
We could no longer live in our home
My children could not be around their father
I could not be alone with my children and
My mother has to be around the children at all times.
I never did violated those terms but because the caseworker found me with my children and my mother at our home, where we were told that we could not live, the caseworker claimed that I did indeed violate the terms.
If I did violate them then why didn’t she say so on that particular day.
The caseworker never stated that my children could not not return there with my mother and plus my husband was not there he was at work. My children were taken and separated.
(My son, 8 and is at a kids shelter, my daughter,10, is at group home all alone, and my 9 and 13 year old are together in foster care.
I did not violate. We just purchased a very nice home. How can I put my story “out there” where others can read it and offer me advice? My children are all depressed and I’m desperate PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!
I’m a former foster child. I had suffered abuse at home with my step dad. I stood up to my abuser and asked for the help of child protective services. He confessed and was convicted for his crime and I was placed in foster care. Even though my step dad was the criminal he was released years before I was. Foster care had become such an abusive prison for me I finally ran away, homeless out on the streets, to young to work and no where to go.
Not only do I have physical scars from the abuse I received in foster care but some days I still cry from the type of mental maltreatment I received at the hands of my supposed protectors. I’d come a long way since foster care. I had worked full time and went to school at night to finish high school and continue further in my education to become a surgical dental assistant. Later, I changed my career path and began working for scholastic books. I refused to allow CPS, my therapist, and the foster parents opinions to control who I would become or to limit my future. (I was lucky to be stubborn and rebellious.)
Here recently I’ve had a great opportunity to become connected with other former foster children, and we each share our stories with each other and give each other support. But I started to notice something. The opinions and ordeals each former foster child had faced in foster care, seemed to echo the same opinion or same unacceptable situation when thrown into foster care. For example:
An ex foster child said something recently that had caught my attention. She said, “One thing that bothers me is society says parents who use drugs, abuse their kids, neglects them, and many more things, aren’t good enough to be parents and forcefully removes the children. This very same society looks the other way when we’re abused in foster care, moved several times, remain in limbo for years without any stability.
We go years if not forever, waiting to be adopted by these people, but they go overseas to adopt. We get dumped out on the street and left to survive like animals when we age out of the system with absolutely nothing. Society doesn’t care what happens after we leave our unfit parents. When in some cases the unfit parents are 100% better than the numerous foster homes who have been checked out by the state and approved. Just because we leave our unfit parents doesn’t mean we live happily ever after.”
Here are some numbers found on Wikipedia that support this former foster child’s statement.
Maltreatment per 100,000 US children.
CPS Parents
Physical Abuse 160 59
Sexual Abuse 112 13
Neglect 410 241
Medical Neglect 14 12
Fatalities 6.4 1.5
I’ve also had an ex foster child contact me wondering why foster kids are treated so badly and no one pays attention. His reasoning, his temporary foster parent had run him over with her truck. He was pronounced dead but then had finally been revived. He sued the state for this and somehow only ended up with $40 thousand dollars and mass long term pain (his court appointed lawyer received the bulk of the money) and he also has many bills from the doctors, him and his bio mother are obligated to pay. ( I can understand his frustrations.)
I’ve been reading many ex foster kids stories (including having my own) and what I find is more atrocities after they were removed then what they experience at home. I can not help but wonder why this agency has made such great leaps and bounds on how to manipulate, maneuver through the law, and perfect how to remove children but they themselves have no idea how to raise children. They have spent millions upon million each year for over 30 or 40 years on these state run agencies yet in general all they have produced is abused and neglected children who go on to struggle in society.
Look at these statistics copied from children’s rights.org
12-30 percent struggled with homelessness
40-63 percent did not complete high school
25-55 percent were unemployed; those employed had average earnings below the poverty level, and only 38 percent of those employed were still working after one year
30-62 percent had trouble accessing health care due to inadequate finances or lack of insurance
32-40 percent were forced to rely on some form of public assistance and 50 percent experienced extreme financial hardship
31-42 percent had been arrested
18-26 percent were incarcerated
40-60 percent of the young women were pregnant within 12-18 months of leaving foster care.
Nancy Schaefer already further summarized all of this as, “The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect in 1998 reported that six times as many children died in foster care than in the general public and that once removed to official “safety”, these children are far more likely to suffer abuse, including sexual molestation, than in the general population. Think what that number is today ten years later!”
Senator Nancy Schaefer reported, “that poor parents very often are targeted to lose their children because they do not have the where-with-all to hire lawyers and fight the system. Being poor does not mean you are not a good parent or that you do not love your child, or that your child should be removed and placed with strangers; that all parents are capable of making mistakes and that making a mistake does not mean your children are to be removed from the home. Even if the home is not perfect, it is home; and that’s where a child is the safest and where he or she wants to be, with family;
I’ve also read countless ex foster children’s stories of how they had been medicated for one thing after another and even witnessed an adopted child so overly medicated, he could not control himself. Thankfully after talking to his adoptive parents they agreed to slowly back him off of the 10 medications he was on. (He spent a lot of time in my home during this time) he has calmed down greatly and has now been able to focus and excel in school.
Some ex foster kids talk about the long term effects these medications have caused them, long after they have finally gotten off of the drugs. Some must continue taking different types of meds to help them deal with the after effects of the medications forced upon them in foster care, (all under the guise of being in their best interest).
Here’s one former foster child’s statement of what she had been through and how the medications affected her.
“I was living in Maryville, Tennessee and was 14 years old. I was depressed but I was a really quiet kid and a laid back type. These folks decided to start me on meds for my depression (a little red pill that I don’t know what it was) shortly after, I noticed I was feeling anxious and nervous. Then I noticed that I started having a short fuse when it came to my temper and it was more difficult to calm down. I told the group home owner this, but she wouldn’t have me taken off the meds.
I started spitting the meds into a paper Dixie cup they would give me water in to take my medications and crush the cup so no one saw. I started to feel normal again, I did that for a month before I was ratted out by another kid. Any way they took me to a doctor that put me on Paxil. The night they gave me that stuff, I was wired for sound and tried to play sumo wrestling with my roommate Donelle. The medication made me constipated and I felt overly psycho, again, no one would listen to me asking to be taken off the meds.
I also noticed I had more issues than usual on concentrating on my school work and I started being mean to others, really mean, as in hitting folks and yelling, it was like I was losing control. I found myself withdrawing because of it and crying my eyes out at every turn. That’s the same year I started having panic episodes. One day decided to ditch school and just go walking… I was told that I cussed out all of the group home staff but I do not remember it… Eric blankenship could tell you a lot about that. I was picked up by the police and taken back to the group home but then I was moved to a teen psych ward.
There at the psych ward they gave me a higher dose of Paxil and added Milloril to my meds and some pill they were telling me was a vitamin but I’m sure it was a tranquilizer because not long after taking it, I could barely hold my head up.
This went on for a month solid until a caseworker (a man) showed up to take me to my next placement. I was on those meds from foster home to foster home then one day I was taken to an all girl group home in Knoxville, Tennessee where shortly after I was abruptly changed from the Paxil and Millorill, to Prozac and Trazedone. The first time they gave me the Prozac, I was 15 years old and was being given 3 Prozac a day and my head always felt like I had a chunk of lead tied to it. Schooling was hard because it was a new place and I felt crazy out of my head. I hated everyone and everything.
I felt as if my mind was working overtime and I was suicidal because i could not calm down and in that same place I was fondled by one of the men staff workers when we went on a trip to the University of Tennessee Race Track. I would scream in the night in my sleep and I would be so nervous every day. I got defiant with the staff and would cuss this one lady in particular named Deiadra. She was a reasonably nice person but I got to where nothing mattered.
Till this very day, I am a nervous type person and I still have the panic episodes that started as a teenager, I have a very hard time coming down from any emotion whether it be anger, anxiety, joy, depression, fear, etc. I know it was because of the meds because prior to the meds, I was able to keep my emotions in check. I’m angry that this has to be this way, with me but this crap has forever changed me, along with all the being passed around like a dooby. It, all has an effect on me that, will never be normal again. I still consider myself a glitch ”
My child was kidnapped by my ex-husband while he was being investigated for sexually abusing our toddler. The police said that the doctors opinions that the child had been assaulted wasn’t enough to make an arrest, they needed his DNA inside her, or a video of him committing the act.
CPS was called by the doctors, and the state of Nevada’s own state child therapist diagnosed my baby with PTSD, from a sexual assault that the therapist believed occurred at the hands of her father. The CPS caseworker said she had no case, and to stop wasting her time, she turned the investigation on me, then made a “substantiated findings of abuse and neglect” on ME, just from statements made by my ex husband.
I went all the way to the “Fair Hearing” and proved the caseworker had lied and neglected to do her job. They were COURT ORDERED to remove me from the “Child Abuse Registry.” DFS, and every other government agency says they can’t force CPS to do anything, despite the court order being ignored.
Now in retaliation they have recommended sole physical custody to my ex, and continue to harass me. I haven’t broken the law, or ever abused any of my children, (two are grown, one is younger and living in Texas with her God parents while I fight for my now five year old in Nevada). They think they are above reproach, no matter what proof I have, or what a Hearing Master Ordered in a court order. They are ruining my life, and have kept my baby and I from spending one minute alone in three years. I’m exhausted, and emotionally spent. Can you offer any advice?
Sincerely,
Victoria Reynolds
The CPS caseworker Nicole Miller avoided needing a Judge to sign off on this and give me what’s known as a “family plan” (a parents chance to jump through hoops for the state, to reconnect with the child) by not having any reason to arrest me. So as I am not a criminal, I have still been given no attorney. Where as a rapist or murderer would be given an attorney by law if they could not afford one, but NOT a single mother working her way through school, neither arrested nor convicted of anything.
After Child Protective Services kidnapped my daughter, they tried to enroll her into a high school. In spite of the fact that a diploma had been issued acknowledging the fact she graduated from a home school. I was told directly “We are above the Department of Education.”
We have a baby…for awhile at least!
State laws say a child under the age of 16 (up to the 16th birthday) must attend school, with the following exceptions:
(e) The child has graduated from high school or has fulfilled all requirements for high school graduation.
Even though the Governor, State Legislature, Michigan Department of Education all recognize a home school diploma, CPS claims they do not. Even though my daughter was 16, CPS does not have to follow the law. CPS is very knowledgeable of school laws in Michigan. Home schools are not required to register the school or student with any governmental agency. Home schools do not have to conduct standardized tests. Home schools do not have to report student progress to any governmental agency.
CPS asked under what certified educational program was she taught. I told them I was the certified agency. They refused to believe me and also refused to call the Department of Education! At age 16, my daughter legally was not required to attend a school because of age and because of having graduated! But CPS is to arrogant to believe a parent whose child they had just illegally abducted!
In fact, any law that CPS wants to break, they are allowed to inject their personal opinions above what state and federal laws say. As I have said before, CPS has told me directly “When CPS is involved, parents and children have no Civil or Constitutional Rights. We are above the Constitution!”
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