13-year-old Nick Gundersen spoke to ABC reporter Kristin Thorne from his hospital bed. Image source.

Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

ABC7 in New York is reporting on the story of a Long Island mother who lost custody of her 13-year-old son when she disagreed with doctors over his treatment.

Kristin Thorne reports:

A mother on Long Island is fighting to have her son removed from chemotherapy treatment after he was given a clean bill of health by doctors.

Candace Gundersen’s son, Nick Gundersen, 13, is receiving court-ordered chemotherapy at NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola. He’s now in the custody of Suffolk County Child Protective Services.

The mother is reportedly a “holistic wellness coach” and watched her son suffer for 30 days while receiving chemotherapy.

He lost over 20 percent of his body weight. He developed typhlitis, which is a life-threatening bowel infection, he had fluid in both his lungs, he was bedridden. He stopped breathing on numerous occasions, he was on oxygen.

He was discharged from the hospital in July, and one month later doctors at Cohen Children’s Medical Center tried to readmit Nick. His mother refused, and a doctor allegedly called CPS.

On September 2, Gundersen said police officers and CPS showed up at her house at 3:30 a.m. and seized Nick and forced him to return to Cohen.

The next month, October, Nick was declared to be cancer free. According to ABC7:

…doctors at NYU Winthrop gave Nick a clean bill of health and said the cancer was gone, but informed the family that Nick would need three years of chemotherapy

Nick’s mother took him to different doctors in Florida who prescribed a less toxic treatment plan, and this apparently angered the doctors at Cohen Children’s Medical Center:

CPS brought an emergency removal proceeding on October 19th to seize control of Nick. Dr. Mark Weinblatt of NYU Winthrop testified a week later before a Suffolk County family court judge that Nick was in imminent danger of death.

On October 26, the judge granted custody of Nick to CPS and ordered him back to Suffolk County.

Nick left Florida and was admitted on October 30 to NYU Winthrop.

Nick spoke with ABC7 reporter Kristin Thorne from his hospital bed:

“They basically took me away from my parents and that’s unnecessary because they’re trying to help me and they’re not trying to kill me. I think that they should focus on other families that actually need help and whose children lives are actually in danger,” he said.

Read the full article, along with video, at ABC7 in New York.

See Also:

The Cancer Industry is Too Prosperous to Allow a Cure

Unapproved but Effective Cancer Cures

Aurora Chicago Lakeshore Hospital in the city’s Uptown community (Vignesh Ramachandran/ProPublica Illinois)

Commentary by Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News

A psychiatric hospital in Chicago is being investigated by federal and state authorities for multiple reports of abuse of children in their care, many of whom are under state custody through the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

Although the following ProPublica article highlights one particular hospital, investigations by Health Impact News have found that the stories contained within this piece are repeated in psych wards, group homes, and juvenile detention centers all over the country.

Many children who are able to tell their stories have told our reporters of similar horrors to the treatment suffered by the children in this story. Once they are hidden away behind the locked doors of these facilities, in state custody, with little contact with the people who love them, they often become victims of sexual assault, physical abuse, and drugging that they neither consent to nor want.

They become invisible, hidden in the shadows, with their only hope of a voice being the very people with vested financial interests in keeping them silent about the abuse. It is not unlike slavery in many ways.

Children who are eventually returned to their families often come back traumatized. They are haunted, and triggers lie around every corner.

The stories of Samuel Mitchell, Brady Folkens, and the Odonnell twins contain some of the most brutal reports of institutionalized abuse that we have reported. There are many more such stories that happen that go unnoticed by any media.

See:

Colorado Mom Loses Medically Kidnapped Son’s Childhood – Now Reveals State Corruption

Healthy 17 Year Old Dies Shortly After South Dakota Takes Custody Away from Mother

Kidnapped Twins in Michigan Physically Abused: Being Shipped out of State to Destroy Family Ties

It seems that every time that we talk to any former foster child that was forced into a psych ward, group home, or juvenile detention center, their stories of widespread sexual and physical abuse are the same. They are the rule, not the exception.

The response is always the same: the children all report that no one listened to them. When any one of them reported abuse by foster parents or in the facilities, they were told that no one would believe them. They are bullied or shamed into silence, left to suffer, while taxpayers pick up the tab to finance institutionalized abuse.

ProPublica reports that Neil Skene, special assistant to DCFS Acting Director Beverly “B.J.” Walker, gave the typical, politically correct response to the reporter and to the public:

 “The question for DCFS is whether children are safe there,” Skene said. “Nothing that we are seeing gives us concern for their safety.”

DCFS acting inspector Mary Paniak disagrees with Skene’s assessment:

Paniak wrote that she had “significant concerns for the care and safety of the children” at Lakeshore, according to a copy of the memo obtained by ProPublica Illinois.

She provided a list of actions that DCFS could take.

No mention is made about the most obvious to many of our readers, which is to stop taking children needlessly and to work to keep children with family as much as possible.

That simple step would serve to eliminate much trauma and the “need” for psychiatric services – a need which is based more on the agency’s need for funding than the actual needs of the children.

Nonetheless, there was an important step that Paniak listed that would go far in addressing the problems facing the agency, but DCFS refuses to agree to it. That is:

…bringing in an independent expert to do a comprehensive review of the treatment and mental health services at the hospital.

In an interview, Paniak said an independent voice could provide expertise and objectivity. She said she was disappointed by the agency’s decision not to seek an independent review.

Interestingly, DCFS and Child Protective Services nationwide routinely force parents onto some form of a “safety plan.” If the parents do not comply with every provision of the plan, their children can be taken, taken children can be kept in the system, and parental rights may be terminated.

Yet, in a twist of hypocrisy, the agency itself seems to be able to refuse to comply with the “safety plan” given to it in order to protect the children it is tasked with protecting, and consequences for the agency are rare.

Chicago Psychiatric Hospital Is Under Fire Over Reports Alleging Abuse of Children

Aurora Chicago Lakeshore Hospital is under federal and state investigation over reports that detail sexual assaults and physical abuse of children, including some who were cleared for release but remained hospitalized because child welfare officials couldn’t find more appropriate homes.

by Duaa Eldeib
ProPublica.org

A Chicago psychiatric hospital that treats hundreds of children in state care is under federal and state investigation over safety concerns and alleged sexual assaults, and it may be forced to close if it can’t correct deficiencies.

STUCK KIDS Illinois Children Languish in Psychiatric Hospitals

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has investigated 16 allegations of abuse and neglect this year at the Aurora Chicago Lakeshore Hospital in the city’s Uptown community, including allegations that children were raped and sexually abused by staff and other patients, physically assaulted and inadequately supervised, a ProPublica Illinois investigation found.

Among those reportedly abused or hurt in the incidents were children who were cleared for discharge from the hospital weeks or months earlier. DCFS, however, had failed to find them a place to go — a persistent issue for the troubled agency that ProPublica Illinois documented this year.

In addition to child welfare investigations, the Illinois Department of Public Health has conducted a series of inspections on behalf of federal authorities since July that found the hospital had failed to ensure the safety of suicidal patients, obtain consent before giving patients — including children — powerful medications and sufficiently monitor patients.

Federal authorities have said they will cut off funding that is crucial to the hospital’s operations by the end of November if officials there do not implement immediate changes, according to federal records and court documents.
Hospital officials declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica Illinois, but the CEO, David Fletcher-Janzen, said in a statement that they have been working with state and federal authorities to fix deficiencies. He said the hospital strives to provide a safe, therapeutic environment for patients.

“Chicago Lakeshore Hospital takes every allegation of impropriety very seriously and files reports immediately. All allegations, regardless of probability, are reported to maintain a high level of caution and transparency,” Fletcher-Janzen said. “Our goal is to improve the lives of these young patients so they can grow to be healthy adults both physically and mentally.”

The hospital has come under fire before. State inspection reports in recent years found that an employee, who was later terminated, repeatedly punched a 26-year-old patient who had hit him; that the hospital failed to ensure a safe setting for a 15-year-old girl who received 18 stitches after cutting herself by breaking off part of a toilet; and that proper precautions were not taken with a patient with a history [of] inappropriate sexual behavior, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In 2010, DCFS hired consultants from the University of Illinois at Chicago to conduct a review of Lakeshore and found a host of problems, from patients reporting sexual assaults by peers to “lax or inconsistent supervision by staff.” Lakeshore officials disputed the findings at the time, saying the report was “highly subjective” and contained findings “unsupported by the facts.”

The Chicago Tribune revealed in 2010 that children at the hospital had been sexually assaulted.

Neil Skene, the special assistant to DCFS Acting Director Beverly “B.J.” Walker, said the agency is focused on making sure children are properly cared for and addressing the issues federal officials have identified.

“We are fulfilling our responsibility to oversee the care of youth who are our responsibility,” he said. “We believe that the current monitoring bodies will let us know if their concerns rise to a level where we need to stop using the hospital.”

Many of the new allegations echo those of the past. In September, a 7-year-old girl was taken to the emergency room at UIC after she reported that a 12-year-old boy pulled down her pants, sexually assaulted her with his finger and “made her bleed,” according to confidential reports obtained by ProPublica Illinois.

While at the emergency room, she also reported that a Lakeshore employee had kissed her on the mouth and sexually assaulted her with his finger, and said she was “afraid to go back” to Lakeshore. A UIC social worker, records show, expressed concerns about delays in Lakeshore’s reporting and seeking medical care for the girl.

That same Lakeshore employee was at the center of another investigation in August. A 12-year-old girl reported that the man had locked her door, grabbed her by the shirt and touched her breasts. When she tried to pull away, she said that he pulled her down onto his lap, squeezed her buttocks and made her sit on his lap and touch his penis.

Both girls are in DCFS care. The agency said it continues to investigate the alleged assaults and the employee is not currently working at the hospital. Chicago police have also opened an investigation.

DCFS found sufficient evidence to support four other complaints this year, including one report in June that an 11-year-old girl sexually acted out toward four girls on her unit, according to agency records.

In yet another case, a 17-year-old boy diagnosed with bipolar disorder was left with a bloody mouth and bruising in April after he said two male employees dragged him to his room, where they pinned him down while holding his arms over the bedrail, according to DCFS records. The boy said one of the workers threatened to break his arm.

He had been admitted to the hospital that day after a suicide attempt, his mother said.

“It’s never easy sending your child to the hospital, but the thing that helps you sleep at night is at least you know they’re safe,” the mother said in an interview. “But he was far from safe. He was hurt and scared.”

When she arrived at the hospital to visit her son, she said she was horrified at the sight of blood on his lips and mouth and bruises on his face and arm. She began looking for another hospital to transfer him to immediately.

“I knew I could rescue him from there,” the mother said. “But most of the kids there are wards of the state. There is no one to rescue them.”

Hospital officials did not respond to allegations about individual cases. Fletcher-Janzen said employees who are subjects of allegations are either suspended or moved to a different building while Lakeshore and DCFS investigate.

The child welfare agency continues to send children to the hospital, which serves children and adults in two buildings a few blocks apart. Nearly half of the 16 investigations have not been substantiated, and the other cases reflect individual incidents rather than a systemic problem, Skene said.

“The question for DCFS is whether children are safe there,” Skene said. “Nothing that we are seeing gives us concern for their safety.”

As of late September, after officials with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services notified the hospital it planned to stop making its Medicare payments, 18 children in DCFS care were patients there, including a 4-year-old boy who had been at the hospital for nearly three weeks, according to documents.

At least three of those children had already been cleared for discharge but DCFS had not found them other placements, records show. ProPublica Illinois revealed in June that hundreds of children have spent weeks and even months trapped in psychiatric hospitals as the agency searched for residential treatment centers, foster homes and other placements.

DCFS acknowledged the problem and said it was working to find more appropriate homes.

The number of DCFS patients at Lakeshore remained at 18 earlier this month; some children, including the 4-year-old, had been released, but others were admitted as federal and state officials continued their inquiries.

The investigations alarmed Meryl Paniak, DCFS’ acting inspector general, who in a confidential memo urged Walker to take action. Paniak wrote that she had “significant concerns for the care and safety of the children” at Lakeshore, according to a copy of the memo obtained by ProPublica Illinois.

Paniak listed steps the agency could take, ranging from immediately planning for alternative placements for the children to sending an official to Lakeshore each day to evaluate the hospital’s progress resolving its problems.

DCFS officials complied with nearly all of the recommendations, including the daily inspections and making plans to move children. But they have not agreed to one of Paniak’s most sweeping recommendations: bringing in an independent expert to do a comprehensive review of the treatment and mental health services at the hospital.

In an interview, Paniak said an independent voice could provide expertise and objectivity. She said she was disappointed by the agency’s decision not to seek an independent review.

“The question for DCFS is whether children are safe there,” Skene said. “Nothing that we are seeing gives us concern for their safety.”

DCFS relies on Lakeshore to treat children in need of psychiatric hospitalization. Last year, of the approximately 1,100 children and adolescent patients treated at the hospital, 41 percent were in state care, according to court filings from the hospital. The majority of the hospital’s revenue comes from Medicaid payments.

Read More: Hundreds of Illinois Children Languish in Psychiatric Hospitals After They’re Cleared For Release

The Department of Children and Family Services struggles to find appropriate homes for young people with mental illness

Lakeshore typically sees more children from DCFS than other area hospitals because it accepts children with the “highest needs and most volatile behaviors (that) other hospitals won’t,” Skene said.

The majority of the cases that DCFS substantiated or continues to investigate involve sexual abuse or assault.

A 12-year-old boy reported in January that he was fondled by a 17-year-old. Five other patients reported the teen tried to touch them inappropriately when employees were not looking, records show. The 17-year-old was on probation and was sent to juvenile detention following the incidents, according to DCFS documents.

In that case, DCFS cited hospital staff for inadequate supervision and wrote that it was unclear “where responsible staff were” when the abuse happened and why a 12-year-old was on the same unit with older teens.

Another investigation into allegations of inadequate supervision involved a 16-year-old from Honduras who had come to the U.S. unaccompanied. The girl, who is transgender and in the custody of the federal government, reported she had sex with another patient at the hospital this summer. That investigation is ongoing.

DCFS also is investigating an allegation by an 8-year-old boy who said one of his roommates climbed on top of him and started “to hump” him and another stood next to his bed while masturbating, records show.

One complication in investigating these cases is the lack of video evidence. While the hallways contain cameras, the hospital has not provided footage to DCFS investigators on several occasions when asked for it, ProPublica Illinois found.

Skene said the agency has discussed the issue with the hospital, and the hospital is in the process of replacing its surveillance system. The installation of the new system in the children’s building is expected to be completed this week, a hospital representative said.

“It’s just an awful lot of very serious red flags in a very short period of time,” Charles Golbert, Cook County acting public guardian, said in an interview. He said children would be better served by an independent review of the hospital instead of separate investigations done by state and federal agencies.

He added it’s difficult for DCFS to be objective because it depends on Lakeshore to care for so many of its children. Without Lakeshore, he said, the agency has few options for psychiatric treatment.

“That’s a conflict of interest,” he said.

Last month, Michael Jones, a DCFS senior deputy director, said in court records that “significant challenges and harm” would follow if Lakeshore lost its federal funding and was unable to treat DCFS children, reducing the number of available beds for them by 25 percent. He called the hospital a “community partner and a necessary ally for DCFS and the children we serve.”

Jones also said the three other hospitals in Chicago that DCFS primarily uses do not always accept children in the agency’s care and may not be geographically convenient for some patients.

But Golbert said there’s another reason other hospitals are reluctant to take some children from DCFS. Those children, he said, sometimes end up staying weeks or months past their release dates because the agency can’t find homes for them. Children who remain locked in psychiatric hospitals for long periods of time may suffer additional emotional harm and sometimes begin mimicking the negative behaviors they are exposed to, including sexual and physical misconduct.

The 12-year-old boy who allegedly sexually assaulted the 7-year-old girl at Lakeshore last month had been admitted to the hospital in June and was cleared for discharge three weeks later. But he remained at the hospital for nearly four more months because DCFS could not find him an appropriate placement.

The alleged assault occurred during that time. The girl he allegedly assaulted was cleared for release at the end of August but did not leave until September, a week after the reported incident.

There is joy in the Bright household after just rulings to sanction CPS. Photo: Michael Ciaglo, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer

Commentary by Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News

There are elements that are common almost to the point of being universal in cases involving children taken from their families by Child Protective Services, including false allegations, lying by social workers, falsified medical records, failure of social workers to follow their own policies, laws broken by CPS, and the failure to consider evidence that refutes CPS allegations.

However, there is one thing that remains rare in CPS cases – that is, for anyone within the system to be held accountable. Repercussions for social workers, the CPS agency, or doctors involved in taking children from innocent parents are very rare.

On Thursday, November 8, 2018, a judge in Houston, Texas, called CPS on the carpet, issuing what the Houston Chronicle says:

…may be the largest-ever sanctions against Child Protective Services, forcing the state to come up with new training for its workers and pay more than $127,000 for wrongfully removing a couple’s children and allegedly lying to the court about it.

This follows a decision that Judge Mike Schneider issued last month involving parents Melissa and Dillon Bright, the same family whose children were medically kidnapped by CPS and Texas Children’s Hospital.

See:

In Unprecedented Move Texas Judge Orders CPS to Have No Contact with 2 Children Removed without Warrant – Social Worker Pleads 5th in Court

Houston Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger writes:

It’s an unusual case that offers repeated examples of CPS missteps, but the Brights’ attorneys say it’s also a sign of a “broken system” and the need for more accountability from the agency tasked with making decisions as to whether parents are fit to keep their own children.

While we would agree that more accountability is certainly needed, we at Health Impact News have found after years of in-depth investigation of hundreds of similar cases that the Bright family case is anything but “an unusual case.” On the contrary, their story is typical of what we see on a regular basis.

Melissa Bright and her baby, who was seized from his family in an all-too-familiar scenario. Photo: Michael Ciaglo, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer.

The details of the story are in the Houston Chronicle piece. The essence of the story is this:

There was an accidental injury when their 5-month-old baby fell off of a chair. Melissa Bright called 911, and the baby was taken to Texas Children’s Hospital.

Like most children’s hospitals, Texas Children’s has a Child Abuse team. They deemed the baby’s injuries to be “consistent with child abuse,” which ultimately led to CPS seizing custody of the Brights’ two children.

The children were taken without a warrant in an “emergency removal,” and the social worker lied in his reports to the court about the facts of the situation.

Other doctors discovered that the baby had an underlying medical condition, a blood-clotting disorder, but that information was ignored by CPS.

The parents were not told about the emergency removal hearing or given any opportunity to defend themselves when their children were taken.

Again, there is nothing in this account that is any different from any other story that we have covered over several years.

The difference lies in the conclusions by Judge Mike Schneider, who is to be commended for standing up for what is right, in both last month’s hearing and yesterday’s hearing.

“It is not possible,” Schneider said in court last month, “to look at the facts and imagine that the agency actually felt there was any sort of urgent need for protection to remove the children.” (Source).

Judge Mike Schneider. Photo source.

Attorneys for the Brights requested, and got, sanctions placed on the CPS department for their blatant failures in medically kidnapping children from innocent parents.

In the sanctions hearing which concluded yesterday, attorneys Dennis Slate and Stephanie Proffitt:

…argued that the agency’s efforts to take the kids were based on such groundless arguments that they should be forced to pay the family for legal fees and other costs – a total of more than $127,000.

Now, attorneys for parents Melissa and Dillon Bright are calling for the firing of the CPS workers involved and asking for prosecutors to investigate and consider criminal charges.

Unqualified Social Worker

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Over the course of five days, the court heard testimony from the Brights, a program director and supervisor Edwards who drew incredulous looks in the courtroom when she so frequently claimed that she didn’t know, couldn’t answer or didn’t understand the questions that Slate eventually asked whether she had any knowledge that made her qualified to make decisions.

Lies by Social Workers Are Not Acceptable

The family’s attorneys presented evidence that the social workers lied repeatedly to the court:

“They lied in their affidavit, they lied in their sworn removal testimony and they have – when questioned about those lies – taken the Fifth,” said family lawyer Dennis Slate.

“When the Harris County District Attorney [Kim Ogg] ran for office said that she would investigate perjury claims within the Harris County courts. She needs to live up to that campaign promise and look into this case and bring the appropriate action.”

Note: DA Kim Ogg may be reached at 713-274-5800. Her office is also on Twitter here.

In October 1016, Child Protective Services attorneys in Orange County California tried to argue to the 9th Circuit of Appeals that it was acceptable for social workers to lie about parents in order to take their children. Like Harris County Texas judge Mike Schneider, the 9th Circuit judicial panel didn’t buy that logic either.

See:

Judges Reject Claim That Social Workers Didn’t Know Lying In Court to Remove Children Was Wrong

CPS Has Immunity, or Do They?

The Houston Chronicle continues:

Stephen Dieu with the Harris County Attorney’s Office, which represented CPS in the hearing … argued repeatedly that the agency was protected by sovereign immunity.

“There are legal remedies but this is not the one,” he said. “The department cannot be sanctioned.”

But a look back at agency records would show that’s not true.

Seven years ago, Slate and Proffitt won a $32,000 sanction in another case involving a “groundless” removal where the agency didn’t tell the parents about the emergency hearing and waited hours to take the kids after courts closed.

“When we got the sanctions in 2011, we really thought that would open somebody’s eyes,” Proffitt said. “There are only a handful of cases in Harris County that have even filed for sanctions. There’s no repercussions.”

This time, there were. [Emphasis added by HIN].

Judge Slaps CPS with Fine, Orders New Training for Workers

The Houston Chronicle states:

In a scathing ruling from the bench on Thursday, Schneider dinged the agency for being “dishonest” and possibly “malicious,” saying the entire removal and subsequent legal battle never would have happened if the agency just told the Brights about the emergency removal hearing and gave them a chance to defend themselves at the start.

“We do need to deal with the issue of how we make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said, before ordering the agency to pay $127,000 and giving them two weeks to create new training for its workers.

But, Schneider said, there was one thing the family requested that he could not order: an apology.

No Consequences for Child Abuse Doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital

For the Bright family, these sanctions of CPS are welcome news. However, there is no mention of any repercussions for Texas Children’s Hospital or the Child Abuse team of pediatricians that got the ball rolling to take the Bright children from their home.

The role of Child Abuse Pediatricians in these cases cannot be understated. CPS social workers are not doctors, and thus are not able to do the needed differential diagnoses to determine whether or not a child was abused or if they have a real medical condition that mimics abuse. They often simply take the word of the child abuse doctors without question. Attorneys and judges in turn often don’t question these doctors.

Thus, much of the blame for medical kidnapping of children from innocent parents lies squarely at the feet of these doctors, who are not experts in anything.

See:

Pediatric Child Abuse “Experts” are NOT Experts in Anything

The head of the Texas Children’s Hospital Child Abuse team is Christopher Spencer Greeley, MD. He did his internship at Vanderbilt University, another hospital known for its role in many medical kidnap cases.

Dr. Christopher Greeley – head of Texas Children’s Hospital Child Abuse Pediatric Team and President of the Helfer Society, an elite group of Child Abuse Pediatricians. Photo source.

Dr. Greeley is a major player in the field of Child Abuse Pediatrics and is currently the president of the Ray E. Helfer Society, the International Society for Physicians in the Field of Child Abuse.

We first reported on the Helfer Society earlier this year. Another of their members, Dr. Carole Jenny, coauthored a book with her psychiatrist husband Dr. Thomas A. Roesler entitled, Medical Child Abuse: Beyond Munchausen by Proxy, which redefines Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy in order to make it possible to charge more parents. We reported:

Dr. Jenny is part of the Helfer Society – an elite group of doctors involved with Child Abuse. She won the Helfer Society’s Award in 2004. Per their website:

The Helfer Award is given annually to the member of the Society who has made significant contributions to the field of Child Abuse Pediatrics.

The list of recipients contains several names that have come up repeatedly in our research of Medical Kidnap articles. It seems that a small group of people have acquired a great deal of power over the lives of American families as they impact policy, philosophy, and judicial decisions. See the list here.

See:

California Christian Homeschool Family Torn Apart as Children are Medically Kidnapped, Forced into Public School, and Mother is Forced out of Family Home

The Brights are thankful for the sanctions against CPS.

However, the Child Abuse Pediatric Team at Texas Children’s Hospital has not been faced with any consequences for their role in the Bright children being taken.

By Health Impact News/Medicalkidnap.com Staff
Health Impact News

Early in our Medical Kidnap research at Health Impact News, we found that a particular subset of doctors kept coming up in the stories of parents accused of abuse when their children had a medical condition that causes symptoms that mimic abuse.

Doctors known as Child Abuse Pediatricians or Child Abuse Specialists play a central role in the majority of medical kidnapping cases, particularly those involving accusations of Shaken Baby Syndrome, multiple broken bones, and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

We were shocked to learn that parents often lose their children, and are sometimes imprisoned, even placed on death row, due to the testimony of these Child Abuse doctors, while the parents had other medical experts, as many as a dozen, who have asserted that the child was not abused but rather had a medical condition that the Child Abuse doctors refused to acknowledge.

It is common nationwide for judges, social workers, and Child Protective Services attorneys to outright dismiss the stacks of medical evidence that would exonerate parents, instead convicting innocent parents based on the word of one Child Abuse Pediatrician.

Though Child Abuse Pediatricians are not truly “experts” in anything, in practice their word carries more weight in courts than the word of other, more qualified, doctors. (See: Pediatric Child Abuse “Experts” are NOT Experts in Anything). This frequently plays out in the court of public opinion and the media as well.

This did not happen by accident or by happenstance. On the contrary. It appears that this was a well-orchestrated move, with money and power as the driving forces.

As we continue to pull back the curtain on the “great and powerful Oz” of the child abuse physician industry, we have found that there is a calculated effort to silence opposition and to train the media and public to accept their interpretations and conclusions without question.

In a promotional video for Palmetto Health – USC Medical Group in Columbia, South Carolina, Child Abuse Pediatrician Susan B. Luberoff, MD, shines some light on how her group of doctors sees their role.

She says that the “most fun part” of her job is working with everyday people to “interpret” information for them:

A big part of my job is INTERPRETING information for people that are not medical, interpreting medical information for law enforcement officers, for DSS [Child Protective Services in South Carolina] caseworkers, for teachers, for other people that have a concern, and they’re being barraged with a lot of big words that they don’t understand, and maybe can misunderstand, and go down the wrong path.

Listen to her speak here:

The Helfer Society Wants to Educate Media

Many of the Child Abuse Pediatricians who play a role in Medical Kidnap stories are a part of the Ray E. Helfer Society, which is an elite group of doctors in the child abuse field.

Dr. Christopher Greeley is President of the Helfer Society, as well as head of the society’s Public Relations Committee. Photo source.

According to the Helfer Society’s website, one of their goals is to educate the media and the “lay public” as they testify against parents whom they have accused of child abuse.

In the section on “Public Relations and Media Literacy Training,” they write:

Child abuse physicians have always talked to the lay public. Testimony to judges and juries is a regular part of CAP practice, and physicians have been called upon to talk to the press about high profile cases and prevention agendas.

There are many doctors, including top medical experts in their respective fields, who disagree with the conclusions of the Child Abuse Pediatricians.

The Helfer Society actively seeks to discredit these doctors who dispute their interpretations of the data.

See some of our coverage on Dr. Waney Squire, who disagrees with the junk science of Shaken Baby Syndrome, something frequently diagnosed by Child Abuse Pediatricians even when there are other medical explanations:

Pediatric Neuropathologist on Failed Science Behind Shaken Baby Syndrome: Doctors Value Their Careers More than the Truth

World Renowned Neuropathologist has Career Destroyed for Disproving Shaken Baby Syndrome

As long as the fields of medicine and science have existed, there has always been disagreement. There has always been the courageous doctor, scientist, or explorer who challenges the status quo and takes the field into new frontiers and discoveries.

Science is ever-evolving, ever-changing, and ever-growing. The brilliant mind who reaches deeper and further is celebrated in hindsight, but is often mocked and ridiculed by those whose ideas he challenges.

It appears that the Helfer Society is more interested in asserting their superiority where child abuse is involved, and they seek to squelch opposition by other doctors, as well as those in “the legal community and lay press.”

The website narrative continues:

Arguably this job [of talking to the lay public and press] has gotten both harder, and more important in the last ten years.

A number of physicians have shown up regularly in court to put forth opposing and often novel theories for individual children’s injuries. Some of these same physicians have been creating a body of medical literature challenging the foundation of child abuse diagnosis, much of it novel hypothetical and poorly [sic – It is unclear what word they left out, whether “conducted,” “written,” or “accepted by the Helfer Society members.”]

Armed with this literature, these physicians have developed alliances within the legal community and lay press to bring these arguments to legal journals and lay media. The Tuerkheimer law review article and the PBS/Pro Publica television segment are two well known examples.

Child Abuse Pediatricians who are Helfer Society members are not happy about it.

Recent media representations of child abuse issues have been hot topics on the Helfer list-serve, and instill passion and calls to action, as well as anger and sometimes disgust among members.

It is clear that it is important to the Helfer society members to maintain their reputation and power with the legislature, as well as their funding. When their dictates are challenged by other doctors, alternative media, and you – the public, these core values of the society are jeopardized.

The importance of educating our members on interacting with the media ripples into every part of our profession: for our profession’s standing in the public eye; for our advocacy with government legislature and funding agencies; for education of the public and other key stakeholders; and for the protection of children in general.

From the Helfer Society website – https://www.helfersociety.org/committee-awards

There have been thousands of parents who have been accused of abuse when there is abundant evidence that there was something else going on, as courts all across the country are overturning child abuse convictions when opposing medical testimony was not present. Yet, families have been destroyed by the testimony of one of these Child Abuse Doctors.

More on the Helfer Society Agenda

The president of the Helfer Society, Dr. Christopher Greeley, is the head of the Texas Children’s Hospital Child Abuse Team. He also heads up the Public Relations Committee for the Helfer Society.

According to the website, the purpose of the the committee seems to be directly related to anticipating and responding to those doctors and journalists who don’t accept their conclusions.

They want to BE the voice that the media and the public listens to, no matter how much opposition there may be:

Purpose: To discuss and generate the Helfer Society’s public responses to current and anticipated controversies and debates which occur in the field of Child Abuse Pediatrics.

Scope: The scope of the committee includes issues affecting our professional practice, the research and science in our field of practice and public policy affecting families and children.

Aims:

Primary Aim

The primary aim of the committee is to provide the Helfer Society a mechanism for a public voice on issues which affect the field of Child Abuse Pediatrics.

Secondary Aims

1. To provide a vehicle for the Helfer Society to generate public comments on issues in the media.
2. To provide the Helfer Society a vehicle for publically addressing challenging scientific, policy and professional issues concerning Child Abuse Pediatrics.
3. To provide a mechanism for Society members to engage in the public policy and media arena as part of their clinical practice. This committee would provide resources or policy recommendations as directed by the committee chair or Society president.

Shaken Baby Syndrome

The Helfer Society alluded to “the Tuerkheimer law review article,” which is likely this article: “The Next Innocence Project: Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Criminal Courts,” by law professor and former district attorney Deborah Tuerkheimer, who has written a great deal challenging the junk science behind Shaken Baby Syndrome.

She has authored a book entitled, Flawed Convictions: “Shaken Baby Syndrome” and the Inertia of Injustice, and her work is featured in the documentary, The Syndrome Film.

When The Syndrome Film was released and scheduled for various film festivals around the country, supporters of Child Abuse Doctors actively opposed the film and tried to prevent it from reaching the public. See:

New Film Exposes Shaken Baby Syndrome Myth – Opponents Want to Silence it at Film Festivals

The objective of the Helfer Society is to rebut stories like the one featured in this film, no matter how many experts dispute the narrative promoted by Child Abuse Pediatricians. Their aim is to influence media to, in turn, influence the public mindset, or groupthink.

If the society has their way, how many more innocent parents will be falsely accused of Shaken Baby Syndrome, or other child abuse that never happened?

Policies Serve to Endanger, Not Protect, Children

There are many medical experts whose work we have covered at Health Impact News who challenge the conclusions of the branch of medicine known as Child Abuse Pediatrics.

Due to the efforts of those who wish to silence them, good doctors who stand true to their Hippocratic oath and the principles of scientific research have been attacked, and careers destroyed.

As a result of the unquestioned dogma of Child Abuse Pediatricians, many children are not protected from abuse. Instead, many children are placed by Child Protective Services into situations that prove to be far more dangerous than any that they left.

According to many federal databases, they are at least 6 times more likely to be raped, molested, abused, or killed in foster care than they are in their own families, and those numbers may well be much higher.

Other children who have serious or complex medical conditions are left to languish in hospital beds all over America, for months or even years, without the benefit of their parents’ advocacy for their best interests. They lay in lonely wards, away from everyone who loves them, while their mothers are accused of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, or Medical Child Abuse.

Media stands positioned to question the abuses of the Child Protective system and to provide “the other side” to the interpretations espoused by Child Abuse Pediatricians, unless they are “educated” to disregard the voices who challenge those interpretations.

It appears that this education of media by the Helfer Society is little more than cleverly-disguised marketing of the product of their agenda. Such does not befit the mission of true journalism.

See more on Child Abuse Pediatricians:

Child Abuse Pediatricians: An “Ethically Bankrupt” Profession that Destroys Families

Exposing How Child Abuse Pediatricians Medically Kidnap Children: A Guide for Parents

American Academy of Pediatrics’ Failing Shaken Baby Syndrome Diagnoses: Use Tyranny When Science Fails

By Health Impact News/Medicalkidnap.com Staff
Health Impact News 

The story is one that we hear repeatedly: parents take their child to the doctor for an accidental injury or an illness and end up being accused by a doctor of abusing their child.

The doctor calls Child Protective Services, and the stunned parents watch their child be taken away by social workers. Often, one of the parents will go to jail for accusations of child abuse.

There is little to no due process, and the multiple court hearings that follow are merely an illusion of attempts at justice, since the accusing doctor, a Child Abuse Pediatrician, has essentially become judge and jury.

Opposing viewpoints by other doctors are often ridiculed or disregarded.

It matters little if the parents have no history of violence, or that there is not a single shred of real forensic evidence which supports the diagnosis of abuse.

Once the Child Abuse Pediatrician decrees that child abuse has happened, the Child Protective System, as well as the foster care and adoption system, becomes activated, and parents watch in horror as their children are stripped away from them, sometimes permanently.

Health Impact News has documented much of the history of the entity known as CPS:

From Child Protection to State-sponsored Child Kidnapping: How Did we Get Here?

The U.S. Foster Care System: Modern Day Slavery and Child Trafficking

These events parallel the takeover of American healthcare by corporate pharmaceutical interests through the rise of the American Medical Association (AMA) in the late 1800’s.

The AMA suppressed all other modalities of dealing with sickness by establishing a licensing process for “medical doctors” which was backed by powerful government interests.

See:

American Medical Revolutions: How the AMA Took Over America

When it comes to the seizure of children from their families by Child Protective Services, doctors don’t merely play a peripheral role, contributing their medical findings to the body of evidence gathered by law enforcement investigators.

On the contrary, doctors known as Child Abuse Pediatricians are at the very heart of what has become known as state-sponsored child abductions and medical kidnappings.

Though board certification for the sub-specialty of Child Abuse Pediatricians did not exist before 2010, their history traces back to the early and mid 1900s.

Instead of being built upon a foundation of protecting children from abuse, the Child Abuse Pediatrics field is largely a house of cards built on a flawed foundation with a controversial, decades-long history hidden in the background.

Early medical papers by a small group of doctors framed the child abuse story from the very beginning in such a way that silenced opposing viewpoints. Their strategy has been to develop policies that anticipate arguments and squelch opposing voices by maligning or discrediting them.

These tactics are in use today by Child Abuse Pediatricians. These doctors heavily influence the policies of courts, legislators, the child welfare system, and the American Academy of Pediatrics regarding child abuse.

“The Battered-Child Syndrome”

The beginning of the modern effort to address child abuse as a medical diagnosis arguably traces to a landmark paper called “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” which was published on July 7, 1962 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

In this paper, Dr. C. Henry Kempe and the other authors concluded that:

The battered-child syndrome … should be considered in any child exhibiting evidence of possible trauma or neglect (fracture of any bone, subdural hematoma, multiple soft tissue injuries, poor skin hygiene, or malnutrition) or where there is a marked discrepancy between the clinical findings and the historical data as supplied by the parents.

Dr. Kempe’s paper, which was reprinted in Child Abuse and Neglect in 1985, declared that radiologists were experts who are uniquely qualified to find signs of abuse that other doctors frequently miss, and he recommended full skeletal x-rays of any children who met the above qualifications, “in order to ascertain the presence of characteristic multiple bony lesions in various stages of healing.”

Dr. C. Henry Kempe. Photo source.

As many innocent parents have discovered, these policies were indeed enacted by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

When they take their child to the local children’s hospital or emergency room because the child has an accidental injury, exhibits symptoms they cannot explain, or has a mysterious bump that appears, Child Abuse Pediatricians are quickly called in, and their child is subjected to a full skeletal survey (x-rays). This is standard practice today.

See:

Exposing How Child Abuse Pediatricians Medically Kidnap Children: A Guide for Parents

Other Medical Conditions Rejected by Kempe and His Followers

As we have documented many times at Health Impact News, there are many other real medical conditions that can cause symptoms that mimic abuse, such as infantile rickets, osteogenesis imperfecta, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, vaccine injuries, metabolic disorders, infections, or accidental injuries.

Shouldn’t these medical conditions, which all documented today in the medical literature, be the focus of medical doctors, rather than child abuse? Abusing children can be a criminal offense, and is generally part of law enforcement investigations and detectives trained in forensic evidence, something doctors are not trained to do. Most doctors who are Child Abuse Specialists only look at medical records, and never even interview the child or family members.

Numerous families have lost their children due to accusations by Child Abuse Pediatricians that they abused their children, while other doctors, including recognized medical experts in their fields have diagnosed medical conditions that the parents did not cause.

Parents and advocates alike are dismayed when judges, social workers, and sometimes even law enforcement ignore the reports of upwards of a dozen experts in favor of a single report of a narrative put forth by the Child Abuse Pediatrician.

We recently reported that there has been a well-orchestrated effort by an elite group of Child Abuse Pediatricians known as the Helfer Society, founded by Dr. Ray E. Helfer in 1999, to influence the way that the media and the public view child abuse issues. See:

Elite Medical Doctors Seek to Control the Media and Public’s Perception of Child Abuse Specialists

The Helfer Society’s Public Relations Committee states on their website:

A number of physicians have shown up regularly in court to put forth opposing and often novel theories for individual children’s injuries. Some of these same physicians have been creating a body of medical literature challenging the foundation of child abuse diagnosis, much of it novel hypothetical and poorly [sic – unclear what word was left out].

The Helferites, as they call themselves, currently assert that non-Helferite doctors “put forth opposing and often novel theories” for the injuries, as though those physicians who disagree with them are grasping at straws and coming up with strange new ideas to counter their well-established, almost sacred dogma that certain symptoms must signify abuse.

Yet, the “theories” with which the Helferites disagree have been existence for at least as long as their own ideas.

None other than Dr. Ray Helfer’s mentor, Dr. Kempe, wrote about such “theories” in his 1962 paper, in what might be viewed as a preemptive strike to discredit opposing interpretations of the data.

He said that the “clinical manifestations of the battered-child syndrome” can be “very mild” and could be “often unsuspected and unrecognized.” In these children, he says:

the patients’ signs and symptoms may be considered to have resulted from failure to thrive from some other cause or to have been produced by a metabolic disorder, an infectious process, or some other disturbance.

In these patients specific findings of trauma such as bruises or characteristic roentgenographic [x-ray] changes as described below may be misinterpreted and their significance not recognized.

Circular Reasoning

According to a paper by Jennifer Crane of the Centre for the History of Medicine, Kempe’s daughter Annie Kempe said that her father “found it was common practice to offer ‘patently absurd’ explanations for the injuries of children,” who were:

misdiagnosed with rare brittle bone diseases, “spontaneous” cases of subdural haematoma, unexplained bleeding disorders, and with the catch-all notion of “failure to thrive.” (Source).

Could this be why Child Abuse doctors such as Susan Luberoff, MD, feel it necessary to “interpret” the “big words they don’t understand” for non-medical people, so they don’t “go down the wrong path” (which might be interpreted as meaning a path that the child abuse team doesn’t want them to take)? See video.

Kempe stated in his paper that parents frequently deny any wrongdoing. In reality, it may be true that guilty people often deny wrongdoing, it is also true that innocent parents also deny that they have done anything wrong. Kempe had an answer for that as well:

Such attitudes are maintained despite the fact that evidence of physical attack is obvious and that the trauma could not have happened in any other way.

(He may have forgotten that he previously indicated that the signs are often so subtle that only certain trained experts could recognize them by x-rays.)

The entire narrative is circular, set up many decades ago by a doctor who seemed determined to pre-empt any alternative explanation for symptoms that the doctor asserts must be abuse because there is no other explanation.

CPS Established as Result of Doctors’ Assertions

“The Battered-Child Syndrome” paper of 1962 was followed in 1968 by a book similarly titled, The Battered Child, authored by Dr. Ray E. Helfer, the pediatrician who later founded the Helfer Society. His mentor Dr. C. Henry Kempe co-edited the book.

Dr. Kempe went on to found the National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect in 1972.

Congress passed the bipartisan federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), or the “Mondale Act,” in 1974 which gave birth to the agency known as Child Protective Services (CPS).

The practice of Medical Kidnapping had begun, but the public remained largely unaware for decades.

See:

Child Kidnapping and Trafficking: A Lucrative U.S. Business Funded by Taxpayers Called “Foster Care”

The media and the public learned about “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” and the narrative seemed set in stone.

Doctors were taught that “the triad” of symptoms – brain bleeding, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhaging – meant that the baby had been violently shaken and abused.

If doctors saw certain kinds of broken bones, or “multiple rib fractures in various stages of healing,” their medical training demanded that they interpret the findings as abuse and call CPS.

To the unsuspecting public, it appeared that there was only one way to see these injuries, and that there were no other perspectives to be had.

There Has Never Been Complete Consensus with Child Abuse Doctors’ Interpretations

From the time that the public first began to be aware of child abuse as a social issue, there have always been dissenting voices. There have always been doctors who researched past the agenda that they had been taught in medical school who recognized that the reality that they were seeing didn’t match up to what they had been told to believe.

There is not, and never has been, a consensus among all qualified, expert doctors with regards to Shaken Baby Syndrome, metabolic bone conditions, vaccines, or child abuse diagnosis.

The Helfer Society would have the media, courts, legislators, and the public believe that they are the only perspective on child abuse.

But they are not.

According to researcher Jennifer Crane, Drs. Helfer and Kempe and their colleagues were the ones who actually “invented” the concept of the battered child syndrome. (Source)

Based on their own ideas and biases, they wrote what later became the policies for the American Academy of Pediatrics for “recognizing” child abuse.

These policies have been communicated with social workers, law enforcement, media, and the courts, and have been implicated in the medical kidnapping of thousands of children from innocent parents.

There have been many dissenting voices from medical experts over the past several decades, but the Child Abuse Pediatricians and the Helfer Society have worked to malign them and reduce their opposing interpretations to irrelevance.

World-renowned neuropathologist Dr. Waney Squier was one such doctor who recognized that what she had been taught about Shaken Baby Syndrome simply was not true. After years of testifying against parents, it was the evidence and the science of Shaken Baby Syndrome symptoms that changed her perspective.

Because she began testifying on behalf of innocent parents, she was vilified, and her career was destroyed.

See:

Dr. Waney Squier Speaks out on Faulty Shaken Baby Science Used to Condemn the Innocent

Neuropathologist Doctor: I Believed in Shaken Baby Syndrome until Science Showed I was Wrong

She was not alone:

After she had been discredited months earlier, 350 doctors, scientists and lawyers rallied together in her support, and in an unprecedented move had written a letter of protest to the British Medical Journal(BMJ), questioning the GMC’s decision.

See:

Dr. Squier Wins Appeal but Banned from Telling the Truth in Court about Shaken Baby Syndrome

Using X-rays to “Prove” Child Abuse

Dr. John Cannell wrote an article, “Child abuse or infantile rickets,” in 2014. (Source).

He says that “the possibility of infantile rickets” is often overlooked in cases where a child is found to have multiple broken bones.

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect (AAPCCAN) is made up of Child Abuse Pediatricians. Dr. Cannell addresses the committee’s guidelines for evaluating such children:

However, common sense questions still need answering regarding the medical diagnosis: Why would abusive parents repeatedly bring their infant to the emergency room? How can trauma severe enough to fracture bones not leave a bruise? Why wouldn’t such chest trauma severe enough to fracture ribs not result in lung damage?

Additional questions need answering: Wouldn’t parents who abuse their infant severely enough to cause multiple fractures show evidence of psychopathology? Why do all eyewitnesses to parental behavior report the parents were concerned and loving?

Are members of AAPCCAN impartial experts or do they almost always testify for the state?

He points out many times in the medical literature where radiologists missed infantile rickets on x-rays.

He specifically takes issue with Dr. Kempe’s 1962 study, “The Battered Child Syndrome.”

It was this paper, more than any other, that led to the current widespread medical belief that multiple fractures at various stages of healing always mean child abuse.

However, at least some of the radiographs [x-rays] depicted in Kempe et al actually showed ricket; one radiograph even showed classic bowing of the legs.

This means the seminal paper that started the medical profession on its current course of always diagnosing multiple unexplained fractures as child abuse may have been fatally flawed. [Emphasis added.]

Many other doctors throughout the United States and the rest of the world also disagree with some of the assertions of the Child Abuse Pediatricians.

Doctors such as Dr. Michael Holick, Dr. David Ayoub, Dr. Marvin E. Miller, Dr. Steven Gabaeff, and many others have testified and written medical reports for families accused of abusing their children – reports which assert that there are medical reasons for the children’s injuries or symptoms and that they are not cases of abuse.

Conclusion: How Much Longer will Society Allow Doctors to Have the Power to Kidnap Children and Destroy Families?

At what point will law enforcement and the courts stop letting Child Abuse Pediatricians, who have held themselves up as the ultimate authority regarding child abuse, continue condemning parents and stealing children by denying due process and preventing true investigations from happening when child abuse is suspected?

When will pediatricians start doing the real work of doctors in searching for answers to health problems that could cause brittle bones and other illnesses? Should not every other medical option be explored first, to explain symptoms that are now, primarily, only being used to accuse parents of child abuse?

Should doctors really be used as expert witnesses in cases of child abuse simply on the basis of medical evidence, or should professional investigators from law enforcement trained in forensic evidence be utilized to investigate child abuse accusations, upholding the accused person’s Constitutional rights to due process of the law, just like any other suspected criminal?

Dr. John Patrick Caffey was born in Utah in 1895, the year that Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen accidentally discovered the x-ray, which was originally known as the “roentgen ray.” The impact of Dr. John Caffey on medical kidnappings of today cannot be underestimated. Photo source.

By Health Impact News/Medicalkidnap.com Staff

“The bones tell the story,” or so the saying goes. But do they tell the full story?

The discovery of the x-ray in 1895 gave rise to a group of doctors who claimed to be able to read the x-rays and find the subtle signs of child abuse that everybody else missed.

It took decades for their rhetoric to be accepted by the public, but when it was finally embraced, it was not long after that The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA) was passed by a bipartisan Congress, establishing what we now know as Child Protective Services.

Most historians trace the modern era of Child Welfare to the landmark paper, “The Battered-Child Syndrome” by Dr. C. Henry Kempe and his colleagues, published in 1962.

See:

Has the U.S. Become a Medical Police State? How Doctors Deny Due Process to Kidnap Children Through CPS

From Child Protection to State-sponsored Child Kidnapping: How Did we Get Here?

The paper forms the theoretical framework upon which assumptions by Child Abuse Pediatricians of today are based, up to and including language to circumvent any alternative explanations that parents and other doctors may present.

No matter how much solid medical and scientific research goes into rebutting the allegation that the child was abused, the foregone conclusion by Child Abuse Pediatricians is that it is incorrect.

Dr. John Caffey Established His Breed of Doctors as “The Experts” in Child Abuse – in the 1940s

The history of the paper, and this line of thinking, owes its roots to a man named Dr. John Patrick Caffey who was born in Utah in 1895, the year that Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen accidentally discovered the x-ray, which was originally known as the “roentgen ray.”

After training in internal medicine and pediatrics, he practiced at Babies Hospital in New York as a pediatrician.

Dr. Caffey wrote an influential paper on Shaken Baby Syndrome in 1972. Photo source.

Meanwhile, the field of radiology, the medical specialty of using imaging such as x-rays in the practice of medicine, was in its infancy. There was only one full-time pediatric radiologist in the entire United States in the early 1920s.

As a pediatrician, Dr. Caffey attended occasional radiology conferences, but he became frustrated after attending one such conference, which was taught by a pathologist, not a radiologist.

His comment that it was “another hour wasted” was overheard by Babies Hospital’s chief of pediatrics, who asked him if he thought he could do better. He reportedly answered that he “could hardly do worse.”

As a result, he was put in charge of the hospital’s radiology department in 1929. According to the Society for Pediatric Radiology website:

He began to realize that the field was wide open for a physician of scholarly bent and pediatric background, and he seized his opportunity. He rapidly taught himself the range of normal appearances and the plain-film manifestations of children’s diseases. [Emphasis added.]

He published the first edition of the Pediatric X-Ray Diagnosis textbook in 1945. He defined what was normal.

The next year he published an article in the American Journal of Roentgenology that examined the case studies of 6 infants admitted to his hospital with subdural hematoma. X-rays showed that the babies also had multiple long bone fractures.

Subdural hematoma (brain bleeding) is one of the “triad” – the 3 symptoms upon which doctors assume a baby has been shaken. Broken bones in babies, even babies with documented conditions of bone fragility, are assumed to be child abuse.

Often broken bones and shaken baby symptoms are seen in the same child.

With this article, Caffey invited radiologists and paediatricians to be more aware of the possibility that violence was, albeit occasionally, purposefully inflicted upon children.

Caffey established himself, and the discipline of paediatric radiology, as radical, innovative and unafraid to draw what were, for this period, bold conclusions about child maltreatment.

Authority in diagnosing the physical mistreatment of children by adults was thus concentrated within the professions of paediatrics and radiology.

Building on Caffey’s early work, these professions consolidated their status as ‘experts’ in managing child battering in both Britain and America over the following 20 years. (Source.)

Thus, Caffey’s paper formed the root of declaring that pediatric radiologists were THE experts in child abuse, long before Dr. Kempe’s 1962 paper and the board certification of Child Abuse Pediatricians which began in 2010.

Caffey’s Junior Assistant Discovers “Unrecognized Skeletal Trauma”

Dr. Frederick Silverman trained at Yale University as a pediatrician. From 1945 to 1947, he trained under Dr. John Caffey at Babies Hospital in New York – the same time period during which Caffey published his paper and book. He became Caffey’s junior assistant.

Dr. Fred Silverman – Photo Source.

From there, Silverman became the Director of the Division of Roentgenolgy at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in 1947.

He published a paper in 1953 entitled, “The Roentgen Manifestations of Unrecognized Skeletal Trauma in Infants,” in the American Journal of Roentgenology. He noted classic metaphyseal lesions in 3 babies with injuries similar to those in Caffey’s study.

Silverman concluded that the bone fractures were clearly the result of several traumatic injuries.

Consequently, he urged physicians to gain accurate patient histories, emphasising that parents may ‘permit trauma and be unaware of it, may recognize trauma but forget or be reluctant to admit it, or may deliberately injure the child and deny it.’ (Source.)

Caffey later joined Silverman to work with him at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Silverman collaborated as one of the contributing authors of Dr. C. Henry Kempe’s paper, “The Battered-Child Syndrome” in 1962.

Silverman moved to Stanford University Medical Center in California in 1976 where he served as professor emeritus of radiology and practiced at Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital for 25 years.

Dr. Edward Neuhauser

Dr. Edward Neuhauser was born in 1908 and trained in orthopedics. He became “disenchanted” with that field and considered other options including tugboat captain before deciding to enter radiology. According to Radiology:

In 1941, without completing his residency, Dr. Neuhauser became director of radiology at Children’s Hospital, Boston. (Source.)

He became a prolific writer of medical articles and a charismatic teacher of medical students. In 1949, he “established the world’s first regular pediatric radiology fellowship.” (Source.)

Interestingly, he won the Jurzykowski Award in Medical Science for “work in the diagnosis of Wilm’s tumor.” (Source.)

Wilms tumor is the diagnosis that was given, before any biopsy or lab testing was done, to little Grace Beabout, a previous story we covered on MedicalKidnap.com. See:

California Parents Lose Custody of 2-Year Old Daughter When Asking for a Second Opinion Before Removing Child’s Kidney

Exclusive Group of Pediatric Radiologists Is Formed

As the field of pediatric radiology continued to grow, concerns were growing in the general public over the risks of radiation from x-rays, as nuclear weapons were being tested above ground in places like Nevada and the Soviet Union.

There were talks among Caffey and his colleagues about how these doctors would work with the American Academy of Pediatrics and what path they would take.

In what members later referred to as a “jam session,” a group of doctors got together for a day of discussions on April 21, 1958, the day before the opening of the annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society in Washington, DC.

Only a select group of American and Canadian doctors, mostly pediatric radiologists, were invited to the event.

According to the Society for Pediatric Radiology website:

Though it would have no official connection with the pediatric session, the American Roentgen Ray Society would provide viewboxes, a lantern slide projector, and a blackboard. The meeting would not be publicized to the general membership of the American Roentgen Ray Society.

There were only 9 people present at the exclusive meeting, which was conducted without a printed agenda.

The Society of Pediatric Radiology was established that day, and they met again on September 29 of the same year.

This time there were 33 physicians in attendance, “including 11 who later became president of the society.”

Dr. Neuhauser became the first president, elected by attendees:

…perhaps because more than half of the charter members had spent some time in Boston under his pedagogical spell.

Dr. Silverman was named president-elect, not only because of his outstanding qualifications and his close ties to Dr. Caffey (who was not present), but also because he practiced in Cincinnati, the site of the next meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society.

Rules were established over the next year, including a provision that membership would be limited to:

…individuals with a primary interest in pediatric radiology and should be limited to 100.

Part or all of the meeting should be closed to everyone but members and contributing guests.

There is no mention of who these “contributing guests” were, what their agenda was, or what they contributed.

Drs. Neuhauser, Caffey, Holt, Silverman, and Taybi at the 1975 meeting of the Society for Pediatric Radiology in Atlanta, Georgia. Source.

Drs. Caffey, Silverman, and Neuhauser each remained involved with the society over the years.

Society Gives Rise to “The Battered-Child Syndrome” Landmark Paper

It was not long after the formation of the Society for Pediatric Radiology in 1958 that Dr. C. Henry Kempe published the previously mentioned paper, “The Battered-Child Syndrome” in 1962.

Dr. Kempe was born Karl Heinz Kempe in what is now Poland on April 6, 1922. He was a Jewish boy born in what was then Germany shortly before the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He came to the United States in 1939 at the age of 17 after the war broke out. The Holocaust had already begun.

Before he fled the horrors happening in his homeland, a doctor had taken him under his wing and inspired him to learn medicine. Kempe was accepted into medical school at the University of California, where he studied pediatrics.

In 1948, he became an assistant in pediatrics at Yale.

After his 1962 paper which he wrote with other doctors including Dr. Silverman, he collaborated with Dr. Ray E. Helfer on a book entitled, The Battered Child. He went on to found the National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.

Dr. Helfer considered Dr. Kempe to be his mentor. The Ray E. Helfer Society, an elite group of Child Abuse Pediatricians, was later founded in 1999.

Dr. Ray E. Helfer, founder of the elite Helfer Society of Child Abuse Pediatricians, was mentored by Dr. Kempe. Source.

X-Rays Have Never Told the Whole Picture

These doctors, papers, and the societies that formed around them served to establish pediatric radiologists as the “experts” on child abuse, and x-rays as the primary tool to diagnose abuse, especially when no one else was clever enough to recognize that the child had been abused.

It was all very appealing to doctors, social workers, and attorneys who wanted a definitive magic bullet to identify child abusers. By writing papers that decreed the expertise of radiologists as the proper identifiers of abuse, dissent and opposition were effectively shut down.

The campaign to discredit doctors who disagreed with their interpretation of the data was begun many decades before the Helfer Society began their recent media educational campaign described in our previous article here.

The arguments that parents falsely accused of child abuse face in today’s courtrooms began before their own parents were born.

These arguments have always been challenged by doctors, researchers, scientists, and others who understood from the beginning that x-rays and other diagnostic imaging tools are just that – tools.

They are not adequate to “provide an objective measure of child abuse, but rather must be used merely as one indicator alongside” other evidence. (Source.)

It Goes Back to Funding and Power

As various child abuse societies were established as a result of the efforts of early pediatric radiologists, the mindset of the public and legislators began to change:

The most significant outcome of these international discussions was not in changing the specific construction of the battered child syndrome, but in enabling a small and disparate group of transfer agents to mutually reassure one another of the fundamental necessity for further research into child battering. (Source.)

Radiologists rose up to be established as the experts able to diagnose child abuse, despite abundant research by other medical professionals which rebuts their conclusions.

Jennifer Crane documents what she calls  the “invention” of the battered child syndrome:

Kempe initially ‘discovered’ this condition and positioned radiologists as the primary diagnostic agent.

She says that:

…radiologists were particularly successful in negotiating themselves a key role in the identification of child battering….

In Britain, the publication of ‘The Battered Child Syndrome’ saw radiologists seek to direct funding and resources to their increasingly expensive profession. (Source.)

Pediatric radiologists were the original “Child Abuse Pediatricians” who cleverly positioned themselves in such a way as to assure the continuation of the demand for their services, as well as to secure a never-ending flow of donations from non-profits as well as federal dollars for their continued research into conditions that, often, they made up, to the detriment of innocent families in the United States and around the world.

Commentary by Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News

It is clear that the effort to protect children from abuse has resulted in many non-abused children being taken away from innocent parents by Child Protective Services. Less than 16% of children are taken from their families for allegations of any kind of abuse (Source), and only 17% of allegations against parents are even substantiated (Source).

In the name of protecting some children, many more children are traumatized and abused by the very system tasked with protecting them. Medical kidnapping and state-sanctioned seizure of children is more common than most people have realized.

Yet parents whose children are taken find that they have less rights than criminals. The right to due process is conspicuously absent from almost all CPS cases. A legislator once told me that she does not care about the Constitutional rights of parents when it comes to child abuse allegations.

Is it possible to protect abused children while, at the same time, protect the integrity of families and the Constitutional or civil rights of parents?

Richard Wexler, the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR), believes that it is. He writes that his organization:

…believes the only way truly to protect children is to demand civil liberties without exception. There can be no true child protection when a government agency is given virtually unchecked power, almost no accountability, and operates in secret. (Source.)

In a document entitled, “Civil Liberties without Exception: NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda for Children and Families,” Wexler compares child abuse laws to potential anti-terrorism laws.

If the rules that currently apply in family courts were to be applied in the context of terrorism, it is readily apparent that there would be an outcry to the violations of civil liberties created by the fictional proposed laws.

Yet, it happens every day to American families dealing with CPS.

He invites readers to consider what would happen if then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had proposed legislation regarding terrorism with the following provisions:

Special anti-terrorism police could search any home without a warrant – and stripsearch any occupant — based solely on an anonymous telephone tip.

Any occupant of the home could be detained for 24 hours to two weeks without so much as a hearing – and they’ll probably be detained far longer because, in the special anti-terrorism court set up by this legislation, all the judges are afraid to look soft on “terrorists.”

At that first hearing the detainees may – or may not – get a lawyer just before the hearing begins, and they almost never get effective counsel.

At almost every stage, the standard of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” or even “clear and convincing” but merely “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in American jurisprudence, the same one used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.

And in most states, all the hearings and all the records are secret.

The reality is that this isn’t fictional at all – except that it doesn’t apply to alleged terrorists; it applies to families. These injustices are the experience of hundreds of thousands of parents all across the United States of America. Wexler says:

…this hypothetical anti-terrorism law already is the law governing child welfare.

The article lists a number of recommendations that NCCPR has made since 2000 which, if applied, would go far to ensure that the system takes only children who are truly in need of state intervention.

If Constitutional principles and civil liberties were actually followed by all state actors, then children would not be terrorized by our own government taking them away from loving homes.

Transparency and Openness

Much of what happens with Child Protective Services is done in secret. Courts are often closed, and parents are threatened with unconstitutional gag orders if they try to talk about the seizure of their children.

While agencies cite “confidentiality” concerns to the public, bad actors are left free to trample civil liberties like due process, perjury is unchecked, and children are left to be abused in foster care or group homes, or even to be trafficked to pedophiles or pornography rings. Criminal actions are shrouded in a veil of secrecy.

NCCPR calls for the most basic of protections for the integrity of the process: transparency.

Social workers and Child Abuse Pediatricians currently hold almost unlimited power to tear a family apart with no more than their word. Richard Wexler says that:

The power must be checked by accountability. Accountability is not possible in secret.

Nor is accountability possible simply by hiring people with more expertise and assuming they will do the right thing. It’s not supposed to work that way in a democracy. That is why it is so urgent that all court hearings and almost all records in child welfare cases be presumed open.

Shelby County Judge Corey Moore tried to silence Journalist Terri LaPoint for reporting the medical kidnapping of a newborn from family – a family that has since been exonerated. See story.

Attorneys for the parents or the GAL for the child might be permitted to request that a case not be open to the public, but Wexler states:

CPS should not even be allowed to ask for it. CPS has no interest in secrecy other than as a way to cover up its failings.

He points out that:

The most traumatic cases are likely to involve not only child protection proceedings but criminal cases as well. These hearings already are public.

Yet we have never seen nor heard a single account of a child saying that she or he was traumatized by the fact that such a trial was public. Nor do we know of any adult coming forward years after the fact to complain of such trauma.

There are some states that have opened up their CPS court cases to the public, and the results were positive. New York Judge Jonathan Lippman found that:

“It has been 100 percent positive with no negatives … Our worst critics will say it was the best thing we ever did. Their fears were unfounded … I wish other states would do it.”

NCCPR recommends that records, as well as the courts, be open.

The public tends to only hear of the cases where a child was left in a situation that CPS should have taken them out of. These are the horror stories that drive ever more intrusive legislation and help non-profits to secure funding.

But they are not the vast majority of the cases. More often than not, children are removed from good homes, not left in bad ones. Due to the policies of closed records, the media and the public get the wrong idea, and demand action to stop the child abuse crisis.

The Stanley children were taken from innocent parents for false allegations, prompting Arkansas state lawmakers to investigate how to stop this kind of abuse by the state. See story.

If other agencies, legislators, and the media had open access to the records, a more accurate picture could be painted. In this context, CPS would be free to comment as well, instead of saying, “There is more to the story, but we can’t tell you, due to confidentiality laws.”

Our experience at Health Impact News has been that parents WANT people to see what is happening. Parents tend to be forthcoming about their warts and failures, because they aren’t trying to pretend that they are perfect parents. They just want people to see that they are loving parents, albeit imperfect, who didn’t hurt their children.

Good Legal Representation

Wexler recommends that:

Quality legal representation must be available to all parents who must face CPS.

In the cases where the parents cannot afford an attorney:

The institutional provider of counsel should have lawyers available 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, so that they can begin to work on a case from the moment a child is removed from the home instead of only at or after the first hearing – or even later – as usually is the case now.

In any given CPS case, the state has more money and more legal resources at their disposal than the parents, presenting a lop-sided pretense at justice. How can parents fight back against such a huge entity, especially if they were already struggling to make ends meet BEFORE CPS?

Connie Reguli of Tennessee is a warrior attorney who fights for what is right for families. Photo from Family Forward Project Facebook page.

A judge in Washington state proposed a novel idea to help “level the playing field,” and it has worked well:

In Pierce County, Washington, the judge in charge of the county’s juvenile courts was dismayed at the escalating rate of terminations of parental rights – knowing that he was dooming some of the children to a miserable existence in foster care.

So he persuaded the legislature to provide enough money for defense attorneys to have resources equal to those of the Attorney General’s office, which represents the state child welfare agency in juvenile court. The result: successful reunification of families increased by more than 50 percent.

Along this line, I would like to propose a legislative mandate that, whenever an allegation by a Child Abuse Pediatrician is heard by a court, the court should be required to consider the testimony of any medical experts who disagree with the interpretation of the Child Abuse Pediatrician or who can attest to a medical condition that explains the child’s symptoms.

The state which pays for testimony against the parents should be required to provide a funding grant to the parents for medical experts who can provide exonerating testimony, in the interest of finding the truth as to whether or not the child was truly abused or simply has a medical condition.

GALS Should Actually Look Out for the Child, Not the State

When teenager Isaiah Rider was medically kidnapped, he tried repeatedly to fire his Guardian ad Litem (GAL). He said that she did not represent either what he wanted or what was best for him. (See story.)

Isaiah Rider with his mom Michelle. Isaiah said his GAL didn’t represent him, but instead actively fought against him. Photo provided by family.

We have heard this story repeated by kids all over the country who are old enough that their voice should be heard. NCCPR has also apparently found this to be the case. They recommend:

Law guardians should act as lawyers. Guardians ad litem (GALs) should advocate for what the children they represent want, even if the GAL does not think it’s in the child’s best interests.

…in most states, the job of the guardian is to fight for what the guardian thinks is best for the child – even if the child disagrees. The guardian may make the court aware of what the child wants but, if the guardian thinks that is bad for the child, the guardian fights against the child’s wishes.

Reporting Abuse

Too many parents have learned the hard way that a vindictive neighbor, a scorned ex, or a hostile relative can destroy their family by picking up the phone and making up lies. While this can waste resources that could be needed for truly abused children, it also serves to open up the door to CPS social workers to go on a “fishing expedition” to find the slightest excuse to take a child and put them into the system.

NCCPR recommends:

Before a call is accepted by a child abuse “hotline” and referred for investigation, the caller must be able to demonstrate that s/he does, indeed, have “reasonable cause to suspect” maltreatment.

The caller must be able to offer something more than a guess that a child really is being abused or neglected. To help hotline operators accomplish this goal:

• A rational method must be established for screening hotline calls.
• Anonymous calls should not be accepted.

Of all the sources of child abuse reports, anonymous reports consistently are the least reliable. They’re almost always wrong.

The “Central Registry”

Parents can end up on a “central registry” of child abusers even if the allegations are unsubstantiated. Many see the registry of a gross violation of civil rights, and for good reason. Wexler proposes recommendations to address these concerns:

No one should be listed in a central register of alleged child abusers, and no allegation should be substantiated, until, at a minimum, the family has had an administrative hearing conducted by a hearing officer outside of the child welfare agency. The standard of proof should be “clear and convincing.”

All states have massive databases listing everyone caseworkers suspect of being a child abuser. Most databases also include the names of people even when the accusation was determined to be “unfounded.”

This poses enormous risks to children. Anyone can be declared a child abuser based on no more than a caseworker’s guess. All she has to do is check a box on the form. Then the accused must fight her or his way out.

In some cases, there is no way to fight your way out at all. Some states allow for no appeal of this decision. In other states, the appeal process is long and cumbersome.

Yet a listing in a central register can have profound consequences….

As always, CPS agencies will claim that any curb on their power to effectively blacklist anyone they choose will compromise their ability to protect children. In fact, depriving people of employment based on rumor and innuendo is enormously harmful to children.

• Obviously, if a parent can’t get work, that will affect his or her children.
• If information based on little more than a caseworker’s guess is allowed to pile up in secret files, sooner or later some CPS worker is likely to claim that there is a “pattern” and use that as the basis to take away the children.

Children need protection from the mindless piling up of rumor and innuendo in files about their families. This is particularly true when unfounded reports are kept.

Wexler recommends that:

When a report is “unfounded” all records should be expunged within 30 days. The reason unfounded reports should be expunged is the same reason CPS agencies want to keep them.

Once again, they say they are needed to detect “patterns” or, as they often like to put it “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” But a pattern of rumor and innuendo is so misleading that it is worse than no pattern at all. In child welfare, where there’s smoke, there often is only smoke – and no one can see clearly through smoke.

Visitation

Children need relationship with their parents. The parent/child relationship, no matter how wonderful or dysfunctional, is crucial to a child’s development. In most cases, there is no justifiable reason for the state to withhold these visits.  NCCPR’s recommendation is:

From the moment a child is removed until the first hearing at which all sides are represented, the child welfare agency shall be responsible for arranging daily visits, unless it can show, by clear and convincing evidence, that this would cause severe emotional harm to the child.

Children are wired to need their parents. Deprivation of the parental bond is, in itself, very traumatic to children. See Marty Peele’s story.

Record Everything

Advocates universally tell parents facing CPS to “record everything.” Wexler takes it a step further:

All interviews conducted by CPS personnel in the course of child maltreatment investigations – not just interviews with children – should be, at a minimum, audiotaped, and preferably videotaped.

Interviewees must be informed that their statements are being recorded. Information from any interview that is not taped should be inadmissible in all court proceedings.

It is the experience of many, if not most, parents dealing with social workers or Child Abuse Pediatricians that the workers say one thing to them and another in court, or they actually fabricate information that is presented as fact to the courts.

A case could be made that parents may do the same thing. Recordings help to keep everyone more honest.

A basic tenet of communications theory is that people tend to hear what they want to hear or what they expect to hear. Everything we hear is filtered through our life experiences, our beliefs, and our prejudices.

There is no excuse not to require that every interview done by a CPS worker in the field be, at a minimum, audiotaped and every interview done at a CPS office or similar facility be videotaped.

As important as requiring taping itself is a requirement that interviews that are not taped be treated, in effect, as though they don’t exist.

In criminal cases, evidence obtained improperly cannot be admitted – no matter how compelling that evidence may be. The requirement is an attempt to be sure that police are scrupulous about the rights of citizens when they gather evidence.

If taping is “required,” but notes from interviews that were not taped still can be used in court, it is an invitation for apps to “fail,” workers to “forget” and batteries to “die” on a regular basis.

Raise the Bar

The standard by which a parent can be “substantiated” as abusive or neglectful is low, and as we have seen repeatedly in our investigations, parents may be essentially declared guilty without any real evidence required. Wexler takes issue with this and proposes that the bar be raised:

The standard of proof in all court proceedings should be raised from the current standard in most states, “preponderance of the evidence,” to “clear and convincing.” The standard also should apply when a worker decides to “substantiate” alleged maltreatment.

There are few punishments one can inflict on a child that are more severe than needlessly tearing away her or his family. And yet, when it’s time for courts to decide to place a child in foster care, they do not apply the standard used to convict someone accused of murdering a child, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” or even the middle standard, “clear and convincing” evidence.

Instead, courts in most states apply the lowest standard of proof, “preponderance of the evidence.” As we noted at the start of this report, this is the same standard used to decide which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.

Devani’s story is a horrific example of a child taken from parent’s for flimsy reasons without evidence, and placed into nightmare situations far worse than anything she ever knew at home. See story.

As a result, many more children suffer abuse at the hands of the state:

Opponents say, in effect, that if caseworkers ever actually had to provide real evidence that a parent did something wrong before they took away the children, then children might be left in unsafe homes.

But if the standard is not raised, even more children will be subject to the unconscionable trauma of needless foster care – and some of them will be abused in foster care itself.

Protecting Parental Rights Protects Children

The bottom line of all of these recommendations is that we must protect the Constitutional civil liberties of parents. The recommendations fall into several basic categories which already apply to alleged criminals accused of even the most heinous of crimes:

• open and transparent courts,
• quality representation, and
• actual evidence required before deciding guilt and tearing apart the family.

It is incomprehensible that parents are not already afforded these same rights, when what is at stake is more important and valuable than anything else – our children.

In doing so, we will then ensure that children are indeed protected, who may have more to fear from the state than they ever did from their parents.

Virginia McKale. (Photo: P.J. D’Annunzio/ALM – Source.)

Commentary by Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News

Child Protective Services, funded by American taxpayers, doesn’t believe that they should be held accountable to the citizens who foot the bill.

Repeatedly, we have seen efforts by various state CPS agencies around the country to silence parents who speak out about the abuse that they and their children suffer at the hands of social workers and courts as well as abuse that happens to their children in foster homes, group homes, and hospitals.

CPS social workers and their attorneys sometimes request, and judges approve, gag orders demanding that families keep quiet about what they have seen.

Not content with the violation of the parents’ Constitutional First Amendment rights, social workers frequently retaliate against families members who talk, pushing for quicker termination of parental rights, denying visitation, or making up new fictitious allegations.

The story we share today plays out in CPS cases every single day, all over the county. If Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS) has their way, the story will disappear and no one will hear about it.

Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) asks for the help of our readers to make sure that the story doesn’t disappear.

He published this blog piece on Tuesday, November 27, 2018:

There is a news story that Philadelphia’s child welfare agency desperately does not want the world to read. What do you think we should do about that?

Reporter P.J. D’Annunzio of the Legal Intelligencer has written a series of articles about “the horror show that is foster care in Philadelphia.” The first article (Link) delved into exposing abuse that happens to children at the hands of the state once they are taken from their families and placed into foster care in Philadelphia.

D’Annunzio opened with the story of grandmother Virginia McKale of New Jersey learning to her horror that her 9-year-old grandson in Philadelphia DHS foster care had been raped by another foster child.

She had previously petitioned the court for custody of her grandchildren, and she had plenty of room in her 7-bedroom home. However:

…former Philadelphia Family Court Judge Lyris Younge denied that request because McKale lives across state lines. (Source)

Judge Younge has since been removed from the Family Court bench. See:

Philadelphia Family Court Judge Exposed and Charged with Illegal Medical Kidnapping

According to NCCPR:

The younger child, who suffers from severe brain damage, was institutionalized. The older child, age 9, was moved five different times.  In the fourth of those placements he was raped by another child.  The story was careful to use pseudonyms to protect the children’s identifies.

“They know they’ve done wrong,” McKale told the Legal Intelligencer “and every time I turn around they’re trying to cover it up.”

McKale had no idea how right she was.

An agency with a shred of decency would have placed the children with their grandmother and surrounded the family with all the support they needed to heal from what the agency itself, and its private contractors, did to them.

Needless to say, that was not the response from the Philadelphia Department of Human Services. Instead,  DHS got a judge to issue two orders: First, a gag order, so McKale can’t tell anyone any more about what DHS and its contractors have done or are doing to her family.

Retaliation

As happens in many CPS cases, Virginia McKale faced retaliation in the form of visitation with her grandchildren being restricted. NCCPR continues:

Even worse, they got an order rescinding unsupervised visits.  Now all visits must be under the supervision of the very agencies she’s criticized – so you can be sure McKale will be under a microscope as the visit supervisors search for excuses to cut off visits all together.

At a minimum it will ratchet up the stress all around and make visits harder to schedule.  So in effect, Philadelphia is punishing a nine-year-old rape victim because his grandmother dared to speak out about how he was raped in foster care.

See more about the gag order and retaliation in the Legal Intelligencer:

Court Silences Woman Who Spoke Out About Grandchild’s Abuse in Philadelphia Foster Care

How You Can Help

Richard Wexler of NCCPR calls for the public to take to social media and let everyone know what is happening to this family and to countless others:

…there is one thing we can do about this: Make the gag order backfire.

I almost never explicitly urge people to do anything on social media – partly because it angers the social media gods.  But this once, I think an exception is called for.

The Legal Intelligencer published a story that the Philadelphia Department of Human Services desperately does not want the world to see.  So let’s do everything in our power to make sure as much of the world as possible sees it!

He concludes with this:

So, we know that the one thing DHS really cares about is not the children or the families – it’s not having its failings exposed to the world.

What should we do about that?

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

800,000 children a year in the United States go missing, many of them being sexually trafficked through pedophilia networks where the children suffer unimaginable horrors such as Satanic ritual abuse.

This number is comprised of documented cases of children gone missing, and does not include children who are born and bred into pedophilia networks and have no birth certificates, or undocumented immigrant children who come across the borders.

Worldwide, the number is close to 8 million children missing and being sexually trafficked.

Such is the scope of the problem that was reported earlier this year (2018) in Westminster, London by The International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ), as the court convened over a 3-day period to launch their Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse.

The Judicial Commission is comprised of world leaders who have been involved in fighting child sex trafficking for years, and includes intelligence officers, politicians, legal scholars, and many others. (Website: https://commission.itnj.org)

The International Tribunal was formed because most of the world’s government bodies today have been corrupted and no longer represent the people, but instead serve the interest of private corporations, and as such, justice is seldom found in most government judicial courts around the world today to stop such a heinous crime as child sex trafficking.

In fact, the child sex trafficking network today is actually facilitated by the rich and powerful, whose influence reaches into the political and judicial branches of society.

From the INTJ report:

The ITNJ initiative has arisen as a response to the disregard for the rule of law exhibited by (alleged) public officials, corporate directors, and ‘world leaders’ who have deliberately privatized and weaponized the governments of the world against their own people.

It is the culmination of years of endeavour and research on the part of many people from a diverse set of backgrounds dedicated to safeguarding a viable future for human kind. It is recognized that we the people must take responsibility in holding government to account when it violates basic human rights and natural law.

Today we know conclusively that many of these activities are being facilitated by politically and financially powerful individuals, government, and corporate organizations who perennially avoid being brought to account for their actions due to their affluence and influence.

Included in the court proceedings of the first Judicial Commission of the Tribunal were powerful testimonies from victims who suffered unimaginable horrors as children being sexually abused and trafficked through this powerful world-wide pedophilia network that sexually trafficks children, a human trafficking network that brings in more revenue than the trafficking of weapons and drugs.

During the opening Plenary Session, Chief Counsel Robert David Steele, a former CIA officer, gave perhaps the best summary of the purpose of Tribunal’s Judicial Commission, which has been condensed into a 15 minute video:

A partial transcript:

As a parent and as a patriot I have been outraged for some time by the clear and present danger to society of pedopredation (pedophilia or paedophilia).

I recognize now that child torture, child murder, and child organ harvesting is an ‘accepted’ practice at the highest levels of government, the NGO and multinational corporate sector, as well as throughout academic institutions and civil society.

This scourge persists because it is allowed to exist by the complicit authorities.

As a former spy and pioneer for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) I have worked with INTERPOL, EUROPOL, Scotland Yard, the FBI, and the national intelligence and law enforcement services or their representatives from over 66 countries.

What I have found, without exception, is that they are all staffed by good people trapped in bad systems – systems that are not allowed to properly address this scourge – the multi-generational crime against humanity known as pedophilia.

Pedophilia – a ‘love for children’ – is not an accurate term. There is no love for children manifest in any aspect of child slavery, sexual abuse, torture, murder, or body harvesting.

For this reason the inaugural seating of the Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking & Child Sex Abuse, at the behest of ITNJ Commissioner Carine Hutsebaut (a criminologist and psychotherapist) the term ‘Pedopredation,’ has been designated as a more appropriate term, along with the term ‘pedosexual,’ for that considerable sub-set abuses of children outside the Satanic ritual network.

It is vital to note that many organizations that started out with the best of intentions – from the Boy Scouts to the day care centers to United Nations assistance and development groups to Oxfam as the most recent example – appear to have been infiltrated by pedopredators.

By virtue of being in daily contact with the most vulnerable members of society, our children, many of the mandated organizations have, over time, attracted numerous pedopredators to their ranks, and been compromised by their lack of proper vetting processes, as well as also turning a deliberate blind eye to the transgressions of staff.

This need not be so if governments were honest and counterintelligence were to be exercised. It appears to be a matter of policy at the highest levels of global leadership to turn a blind eye to pedopredation and pedosexuality.

It appears that pedopredation – including the attendant torture and murder of infants to produce adrenalized blood via ritual Satanic abuse – is in some cases considered an elite ‘privilege’ whereupon these echelons are permitted to practice such perversity with impunity.

There are two additional causes for alarm.

First, there appears to be a deliberate campaign by the elite to infect local, state (province) and national police, prosecutors, and judges – from Australia to Zimbabwe – with a ‘taste’ for pedosexuality.

It is used as both an initiation rite into the Deep State and Shadow Government, and as a basis for blackmail.

Worse, we are now seeing two terrible trends: one toward abusing and murdering children before they learn to speak (they cannot bear witness); and the other, perhaps brought back by US forces from Afghanistan, the combination of war dogs and toddlers in a devastating combination of child rape and bestiality – dogs raping children for videos to be sold.

Add to this the growing market in fetuses, the most prized being those delivered on the floor as part of a Satanic ritual, and one has an inkling of the greatest evil on the planet.

Second, it has become clear from our early inquiries with ample documentation, that both the family courts and the insolvency courts are being used to strip children from families to convert the children into a commodity that can be sold for cash, and are also being used to strip assets from wealthy individuals who are not part of the Deep State network.

Governments are complicit in child and asset stripping, which would not occur if registrars, lawyers (barristers), and judges were held accountable. False claims and documents abound, and in their tolerated existence, challenge the legitimacy of the government.

ENOUGH! The purpose of the Commission is to do what has not been done before: to document the actual totality of missing children each year (preliminary estimates yet to be documented are eight million a year, or 22,000 a day); and also to document what happens to these children once they are ingested into the local to global pedopredation network of networks.

The average lifespan of a child once in the pedopredation (pedophilia or paedophilia) system is estimated by some to be two years — those being groomed for ‘leadership’ roles that perpetuate pedosexuality at all levels live much longer.

Tribunal Censored by the Corporate “Mainstream” Media – Public Largely Unaware of the Child Sex Trafficking Problem

David Seaman is the journalist who wrote about “Pizzagate” exposing child trafficking from the leaked Podesta emails, and was subsequently fired by the Huffington Post. Testimony here.

The first meeting of the Judicial Commission happened in Westminster, London on April 16-18th 2018.

Health Impact News stumbled upon the ITNJ website when investigative reporter John P. Thomas was researching material for his series of articles on pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church. See:

The Catholic Church and Pedophilia: Trafficking Children as Sex Slaves

Even though this event happened many months ago, it apparently has not been reported on in the corporate “mainstream” media, as is to be expected, but the event apparently is not well-known to the alternative media either.

The work of the Tribunal and the Judicial Commission continues here at the end of 2018, and it is our hope that our readership and others in the alternative media will share this information far and wide exposing what is the most evil enterprise in the world today.

Chief Counsel Robert David Steele states that the Tribunal and Judicial Commission’s purpose is to educate the public, not to try or convict criminals (see video above):

This is a court of inquiry. It’s not an adversarial court, it’s a non-profit educational event.

One of the most wonderful things that this court could achieve, now that we have had “pizzagate,” for example, which opened people’s minds, is we could achieve an opening of the public’s mind.

Governments are letting us all down. And I absolutely agree with the Commissioner who brings forward the need to the sovereignty of “we the people.”

Because governments have become not only bureaucratized, but they are now the servants of the deep state, of the banks.

And while we are not a law enforcement commission, we can in fact turn information over to law enforcement.

The center of gravity for taking down the deep state, pedophilia is both the induction glue, pedophilia is how the deep state recruits and controls people.

It is also the Achilles heel of the deep state.

I believe that once the public realizes that the government is not protecting their children, at a scale of vulnerability that we can articulate, then everything else about the government is called into question.

So for me this is a truly righteous endeavor.

I will end by saying that as much good as it might do to get the British angry, for me the center of gravity for change is the American public.

Because if you can get the American public angry, we will stop supporting dictators overseas, and we will close all of our military bases overseas.

I am on record as a former CIA operations officer saying that our thousand bases overseas are not there for national defense, they’re there to serve as lily pads for the smuggling of guns, gold, cash, drugs, and small children.

Exposing Police Involvement and Cover-up of Child Sex Trafficking

One of the most revealing and compelling testimonies given to the Commission was from former Scotland Yard Police detective Jon Wedger who specialized in child abuse investigations.

As a CID officer he discovered child sex trafficking networks reaching to highest levels of the police department, local government, and even the BBC, which led to an independent Police Complaints Commission delving into the depths of police involvement.

Attempts to silence him failed, even after he was threatened by his superiors that he would lose his job, his children, and his home if he did not shut up.

When asked by Chief Counsel Robert David Steele why he hadn’t been killed, he replied:

Jesus loves me. Hopefully I’ve got a few more years. I’ve got a job to do.

One of my saving graces, and it didn’t meant to happen…. I actually did an interview with the UK column with a man called Brian Garish and he said it was too hot to handle and put it out online, and I thought “Oh my God, what’s he done.”

But it actually saved me.

So the alternative media really did help me.

Watch the entire testimony in the video above.

Victim Testimonies

Ronald Bernard

One of the most amazing victim testimonies given at the Judicial Commission was that of former Dutch Banker Ronald Bernard, who suffered through horrible sexual abuse as a child, and then became an abuser himself while working his way up into the elite sections of the global banking industry.

Bernard claims that there are about 8000 to 8500 leaders in the banking industry that control most of the affairs of this world. He was on his way to becoming one of them, until they asked him to sacrifice a live baby.

His testimony, like other survivor testimonies, will disturb you.

When I searched other information regarding Bernard, I found news reports stating he had been killed in Florida for exposing some of the inner workings of the secret society called the “Illuminati.”

Yet here he is in 2018 giving testimony at the Tribunal’s Judicial Commission, no doubt at great risk to his life in bringing this information to the public.

Watch the video above.

Jay Parker

Jay Parker grew up in a multi-generational family involved in the Illuminati secret society, dating back to the 1700s. As a child he was a victim of Satanic ritual abuse. His mother taught him that 12% of America is generational satanic.

When my mother in 63 told me that 12% of America is generational satanic, I really found it hard to believe.

We went to regular church, and then of course in the afternoon we went to Church of the Marquee of Hell.

But when you have a society where 800,000 children are disappearing a year, like here in America, and its not even in the media, its not discussed at all except among people who are researching the child trafficking and the horrific abuse that’s going on from these dark occult….. Can I say that we are in an insane position here?

I mean, this is insanity. 17 and a half million people dying of cancer because the cure is banned by the corruption of the pharmaceutical companies controlling the governments.

This is genocide, and yet we’re putting up with it.

His expertise today is in healing modalities, and overcoming what he describes as the Satanic brainwashing that happens during the first six years of life.

As an insider growing up in the Illuminati, he has much information to share about mind control and how the elite in the Illuminati control culture through the media, academia, the entertainment industry, etc.

He claims that this control over people’s minds is what allows 800,000 children to go missing each year in the U.S. and no one even bothers to question this.

However, Parker believes people are beginning to wake up to the truth.

Watch the video above.

Kristy Allen

The video of Kristy Allen’s testimony is probably the most-viewed video from the Westminster hearings.

Kristy was a victim of Satanic ritual sexual abuse as a child. But for much of her life, she did not remember it.

Her father was a member of the Mormon Church, and was recruited by the military. He himself was reportedly a victim of child abuse as well.

Kristy reveals how their family was affected by mind control through the MK Ultra program, which prevented her from remembering anything about the sexual abuse for years. Her and her siblings were allegedly chosen for covert military operations as children.

Kristy eventually began to remember some of her childhood memories where she was continually raped and abused, and is in the process of healing.

Watch her testimony in the video above.

Why is Health Impact News Publishing this Information?

I started Health Impact News in 2011 to share with the public truths I was learning about health that are routinely censored in the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media.

My own spiritual awakening to the truth began in 1979 when I committed my life to Jesus Christ, and can be read here.

In 1998 my family and I moved to the Philippines for several years, and it was there that I researched the truth about fats and oils, seeing first-hand how healthy the older generation of Filipinos in the rural areas were when consuming such large amounts of saturated fat through coconut oil, which was virtually banned in the U.S. due to the Government’s nutritional policies which condemned (and still do!) saturated fats.

I quickly learned that powerful corporate forces controlled nutritional policies to promote the sale of certain foods and drugs worldwide where the U.S. dominated the world market.

As I began to publish the truth about coconut oil and how healthy it was, while at the same time starting to export a natural form of virgin coconut oil to the U.S. produced by traditional methods, the public began to wake up to the truth about the health benefits of coconut oil and the lies being published about saturated fats in general.

I was utilizing the power of the Internet, taking the truth directly to the public.

Little did I know at that time that I was bumping into a mutli-billion dollar drug industry selling cholesterol-lowering statin drugs that depended on this false nutritional philosophy that condemned saturated fats.

The FDA came after us for selling “unapproved drugs” as we were making health claims for coconut oil, publishing peer-reviewed studies and customer testimonials.

We spent considerable resources on legal advice to learn how to market our products without violating FDA laws, which necessitated that we keep all of the information about the health benefits of coconut oil and any other natural, non-patentable product we were selling, off of the websites where those products were sold.

This was the genesis of Health Impact News, which originally started out at CoconutOil.com where we publish the truth about coconut oil.

I began to publish much about the pharmaceutical industry and its collusion with the U.S. government, particularly on the vaccine topics, which today are our most-read topics, particularly the HPV Gardasil vaccine and the scandals surrounding it.

In 2014, we started MedicalKidnap.com, documenting how the government routinely takes children away from good homes and good parents for reasons other than true child abuse, and effectively trafficks those children through the current foster care system where the majority of them are abused and heavily drugged while under state care.

What we learned at the end of 2014 and into 2015 truly shocked us, and destroyed much of my belief in the concepts of freedom and liberty in the United States.

I still believe that the Constitution of the United States is perhaps one of the greatest documents ever written in the history of mankind, but the values of human rights that it represents are routinely ignored or violated every day across this country – and maybe always have been.

We began to investigate why so many children were being taken out of homes and put into foster care, and have documented those reasons at MedicalKidnap.com, along with scores of stories of terrible injustices done to children and parents.

One of the reasons that we knew was behind children being taken away from good parents, was the child sex-trafficking problem and the growing problem of pedophilia. (Read our stories on that subject here.)

Earlier this year as many U.S. State Attorney General offices began issuing indictments against pedophile Catholic priests and leaders in the Catholic church abusing children, we decided to give more exposure to this problem.

It was during this research that we came across The International Tribunal for Natural Justice and their Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse in London earlier this year.

If this topic disturbs you, good! It should.

The ITNJ has done the world a great service in exposing this, and we encourage you to share this information with as many people as you can.

Because the first step in solving this horrific problem of child sex abuse trafficking and ritualistic murders is acknowledging that this problem actually exists, and that the truth will NOT be found in the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media.

800,000 children in U.S. go missing each year, and 8 million worldwide.

Now that you know the truth, you are either part of the problem in allowing it to continue, or you are part of the solution in exposing this to everyone you can, and risking the scorn you will have to endure as a “conspiracy theorist,” “idiot,” or whatever other name the brainwashed masses will call you for exposing this truth.

He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
(Matthew 18:2-6)

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

Be on your guard against men; they will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues.

On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles.

But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.

All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.
(Matthew 10:16-22)

Learn more about the The International Tribunal for Natural Justice here: https://commission.itnj.org

Copyright 2018 Health Impact News. Permission granted to republish in full. Links back appreciated.

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com.

Parents collecting signatures to remove Rocky Crabb from the bench at the courthouse in Pomona, California.

by Health Impact News

Why have parents in Pomona, California been able to gather more than 2000 petitions to remove Commissioner Rocky Crabb from the bench in Family Court?

Parents who have contacted Health Impact News have reported an abuse of power, discrimination against Hispanics, taking children away from good parents and leaving them in the hands of abusers, and a denial of civil rights by Commissioner Rocky Crabb, who functions in the same capacity as a judge. The primary difference between a commissioner and a judge is that a commissioner is appointed and voted on by judges, not the public, and therefore holds less accountability to voters.

Rocky Crabb ran for office, as Superior Court Judge in LA County in 2008, but lost, having obtained just 37% of the vote while his opponent won with 63%. He remains on the bench, however, as an appointed commissioner.

The website RobeProbe.com rates judges, and Commissioner Rocky Crabb has 44 ratings. A user can rate a judge on a variety of qualities, ranging from “Very Bad,” “Bad,” “Adequate,” “Good,” or “Excellent.”

Out of Commissioner Crabb’s 44 ratings, 43 are overall “Very Bad” and 1 is “Adequate.”

There are currently over 30 cases Commissioner Crabb has ruled on that are being appealed.

So how does this man stay in power? Parents have told us that attorneys are reluctant to take their case when they learn it is against Commissioner Rocky Crabb, a man who was appointed to his position – not elected by the public.

Tammi Stefano interviewed two of the parents who claim they and their children have been abused by Commissioner Rocky Crabb:

He has destroyed my life.

Watch this shocking interview with two fathers who are among the parents spearheading the movement to remove Rocky Crabb from the bench.

Parents have put up a website, see RemoveRockyCrabb.com to learn more:

Commissioner Crabb apparently likes to intimidate people, but does not like the spotlight shown on him. So exposing his alleged corruption via the media and in public forums may be the only way to see justice served.

Parents have called for a rally at the courthouse:

Sign up to attend the rally!

Rocky Crabb’s phone number is listed here.

Robbie and Jennifer Ray with their twins Evren and Elijah at Christmas 2017. Photo provided by family.

By Health Impact News/Medicalkidnap.com Staff

One doctor says that the ONLY way a child’s injuries could happen is by “brute force.” Other doctors can look at the same data and say that that the injuries could have been caused by an accident, metabolic disorder, nutritional deficiency, infection, or other non-abusive mechanism.

When these two perspectives collide, then justice demands that we examine other evidence. Is there a history of violence? Is there other evidence of abuse? Has anyone witnessed abuse? What about the perspective of those who know the accused – is abuse consistent with the character of the person who is accused?

All too often, parents lose their children to Child Protective Services, often permanently, and others have gone to prison based on the testimony of one particular kind of doctor – a Child Abuse Pediatrician (CAP) – even though there is no other evidence that the parents have abused their child.

Robbie and Jennifer Ray of South Carolina are facing just such a scenario. Dr. Susan Lamb, CAP at Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital, says that the only possible explanation for the couple’s twins’ injuries is child abuse, even though other doctors and their families disagree. Jennifer Ray told Health Impact News:

If there is no evidence to prove physical abuse, then you need to second guess the diagnosis [made by the child abuse doctor].

CAPs present themselves to the public and to the courts that they are “THE experts” on all things child abuse related. Yet there are other doctors, many of whom are highly esteemed experts in their respective fields, who dispute the findings and conclusions of the CAPs.

We recently reported that the Helfer Society, an elite group of CAPs, has made it part of their mission to educate the public and media that their way is the right way, calling into question the reputations of any doctors who disagree with them. See:

Elite Medical Doctors Seek to Control the Media and Public’s Perception of Child Abuse Specialists

Though CAPs only began to be board-certified in 2010, their history traces its roots back to a group of pediatric radiologists who began writing and organizing in the 1940’s to set themselves up as experts in being able to see what no other doctors were clever enough to see. Their papers formed the basis of what we now know as Child Protective Services. See:

Has the U.S. Become a Medical Police State? How Doctors Deny Due Process to Kidnap Children Through CPS

History of Shaken Baby Theories Exposed: How an Elite Group of Pediatric Radiologists Started Medical Kidnapping in the 1940s

The Ray family story is yet another example of a story repeated all across the United States and across the ocean in the UK, Australia, and other nations – that of parents accused of abuse based on the interpretation of one kind of doctor, a Child Abuse Pediatrician, without any other evidence that indicates that they abused their child. Family and friends who know them best have written letters affirming that they know the parents to be caring people incapable of hurting anyone. While there is no history of violence, there is family history of medical conditions that can cause fragile bones.

How is it that we have given the power of judge, jury, and executioner to one kind of doctor, even when other doctors disagree with them? How is it that law enforcement investigators, social workers, and some other doctors stop investigating further the moment that a CAP declares “child abuse”?

The Ray Family Story

Jennifer Ray describes her pregnancy with twins Evren and Elijah Ray as “great.” She took a lot of Tums for heartburn, but otherwise she enjoyed being pregnant.

When the babies’ growth slowed down during the last weeks of pregnancy and Jennifer developed pre-eclampsia, doctors decided that it was time for the babies to be born at 36 1/2 weeks. They arrived on May 9, 2017, via c-section. They were pulled out of the womb by their ankles.

They spent just 6 hours in the NICU after birth, but both babies were jaundiced. Evren’s levels were higher and she was sent home with bili lights to help bring down the high bilirubin levels. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the babies had blood drawn from their heels more than 20 times as their levels were monitored.

The last heel stick test was at the 2-week doctor visit on Wednesday, May 24. The babies got all of the routine vaccines that day.

Jennifer Ray with her twins Evren and Elijah. Photo provided by family.

Both Jennifer and Robbie Ray come from large families, and the Memorial Day weekend was a time for the extended family to celebrate and enjoy the new babies who were now 2 1/2 weeks old. Evren was “fussier than usual” through the long weekend, but they assumed that it was colic and tried treating her with gripe water.

It was Tuesday morning, May 30, that Jennifer noticed that her daughter Evren’s ankle looked swollen. As she looked closer, she found a bruise. Her first call was to the pediatrician, who told her to come in at 4:30 that afternoon. Jennifer then called her husband at work and her mother who lived down the street.

The pediatrician sent Jennifer over to the nearby hospital, Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital, for x-rays. Her husband, and later her parents and other family members, met them at the hospital. It was there that the Ray family’s lives turned upside down.

An x-ray revealed that Evren’s right ankle was fractured. As the stunned parents tried to figure out how their baby’s ankle could have been broken, the hospital’s Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Susan Lamb had already been consulted.

Dr. Susan Lamb – Child Abuse Pediatrician at Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital. Photo source.

American Academy of Pediatrics protocols, written by Child Abuse Pediatricians, state that certain injuries indicate that a child has been abused, including:

Fracture(s) in nonambulatory infants, especially in those without a clear history of trauma or a known medical condition that predisposes to bone fragility. (Source.)

The same policy statement says that when “there is either no explanation or a vague explanation given for a significant injury,” it should “raise a concern for abusive trauma.” See:

Exposing How Child Abuse Pediatricians Medically Kidnap Children: A Guide for Parents

The Rays had no explanation. They didn’t know how the injury happened. While they were being interrogated by the Child Abuse Pediatrician, they were asking questions themselves, trying to figure out what could have happened.

Jennifer recalls that Dr. Lamb told them that there was no way that this was an accidental injury and that “brute force was needed in a pull and twist manner.”

She also told them that it appeared that there was a fracture on baby Elijah’s ankle as well, along with 2 bruises on his back.

The “bruises” were tiny red marks on his back first noted by Dr. Lamb, who said that the bruises were caused by “blunt force trauma.” Jennifer said that no one in her family had seen the bruises, and they could well have happened in the hospital as he was being handled by the doctors. He had never shown any symptoms of injury whatsoever and had always been a happy baby.

South Carolina Department of Social Services (DSS) and law enforcement were called, and both babies were admitted to the hospital that night. One investigator reportedly told the parents that she didn’t see any signs of abuse and allowed them to stay with their babies that night.

The next day, Robbie and Jennifer Ray were escorted out of the hospital and their 3-week-old babies were placed into foster care with strangers, based on the allegations of abuse by the Child Abuse Pediatrician. According to Jennifer:

Their WHOLE case relies on the testimony from that one “child abuse specialist” who said the ONLY way their injuries could have happened were from child abuse.

The family’s attorney was later able to get the twins placed with an aunt. Meanwhile, the family sought answers. One doctor told them that Evren’s fracture was a hairline fracture that should heal within a couple of weeks. Another doctor told them that they couldn’t find Elijah’s “fracture” on the x-ray.

Jennifer asked DSS to test the babies’ Vitamin D levels. When the social worker asked Dr. Lamb about testing, she reportedly replied that there was no way that they had rickets.

This is not surprising. Since the 1940s, pediatric radiologists and, later, Child Abuse Pediatricians have made it clear in their papers that they do not take infantile rickets, or any other medical explanation for bone fragility, seriously.

This is in contrast to numerous other doctors around the world who assert that much of what is called child abuse is actually a medical condition such as a metabolic bone disorder, nutritional deficiency, or infantile rickets, or a simple accidental injury that could happen to anyone. See:

Has the U.S. Become a Medical Police State? How Doctors Deny Due Process to Kidnap Children Through CPS

History of Shaken Baby Theories Exposed: How an Elite Group of Pediatric Radiologists Started Medical Kidnapping in the 1940s

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

Soon after, Jennifer requested that the follow-up orthopedic doctor consider the possibility of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and have their Vitamin D levels checked. Dr. Whitaker contacted Dr. Lamb, who told him that it was not possible for Ehlers-Danlos to have caused the fractures.

Dr. Lamb’s perspective is consistent with that of other Child Abuse Pediatricians, but there are studies from other doctors that indicate otherwise. These are doctors without a vested interest in finding abuse, whether or not it truly exists.

World-renowned Vitamin D expert Dr. Michael Holick is known for his work on Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. He published a paper in 2017 entitled, “Multiple fractures in infants who have Ehlers-Danlos/hypermobility syndrome and or vitamin D deficiency: A case series of 72 infants whose parents were accused of child abuse and neglect.” (Source.)

However, he is certainly not alone in his medical perspective that the collagen deficiency syndrome can be linked to bone fragility. A 2015 Italian study published by the Endocrine Society found a “High Prevalence of Vertebral Fractures in Patients with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.” (Source.)

A similar study was published in 2016 by Osteoporosis International. (Source.)

In September of 2017, the Rays flew to Boston to see Dr. Holick. Both parents were diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, hypermobility type 3. There is also family history that indicates that there are other family members with this inherited disorder. Both Jennifer and Evren have the classic EDS sign of blue sclerae in their eyes. Other symptoms in the twins include gastroparesis, which is often misdiagnosed as reflux, transparent mottled skin, profuse sweating, joint clicking, and skin flushing.

Despite his findings, Dr. Holick’s report was never brought up in the Rays’ court case.

Did Heel Sticks Cause Fracture?

The explanation for what happened to the twins may well be something much simpler and less controversial. At the babies’ follow-up orthopedic appointment in September, Dr. Christopher Hydorn reportedly told the family that the injuries could have happened from the numerous blood draws from their heels.

Because of their jaundice, they had more than 20 “heel sticks” in their first 2 weeks of life. Jennifer notes that “Evren was harder to draw blood from.”

The heel stick procedure can be rough, especially if the practitioner is having a difficult time getting a blood sample. Photo source.

A family friend who is also a long-time OB nurse has known Jennifer for more than 15 years. She wrote a letter to the court on the Ray family’s behalf, speaking of how kind and loving that Jennifer has always been to children, the elderly, and to animals.

This was one of many such character witnesses who wrote letters on behalf of Jennifer and Robbie. According to the nurse:

When I was told of the case DSS filed I was dumfounded. At NO time did the thought cross my mind that there was any merit to the accusations.

As a nurse who drew blood to check bilirubin levels from countless infant heels I immediately assumed the blood draw caused injury. I have personal knowledge and experience of how difficult it can be to get the blood …

I myself have squeezed and bent little feet to get the blood, hating the pressure I was inflicting but knowing the potential brain damage from a very high bilirubin was a far greater risk than a bruise or even hairline fracture.

These children are being robbed of their loving home and family unit, these parents are being robbed of 1st everythings. Evren and Eli may not remember this time spent apart. Jen and Robbie will never forget.

Dr. Lamb later testified that one cannot look at bruising and tell how old the bruises are. Another doctor told Jennifer that Evren’s fractures on the x-ray appeared to be healing and could be a week and a half to two weeks old.

The twins’ Guardian ad Litem told the parents that she believed that the injuries likely happened during the heel sticks.

Trial – Babies to Go Home

Dr. Lamb testified in the Child Protective Services hearing on the morning of December 4, 2017. When court resumed after lunch, the parents were asked to make a deal to reunify. Witnesses on behalf of the parents never testified.

The parents were required to complete assessments with a DSS-approved counselor to determine their risk of abusing their children. Both passed with flying colors. Their only diagnosis was Acute Stress Disorder from having their children taken from them.

Reunification would begin with unsupervised weekend visits after DSS received the results of the assessments.

Immediately the couple scheduled an appointment with an orthopedic doctor to try to get a definitive answer as to what had caused their babies’ injuries. Even though the trial was over, they still wanted “to know if there was anything wrong that they needed to know about for the babies.”

Home at Last

Evren and Elijah had been gone since they were 3 weeks old. They were now almost 8 months old. Jennifer and Robbie had never really had the chance to be parents to their children. The first unsupervised visit began on Christmas Eve. The next was New Year’s weekend. The holidays were filled with visits from relatives who were excited that the twins were finally transitioning home.

Jennifer describes their New Year together:

We were blessed to ring in the New Year as a family again. Robbie and I sat with the kids in our laps and cried happy and sad tears with our children when the ball dropped. New Year’s Eve Evren said her first word which was “Da-Da.” We were slated to bring the kids home officially on February 7th.

Their first opportunity to finally act somewhat like a “normal” family was the following weekend.

Evren is normally the more outgoing and independent of the twins, but that day she didn’t seem to feel well on that Saturday, January 6. Since several extended family members had experienced colds, Jennifer says that they wondered if she was coming down with a cold.

When the babies went down for their naps, Jennifer headed to the store to get a few things while Robbie watched them.

When the babies woke up from their nap, Robbie fixed their bottles. Elijah liked to be held and loved on when he took his bottle, but Evren liked to hold her own bottle. Robbie put Evren in her Snugapuppy swing and gave her the bottle. He didn’t realize till later that he didn’t buckle her in completely. One leg was not strapped in.

Robbie sat on the couch and began feeding Elijah. A few minutes later, he heard a “thud,” then saw Evren lying the carpet with her face on the metal bar of the swing. He set Elijah down on the floor and rolled his unresponsive daughter over. He could see immediately that it was bad and he called 911.

In retrospect, the Rays believe that she must have dropped her bottle, tried to go after it, and fell out of the swing.

Shortly after the paramedics got her into the ambulance, Robbie heard her crying. A paramedic told the terrified father that her cries were a good sign and that she was coming around.

Family members who live nearby heard the sirens and came running. Jennifer’s phone wasn’t working right, so she didn’t hear any phone calls. She arrived home shortly after the ambulance left and found an empty house. The car seats were still there, so she assumed he must have taken the babies to her parents’ house. She says that when she called her husband:

…he was sobbing in panic when he answered the phone and was extremely upset trying to tell me what had happened and that he was so sorry for not strapping her in all the way.

She rode with her mother to the hospital. A relative had picked up Elijah from the house. Other family members gathered at the hospital.

Evren’s right eye was swollen and she had a red line across her nose. She was intubated, and x-rays showed that her right femur was broken near the hip. There was subdural hemorrhaging (brain bleeding) as well.

Evren in the hospital after falling out of the swing. Photo provided by family.

Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Susan Lamb was working that day at Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital. According to a police report:

When Dr. Lamb arrived, she examined [Evren] and after looking at her, she provided that the injuries she observed were not consistent with the report of [Evren] falling out of a swing.

The original complaint for removal states that Dr. Lamb:

…”determined that Evren suffered from bilateral [on both sides of the head] subdural hemorrhaging…. [She] determined that these injuries were indicative of physical abuse, due to blunt force trauma to both sides of her head.”

Subdural hemorrhage is, according to Child Abuse Pediatricians, indicative of Shaken Baby Syndrome, or Abusive Head Trauma as CAPs prefer to call it.

The CT scan done at 5:55 pm that day didn’t show bilateral hemorrhaging, but rather found that “there is a small right sided subdural hematoma,” which the Rays believe would be consistent with their daughters fall from the swing.

Dr. Lamb said that there were bruises on the baby’s ears and that there were “multiple planes” of injuries that she said were inconsistent with the father’s explanation.

This earlier photo shows Evren in her swing at her aunt’s house with the point of impact marked. Note that one of the bars is slightly higher than the other bar that it connects to on the base, which could account for injuries on “multiple planes.” Photo supplied by family.

A tightly-held doctrine asserted by Child Abuse Pediatricians is that the symptoms of Abusive Head Trauma cannot arise from short falls. Other doctors refute this assertion. There are case studies and other medical articles showing that short falls can indeed cause serious injury and even death, such as a 2001 study published in The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology (Source).

More recently, Dr. Steven Gabaeff has published research challenging the subdural hematoma/abuse diagnosis connection, asserting that:

…clinically, short falls have been documented to cause serious injury. (Source).

At one point, Dr. Lamb told the Rays that the leg fracture was 2 weeks old, even though none of the relatives’ accounts indicate any sign of injury before she fell. Some family members had been at the Ray home only hours before the accident, but the only complaint anyone noted was that she didn’t seem to feel well, as if she were coming down with a cold.

Once Dr. Lamb decreed that Evren had been abused, other doctors and law enforcement fell in line with her playbook, repeating her allegations that the baby’s injuries could not be explained by the short fall out of the swing that Evren’s father described and thus had to be abuse. Jennifer Ray calls it a “snowball effect.”

Police arrested Robbie Ray 3 days later based on Dr. Lamb’s word. According to the police report:

Medical professionals [i.e. Dr. Susan Lamb – Child Abuse Pediatrician] said the child’s injuries are consistent with abuse, and inconsistent with the account provided by Ray.

While Evren was in the hospital, she developed a high fever and showed a high white blood cell count. She was treated with multiple antibiotics for a urinary tract infection, e-coli, and MRSA.

A brain scan also later showed an infarction, or an area of brain tissue death, according to Dr. Lamb’s final report. Medical records show that there was no infarction in the CT scan that was performed on the first day.

Evren and Elijah Ray playing with their family at a visit several months after Evren’s accident. She is “doing great.” She still has some weakness but she has recovered excellently, according to her family. Photo provided by family.

The family believes that there was more going on in the hospital with their daughter, but there are conflicting medical reports. They don’t have clear answers, and they still don’t know if their children have an underlying metabolic condition.

They don’t know how they got an infection or why doctors inserted a “central line” into Evren’s femoral artery. They know that they themselves have been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and that their children are more likely to have it because they do.

Child Protective Services seized custody of both babies and placed them in foster care, this time with strangers. There was a period of time that the twins were even separated from each other.

Social workers explained that they didn’t want any relatives to have the babies, because then Jennifer and Robbie might have “access” to their children. Jennifer wasn’t even home when the accident occurred, but DSS wants to terminate her parental rights as well as Robbie’s. The DSS goal is now to adopt them out.

In the Termination of Parental Rights petition in April 2018, DSS wrote:

Evern [sic] Ray is brain dead on the right side of her brain.

Dr. Susan Lamb stated that the child may not live, due to the extent of her injuries.

Elijah and Evren seem to be doing well. This photo was taken at a visit on October 16, 2018. Supplied by family.

Dr. Lamb – “My Job Is to Interpret”

The common thread in many medical kidnap stories is a Child Abuse Pediatrician. Parents lose their children, and some go to prison, and the only “evidence” that they abused their children is the interpretation of a Child Abuse Pediatrician. That interpretation is the lens through which social workers, law enforcement, and judges view the parents and the case.

Any testimony or reports of doctors who disagree with the allegation of abuse is dismissed, and evidence of the parents’ innocence is often ignored. The testimonies of the parents’ character from people who have known them their whole lives becomes irrelevant once a narrative to follow has been determined.

It isn’t the medical evidence or facts that convict parents; it is the INTERPRETATION of the data that signs the family’s death warrant and tears families apart.

Dr. Susan Lamb spoke about how she sees her role as a Child Abuse Pediatrician in a video that was previously on the Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital website (here), and on YouTube. It has since been taken down after the Rays posted it on social media. Jennifer Ray recorded the video before it disappeared.

Here is what Dr. Lamb stated in the video:

We just provide medical information, medical diagnoses, and help them understand.

We don’t work for DSS. We don’t work for law enforcement. We’re just medical interpreters. We kind of stand at that gap between the medical world and the investigative world, and we interpret for them.

It’s collecting the medical pieces and putting them together and trying to help the investigators figure out what could or could not have happened to this child.

Dr. Lamb works for the Metropolitan Children’s Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina. (Source).

According to SC state law, the Children’s Advocacy Centers are sanctioned and funded by the state to address child abuse. (Source).

Samantha Osteraas at her sentencing hearing. Photo by Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star.

by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff

The Arizona woman convicted of scalding a little girl placed in her care by Child Protective Services has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, followed by 15 years probation.

Samantha Osteraas could have received up to a 30 year sentence at her hearing on December 3, 2018, but Superior Court Judge James Marner of Pima County felt that Osteraas “deserved some leniency,” according to the Arizona Daily Star. (Source.)

A group of concerned citizens called the AZ DCS Oversight Group says that they tried to submit a Victim Impact Statement to the court, but were refused. The judge’s clerk threatened to throw the group representative out of the courtroom if the document was distributed, but the group had already given it to various media representatives before giving it to the clerk.

Osteraas was found guilty in October of reckless child abuse for waiting for several hours before calling 911 after then 5-year-old Devani was scalded in the bathtub. Devani suffered 3rd degree burns to more than 70% of her body and had to be placed into a medically induced coma. She lost all 10 of her toes and has undergone 29 surgeries since the crime against her almost 2 years ago. During the trial, Devani, now 7, testified that Osteraas held her down in the bathtub with a pink towel.

Devani – before she was burned over 80% of her body by Samantha Osteraas, the woman permitted to adopt her by DCS. Source – Justice for Devani Rose Facebook page.

See:

Arizona Foster Mother Found Guilty of Child Abuse after Scalding Young Devani

Devani’s horrific story spotlights many of the problems of the child protective services system, beginning with the reality that Child Protective Services frequently takes children from non-abusive parents without any evidence of the children being in harm’s way with their parents.

See:

Arizona Child Removed from Loving Family and Placed into Foster Care Where She was Repeatedly Raped – then 80% of Body Burned

Arizona Places 2 Year Old Child in Foster Pornographic Pedophile Ring – Foster Mom Burns 80% of Her Body

After she was unjustly taken from her family at 2 years of age, the system charged with protecting children repeatedly put the little girl into extremely harmful situations. Among other abusive placements, the Arizona Department of Child Services (DCS) placed her in a house of horrors headed by David Frodsham, who ran a pornographic pedophile ring out of his house using foster children.

See:

Arizona Foster Care System Revealed as Pedophile Ring: Former Foster Child Tortured for Years Sues for $15 Million

After the system terminated parental rights (based partly on her mother’s trying to get DSS to stop allowing Devani to be a victim of sexual abuse in the foster home), DSS placed her for adoption with Samantha Osteraas and Justin Osteraas.

The placements were approved by the Guardian ad Litem Thea Gilbert, an attorney who is supposed to represent the best interests of the child. Gilbert has been involved with Devani since the beginning of her DSS experience. To this day, Thea Gilbert has not been removed from Devani’s case, nor have there been any consequences for her poor judgement in placing the child repeatedly in harmful situations.

Thea Gilbert – court-appointed attorney for Devani. Photo source.

With both Frodsham and Osteraas, there were clear indications of problems before children were placed with them. To date, there has been no explanation or apology from DSS or the GAL for missing these signs. Frodsham’s record from his military service in Afghanistan shows that he was disciplined for sexual misconduct. The adoption agency was notified by family members that Osteraas had a history of instability and violence.

Reasons Given for Leniency in Sentencing

The defense attorney for Samantha Osteraas, Jeffrey Rogers, argued that she had suffered herself as a product of the foster care system itself. According to the Arizona Daily Star:

…she was physically and sexually abused by her father and that both of her parents neglected her due to drug addiction. Osteraas was removed from her parents’ care at age 2 and their rights to her were terminated when she was 6.

“She made the decision to become a foster parent herself because of that,” Rogers said. (Source.)

Defense attorney Jeffrey Rogers. Photo by KOLD News 13.

Instead of getting the help she obviously needed to deal with her personal trauma, she continued the cycle of abuse – this time on an innocent child that she adopted from foster care. After adopting Devani, she changed her name to Madison Osteraas.

The Sun reports that Samantha Osteraas read a prepared statement at the sentencing hearing in which she said that none of what “Madison” suffered was “her fault.” She told the court:

I want you to know I take full responsibility for anything that could have caused my daughter to be injured. (Source.)

Judge Marner considered Samantha Osteraas’s difficult background in sentencing her. The Arizona Daily Star reports that the judge “agonized for days” as he tried to determine her sentence, considering factors listed in the defense attorney’s report such as the fact that her husband has filed for divorce and their 3 biological children, as well as Devani, have been placed into foster care.

The maximum sentence that Osteraas could have received was 24 years. The minimum was 10.

[Judge] Marner said giving her less than 17 years wasn’t easy when he considered how horribly the child suffered and how much she would continue to suffer through more surgeries to deal with the burns.

But the judge told Osteraas that as he recovered from the flu over the weekend, he kept thinking about the case, about the child and about her. He said at times he wished he could sentence her to 30 years or more, and other times he wished it could be less than 10. (Source.)

Devani’s biological families and her advocates wish that the judge would have taken into consideration the Victim Impact Statement composed by the AZ DCS Oversight Group.

Victim Impact Statement – Not Heard in Court

Here is that statement in its entirety:

December 3,2018

Judge James Marner,

VICTIM IMPACT STATEMENT: WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?

This girl who was renamed M.O. at age 5, was seized on April 17, 2013 by Child Protective Services from her real parents without warrant, emergency or due process of the law. Although DCS continue to smear and cast blame on her real parents this child was NEVER harmed by any member of her birth family. They adored her and she adored them, she and her real parents, Michelle and Jon were deeply bonded.

Devani’s real mother, Michelle Tremor-Calderon, never abused her. Photo credit: David Wallace/The Republic.

It is an indisputable fact that when CPS later named DCS seized this child there wasn’t a mark on her body. It is also an indisputable fact that this child’s suffering in the hands of foster care providers began immediately upon seizure into foster care just a few days shy of her second birthday.

There were four disastrous foster care placements including the Samatha Osteraas who changed the name of Michelle and Jon’s daughter’s to M.O.. Within two weeks of her seizure from her real parents this child showed signs of abuse. Her parents were the only ones who came forward to report scratches, bruises and bite marks. Michelle took pictures of her daughter injuries and called the police when DCS operatives and contractors did nothing to protect their precious daughter.

After removal from foster care placement #1 to foster care placement #2 in Sierra Vista, into the home of David and Barbara Frodsham, Jon and Michelle repeatedly reported their daughter had developed an 8 month long urinary tract infection and an inexplicable fear of unfamiliar men …Their daughter did not fear her real father because, she would fly into her real father and mother’s arms as soon as she could get out of her carseat at her two hour monitored visits at Casa de Los Ninos in Tucson.

This was the child’s behavior as reported by her driver after the long 90 mile trip from foster care on Sunflower Street in Sierra Vista. And, when those visits were over the same female driver reported their daughter cried inconsolably when it was time for her to to leave her beloved parents to be returned to the Frodsham’s. In a sworn statement the female driver reported the little girl cried herself to sleep on the long drive back to the Frodsham’s home.

Frodsham’s home was later found to be a full fledged pedophile ring, producing child pornography. Repeated complaints of battery, starvation and rape from children to their CPS case workers that were ignored.

Michelle begged DCS to investigate and protect her daughter and as DCS did nothing, Michelle called South Tucson police when DCS would not act to protect her daughter. Michelle was excoriated by DCS and lost her rights to her daughter for interfering in her daughter’s foster care placements.

DCS did not explain to Judge K.C. Stanford that Michelle’s daughter was being abused and that her parents and grandmother were the only ones fighting to protect her as Stanford ordered severance of Michelle’s parental rights.

Foster care placement #3 resulted in a goose egg sized bump on the little girls head and an introduction to the Osteraas family after Mr. Frodsham was found drunk with M.O. and a child she called Kinsy in the back seat of Frodsham’s car. He left the two toddlers alone as he picked up his check at the DCS office in Sierra vista.

Mr. Frodsham was charged by ICE, Homeland Security and the FBI nine moths later, on October 1, 2015 for his crimes against children.

On October 8, 2015, Michelle’s parental rights were severed. Jon the target of DCS, to absolve themselves of their own negligence and refusal to report suspected sexual abuse of M.O. … gave up his rights to his daughter in hopes Michelle could regain custody … but to no avail.

At the termination of Michelle’s parental rights the Osteraases were in the back of the courtroom. Samantha Osteraas looked at Michelle with the same rank disdain as has DCS displayed against her though out all proceedings even this proceeding.

Michelle and Jon were not even allowed to take a glimpse of their daughter through the crack in the courtroom door as their daughter testified against the woman who submerged their daughter in a bath of hot water causing grave injury to THEIR CHILD! The real family tried to see their child and were denied entrance to the hospital as she lay gravely ill hanging by a thread to her life and isolated from all that she ever knew and loved. And when she testified they were removed from the courtroom. They huddled down as not to distract their daughter but Jon and Michelle were literally dying to lay eyes on their little girl.

Civil rights attorney Shawn Macmillan (Quote from his opening statement, court transcript) –

“Nobody, nobody especially the government is above the law. The County of Los Angeles, they know that sizing a child from his parent without getting a warrant accept in an emergency violates the United States Constitution and harms not only the parent. You’ll hear this in the evidence. It also harms the child. County also knows that doing a bad, a biased, a shoddy investigation, not following procedures, not properly supervising its workers, it could cause a parent to lose their child. Potentially forever. (Transcript from Duval vs. County of Los Angeles January, 2016 winning jury trial)

If there were a proper warrant procedure in this state this child, M.O. would never have suffered all that she suffered. She did not need to be removed from her family. When the notion sets in that the minds and the bodies of children are worth protecting instead of the harvesting and monetizing of children into adoption schemes then this state will be a better and safer place to raise our children. We ask that this child be reintegrated into her real family so that she knows it was DCS that has isolated her from those she loves and that her real family who love her with all their hearts did not abandon her.

FOR THE FAMILY AND A DEEPLY CONCERNED COMMUNITY.

KOLD News 13 reports that the attorney for Samantha Osteraas intends to file for appeal. (Source.)

Commentary by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Earlier this year Health Impact News investigative reporter John P. Thomas began a series of articles on child sex trafficking within the Roman Catholic Church. See:

The Catholic Church and Pedophilia: Trafficking Children as Sex Slaves

Whistleblowing Priests Killed to Prevent Exposing Pedophilia Problem in the Catholic Church?

Pedophilia in Non-Catholic Churches

Other Christians who are not part of the Catholic Church might be tempted to believe that such horrible crimes could never happen in their particular church or denomination.

However, the Star Telegram in Fort Worth, Texas has recently published a series of articles covering an 8-month investigation in the Independent Fundamental Baptist Churches across the U.S. showing that sexual abuse against children has been rampant and covered up for years. See:

Hundreds of sex abuse allegations found in fundamental Baptist churches across U.S.

These ‘men of God’ sexually abused children. Then they found refuge at other churches

‘My earliest memory of being molested was when I was 4 years old. It was Sunday school’

According to their investigative team:

A team of four (Katie Bernard, Jenna Farhat, Cortlynn Stark and Sorayah Zahir) searched news reports and court filings from across the country for cases of abuse. Star-Telegram reporter Kaley Johnson put in dozens of records requests for police reports and court cases.

The Star-Telegram also reviewed court documents, emails, notarized statements, text messages, notes from contemporaneous conversations, Bible college class material and books written by independent fundamental Baptist pastors.

The Star-Telegram counted 187 independent fundamental Baptist churches and affiliated institutions that had been affected by sexual abuse allegations. The Star-Telegram included in its count churches where alleged abusers had served before or after alleged abuse occurred because the allegations could affect the congregants.

Each institution was counted only once, even if it had multiple abusers.

The Star-Telegram found 412 sexual misconduct allegations. Some of the alleged abusers have only one allegation against them; others have accusers in the double-digits. Forty-five alleged abusers were permitted to continue serving in the ministry after allegations were brought to church officials, even sometimes law enforcement.

In all, the Star-Telegram interviewed over 200 people: Pastors, ex-pastors, ex-members, current members, theologians, people who said they’d been abused and people who had been convicted of sex crimes.

Churches, both Catholic and non-Catholic Christian churches, are a huge part of the child sex trafficking problem in the U.S.

These religious institutions receive significant government funding for foster care and adoption services, which we have reported for years now is a Child Trafficking multi-billion dollar business employing hundreds of thousands of people. See:

The U.S. Foster Care System: Modern Day Slavery and Child Trafficking

Child Kidnapping and Trafficking: A Lucrative U.S. Business Funded by Taxpayers

Church-sponsored organizations, most also receiving significant government funds, are necessary for the State to continue taking children away from parents and putting them into the lucrative foster care and adoption system. Here are a few samples, for example, of Baptists participating in the foster care business:

Free Will Baptist Children’s Home

Florida Baptist Children’s Homes

Houston’s First Baptist Church 

We are not accusing any of these organizations for wrong-doing, or denying that they do provide some valuable services to their communities, we are simply pointing out that children are being sexually abused in a corrupt foster care and adoption child trafficking business, and that includes churches.

Earlier this year, Lisa Wheeler of the National Review published a commentary entitled “Pro-Life Should Include Foster Care, Too,” criticizing American churches for not participating more in state-sponsored foster care programs.

However, it is clear that churches are part of the problem, not the solution, when they allow children to be trafficked, especially to pedophiles. See:

State-funded Foster Care and The Church: Part of the Problem, NOT Part of the Solution

It is likely that many well-intentioned church members are largely unaware of the abuses happening in the foster care and adoption system. As Texas Judge Janis Graham Jack has written in her ruling that the State of Texas’ foster care system is unconstitutional, abuses within the system (very few children are removed from their families due to “abuse”) are “the norm:”

Texas’s PMC (Permanent Managing Conservatorship) children have been shuttled throughout a system where rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm.

See:

Judge Condemns Texas Foster Care System that Abuses Children as Unconstitutional

Time for the Public to Wake Up and Understand that Child Sex Trafficking is a Huge Problem, NOT a Conspiracy Theory

As we have investigated the problem of child sex trafficking, we have discovered that the problem reaches to the most elite members of society, and that they depend upon the public not understanding what is happening, or minimizing it and excusing most reports as “Conspiracy theories.”

In response to this problem, we recently covered the meeting earlier this year in Westminster, London by The International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ), as the court convened over a 3-day period to launch their Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse. See:

800K Children in the U.S. Missing Each Year – International Tribunal Exposes Pedophilia Problem – Victims Testify of Child Sex Trafficking and Satanic Ritual Abuse

Therefore, in the third installment of John P. Thomas’ investigative reports into child sex trafficking, we seek to help the public understand the full scope of this horrific problem.

This problem will continue to exist until enough people in the public wake up and decide something needs to be done to stop these horrible crimes against our most vulnerable citizens: children.

Crimes Against Children

by John P. Thomas
Health Impact News

Unless the nature of criminal and immoral activities such as child trafficking, child torture, child rape, trauma-based mind control programming, and child blood sacrifices on the altars of Satan are clearly understood, it will be difficult to intervene in the dark system that is consuming perhaps as many as 8 million children in the world every year. [1] 

There is No Child Love in Pedophilia

Acts of child molestation are commonly called pedophilia. Pedophilia is defined as “child love.” Clearly this term is a misnomer – there is nothing loving about raping children, feeding children into the sex trade, torturing children and using mind control techniques to turn them into slaves, or tying them to altars where they are gang raped prior to being mutilated and killed as an offering to Satan. [1, 2]

Thus, I will not use the word pedophilia in this article, but instead will call the perpetrators of such evil – pedovores, because they consume children. Another term that I will use for these people is paedo-predators, because they prey upon children like snakes or wild beasts prey upon the animals they kill and eat.

Pedovores use children as consumable products. They freely use them for their sexual gratification, for their financial gain, and for Satanic rituals.

This article is the next installment in the series about child molestation and the predators who destroy the lives of children. The first two articles focused on the scandals rocking the Catholic Church.

What our research has uncovered is that the issue of predators destroying the lives of children are much more widespread than we ever imagined.

The Activity of Paedo-Predators goes Far beyond the Roman Catholic Church

The RCC and other religious institutions are not the only perpetrators of crimes against children. Children are abused in numerous secret societies, in the CIA and other government agencies, in many different religious organizations, in families, and in every imaginable program that has been designed to serve the needs of children.

Child protective services and both the law enforcement and judicial systems rarely protect children from this abuse, and sadly they often contain pedovore rings of abusers who perpetrate these crimes against the children they are sworn to protect, while protecting the pedovores. [1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 15]

Warning – Adult Content

The remainder of this article contains graphic and gruesome descriptions of what happens to children. I will not sanitize the truth to make the crimes seem less horrific. 

Types of Crimes Pedovores Commit against Children

These crimes can be roughly organized into four categories, though there is most certainly overlap between the crimes: (1) child molestation, (2) child pornography and prostitution, (3) child sacrifice, and (4) trauma-based mind control slavery.

I will not be discussing child forced labor for manufacturing, the harvesting of organs from children for transplantation, involuntary medical experimentation, or the use of child soldiers in war, because I need to limit the scope of these articles.

Kidnapping and selling/trafficking children are also crimes, which go hand in hand with some of the other crimes against children. It is the beginning point for the horrors of abuse that follow.

1. Child Molestation

These children are fondled, exposed to various forms of sexual activity, and anally, orally or vaginally raped.

These children usually reside in local communities with their parents or caregivers and are victimized by pedovores who also live in the same communities. They are usually released by pedovores after molestation. Sometimes children are killed, but not usually.

The full extent of damage caused by molestation is often not immediately seen.

Molestation is like a slow acting poison – it permeates every aspect of a child’s life for many years to come.

As these children mature their lives will be marked by dysfunctional relationships, depressions, low self-esteem, distorted views of sex, mistrust of adults, and immune system suppression which eventually unfolds in long-term chronic illness. [5, 6] 

2. Child Pornography and Prostitution 

Children are kidnapped and trafficked into the international sex trade. They can be raped by the hour and may only live a few years before the physical and emotional damage is so severe that their captors simply kill them, because they are no longer useful or profitable. [1]

They are used to make child pornography films and possibly child “snuff films.” Snuff films show actual film footage of people being raped, tortured, and killed to stimulate the sexual pleasure of those who purchase the videos on the dark web.

You won’t find links to real snuff films in an internet search since they are recordings of criminal activities. For this reason, there is considerable propaganda that suggests that snuff films just don’t exist. [7]

Evidence, however, is strong that recordings of children being tortured, raped, and killed are being made for high price purchasers who can pay several thousand dollars per video. [8]

3. Child Torture and Sacrifice

Other children are kidnapped and channeled into dark occult activities where they are destroyed and consumed in Satanic rituals. Their lives are taken on altars dedicated to Satan, Lucifer, Moloch, and other “gods” of darkness. 

The sacrificial ritual usually begins with gang raping of the child. Children are further tortured by cutting, stabbing, and other types of mutilation designed to cause pain and intense fear, which produces high levels of adrenaline in the blood.

Sometimes the adrenalin-rich blood is consumed by the pedovores to get an intense adrenalin rush. The pedovores may enjoy watching the child bleed to death or they may hasten the process of death by dismemberment.

Sometimes babies are burned alive as sacrifices dedicated to Moloch as has been done for more than 3,000 years. (8)

4. Trauma-Based Mind Control Slavery

Extremely sophisticated techniques of physical torture and emotional abuse are used to break the consciousness of children into pieces to create children with multiple personalities.

The most effective programming happens during the first 6 or 7 years of life. Programming sometimes begins in the womb with electroshock abuse. [3]

The programing is designed to create a permanent replacement for the true self. The slave is intended to obey their “handlers” and the needs of their secret organizations. A handler is a person who manages, monitors, and fortifies the mind control process to be sure the programming does not fail. [3, 9]

Compassion, empathy, independent thinking, and love for others is driven far underground so that the lives of the mind-controlled slave will be dominated by greed and lust for power, and obedience to their handlers. [3]

Sometimes the goal of mind control programmers is to create a slave with multiple personalities who will have multiple lives, which are intended to be completely disconnected from one another.

These victims are managed by handlers who maintain the programming and establish tasks for the slave to complete. The handlers are able to use the programing to force the slave to switch from one personality (alter) to another and do the bidding of the handler. [9, 10]

The mind control techniques used with children were enhanced after World War II through research done under the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. Former Nazi researchers, such as Josef Mengele, were brought to the United States through Project Paperclip to mastermind and refine these techniques. [9, 10]

Functions of Mind Controlled Slaves

Mind-controlled children are used as sex slaves, presidential level blackmailers, drug smugglers, high profile entertainers, and world class athletes. [10]

When they reach adulthood, they occupy positions in every profession. They commonly serve as university faculty, high level religious leaders, corporate executives, mainstream media workers, and for various other tasks that control and shape the thinking and behavior of general society. They are also called Monarch slaves or just Monarchs. [3, 9]

In the extreme, mind control programmers seek to supply the networks of certain secret Satanic elite groups with a race of mind-controlled zombies. They function as mindless assassins, crazed gunmen, and agents provocateurs. [9]

The Investment in Creating Mind Controlled Slaves is Extensive 

It takes many years to program a Monarch mind control slave. Thus, these children are intended to stay under the control of their handlers for a lifetime [3] or until they are deemed unfit for the work.

Some are scheduled for being killed at their 30th birthday. [9] Sometimes they are used as Satanic sacrificial victims when they are no longer seen as valuable.

Sometimes Mind Control Programing Fails 

It is important to note that even though trauma-based mind control programming involving torture and repeated rape is intended to last for a lifetime, it can fail when unanticipated events trigger the release of memories.

When this happens, memories of trauma, abuse, and activities committed as slaves begin to flow into the consciousness of the true self. Sometimes the process starts with unexplainable nightmares or vivid memory fragments that pop into the mind.

The recollection and assimilation of hidden memories is often a very messy process with intense emotional volatility. A person might think he or she is going insane as horrific memories are re-experienced.

The restoration of a unified consciousness (single personality) can be achieved through the use of various deprogramming techniques and with the assistance of loving helpers. [3, 9, 10]

How Many Children Go Missing Each Year?

The exact numbers of children who are molested, trafficked, sacrificed on altars, and subjected to trauma-based mind control every year are not easy to determine.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are 800,000 children who go missing every year in the United States. [11] 

Worldwide, the estimate is 8 million missing children. [1] 

Some of these children may eventually be found, but many others disappear without a trace. 

There are very few mainstream news stories about the topic of missing children. The stories and internet articles on the topic seem to downplay the numbers by saying that most all of the children that go missing are eventually found and only a very tiny number are gone forever, because most missing children are the result of disputes between separated/divorced parents. [11]

Numbers of Unreported Missing and Abused Children

The estimate of 800,000 children in the United States does not include children without birth certificates.

When breeders produce children for Satanic sacrifices, they do not obtain birth certificates for them. This number also does not include planeloads of unregistered children who are illegally brought into the United States through the clandestine activities of government/military operations and other black-market enterprises. [1]  

This number also does not include the hundreds of thousands of children who are voluntarily subjected to trauma-based mind control by their parents or care-givers. These children are not missing.

They are intensely emotionally and physically tortured during the programming process that takes place for the first 6 or 7 years of their lives. [3]

The FBI indicated that it received 464,324 missing children reports in 2017. [12]

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) indicated that they responded to 3,633 reports of possible child sex trafficking in 2017. [13] 

But what about the other 335,000 out of the estimated 800,000 children who go missing every year? These children were not reported to the FBI.

What happened to them? The truth is that we just don’t know.

Estimates from people who have investigated Satanic ritual murder indicate that 50,000 children are sacrificed annually [15, 16]

Is the Estimate of 800,000 Missing Children Actually a much Lower Number than Reality?

It is estimated that more than 30-million Satan worshipers participate in various secret societies in the United States. These people subject their children to trauma-based mind control, which at some point will include each of their children witnessing the sacrifice of a kidnapped child as a key part of the mind control programming process. [3, 16]

In many cities, the powerful positions occupied by paedo-predators in law enforcement, in the criminal justice system, in the juvenile court system, and in Child Protective Services make it nearly impossible to use these organizations to address the crimes against children. [1, 2, 3, 4, 15]

They will not investigate allegations of trauma-based Satanic mind control programming or Satanic ritual abuse and sacrifice, because they are under control of certain elite groups and corrupt officials within their organizations. [3]

The International Perspective 

The International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ) is investigating the international network of criminal activity that is abusing children. [14]

Robert David Steele, their Chief Counsel, has been examining the data concerning the numbers of abused children.

Mr. Steele is the CEO of Earth Intelligence Network. He was recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize and is a former operations officer of the clandestine service of the CIA. He was the cofounder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command. He has trained over 8,000 intelligence and law enforcement representatives across 66 countries.

Mr. Steele stated in part during his opening remarks of the ITNJ meeting in Westminster, England in April of 2018:

The working assumption yet to be proven is that the totality of the children disappearing worldwide is toward 8 million children [annually]. In the United States of America, the acknowledged number, not counting the children being bred without birth certificates and not counting the children being imported without documentation, is between 600,000 and 800,000 a year.

I personally believe that the number that we want to try to document is rising well beyond the official figures and we have yet to learn what the actual number is. [1] 

Mr. Steele mentioned the “deep state” in his remarks, which is the system of international banking families that essentially control the world’s money supply and thereby have powerful influence over national political processes. This was his final comment regarding taking down the deep state. 

Mr. Steele stated: 

Pedophilia is how the deep state recruits and controls people. It is also the Achilles heel of the deep state. 

I believe that once the public realizes that the government is not protecting their children at a scale of vulnerability that we can articulate then everything else about the government is called into question. 

For me, this is a true righteous endeavor… The center of gravity for change is the American public because if you can get the American public angry, we will stop supporting dictators overseas and we will close all of our military bases overseas.  

I am on record as a former CIA operations officer as saying that our thousand bases overseas are not there for national defense but they are there to serve as lily pads for smuggling of guns, gold, cash, drugs, and small children. [1]

Robert David Steele gave a powerful presentation at the ITNJ during which he summarized the full range of crimes that are committed against children. It is stunning in its simplicity and completeness.

Watch Chief Counsel Robert David Steele (ITNJ Seating):

Conclusion: Time to Shine the Light on these Evil Practices

There is a sober tone to these articles, because the topics are so serious.

The good news is that people are waking up to the reality of the crimes that paedo-predators are committing against children. Every time a person realizes what is happening to our children and shares the truth with others, the light of truth shines a little further into the darkness of the criminal underworld and the operations of certain elite secret societies who are working to expand their world dominance.

Their plans are being destabilized and will eventually be overturned by the light of truth as it passes from person to person. 

See Also:

Is “Pastor” A Biblical Title for Church Leaders?

About the Author

John P. Thomas is a health writer for Health Impact News. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Science in Public Health (M.S.P.H.) from the School of Public Health, Department of Health Administration, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

References

[1] Introductory Remarks, Chief Counsel Robert David Steele, Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse, International Tribunal for Natural Justice, London Seating, YouTube, April 2018.

[2] Testimony, ITNJ Commissioner Carine Hutsebaut, Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse, International Tribunal for Natural Justice, London Seating, April 2018.

[3] Witness Testimony, Jay Parker, RSA Survivor, Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse, International Tribunal for Natural Justice, April 2018.

[4] Witness Testimony, John Wedger, Police ‘Whistleblower, Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse, International Tribunal for Natural Justice, April 2018.

[5] “Child Sexual Abuse Statistics,” National Center for Victims of Crime, Retrieved 11/19/2018.

[6] “Long-term health outcomes of childhood sexual abuse,” American Nurse Today, Retrieved 11/19/2018.

[7] “Does Snuff Exist?” The Dark Side of Porn, TV episode 206.

[8] “Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The Reality of Protected Child Abuse and Snuff Networks,” Joël van der Reijden, Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics, 7/25/2007, Article is Google-banned since 2017. (Warning the article contains photos of child molestation. Some photos have been modified to prevent them from being used as child pornography.)

[9] The Biggest Secret: Chapter 16, “Where have All the Children Gone?” David Icke.

[10] Witness Testimony , Kristy Allen, MK-Ultra – RSA Survivor, Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse, International Tribunal for Natural Justice, London, England, April 2018. https://commission.itnj.org/2018/06/05/kristy-allen-mk-ultra-rsa-survivor/

[11] “Missing Children in America: Unsolved Cases,” ABC News, 5/8/2013.

[12] “Key Facts,” National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Retrieved 11/26/2018.

[13] “Exploited Children Statistics,” National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Retrieved 11/26/2018.

[14] International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ), Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse, Homepage.

[15] “Ted Gunderson & The McMartin Preschool Satanic Abuse Case,” You Think Its a Joke, 3/15/2016. (Ted Gunderson describes corrupt police, public prosecutors, and judges who obstruct the investigation of crimes and prevent prosecution of people involved with Satanic ritual abuse of children in the United States.)

[16] Jay Parker, Free Your Mind Conference 2011, YouTube.

Marvin Siegel and “Daddy’s girl” Lisa Belanger, before guardians took them away from each other. Photo provided by family.

Commentary by Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News

Attorneys and guardians have plundered the estate of Marvin Siegel, a retired attorney from Boxford, Massachusetts. At the same time they have gone through the courts to isolate him from his children and essentially imprison him in his own home.

His youngest daughter Lisa Belanger followed in his footsteps in becoming an attorney, inspired by her father’s principles of fighting for what is right. She says:

He taught me to not be silent when wrongs are being done to others.

She and her sister Devora Kaiser were shocked to see the strong arm of the state in keeping them away from their beloved father when he was captured from his family in 2011.

See their original story:

Massachusetts Senior Citizen and Attorney Medically Kidnapped – Estate Plundered – Represents National Epidemic

Marvin Siegel’s daughters had no idea how deeply the corruption in the guardianship issue runs, but they have had a front row seat to see the conflicts of interests, sweetheart deals, drugging of senior citizens, and raping of their estates that are standard fare in some probate courts, such as the one their family has had the misfortune of being subjected to.

According to the Boston Broadside:

In March of 2015, Marvin’s daughter, Attorney Lisa Siegel Belanger, filed an extensive federal civil action in which she claims that Atty.

Kazarosian is part of a long-embedded insidious enterprise of corrupt lawyers and judges using the Massachusetts Probate & Family Court system to exploit elders—and any person of any age for that matter who happen to be vulnerably labeled as “incapacitated.”

Lisa’s extensive, detailed complaint and accompanying exhibits can be viewed by the public free of charge at http://www.belangerlawoffice.com/free-marvin/federal-civil-action-2015/.

In our last update on their story in July 2018, we reported that attorney Marsha Kazarosian retaliated against Lisa Belanger and her efforts to free her father by filing with the Bar Association to have her disbarred.

See:

Massachusetts Attorney Exposing Medical Kidnapping Threatened with Being Disbarred

Marsha Kazarosian is an appointee of Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, and she currently sits on the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers – the very group that has the power to ultimately decide the fate of Lisa Belanger’s law career.

Photo Source: The Boston Broadside.

The latest developments seem to paint a picture of the deck stacked against the attorney who is simply fighting with all she has for the God-given human right to have a relationship with her father, without government interference.

According to a recent order from the Board of Bar Overseers, the Board has ruled that Belanger will not be allowed to “introduce any exhibits at the [upcoming] hearing,” nor will she be able to have witnesses testify on her behalf.

The hearing was supposed to take place December 4-6, but it has been continued to early January.

Meanwhile, Lisa and her sister were notified on Monday, December 10, that their father has been hospitalized. He has pneumonia, but Lisa Belanger is forbidden to see her father by Marsha Kazarosian and the new court-appointed guardian for Marvin Siegel, Brian Bixby, who was recommended by Kazarosian.

The Boston Broadside reports these latest developments, up to Mr. Siegel’s hospitalization:

Gov. Baker’s Appointee, Atty. Marsha Kazarosian, Moves in for the Kill
‘to Protect her $$$ Source’

The Boston Broadside takes on Attorney Marsha Kazarosian and Elder Abuse. Source.

Powerful Political Appointee Kazarosian Seeks to Muzzle Elder’s Daughter After Daughter Exposed ‘Kazarosian-Led Cabal’ Draining Her Father’s Estate

by Lonnie Brennan
The Boston Broadside

Excerpts:

Retired Attorney Marvin Siegel of Boxford, Mass. thought he had everything all set: power of attorney, medical proxies, and all of the regular as well as the complex paperwork to ensure that his daughters would protect his future.

That changed when he was involuntarily transported by elder services to Beverly Hospital approximately 7 years ago, then subsequently transported to a psychiatric unit where, according to his daughters, he was drugged against his will, and signed over control of his multi-million dollar estate to predatory lawyers.

Fast forward to 2018, and Mr. Siegel remains a “prisoner” in his own home, now saddled with some degree of dementia after years of forced drugging and isolation from immediate family members.

According to two of his daughters, their father has been isolated, medicated, and his accounts continue to be liquidated, to the tune of nearly $250,000 per year in legal charges alone. They recently filed yet another objection in Essex County Probate and Family Court (Docket No. ES11P1465PM, and reference prior objections contained in ES11P1466GD).

The various documents submitted to the courts detail lawyers on a mad spending spree: invoices include charging from $275 to $600 per hour to talk to one another, photocopy papers, and respond to e-mails from one another.

The daughters specify in their objections that invoices include “excessive and frivolous” billing and reveal “duplicate and redundant efforts” as well as billing which they cite breaks rules of ethical behavior, charging $275 per hour for photocopying, for example.

But the daughters took on a giant, and payback is a bitch.

In their latest objections, the daughters detail excess charges for various services, as well as cite a certain lawyer whose near-doubling of the hourly rates for services threatens to rapidly accelerate the current nearly quarter-of-a-million dollar drain on their father’s accounts.

But the daughters poked a bear. A big bear.

And that bear has struck back. Governor Charlie Baker’s appointee and member of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, Attorney Marsha Kazarosian of Haverhill, is one of the lawyers at the center of the “liquidation” of Mr. Siegel. Kazarosian has been paid lump sums “on retainer” repeatedly, multiple times each year, with little to no accounting of how she justifies her compensation, the sisters charge.

Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars in prior billings, Kazarosian received payments of :

$15,000 (2/15/2016),

$25,000 (6/17/2016) and

$35,000 (11/21/2016),

bringing her 2016 take to $75,000, according to recently released accountings.

In 2017, Kazarosian received similar payments:

$10,000 (3/9/2017),

$25,000 (4/11/2017),

$10,000 (10/7/2017) and

$25,000 (11/10/2017).

Figures for 2018 remain unreleased.

Kazarosian Strikes Back Hard – Goes for Law License

Kazarosian struck back against one of the daughters, Attorney Lisa Siegel Belanger, seeking to strip Belanger of her license to practice law. Make no mistake, Kazarosian is a giant in political circles, having held many key positions and currently serving on the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers. Kazarosian also sits on a board recommending judgeships.

Belanger is charged with a long list of inappropriate behavior, behavior which included Belanger’s release and exposure of what she terms the systemic draining of her father estate. Kazarosian has gone several steps further by recently filing motions which have sought to isolate Belanger and her father Marvin even more.

Kazarosian had the courts prevent any public viewing, any recording, videotaping, and even went so far as apparently supporting the removal of Marvin’s son-in-law from a court hearing, so that only Lisa and her sister would be in the room.

At that hearing, Lisa doubled-down on the presiding judge, revealing connections between the judge and opposing counsel which was previously undisclosed by the judge.

After much delay that day, the judge consented to having Lisa immediately handwrite a motion to demand the judge withdraw from the proceedings, and recused herself from future interactions on the case. The judge complied.

In addition to the monies drained each year by attorney Kazarosian, the latest court filings cite extensive payments to a number of lawyers over the years, including Brian Cuffe, James Feld, Deutsch Williams, Brian Bixby, Dennis McHugh, Alisa Hacker, Cheri Myette, and others.

“ALL of these attorneys are paid from my father’s estate,” daughter Sheryl Sidman noted, adding that “he would be very upset to learn that his estate is being greatly reduced in size due to paying attorney fees.”

Together, the attorneys took $236,813.22 in 2016 from Mr. Siegel, and $205,066.03 in 2017.

In 2016, 32% of all withdrawals were made to pay lawyer fees. In 2017, 31% of withdrawals went to lawyer fees. The daughters have also vehemently objected to the excessive withdrawal of funds for household items including charges to refurbish a bathroom, pay groceries, and more than $2,000 per week paid to Right At Home for 24/7 “guards” (aka medical babysitters) to stay with their father.

After nearly a year of work, Kazarosian has arranged a trial against Marvin Siegel’s daughter for early December. A three-day trial to strip the daughter of her license to practice law, citing how it was her who has been uncooperative in this matter and blasphemous in her objections to Kazarosian and the other lawyers involved.

The daughters filed to have the proceedings videotaped.

Kazarosian objected and the courts sustained her. Kazarosian in her objects slandered COMFLM founder Janet Aldridge, stating she had no press credentials.

Ms. Aldridge re-filed with the court directly, including multiple press credentials from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts going back many, many, many years.

She routinely videotapes hearings and events at the State House and has more credentials than imaginable. Either Kazarosian was stupid, or she blundered without checking.

The court has DELAYED the court case from Dec. 5th to early January, and has promised to render a decision on allowing the public access to any or some of the Siegel saga and his daughter’s trial.

Read the full article at the Boston Broadside.

Kaya Jackson and her children want nothing more than to be together, but DSS doesn’t think she is smart enough. Photo taken August 2018 and provided by family.

by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff

Child Protective Services doesn’t believe that Kaya Jackson is smart enough to take care of her youngest child Egypt. Though a judge ruled months ago that Kaya didn’t need to have a neuropsychological evaluation, another judge since then approved the South Carolina Department of Social Services (DSS) request for the test.

Now a doctor says that her IQ is too low to care for a special needs child, even though she has taken many classes and learned what she needs to know to care for her daughter.

All this comes at a time when it looked like their family’s nightmare was finally coming to an end and they would be reunited. Unsupervised visits had begun in October, and Egypt was supposed to be returned home by February at the latest.

This new development unravels the progress that has happened over the last 4 years as Kaya has fought to bring her family back together again. She has jumped through every hoop that DSS has placed before her. Every time that she meets another demand, social workers have managed to get a judge to approve yet another demand.

This photo was taken on December 13, 2018. If DSS has their way, this may have been her last visit with her family. Photo provided by family.

Mother Never Abused Children

Kaya Jackson never abused or neglected her children. It all boils down to the fact that the government agency known as Child Protective Services has decided that she doesn’t have enough intelligence to care for one of her children.

Egypt was abused, but her mother had nothing to do with it. Her non-custodial father Joseph Morales is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for beating her during one of his weekend visits. He confessed to throwing her on the couch and punching her in the head, actions which put his daughter into a coma and left her permanently brain damaged. (Source.)

Kaya was not involved in any way with the abuse. She had not seen any reason to suspect that her child’s father was capable of violence, but DSS seized custody from her anyway.

When Egypt was released from the hospital, she left with multiple medical problems. She is wheelchair bound, requires a feeding tube, is partially blind, and suffers from daily seizures.

The foster family was provided with a home health nurse to help with her medical care, but the nurse hired by the state sexually abused the child while she was in the foster home. (Source.)

It took almost a year for DSS to move Egypt to a different foster home.

See original story:

2 Year Old South Carolina Child Medically Kidnapped is Sexually Abused by Nurse in Foster Care

Peggy Louise Atkins was offered a plea deal to reduce her charge from sexual misconduct on a minor to unlawful child neglect. She received a 6 year suspended sentence with 30 months of probation.

When DSS seized custody of Egypt, they also took her 4-year-old sister Sha’kyah and placed her in foster care. Her older brother and sister went to live with their grandmother.

Other Children Returned Home, Reunification Ordered for Egypt

Sha’kyah did not spend long in foster care and was returned to her mother, who has since remarried. The older kids came home in the summer of 2018. The children are thriving and happy with their mother and step-father. They are all doing well in school, but they miss their little sister terribly.

A judge ruled in the fall that Egypt would be reunified with her family, with unsupervised visits beginning in October, transitioning to her being home for good by February 2019 at the latest. Finally, they thought, Egypt was coming home and they would all be together again.

Mother Jumped through Every DSS Hoop

At the time when Egypt was first medically kidnapped in 2015, Greenville Memorial Hospital Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Nancy Henderson told DSS that Kaya was incapable of caring for her child.

In the time since then, Kaya Jackson has attended many doctors appointment and has worked hard to learn how to care for Egypt’s medical needs and to meet every new requirement placed on her by DSS.

When they said that her home was too small, they moved into a 4-bedroom home. When they said that she could not rely on public transportation but needed a driver’s license, she got it. Then she needed a car. It wasn’t big enough for DSS, so they got a van.

See story:

Young Child Molested by Nurse in Foster Care Still not Returned to Mother More than a Year Later

Kaya took every class that DSS requested and then some, including classes on CPR, first aid, seizures and epilepsy, G-tubes, special needs children, and medications. She passed every class.

DSS reportedly never worked with her to get the classes, but she found ways to learn what she needed to without their help.

Her social worker told her that she had to get certified in car seats. She sought classes and watched YouTube videos, only to find out that there is no certification for parents in car seats. Certification is for EMTs and other specialists who work with parents.

She now knows more about car seat safety than many social workers who snatch children only to place them in the wrong car seat for the child’s size. (Many parents report their children being taken by social workers or transported by foster parents using incorrect car seats. Some have reported that their children are not properly buckled, or even placed into car seats that are not even buckled into the vehicle at all!)

For more than 2 years they told her that she needed training in how to care for Egypt, but they refused to give her the referrals that she needed to get the training.

She and her husband were finally able to complete a 3 day intensive training at Greenville Memorial Hospital. She learned how to change out the connectors on the feeding tube, how to give rescue medications for Egypt’s seizures, and how to recognize when to take her to the emergency room.

She knows, and described to Health Impact News, what to do if problems arise.

The hospital where she took classes reportedly agreed that she was capable of caring for Egypt.

Kaya and Egypt at a doctor appointment March 2018. Photo provided by family.

It was one hoop after another, and Kaya met everything that was asked of her. She has “lots of certificates.”

DSS Chooses Own Judge to Reverse Reunification?

DSS was not happy with the judge who ruled for Egypt to be reunified with her family. South Carolina has an odd quirk with family court that may be unique to that state – cases rotate through different judges instead of staying with the same judge. One advocate said that a clerk told her:

DSS makes their own court docket.

DSS is able to look at which judge will be present at what time so they can set up cases the way they want them.

This is how, presumably, at the next court hearing after reunification was ruled, DSS was able to get a new judge to back everything they wanted, including the demand that Kaya get a neuropsychological evaluation. The previous judge had stated that this was not necessary. DSS said that Kaya:

…has the diagnosable condition of Bi-polar Disorder, which renders her unable or unlikely to provide minimally acceptable care of Egypt Morales due to Egypt’s medically fragile condition.

However, Kaya already has 3 psychological evaluations that say that she is not bi-polar. Nor does she have any other mental illness.

The neuropsych evaluation included an IQ test. Before the test, Kaya says that the psychologist Dr. Laura Stone Anthony said to her:

I already know what DSS is looking for. I have to give it to them.

Several advocates have told Health Impact News that the providers of services for DSS/CPS are usually contracted with them, and if they don’t “find” the way the agency wants them to, they won’t continue to get the lucrative contracts with CPS.

Alabama attorney Lisa Chasteen has reported that an attorney for CPS complained in a court hearing that a particular provider did not “find the way we want them to,” and thus they rejected the services of that provider.

Egypt responds to the love of her family at a visit in February 2018. Photo provided by family.

The doctor contracted by DSS to do Kaya’s evaluation found that she was “borderline learning disabled,” with an IQ of 70.

Eric Ziegler and Amy Fabbrini are another couple who lost their children to “low IQ,” but they eventually got them back after their story went viral and was picked up by the Glenn Beck Show and many other media outlets. Eric’s IQ was tested to be at 66 and Amy’s, 72.

See:

Oregon Couple Labeled “Incapable” Parents by Social Workers – 2 Day Old Baby Kidnapped

Oregon Couple Loses Children due to “Low IQ”

After Public Outcry Oregon Judge Orders Children Returned to Parents with “IQ Too Low to Parent”

There were concerns expressed because Kaya didn’t “know the medications off the top of her head.” Kaya’s response is this:

Like I told her nurse, I have a list of her medications. All I have to do is read the bottle and pull her medications. What’s so hard about that? I know all her basic care.

When we first covered Egypt’s story, Kaya’s advocate Adrienne Lomax explained that she is a good mom who is capable of learning anything that she needs to; she simply learns a little slower. Things may need to be explained twice. Her experience has been that Kaya is quite competent in figuring things out and looking up information that she needs.

Egypt is much loved by her family. Her oldest sister is smiling with her during a visit in August. Photo provided by family.

“Low IQ” Finding Destroys Hope of Being Together Again at Christmas

Nonetheless, Dr. Anthony’s findings have had a devastating effect on Egypt’s case.

Egypt’s pediatrician, who recently said that Kaya was capable of taking care of her daughter, has since changed her recommendation, telling the court that she no longer recommends that Egypt be returned home due to her mother’s low IQ and learning disability.

Visitation, which has been unsupervised since early October, has now stopped completely.

There will be no family visit at all for Christmas. The next court hearing is scheduled for January 30, 2019, and DSS is again recommending that all parental rights be terminated.

Kaya and her family are heartbroken.

Egypt’s older siblings are “always asking when their sister is coming home.”

Sha’kyah, who is now 7, sleeps with her little sister’s picture. They were so happy about Egypt coming home, and now they cannot see her at all.

Egypt and her siblings at McDonalds after a doctor appointment – October 2018. Photo provided by family.

Kaya Jackson asks how that can possibly be good for Egypt. She has been told that the current fosters do not want to adopt her and that Egypt may be “unadoptable,” which could mean that:

now my child will be passed around in the system till she dies.

She has a family that loves her and wants her home.

Caring for special needs children is certainly a challenge, but Kaya would not be alone in taking care of Egypt. She has plenty of support available to her, and she has trained to be able to care for Egypt.

DSS provides home-health nurses to help the foster parents with her care. At one time, there were nurses in the foster home for 20 hours per day (including the nurse who was arrested for sexually assaulting the child).

Medicaid would still cover a home-health nurse for 56 hours per week if Egypt goes home, (and they would be supervised by the family to ensure Egypt’s safety in their care). That works out to 8 hours per day.

Kaya has already talked with a special school for her daughter. The school is year-round, and there would be a nurse on the school bus.

Some of the time at home are hours when Egypt will be sleeping. Kaya’s husband will be home in the evenings to help. The other children are old enough to help with their sister’s care as well, and the family has backup support already lined up.

Wouldn’t it be better for Egypt to be surrounded by those who love her most?

ADA Violation by DSS

Kaya apologized on Facebook to her daughter “for having a learning disability.” She wrote on the Family Forward Project page and the Prayers for Egypt page:

Im so sorry i don’t have a genius iq!!!

People were shocked. Comments were very supportive and included statements like these:

• Never apologize for who you are! It is not your fault the system failed you and your daughter. A learning disability does not make you a bad or unfit mom. You are a strong woman to go thru 4 years of fighting for your baby, that’s exactly what a good mother would do. I’m so sorry, my heart breaks for you. Stay strong mama and never give up.
• Girl what I saw you do in the court room blew my mind!!! I don’t even think I could have done that! They way you showed that judge how you knew how to take care of your daughter!! DONT YOU GIVE UP!!!
• This can’t be real life. Idk you at all but I’ve followed your tragedy. My heart breaks for you. My prayers are with you both.

Many reminded her that, if she is learning disabled, then DSS must make reasonable accommodations for her in order for them to be in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). They have not.

See:

Disabled Parents Losing Right to Parent their Own Children in America while Foster Parent Recruitment Seeks “Imperfect Parents”

Disabled Father Denied by State of Tennessee to Father his Own Child

Because this is a violation of Kaya Jackson’s civil rights under the ADA, she has already taken action and filed a complaint with the Department of Justice. She received notice on December 15 that the DOJ has received her complaint.

The family is now in contact with a civil rights attorney whom they hope will take the case.

How You Can Help

There is a Facebook page set up for the family called Prayers for EGYPT.

The governor of South Carolina is Henry McMaster. He may be reached at (803) 734-2100 or contacted here.

The Senator for Kaya Jackson’s district is Karl B. Allen. He may be reached at (803) 212-6008 or contacted here.

Representative Chandra E. Dillard represents the district. She may be reached at (803) 212-6791 or contacted here.

Image source.

Scandal at a New York RTC illustrates how Congress managed to make the plight of sex-trafficking victims even worse

The vastly overhyped “Family First Act” comes complete with a “presents for pimps” loophole.  That will encourage more tragedies like the one at Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls.

by Richard Wexler
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

Excerpts:

It’s always cause for celebration when a place that institutionalizes children is forced to close.

The residential treatment portion of Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls, an institution in Westchester County, north of New York City, is scheduled to shut down.

But don’t celebrate too much. A new federal law actually makes it easier to keep such institutions going, and set up new ones.

The shutdown of the residential treatment portion of Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls won’t happen because the agency that runs it, the Jewish Board Family and Children’s Services, had a crisis of conscience.

It will happen because the pressure from upset neighbors and state regulators became too much.

What was upsetting them?

Oh, just the usual: violence and sex trafficking.

The mere fact that an overwhelming body of research finds residential treatment to be a failure never seems to be enough in itself to shut these places down.  Neither is the fact that almost none of the young people institutionalized in such places really need to be there.

There is nothing an RTC can do that can’t be done better with Wraparound programs, in which all the help a child needs is brought into the child’s own home or a foster home.

Further evidence for this can be found just by looking at what was done when Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls was forced to start shutting down, a process that started nearly a year ago. According to the Rockland / Westchester Journal News:

When it was announced Cedar Knolls would close, there were 54 youths staying there out of a capacity of 78. The youths were expected to go back to their families or be placed with foster families. The final six children are to be transferred a facility in New York City, a spokeswoman told The Journal News on Thursday. [Emphasis added.]

Which raises an obvious question: Why were they institutionalized in the first place?

To really understand this story, it’s worth taking a trip through time.

1990: “Love knows no locksmith.”

The first time I read about Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls was when it and a sister institution, Linden Hill, were exposed as hellholes by New York Newsday. It was 1990, and reporter Michael Powell found that the institutions were

plagued by violence, unchecked sex, and poor supervision. …   Said one counselor: “They have lost sight that the program is no longer safe to kids. It’s outrageous.”

When confronted, the institutions did what they so often do: They blamed the children.

In one case, a teenage boy with a history of aggressive sexual behavior allegedly forced a 14-year-old girl to have sex with another boy. The director of Linden Hill said the sex was consensual.

“Do you set up a situation that is locked down or do you allow kids to try their wings?” he said. “[You ask] how could it happen? Well, it’s almost inevitable. Love knows no locksmith.”

In a just world, the 1990 expose should have been enough to shut these places down.

Unfortunately, a few years later, in spite of such high-quality journalism, it was New York Newsday that actually shut down. Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls kept right on collecting hundreds of dollars per day per child to “treat” children, even though, as noted earlier, the evidence is overwhelming that residential treatment is a failure.

2017: All those runaways

Twenty-seven years after that first New York Newsday expose, the young people at Hawthorne- Cedar Knolls were “trying their wings” once again – running away in massive numbers; massive as in 73 percent of them in a single year.

The New York Times reported that though the institution supposedly was treating victims of sex trafficking, the fear was that the runaways were falling victim to sex traffickers.

Once again, the institution blamed the victims.

The Times’ explained the supposed “dilemma” for such places: They can’t “treat” people who keep running away, but if you make it harder for young people to run, then the places become more like jails – and people who have been victims of sex trafficking shouldn’t be treated like criminals.

The headline on the Times story was: “How Do You Care for Sex-Trafficking Victims if You Can’t Hold On to Them?”

But the story omitted the answer: You place them with people they want to hold on to – in other words, a family.

That, apparently is exactly what happened to most of the children at Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls, but only when the institution was pressured into closing.

Surely when 73 percent of the residents run away in a single year, it’s time to consider the possibility that the problem is the place they’re running from.

2018: A pipeline to prostitution

Now, the Times is back with a follow-up story. The fears were correct. As the story puts it:

On Thursday, the breadth of a pipeline carrying young women out of Hawthorne and into prostitution became clearer. Nineteen people were charged in a sex-trafficking ring that exploited young women and girls as young as 13 years old, federal prosecutors said.

At least 15 victims were in the child welfare system, including nine who were residents of Hawthorne, the prosecutors said. …“These were especially vulnerable victims,” the prosecutor, Elinor L. Tarlow, said. “They didn’t have stable residences. They didn’t have family support. They didn’t have guidance.”

She said the accused traffickers capitalized on that vulnerability. “They approached victims as if they had a romantic interest in them,” she said. “They offered them a place to stay and then they pushed them into prostitution.” [Emphasis added.]

The “presents for pimps” loophole

Anyone could have seen all this coming. Predators go where the prey is. The role of group homes and institutions in making sex trafficking easier has been documented over and over.

And that’s what makes the callousness and cynicism of America’s group home industry so breathtaking.  They used the desperation of Members of Congress to pass the vastly overhyped  so-called “Family First Act” to make tragedies such as this even more likely.

The law puts some very minor, easy-to-evade limits on when the federal government will help foot the enormous bill for institutionalizing children in group homes and residential treatment centers.

But the group home industry chafed at even these minor restrictions. So they added what should be called the “presents for pimps” loophole. The spigot of federal dollars stays open for:

A setting providing high-quality residential care and supportive services to children and youth who have been found to be, or are at risk of becoming, sex trafficking victims

Never mind that such settings are probably the worst possible place for such children and youth.

Read the full article at the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

See Also:

800K Children in the U.S. Missing Each Year – International Tribunal Exposes Pedophilia Problem – Victims Testify of Child Sex Trafficking and Satanic Ritual Abuse

Pedophilia Crimes Against Children Inside and Outside the Church – Time to Acknowledge the Child Sex Trafficking Problem

These are some of the names of children taken by CPS on Nancy Barton’s Memorial Fence. Photo supplied by Nancy Barton.

By Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News

Christmas is an especially hard time for families who have been separated by Child Protective Services and family courts. How can Christmas possibly be “merry” when that which means the most – the children, or in some cases the elderly parents – are not there? The laughter and wonder of Christmas is missing, and their hearts have been shattered.

My heart has been very heavy this Christmas as I carry so many hurting families in my heart. It is hard to see hope and remember joy when there is so much evil in the world, but as I woke up Christmas morning, I was reminded that Hope didn’t come two thousand years ago as a blazing warrior on a white horse bringing victory. He came as a tiny baby. Yet He represented in human form all the love and promises and hope of God.

The greatest light the world has ever known came into the world in a form recognized by only a few, and we have yet to see the full manifestation of everything that was birthed into the world that one holy night and secured on the cross and an empty tomb 33 years later.

I am reminded that, even in the midst of deep sorrow and desperation, the true message of Christmas is that “Hope” has been born. This season is a timeless marker that, no matter how dark and hopeless it may seem, there is still a light that shines in the darkness.

Emmanuel – “God with us” – came two thousand years ago into a world that was filled with darkness and hopelessness. At that time there was great evil in the world, and those who believed in God were in a place of bondage under a brutal and oppressive regime. There had been 4 centuries of silence from the God of heaven.

Hope seemed distant, and the promises of God spoken through the prophets must have seemed like a fairy tale, something for the foolish and devout to hold onto, while the rest of the people struggled simply to survive.

It was into this kind of world that a baby was born, unknown to most of the world but heralded by angels to humble shepherds watching their flocks on a cold winter night.

A star shone brightly to announce his arrival, but the people of Bethlehem slumbered, unaware that the Light of Hope had just been born in their midst. Wise men from a faraway land saw the star. They were awake and knew that something of monumental importance was happening. They left everything they had in search of the King of Kings who had been foretold.

The Hope of the world came as a tiny baby. He is the promise that every Word that has been spoken by God will come to pass. As Zechariah, the father of Jesus’s cousin John the Baptist said of Jesus before His birth:

The splendor light of heaven’s glorious sunrise is about to break upon us in holy visitation, all because the merciful heart of God is so very tender.

The word from heaven will come to us with dazzling light to shine upon those who live in darkness, near death’s dark shadow. And he will illuminate the path that leads to the way of peace. (Luke 1: 78-79 – The Passion Translation)

Memorial Fence for All Children Taken by CPS

Nancy Barton is a grandmother in North Dakota who is grieving the absence of 3 of her grandchildren this Christmas who were taken by CPS.  She recognizes that she is not alone in this, and that there are hundreds of thousands of children who are not spending the holidays with their own families.

A couple months ago, she began a memorial project for children who have been stolen from their families, writing their names on plaques and hanging them on the fence surrounding her house. Her memorial fence was created as a tribute to “give the children a voice,” and she wants them to know that they are not forgotten at Christmastime or any time.

Nancy Barton’s memorial fence for children taken by CPS. Photo supplied by Nancy Barton.

As of Christmas day 2018, there were 1027 plaques on the fence, representing several thousand children. Each contains 1 to 10 names.

Some of them, like Nhyariah Mack, will never come home. More children die in the custody of Child Protective Services than do in their own families.

See Nhyariah’s story:

Formerly Healthy Girl with Rare Genetic Disorder Dies After Being Medically Kidnapped in Georgia

Photo provided by Nancy Barton.

Paula Parker put together a YouTube video slideshow with photos from Nancy Barton’s memorial fence. She too has 3 grandchildren who were taken by CPS, and she understands the pain facing many in this season. She writes:

I created this Tribute video I made for the children and for Nancy Barton‘s hard work for her putting this memorial fence with all the children’s names who were stolen by cps and for all the grieving parents and grandparents to give their children a voice to be heard and not forgotten this Christmas!

… for all the children stolen by the corrupted cps and family courts, stolen from innocent parents and grandparents for profit, under the Title IV-E federal state funding in the ASFA adoption safe families act signed under Bill and Hillary Clinton. CPS rips families apart by stealing children and placing them in foster care so they are able to receive federal funding and bonuses and incentives for every child they take out of the home.

This video is to give children a voice and raise awareness on what child protective services is doing to children worldwide.

Nancy Barton created the memorial fence to give all the children a voice and has worked nonstop on this tribute memorial fence for all the stolen children….and many families gave their children and grandchildren’s names and dates when stolen to be placed on this memorial fence so they would have a voice and not be forgotten. Nancy herself is grieving grandparent – cps wrongfully stole her grandchildren from her and she is wanting them back.

I myself am a grieving grandma whose 3 grandchildren have been taken also, along with many parents and grandparents around the world. CPS is corrupted. They are taking from innocent parents and extended families.

We the People need to wake up and see what is happening right in front of us. Our children need us! [Edited for grammar]

Hope

Jesus came to bring light, life, and hope to this dark world. The word “hope” is a fascinating word in the Bible. It isn’t the kind of hope that one may “hope” they win the lottery, or “hope” that their team may win the Superbowl.

It isn’t just a wish.

On the contrary, the New Testament Greek word for hope is far more substantial. It is elpis/elpizo (1679/1680 Strongs). The literal definition of this Greek word is:

…the desire of something good with the expectation of receiving it.

Every single time the word hope is used in the King James Version, it is this word, as in Hebrews 11:1 –

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

This word “hope” links to the word “batach” (982 Strongs) in the Hebrew language. It is the word used in Psalm 22:9, which says:

Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast. (NIV)

It literally means to attach oneself, to trust, feel safe, secure, or be confident. This picture of trust and hope is of a breastfeeding baby who desires something good (mother’s milk) with the expectation of receiving it. In a normal, non-CPS situation, the nursing baby doesn’t just wish that his mother will nurse him. He KNOWS it. She wants to give her milk as much as baby wants to receive it, maybe more.

The baby born in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago came to bring us hope of redemption. It isn’t a Christmas wish. It is a promise.

May this kind of hope and faith spring up in our hearts this day, and may the new year bring the restoration of families all over the world. May this be the year that the prayer of Jesus be answered:

Thy kingdom come; thy will be done – on earth as it is in heaven.

Family was God’s idea. Restoration of families is God’s promise.

In this hope, may you find renewed strength for tomorrow.

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

The Gardasil vaccine scandal once again was the top news topic on Health Impact News for 2018, as it has been for the past several years.

Three of our top 10 stories from 2018 were in the vaccine topic area, with the top 2 news stories dealing with the Gardasil HPV vaccine.

The top story, by far, was the tragic story of 14-year-old Christopher Bunch, originally published at The Vaccine Reaction, who died shortly after receiving a Gardasil vaccine.

The Gardasil vaccine was also the focus of the second most-read article in 2018, where Vera Sharav, from the Alliance for Human Research Protection, reported how public hearings in Japan were exposing the dangers of the vaccine and seeking help for the victims.

Four of our top 10 stories from 2018 were from our MedicalKidnap.com website, documenting how dangerous it is today to disagree with medical doctors who can call in Child Protection Services (CPS) to remove your children simply for disagreeing with their medical advice.

One of the stories from MedicalKidnap.com was about an 18-year-old who aged out of foster care and reported how his foster home was part of a pornographic pedophile ring, as he sued the State of Arizona for $15 million in damages.

Another story was from a mother who posted her experience with her local dentist on Facebook, which soon went viral, showing how she received a letter from her dentist’s office threatening to report them to CPS if she did not bring in her child for dental services. Subsequent investigations by Health Impact News revealed that pediatric dental fraud is widespread in the U.S.

The other topics rounding out the top 10 dealt with the FDA’s efforts to ban homeopathy, how the new 5G technology is linked to diseases and loss of privacy, and the Monsanto case where a jury ruled against Monsanto regarding the herbicide glyphosate which causes cancer.

1. Illinois Teen Dies Three Weeks After Being Injected with HPV Gardasil Vaccine

2. Japan Leading the World in Exposing Fraud with Gardasil HPV Vaccine Injuries and Deaths

3. California Parents Lose Custody of 2-Year Old Daughter When Asking for a Second Opinion Before Removing Child’s Kidney

4. Arizona Foster Care System Revealed as Pedophile Ring: Former Foster Child Tortured for Years Sues for $15 Million

5. Alabama Newborn Baby Kidnapped at Hospital with No Warrant, No Court Order, No Emergency Circumstances

6. Former Medical Director of Cleveland Clinic Speaks Out After Being Fired for Questioning Flu Vaccine

7. Did Pennsylvania Mom Who Stood Up to Dental Bullying Uncover Massive Pediatric Dental Fraud Nationwide?

8. FDA Declares All Homeopathic Drugs Illegal Threatening Remedies for Millions of Americans

9. 5G Technology is Coming – Linked to Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Death

10. Judge Says She Will Overturn Jury Conviction of Monsanto and Nullify $250 Million Award in Damages Over Glyphosate Injuries

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com.

Kaylynn with her parents. Photo supplied by family.

Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff

For Kitrina Nelson and Cody Stanphill-Kiser, the year 2018 began with a celebration.

Initially taken over her parent’s medical marijuana harvest, 1-year-old Kaylynn was ripped from her parent’s arms on Oct. 24th, 2017, by Malheur County, Oregon Child Protective Services. Kaylynn was placed with strangers in foster care, as her parents were forced to fight allegations of Child Neglect in Family Court over their legal status as Medical Marijuana patients.

Kitrina represented herself, and won the case on Dec. 28th, 2017; and Kaylynn was returned home immediately – after spending 70 terrifying days in State Foster Care.

See our previous coverage on this family’s story:

Oregon CPS Kidnaps Child Because Parents are Legal Marijuana Patients

Child Seized for Medical Marijuana in Oregon Returned Home After Public Outcry

Now, almost a year later, Kitrina and Cody are celebrating once again.

The Long Fight Against Criminal Charges of “Child Neglect”

Kaylynn with her parents. Photo supplied by family.

As part of the civil claim of child neglect, that is used to ultimately strip parents of their rights to their children, CPS caseworker Shannon Casad had also worked with Malheur County Sheriff Deputy, Asa Palagi, to also pursue Criminal charges of Child Neglect under ORS 163.545.

The charges were listed as a basis of dependency in the state’s child welfare petition. This is a frequent tactic used by child protective services, nationwide, often used to trump up reports and intimidate parents into cooperation with dependency cases to avoid facing the criminal charges.

Kitrina and Cody were both charged with the same crime, were forced to book and release on the charges, and each faced up to a year in the county jail, if convicted.

After the charges were filed, both parents were reportedly offered a plea agreement of dismissal of the criminal charges – if Kitrina would just agree to the dependency case before the hearing on Dec. 28th, 2017.

When Cody and Kitrina refused to agree, and pointed out that the State had to prove child neglect by proving they had left Kaylynn unattended in a dangerous situation, as the law stated, the charges were amended on Dec. 13th, 2017, by Malheur County Prosecuting Attorney, Carrie Greenshields, to “Recklessly Endangering Another Person” under ORS 163.195.

After the Dependency case was dismissed on Dec. 28th, 2017, and Kaylynn immediately returned home, Malheur County refused to let go of the criminal charges.

Parents Reject Plea Bargain Offers

Kitrina and Kaylynn. Photo supplied by family.

For the last year (2018), Cody and Kitrina have attended numerous court hearings, and been offered numerous plea bargains – all of which they refused.

Their trial date, originally scheduled for March 2018, was pushed to June 2018, after they still refused to submit to a plea bargain and insisted upon their rights to a jury trial.

In June, it was pushed again to December 2018 – where they were prepared represent themselves against the allegations.

The basis for the charges was that Cody and Kitrina had exposed Kaylynn to Cannabis, and that this had endangered her wellbeing.

Cody points out that the prosecutors still didn’t have anything to prove that they had endangered Kaylynn. Cannabis is a nontoxic plant and cannot cause substantial risk of harm, which is required of the law in order for a conviction of the Reckless Endangerment charge.

And on top of that, the Oregon Medical Marijuana law provides an affirmative defense protection from prosecution for activities under that law, a law of which both Cody and Kitrina were following by maintaining their medical marijuana recommendations from their doctors.

CPS Continued to Harass Family

Cody and Kaylynn. Photo supplied by family.

In what Cody sees as intimidation tactics to convince them to plea to the criminal charges, the family has had to endure numerous encounters with CPS over the last year.

Fraudulent reports were allegedly stated each time caseworkers showed up at the door, but Cody and Kitrina stood their ground, refusing access to their house and to Kaylynn – without a warrant. CPS reportedly went so far as to even extend the harassment over the state border, where CPS in Idaho reportedly visited Kitrina’s mother as well.

Cody reports that in the last year, all of the caseworkers and officers involved in the case have allegedly been transferred out of the small town of Vale; and he has heard rumors that many were fired or resigned – including Caseworker Shannon Casad and Malheur County Deputy, Asa Palagi, both the original witnesses in their case.

Charges Dismissed

As the trial dates approached, scheduled for Dec. 17th & 18th, the couple was approached with an agreement almost too good to be true. In exchange for dismissal of the charges, Kitrina would simply need to provide documentation that she had completed a parenting class.

Initially, Cody and Kitrina still attempted to press forward, refusing any kind of agreement, until they were told that the trial was about to be pushed off, yet again. This time, for another 6 months, and they wouldn’t have their day in court until June 2019.

In an effort to finally end the court battle they’d been fighting for over a year, the couple decided to finally agree. Kitrina took a $40 divorce parenting class, and provided a certificate of completion to the Malheur County prosecutor, David Goldthrope – who in turn, filed for dismissal of the charges on Dec. 14, 2018.

This year’s Medical Marijuana harvest came and went without any incident, and both parents maintain their medical marijuana status as patients under Oregon law.

Kaylynn celebrated her 2nd birthday in September, surrounded by her family.

Family Begins to Heal

Now married, and expecting a new baby girl, Kassandra Lynette, due in March – Kitrina and Cody are ecstatic over their recent win, and the ability to finally move on with their lives.

The family is finally able to begin healing and they are excited to move away from the fear and harassment of the last year and a half. They hope that their case helps show other parents that it is possible to fight back against the false allegations of both CPS, and the police.

Cody and Kitrina. Photo supplied by family.

Cody says that the whole ordeal has been such a strain on their family, that they almost lost their relationship.

But they found strength in fighting together.

Cody encourages other parents who face the same situation to “Stand loud and proud, and never stop fighting back. It is possible to bring your children home again, as long as you don’t quit fighting.”

Family advocate, Serra Frank, from the Fight for Lilly, has been following the case from the beginning, and personally witnessed the fight.

She says:

“Cody and Kitrina’s case is the epitome of how parents can successfully fight back against the corruption found within CPS. Their success just goes to show, if you fight them, you CAN win.”

Twin Boys Taken From Their Parents Due To Food Intolerances, Accusing “Neglect”

by BECKY PLOTNER
Nourishing Plot

Six-year-old twin boys in Mesa, Arizona were taken into custody by the Department of Children Services (DCS) for “Neglect” due to food intolerances. Both boys have had a lot of chemical and food sensitivities their whole lives, starting from when they were weaned from breastfeeding.

“We have constantly struggled with their food sensitivities, one step forward, two steps back,” Jessica, acupuncturist and mother of the twin boys says.

From very early on, both boys suffered with joint pain, irritability, headaches, horribly dark circles under their eyes, swelling all over the body, difficulty sleeping, heel pain, itching, rashes that got so bad they turned purple and great bloating.

The family removed different foods such as wheat and other processed foods, switching to a real food diet so popular today that it was thoroughly explained in a recent documentary on Netflix called “The Magic Pill”.

Their problems subsided until the were literally thriving with no negative issues. They began taking tennis lessons, taekwondo and playing at the local playground regularly.

Looking at the boys, you wouldn’t be able to tell anything was different about them from any other healthy child. They continued to thrive on their foods, growing taller, gaining weight and participating in scheduled activities. They were elated and spent their days filled with laughter and play.

They continued to get more and more healthy, while introducing more foods, according to what foods didn’t cause negative reactions. This continued for over two years.

The boys started at a local charter school in August of 2018. Shortly thereafter, they experienced great change in their bodies. They felt yucky overall, suffered from joint pain, weakness in their muscles and headaches. The problems escalated.

Jessica, the boys’ mother, was in close communication with their teachers. They navigated the potential factors together including possible ingested foods, perfumes, cleaning products, pesticides and many other potential factors.

Due to the pains and specifically a fall at school on the playground for one of the boys, the parents scheduled a visit to an orthopedist.

Healing took longer than expected, incorporating more and more visits to the orthopedist where they were told to just give it more time.

As concerned parents, they went to Phoenix Children’s Hospital for a second opinion where they agreed with the schedule of treatment. The child who fell, experienced such pain that he was unable to stand and was put in a wheelchair for over a month.

The other boy also had a fall at school, tripping over a child on the floor when the teacher was absent from the room. This fall injured his knee so the parents took him to Phoenix Children’s Hospital where he was diagnosed with a severe bruise on the end of his femur. Rest was advised, so he was also given a wheelchair.

This means both boys were in wheelchairs and still attending school for roughly one month, where they continued to decline in stability, suffered from increased pains and began having cold after cold.

After much detective work form Jessica, overturning every possible cause, the biggest concern came down to the 30 kids in the classroom using dry erase markers on white boards.

Other factors could have been pesticides, herbicides and cleaning chemicals.

The potential side effects of dry erase makers and the dry erase maker cleaners included every one of their symptoms. The boys were pulled from school and began homeschooling. This method fitted them better as they were ahead in their schoolwork in class and could advance at their own pace.

They visited a neurologic rehabilitation center while they were waiting for many months for an appointment with a neurologist.

Their hopes were to find help with the pains. Both boys were struggling, one more than the other. Facial swelling began and went, began and went.

They visited their chiropractor, osteopath and continued to see their naturopath, chiropractor and MD Functional Medicine Doctor, as their support tools were what historically worked best for the boys. Each practitioner said the symptoms were consistent with liver signs.

Nutritional labs showed micronutrients at the cellular level were all within optimal ranges. The pains and weaknesses continued to overwhelm the child, heart pain and a change in his breathing pattern concerned the parents greatly.

They took the boy to the Cardon Children’s Medical Center. Staff told the parents they did not have concerns regarding the boys and sent them home.

Two days after being sent home the parents saw continued swelling in their son with lethargy so they took him to Cardon Children’s Medical Center Emergency Room.

Emergency Room staff was told there was chemical exposure at school with subsequent edema and lethargy. After finding out he did not eat a Standard American Diet, and wasn’t recovering as quickly as he should, the Emergency Room Doctor made a complaint to DCS.

The boy was admitted to the hospital for further testing, to the PICU, telling the parents that since they were going into the weekend he would get better care in the PICU, not that he needed the ICU.

After many, many, many tests pre-albumen levels were abnormal showing protein wasn’t being absorbed properly, but albumen levels were fine.

This is consistent in those with Intestinal Permeability, AKA Leaky Gut, which they already knew the boys had from many years earlier. Again, both boys were thriving on organic meats, organic vegetables, collagen, grass fed animal fats, marrow bones, organ meats, avocado and other foods.

After numerous tests finding no real cause for the boy’s struggle, DCS visited their home, after 10 pm, to interview the twin brother and visited the mother, father, doctors and child in the hospital.

They put him on levothyroxin, a synthetic thyroid medication. They insisted more food needed to be given to the child in the hospital, that he was malnourished.

The only test showing anything regarding malnutrition was the pre-albumen level, low blood sugar and electrolytes upon admission as the child hadn’t eaten prior to admittance.

While in the hospital the parents continued to run home, cook food and bring their food to the hospital, juggling each of their jobs. The hospital insisted the child be fed more, threatening they would put him on a feed tube.

Jessica continued to increase his intake of food to the point where the few days prior to when they took custody of both boys citing “neglect”, he was fed continually through the day.

At that time his food intake included: breakfast – 6 New Zealand lamb meatballs, 3 turkey meatballs, 2 tablespoons mashed potatoes, 2 teaspoons beets, 1 teaspoon carrots with the skins, 5 ounces of water, lunch – 11 New Zealand lamb meatballs, 1/3 of a cup of potatoes, 1/8 of cup of lentils, 1/4 hard boiled egg yolk, dinner– 2 teaspoons mashed potatoes, 6 New Zealand lamb meatballs, 4 lamb meatballs, 3 teaspoons baked apple, snacks – 2 tablespoons carrots, 1 tablespoons beets, 5 New Zealand lamb meatballs, lamb meat stock, 1 tablespoon rutabaga, 2 tablespoons carrots, 1 tablespoon beets, 2 New Zealand lamb meatballs and 1/4 of a yolk.

They insisted this wasn’t enough food because he didn’t gain weight over the prior three days. Since the parents were abiding by the orders, they were pushing foods that were generally not tolerated.

This resulted in itching, red rash, crying, fussiness, irritation, anger, bloating, restlessness, and he began to stop sleeping from the hours of 1 am to 5 am. These responses grew to constant itching, the rash turned an angry purple and grew to cover most of his torso and he stopped sleeping. The child spent most of the day crying.

When the reactions were brought to the attention of the hospital staff and doctor, they said they weren’t concerned unless it was an anaphylactic reaction and specifically saying,

“Food can’t cause these reactions. We are to ignore any reaction that isn’t anaphylactic.”

His regular food intake was easily tripled to appease the staff. Jessica was measuring every morsel of food, calculating every calorie which far exceeded 2,000 calories for the 6-year-old. Since he didn’t gain weight in the last three days they blamed the mother accusing her of refusing him food.

DCS took custody of both boys two weeks after one was admitted to the hospital. The parents were still allowed to visit the son in the hospital but were required to leave while he ate.

The first meal he was given from the hospital cafeteria “for more balanced nutrition” was a muffin and piece of sausage. After his dinner meal, the parents came back into his room and asked their son what he had for dinner which resulted in them getting kicked out of the hospital.

They were escorted from the hospital by security, the husband was threatened to be put in handcuffs.

The parents were told they were taking custody of the boys due to medical neglect.

They said the boys were in pain due to abuse from the parents.

The mother was blamed of refusing him food, denying him food when he asked. She was accused of keeping him in pain since she said he doesn’t tolerate Tylenol.

The mother was also accused of being argumentative because she continued to bring him food from home instead of allowing him to eat from the hospital cafeteria.

The hearing on this case will be held in two days.

To express your concerns, fear of taking your own kids to a doctor and questions regarding this situation, call Sarah Kramer at the DCS Field Office for Mesa, Arizona (480) 659-6364 are send an email to sarah.kramer@azdcs.gov and call Sarah Mendez at 480-659-6648 regarding the twin boys Dylan and Kenan.

If you have the time to make three calls, do the same with Cardon Children’s Medical Center (480) 412-5437.

If this happens to them, it can happen to us. If we speak up offering our thoughts, they may let these children come back to their parents.

An advocate has told the parents that this situation is becoming more and  more common and children are often held. She also said that parents usually receive a gag order for raising awareness.

This is not a situation to sit by and see what happens, it’s a call to action.

Click here to hear mom’s words on the situation.

Read the full article at NourishingPlot.com.

Reprinted with permission.

Image from inForney.com.

by Bryant Martin
inForney.com

Excerpts:

One adult is in custody on charges of possession of child pornography from a home in Forney where an infant foster child died unexpectedly December 29.

Christian S. Richmond, 19, was booked into the Kaufman County jail on possession of child pornography where he awaits arraignment according to jail records.

Law enforcement officials confirm to inForney.com that his address is the same home where an infant in CPS foster care died unexpectedly.

Elizabeth Henson of McKinney was only five months old when she was found dead at the foster home. She had been in CPS custody since she was only five days old. The cause of her death is still unknown.

While law enforcement officials have not released the name of the infant, inForney.com has confirmed with the family and Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office the identity of the deceased infant.

Records released by the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO), reveal a 911 call was made at 9:01 AM on Saturday, December 29 reporting a death in the 2000 block of Chisolm Trail, a home in the Amber Fields addition of the Windmill Farms community. Deputies and emergency medical personnel responded to find baby Elizabeth dead and 4 other foster children in the home.

The infant’s mother, Brittany Gastineau is desperate for information surrounding her daughter’s death and she says she is not getting answers from CPS.

In a series of exclusive telephone interviews with inForney.com, Gastineau says she first learned of her daughter’s death late Saturday afternoon after being contacted by her CPS case worker’s supervisor.

She says that both of her children, Elizabeth and an older son, had both been in Denton County CPS custody since the baby was born in July.

The mother says CPS took her children after Elizabeth tested positive for marijuana at birth. Her son was first sent to a group home while awaiting his sister to be discharged from the hospital and a foster family was located that would accommodate both children she says.

Gastineau says she has never met the foster parent responsible for her children’s care, but she has had concerns with their safety since the beginning and says she has made numerous complaints to Denton County CPS officials about the conditions and the other people living in the home.

“Since the very first day that my kids were there, there has been problems,” Gastineau tells inForney.com. “I have complained every single week since they took my kids.

My daughter slept in a car seat. She didn’t have a bed. My son got picked on by 17 and 18-year old. It was not a safe environment for my kids.

My son has not been comfortable the whole time he has been there and has told me so. My daughter couldn’t tell me that.”

CPS caseworkers and her son’s court appointed attorney all dismissed or minimized her concerns and complaints, ensuring her and her husband that the children were “safe” she says.

Officials who responded to the home reported, while the living room and entry was clean and orderly, other parts of the home was described as “filth and squalor.”

In addition to 5 foster children, there were also two teenage biological family members also living in the home with the foster mother whose identity has not yet been confirmed. The foster mother’s brother, an unidentified adult male, also allegedly lived in the home.

Neighbors say the home is a Section 8 rental property and the owners live in Collin county.

Gastineau says she last saw her children alive on Friday, December 28, the day before her daughter’s death. She said she was able to visit with them and exchange Christmas presents. She has not been able to see her daughter since her passing and she said she doesn’t know where she is.

“They (CPS) want me to make funeral arrangements. How can I make funeral arrangements when I haven’t seen her? I don’t know where she is.” Gastineau said. “This can’t be fair!”

A Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office representative said the infant’s autopsy is complete and the report is currently pending. Her body remains in the medical examiner’s custody.

Marissa Gonzalez a spokesperson for CPS says that the four other foster children have been removed from the home and CPS would not be providing any additional information on the case.

Read the full story at inForney.com