Henderson Update: “I Never Had a Right to Confront My Accuser” pb

SEVEN CHILDREN REUNITED WITH MOTHER OVERNIGHT FOR FIRST TIME IN 22 MONTHS

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 27, 2013) —A family whose children were placed into foster care 22 months ago after the parents were falsely arrested and jailed was reunited for three days and two nights earlier this week.

A catalog of the Hendersons’ attempts to regain custody of their children is here.  Both parents have denied ever abusing any of the children.

The children and their friends enjoyed playing together as a family, watching and participating in a fashion show, and having a dance party, with the girls doing most of the dancing.  Elizabeth’s children played with the baby, and they danced some more.

Of the visit, Mrs. Henderson told The Post & Email:

It was a really great weekend.  I think the kids got a lot of healing done and there was lots of love…physically, spiritually and mentally…and I’m really glad that we got to have that time together.  We’re trying to keep the momentum with the overnights with another overnight this weekend.  I’m trying for a Saturday night stay-over and all day Sunday.

When do you find out if that is approved?

I don’t know when, but I’ve spoken with the social worker already, and he said as soon as he has word, he’ll contact me.

How did the overnight visit come about, given that DCFS and the court seemed to be at odds two weeks ago?

The confusion comes in with the switching back and forth.  The court will say, “We’re having a difficult time with the department; we need the department to liberalize,” This last time, we got the department’s cooperation, but the judge said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute!”

I think the department got wind of the judge’s frustration, and that’s why we were told, “Now you don’t get even unsupervised.”  But I think because we had that successful TDM, it’s harder for the department to go back after they’ve made their own judgment.  So we were waiting for the two to balance out.

The other factor is that we’ve had a lot of really wonderful support from people like Elizabeth, who has escorted us to meetings and court dates so that we have witnesses so that the department has a greater duty to hold to their pledge.  We’re writing letters and encouraging the department to live up to its word and let us have the kids for overnight and for the high holy days.  My counselor wrote a letter, and we had some friends who wrote letters. So all of those things came in to play.  So now the idea is to keep the ball rolling while we have this good momentum going.  Also, Elizabeth was here for the entire weekend. It’s another set of eyes and ears.  With the department in your life, you have to be doubly-careful, because any scrape, any bruise, any strange conversation is going to be suspect.  So it was really helpful to have that.  And you never know when the department is going to show up at your home.

Did they show up over the last three days?

No, they didn’t.

Did they call?

Yes, the social worker called on Tuesday afternoon to tell me what time everybody was going to be picked up, which of course, I already knew.  So when he called, I had the kids still here and I told him, “The kids are asking when they can have their next overnight, so can we go ahead and set that up so I can set their minds at ease?” and he said, “Let me talk to my administration and get back to you soon.”

What was the first night like?

The first night was really great; everybody had a really full day.  We had lots of food and dance parties and water fights.  Even though there was a lot of activity, they still stayed up really late because they were so excited…they didn’t want to go to sleep or for it to stop.  It was really fun and exciting the first night. By morning, I had five out of seven kids in surrounding beds all around me (laughs), so it was really nice.

The second night, there was more of a routine and they went to bed at a more decent hour.  It was really neat to see how in just 24 hours how quickly they normalized back to what they know.

As an observer, the children looked to function well as a family while together.

If the trauma came from within the family unit, I think you would see that.  I think what people are looking for, and I think partly, that’s what the department counts on, but when they get tot their safety zone, they can start to relax.  On the other side, as it drew to an end, they acted out in anticipation of leaving. For the younger ones, that displayed as temper tantrums and hiding.  They couldn’t find their clothes, they tried to get into the bathtub, hid in the closet.  The older ones became angry and picked fights with their siblings.  You could see that they didn’t want to go and they were just acting out in a show of frustration.  I had to bring the babies down the stairs kicking and screaming because they refused to come when it was time.

That must be very hard to deal with.

Yes, it was.  (Pause)  I think DCFS is trying to set up a return of the children to me as long as I’m separate from my husband.  Part of my reason for saying that is when we had made plans for Jeffrey to take my daughter to the Seder dinner at Habad, I let them know that, and they said, “Fine.”  Then right before Friday night, they called and said, “No, we’re not comfortable with Jeffrey being alone with your daughter.  And I said, “Well, he said he has unsupervised visits…” and they said, “We just don’t want him taking her out alone.”  They also said they don’t want Jeffrey staying overnight while the children stay overnight.  So we agreed and complied with that such that Jeffrey would come for the day and then leave.  But I think the department is backtracking a little bit in that area, because they’re aiming to return to me and somehow leave Jeffrey out of the equation.

Do they have any justifiable reason to identify Jeffrey as a problem?

No, but now they’re saying that they want him to have a different therapist because the one he’s been seeing isn’t good enough for their standards.

Do you think that is that an excuse?

The therapist he goes to is in a group that they recommended over a year ago, and it’s the same people who did our visitation.  They’re definitely approved by the department.  So it’s frustrating for him to use somebody from their list and then have them say, “Oh, no, that’s not quite acceptable.”

Is it that they don’t like Jeffrey personally?

They don’t know him, so they can’t not like him.  I think they have an idea of who they think he is, and they don’t like that.  I don’t think that’s going to go away.

Because he stands up for constitutional rights?

Right.  He’s definitely not someone they’re interested in dealing with because the things they do by force of habit that are not constitutional, that are not lawful, are going to be called into question.  That’s uncomfortable for a public servant to be told, “You’re not saying what you said you were going to do.”  So instead of saying, “Yeah, you’re right,” they say, “That guy’s a bad guy!”  I think it’s a case of that, and it’s really hard to watch.  From my perspective, knowing the kind of man my husband is and then who they’re making him out to be, it’s hard to watch.

Over the weekend, A**** said that the social worker asked her, “Are you afraid of your father?” and she told me that she said to the worker, “Why did you ask me that?” and I asked her, “Well, then what did you say?” and she said she told him, “Of course not.”

What did she then say?

I couldn’t get too much more out of her then.

And the department is constrained by confidentiality laws, so they cannot discuss their reasons for doing things in specific cases with the media.

The confidentiality thing is such a catch-22.  The department asks about the children’s medical records, and people want to know why the kids are getting things to eat or why aren’t the court orders being followed, but if there are children involved, that’s confidential.

So how does the media handle coming up against this brick wall of confidentiality?  If I say it’s OK for you to investigate my children’s case, then shouldn’t it be OK?

But Judge Michael Nash is the one who opened up the juvenile courts to the media unless there’s a compelling reason not to allow a reporter in.

That was really a play, because before that, you could have already people come in with a special request; it’s just that people never did it.  What he did was take the idea of people complaining to him that the courts weren’t open and using it as a way to get re-elected as a judge and say, “Hey, let’s get these courts open; let’s get people in here!”  But he didn’t change the court policy at all.  People were always allowed in.  I get frustrated with that, and even after that happened, in a friend’s case, when we went to be supportive of them, to be eyes and ears, which is so important, the judge said, “We can’t have the public in here,” and we said, “Well, these are our friends.”

That is evidence that the courts are not functioning in the way which our Founders intended.

I’ve never been given the opportunity to face my accuser, my accuser being the woman who wrote the initial report when Jeffrey and I went to jail and they took the kids.  The emergency response worker came and told me, “You have no choice; the kids are going into foster care,” and then wrote in her report that the reason they were taken was that I went to jail.  But I was never able to cross-examine that woman; that was not an option for me; I was in jail.  I had no communication with my attorney whatsoever.  They don’t come to your jail cell.  I wrote my attorney letter after letter from jail and had no response.

The Sixth Amendment to the Bill of Rights states that an accused has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”

Right.  So that goes back to what you were saying about the foundation of what our courts should be.  It should be that someone says, “Hey, you’ve injured me.”  And the two parties – the one who said, “You’ve injured me” and the one who supposedly did the injury – go before a judge and a jury of their peers, and they say, “Let’s hash this out.  You can’t work it out between yourselves, so let’s work it out here.”  And that’s fair; it makes sense.  There are situations where you need judges; you need witnesses and all of these things to keep everybody square.  So it’s not that I think that the courts are bad or judges are bad, but as you said, they’ve gotten so far away from the foundation…it all comes down to how they’re going to pay the bill.  Operating that courtroom, the judge’s assistant makes $200,000 a year.  The last time we went to court, someone looked up the court positions and found that between the judge, the recorder, the clerk and the bailiff, it is $1,000,000 a year.  That’s for four people…that’s amazing!  And that’s bare minimum.  Every courtroom in this country…that’s a lot of money!

And the taxpayers are paying for it.  Most people do not know how bad the problem with the courts is.

Then you have to ask, “When people are paying their taxes, where does that money go?  Does it go to pay for things like judges and courts?”

What is the next step in the process of reuniting your family?

Hopefully there will be an overnight visit this weekend.  A next step would be to have overnight visits every weekend.  We would then hope to get three or four weeks of those successful visits and then go back to the court and ask for the children back.

Is there a court date set?

No, I have to request one through a Change of Petition.