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Wednesday’s Child feature
Pauline Johnson was transfixed by the beautiful three-year-old on the television screen. The child had a smile that could steal your heart. Her luminous face was framed by dark, wavy hair caught up in pigtails. She was captured playing and laughing as Channel 12’s Kent Dana implored couples interested in adopting this “special needs” youngster to come forward.
Pauline had seen the station’s “Wednesday’s Child” series before but had never paid as much attention as she did this night. She couldn’t take her eyes off the child. She yelled to her husband, who was in the midst of his shower, “Cedric, come here! Come see this little girl!” By the time he dashed to the television, Pauline was sure: “She’s the one for us; that’s our little girl.”
The next day she called the Arizona Department of Economic Security, which provides the children, their identity and a summary of their background to the television station for the show. (New Times, however, chose not to use the child’s picture or real name.)
DES officials were enthusiastic. Black couples wanting to adopt are in short supply; older minority children are the least likely to find an adoptive home with any color family. But here was a solid middle-class black family saying it wanted the little girl who so desperately needed a stable home. The agency cut red tape at record speed to unite the eager couple and their new daughter. It all seemed so perfect.
FROM THE MOMENT Joy entered Pauline and Cedric Johnson’s life, bursting into their awareness like a shooting star on a quiet summer night, they loved her. They loved her as deeply as if she had been their own baby, instead of the child of a drug-using prostitute.
And for a few brief months of her life, it seemed as if Joy had finally found a place where her radiant promise could blossom. She’d been bounced from one foster home to another since she was fourteen months old, coming into state custody as a bruised and beaten baby. Four different families had taken her in. Always lovingly, but always temporarily. Not until she came to live with the Johnsons in August 1988 had anyone ever said to her, “This is your permanent home, and we are your parents.”
If the producers of “Wednesday’s Child” had scripted a home for the lovely child they featured that night, it would have been like the Johnsons’. And this story should be about what a wonderful family they’ve become and how Joy is thriving.
But it’s not. This is a story with an ugly ending.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the Johnsons to realize Joy had special problems and to discover the emptiness behind DES’ promises of help. Where the couple sought professional treatment for their child, DES offered cookbook solutions and platitudes. In the agency’s eyes, the trouble was not its failure to provide needed services but the Johnsons’ inadequacy as parents and their lack of commitment to Joy.
As the Johnsons pressed DES to make good its commitment to help their daughter, they were labeled as troublemakers. And DES, perhaps the most powerful–certainly the most secretive–agency in Arizona state government, knows what to do about troublemakers. It gets rid of them.
Acting on the pretext that the Johnsons no longer wanted Joy, DES officials summarily terminated plans for the adoption and removed the child from their home one day last spring, taking her to yet another temporary foster home. When the Johnsons fought to regain custody, pointing out the agency’s mistakes in a succession of administrative appeals, DES officials reacted by mounting an inquisition-like campaign to destroy the couple’s credibility. Where that failed, the Johnsons claim, DES used delay tactics and its special powers under state juvenile-protection laws to stack the deck against them. For instance, the agency prevented the Johnsons’ psychologist from evaluating Joy on grounds it would be too upsetting for her. But DES was able to present its own psychologists’ evaluations to the court.
The agency’s strategy was heartbreakingly effective. In August–five months after DES took Joy back–Judge Pro Tem Thomas Jacobs denied the Johnsons’ petition to regain custody and complete the adoption.
Jacobs flatly rejected the agency’s efforts to discredit the couple: “The evidence is undisputed that Petitioners provided the child a wholesome environment and the best of care under most difficult circumstances.” But he placed greater emphasis on the child’s need for stability, citing her by-now long separation from the Johnsons and the uncertainty of a successful reunion. Just too much emotional damage had already been done by disrupting the original placement, the judge reasoned.
“Risking the unknown as opposed to continuing the present known [foster care] situation is not the function of juvenile law nor consistent with common sense,” Judge Jacobs wrote in his decision. “As painful for Petitioners as this situation may be, they are better equipped as adults to cope with the pain than what the child may experience if returned.”
DES had won. “If you’ve read the judge’s order, as you claim to have, then you know we were upheld,” snaps Macre Inabinet, the assistant attorney general who represented DES in the proceedings.
True enough. But as Joy completes her fourth year as a ward of the state, and Cedric and Pauline Johnson grieve the loss of their daughter alone in their empty house, it is difficult to say exactly what it is the state has won.
THE JOHNSONS moved to Arizona in 1983 from Indianapolis, hoping the dry, warm climate would ease the pain of back and nerve injuries Pauline had sustained in an automobile accident. Though only in her mid-twenties, Pauline suffered intense pain during the cold, damp winters in the Ohio River Valley.
The accident also blighted her chances of becoming a mother. “My doctor told us if I became pregnant, I would surely, not `maybe’ but for certain, experience complications because of the injury to my lower back and sciatic nerve,” Pauline says. “He said at the least I would be bedridden for most of the pregnancy and might lose more of the use of my leg because of pressure on the nerve.”
The couple absorbed the news without much reaction; having children, they say, was not the focus of their marriage during its early years. Instead, they had been focused on finishing their educations and establishing careers. Following Pauline’s accident, their priorities shifted again, to her recovery and to establishing their new life in Arizona.
But once settled in a home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Scottsdale, Pauline says, they began exploring the idea of adoption. They soon found that, even for a black couple wanting to adopt, newborns are in short supply. “None of the agencies were very welcoming,” she says. “The social-service agencies were very nonchalant; their reaction was, `We don’t have anything now, call us later.’ They didn’t even take our name.”
DES was even less friendly than the private agencies, Pauline says. “The person on the phone was very nasty, very aggressive in tone,” she recalls. “She said, `We don’t have any black infants available at this time.’ I left my name, but they never called back. It was really discouraging, so I just dropped the idea at that point.”
The couple, however, continued to extend their roots in Arizona, joining a nearby Seventh-Day Adventist congregation. Both Cedric and Pauline had been raised in the church and had met while students at a church-affiliated college in Alabama. Finding a church family, they say, was an important step for them. Most of the people who later played a significant role in their life with Joy were church members.
By March of 1986, Cedric was working as a Maricopa County deputy sheriff, the job he held prior to taking his current position with the Arizona Department of Health Services, and Pauline was a credit counselor with First Interstate Bank. They were making a comfortable living and were surrounded by a warm circle of friends and neighbors. Life in Arizona was turning out well.
Across town, however, state child-protective workers were looking at a quite different scenario. They had been called by a baby sitter to look at a fourteen-month-old girl who was covered with welts and bruises from beatings with a bicycle chain by her mother’s boyfriend.
What they saw caused the DES workers to take immediate custody of the baby, only later piecing together a fragmented picture of her life. According to DES records, Joy had been born in Denver, the daughter of a Hispanic hooker with a needle habit and a black father who was then in prison on a murder charge.
Shortly after Joy was taken into DES custody, an agency psychologist determined that her mother, besides being mildly retarded, had serious emotional and psychological problems. Despite the severity of her mother’s problems, and the woman’s unwillingness to abandon the abusive boyfriend, DES was mandated by state law to try to reunite the natural family.
Joy spent the next two years in foster care while DES tried to rehabilitate her mother. These were crucial months in the child’s life, a time when her ability to bond and to love was cementing in place, but she was shuttled around to at least three different foster homes, the Johnsons later learned. A succession of caseworkers oversaw Joy’s welfare, and she never saw a foster family again once she had left the home.
The reasons for the moves range from frivolous to tragic, the only common denominator being other peoples’ convenience. Once Joy was moved because she was in a foster home for infants and she was outgrowing the infant-care facilities there. The second move was prompted by a caseworker’s complaints that it was a long drive to the home. The third move occurred because the foster family’s birth child got jealous when the Anglo parents developed an interest in adopting Joy; their child resented her because she looked different from the rest of the family.
The agency finally moved to sever the parental rights of Joy’s natural father in 1987, more than a year after taking custody of the child. Nine months later, in January 1988, Joy’s mother relinquished her parental rights, thus legally freeing the child for adoption.
As the state’s program to rehabilitate Joy’s mother dwindled toward its unsuccessful conclusion, events in Pauline’s life were reviving her desire to adopt a child. “I went home to visit my sister, who had just given birth,” Pauline says. “I just adored her baby, and I wished I could have one so much. When I talked to my sister about adopting, she was very supportive; she said I shouldn’t give up. I came back to Arizona feeling more optimistic than I had in a long time.”
Pauline took no direct action, however, until she saw Joy on Channel 12’s Wednesday’s Child program. Her face softens as she remembers the first moment she saw her daughter. “We talked until late that night about whether we should call and inquire about adopting her,” Pauline says. “Adoption is not something you do lightly, and we tried to explore every aspect of it. In the morning Cedric said, `Make the call,’ and I did.” The Johnsons offered Joy not only a home with a black family, they offered her entree into a uniquely successful community, the black middle-class in Arizona. It is a group tiny in number but rich in resources, pride and achievement. Its members, like the Cosby family on television, esteem their black heritage while, at the same time, move confidently within the larger society.
And in August 1988, less than two months after the Johnsons first saw Joy, their home became hers when they were given legal custody as part of a DES plan for them to adopt her.
DES officials have declined to comment on any aspect of the case, saying they are bound by confidentiality laws. Marsha Porter, DES assistant director in charge of the adoptions unit, refused repeated requests to allow New Times to interview Jesse Baeza, Joy’s caseworker at the time; his supervisor Esther Carbajal or other agency officials who may have been knowledgeable about the case.
As in past instances when the agency’s handling of a case came in question, Porter and other agency higher-ups would only answer questions about agency policy and other general matters relating to the adoption of DES children. The agency, however, made several attempts to dissuade New Times from pursuing its investigation, claiming the newspaper had no right to question the agency over an adoption.
The story of Joy’s aborted adoption thus can only be pieced together. Clues to explain why it failed have been gleaned from interviews with the Johnsons, friends who knew Joy, professionals familiar with the case and from official documents provided to New Times by the Johnsons.
DES HELPED THE Johnsons through an accelerated program to become certified as adoptive parents, naming them temporary foster parents so they could immediately bring Joy into their home. At the same time, however, the agency offered scant information about Joy’s emotional make-up or problems stemming from her unhappy earlier life.
“The adoption certification classes we took dealt almost entirely with the procedures for dealing with DES and the court,” Pauline recalls. “Jesse [the caseworker] told us she had been physically abused. He said she may have been sexually abused, given the environment around her mother, but they had no direct evidence of it. The only thing he expressed concern about was her ability to bond, because she had been moved so much.”
The Johnsons say they were later told by Jeanette Woods, Joy’s court-appointed attorney, that the child kicked and screamed upon being removed from the white foster parents who had been interested in adopting her. “She really loved the family,” Cedric says.
There were at least two more moves before Joy reached the Johnson home. By then, she did not cry or scream at leaving a family. Cedric recalls that walking out of her previous (and, he thought, final) foster home, Joy demonstrated the emotional involvement of a person exiting a Circle K.
“Jesse said he would arrange for the three of us to receive bonding therapy once she was in our home, but he never followed through,” Cedric says. “He also said her court-appointed attorney would be calling us in a few days to schedule a meeting, but we never heard from her until the week Joy was removed from our home, seven months later.”
The Johnsons say Woods also later told them that she always insists that DES schedule a psychological evaluation of a child being placed in an adoptive home to provide information to the new parents. In this case, however, she did not do so, and the Johnsons entered parenthood with very little insight into their new daughter’s inner self.
Woods refused all comment on the case, citing state confidentiality laws. “I am very angry that the Johnsons contacted you about this case,” she says. “Joy deserves to have her privacy protected. I am not willing to answer any questions.”
Despite knowing little of Joy’s background, the Johnsons say their first few weeks together were happy. “The agency always tells you to expect a honeymoon, but that things will change once the child becomes more familiar with you,” Cedric says. “But with Joy, a lot of the honeymoon lasted.”
More than anything, the Johnsons say, the little girl seemed eager to please. “She always wanted to be a part of whatever was going on,” Pauline recalls. “She loved to help around the house; she followed me from room to room like a little shadow. I liked it very much.”
“We told her she was our little girl, and that this was her home and she would never have to leave,” Pauline says. “One day after she’d been here for a while she came to me and said, `This is my house and you’re my mom and no one else is my mom.'”
The memory is searingly painful to the couple. “No one else ever told Joy that; she believed us,” Cedric says. “She must feel so betrayed.”
As she came to trust her new parents, Joy gradually warmed to the people she met at church and in the neighborhood as well. Several neighbors and church members later submitted letters to Judge Jacobs describing their affection for Joy and their belief the Johnsons were good for her.
“I was impressed by how quickly and well she took to her new parents,” says sociologist Leonor Boulin Johnson, a church member. Boulin Johnson, who earned her Ph.D. specializing in marriage and family, was uniquely equipped to observe the intricacies of this new family. “What I observed was a child who was becoming less shy, warming more quickly to those around her and becoming comfortable in her new home. Joy believed she was finally in a permanent home.”
THE CLOSER JOY GOT to the Johnsons, however, the more she began to reveal the emotional legacy of abuse. As the days passed, the turmoil within her started surfacing in sexual behavior which puzzled and disturbed her new parents.
“After she’d been with us a couple of months, we noticed that she frequently masturbated,” Pauline recalls. “It’s normal at that age for a child to explore their bodies, but this was something else. She seemed preoccupied with it.”
At times, Joy masturbated obsessively. She would become so involved that she would wet or soil herself and yet not stop the activity, the Johnsons recall. “She would continue the activity so late at night that she would fall asleep at the breakfast table the following day,” Cedric notes.
When masturbatory behavior goes beyond normal self-exploration, child psychologists call it “sexual acting out.” There can be many reasons for the behavior, ranging from premature sexual involvement (abuse by an adult or another child) to the release of tension caused by other problems. Because young children often lack the vocabulary and self-awareness to explain their own behavior, the mental-health profession has developed methods to distill the truth from specially designed games, questions and direct observation of the child and its family.
The Johnsons suspected Joy’s behavior was rooted in past sexual abuse. “The way we looked at it, this was an abuse-related problem that had been overlooked and needed to be addressed,” Cedric says.
Nothing DES had said to the Johnsons had prepared them for this new development, they say. According to Pauline, the only previous indication of the behavior came in a passing reference. “Just before Joy came to live with us, her foster mother made a remark one day, out of the blue, `You know her mother was a prostitute and she’s always playin’ with herself,'” Pauline says. “I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
All the Johnsons really knew was that Joy had “special needs.” In fact, “special needs” is a DES euphemism that includes emotional scarring so deep a child may never be able to function normally. The Johnsons did not– do not–believe Joy’s problems are that severe. But as inklings of her past emerged, they soon came to feel she warranted individualized analysis and treatment.
Boulin Johnson recalls Pauline seeking her advice. “Pauline said, `I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to overreact but I don’t want to under-react, either,'” Boulin Johnson says. Boulin Johnson referred her friend to a family therapist in the ASU sociology department, who offered Pauline some guidance.
“He told me to ignore the behavior as long as it did not become excessive and suggested a number of techniques for me to distract or redirect her when I observed her engaged in it,” Pauline says. “He said that if she seemed too involved, or got to the point of injuring herself, then we needed to get her to a therapist.”
They also reported the behavior to Jesse Baeza, Joy’s caseworker, and to another DES official who supervises foster parents. Joy’s caseworker, however, dismissed their concern, the Johnsons say. Baeza later claimed in court that they had not notified him of the problem until January, a point they refuted by pointing out a written reference to it in an early report by the foster-care worker assigned to them. “He wanted the court to believe not only that we hadn’t informed him, but that it never came up in discussions between himself and his colleague, who is officed next to him,” Cedric says.
The Johnsons say Baeza never seemed to believe Joy needed professional help. “Jesse said it was no big deal, that all the DES kids acted out sexually,” Pauline says. “He told me not to worry about it.”
“I never got the feeling Jesse took me seriously,” she says. “At first, he said I was taking it out of proportion, and suggested that I get some counseling to learn how to deal with it. He said I had been sheltered all my life and was out of touch with the real world.”
But the Johnsons did worry, in part because their efforts to distract Joy were not effective. The behavior seemed, if anything, to be escalating. In one instance, Joy was discovered demonstrating her knowledge to the young daughter of her baby sitter. The couple feared that without therapy, their daughter’s emotional injuries would not heal and she would, at minimum, be singled out for her behavior and ostracized by the world outside DES foster homes.
Within the DES system, however, Joy merited no special treatment. Her behavior was not nearly as bizarre or dangerous as some that caseworkers encounter, and the Johnsons say Baeza told them time and again he was “working on” getting Joy an appointment with a psychologist.
Sources close to DES, including foster parents, former child-protection workers and mental-health professionals, say psychological therapy for troubled victims of abuse is one of the weakest links in the agency’s chain of services. Waiting lists are long and DES makes referrals only to therapists under contract to the agency. The result, critics say, is that DES children sometimes do not get help or receive abbreviated treatment once they do see a counselor.
Marsha Porter, who has been with the agency thirteen years, says there is a waiting list for kids in need of psychological help but says she doesn’t know the average wait. Porter also says there is no fixed policy for what constitutes a behavioral problem severe enough to warrant putting a child into therapy. “Each case is so different, you have to make judgments based on the facts,” she says. “Moving six times in four years would not necessarily kick in a special-services referral.”
By January, Joy’s compulsive masturbation became severe enough to cause injury and she was treated for vaginal abrasions by her pediatrician. DES, however, still had not arranged for her to be seen by a therapist.
“The pediatrician said she needed to be placed in therapy immediately and I asked if he could arrange for it through our HMO, because DES had been so slow,” Pauline says. “He said it would be better to try going through DES because, until the adoption was final, no one else would be able to provide her complete records.”
When DES failed to act on the pediatrician’s referral, however, the Johnsons again contacted him and he agreed to seek approval for Joy to be seen by a psychologist in the HMO. HMO officials approved the request and Joy was on a priority list, awaiting her first appointment, at the time DES officials removed her from the Johnson home in early March.
LOOKING BACK, CEDRIC believes the agency’s attitude toward Joy’s problem reflects a basic pessimism about the children in its care. “It’s as if the state’s expectations for these children are so low that it doesn’t ever really believe they will leave the system and function normally,” he says.
Porter disputes his interpretation. “I resent the assertion we have lowered expectations for these children; I think realistic expectations is the right word,” she says. “But we find that some adoptive parents have this idea you can send a child to be fixed, and the problem will be over. With children who have been abused or neglected, it doesn’t work that way.”
“One of the main reasons that adoptions fail is that the parents have an unrealistic sense of the problems they will be encountering,” Porter says. “It’s not true to say we don’t expect these children to ever leave the system. Of course we’re disappointed with something doesn’t work out; we’re making every effort to place a child successfully.”
The Johnsons assert, however, that prior to being notified in late February that DES intended to remove Joy and terminate the adoption, they had no idea the agency had developed concerns about the placement. To the contrary, agency actions up to that point indicate that the adoption was proceeding without a wrinkle.
In mid-January, for instance, DES endorsed the Johnsons’ certification as adoptive parents by the Maricopa County Juvenile Court, thus clearing the way for them to sign DES adoption papers. In late January, the Foster Care Review Board recommended that the court approve the Johnsons’ adoption of Joy, based on a positive report by DES.
The foster care board noted that DES had planned to place Joy for adoption ever since she had entered the system nearly three years earlier. “According to the Caseworker: Joy is bonding well to her new family. She is becoming more secure in their home,” the board reported.
The board also noted that, according to Baeza, he was drafting the agency’s official adoption recommendation to the court and expected to submit it within “the next few weeks.”
Baeza, however, never completed the DES court report. Irritated by the Johnsons’ pressure on him, Baeza later testified that he decided to set it aside for a while. Cedric angrily recalls Baeza explaining to the court that he hesitated because he was developing concerns about Pauline’s ability to handle Joy’s problems.
Agency officials later argued that the Johnsons’ handling of Joy’s behavior convinced them the couple was not able to cope with her problems and, further, that the Johnsons’ commitment to Joy was dissolving. Agency officials claimed the Johnsons felt so overwhelmed that they asked to have the child removed from their home. During their appeal to reverse the agency’s decision, Pauline says, “When I asked what I had done to make them think I wasn’t committed, Jesse’s supervisor, Esther Carbajal, told me, `When somebody calls and complains a lot, it’s an indication to us they aren’t committed.'”
Pauline acknowledges that Baeza made two specific referrals for her to seek parent counseling and says she followed through on both. She feels neither was helpful because they did not involve an evaluation of Joy, nor did the couple learn anything they hadn’t already been told about coping techniques.
Pauline describes the first referral as “a parent support group” and says she attended one meeting but found the atmosphere there laden with emotions she did not share. “The other parents were voicing such anger toward their children, and the problems they were describing were so much more severe than Joy’s,” she says. “I didn’t feel their situation applied to us.”
The advice she received from the group’s coordinator, however, mirrored that offered by the ASU therapist she had first contacted. “She said I should ask Jesse for Joy’s complete history and then get her into treatment,” Pauline says.
When Pauline reported the recommendation to Baeza, she says, “He just glossed over it and said he’d try to find me another support group where I’d feel more comfortable.”
“I said, `No, Jesse, I don’t want another support group; we need to get Joy into therapy,'” she says. “Then he suggested Cedric and I go in for family therapy.”
Jo Sedalla, the family counselor to whom Baeza referred the couple, says the couple was, in fact, under severe strain because of Joy’s behavior. “When I talked with them, they were expressing great ambivalence about the adoption,” she says.
Sedalla, one of a number of Valley health-care professionals under contract to treat DES clients, met twice with the Johnsons. DES later based its case against the Johnsons partly on her report of those meetings.
“Pauline was not prepared for Joy’s demands, her need for attention and intense parental intervention and her particular behaviors. Pauline explained that she became overwhelmed by what was going on,” Sedalla said in her report.
Concerning Cedric, Sedalla wrote that he enjoyed the challenges of parenting but added, “Cedric also, however, struggles with his own ambivalence . . . [he] knows he can parent difficult children, however, he isn’t sure he would choose it.”
In conclusion, she wrote, “At the end of the interview the couple had serious questions about maintaining the placement, but were going to continue thinking about it.”
Sedalla, who agreed to speak with New Times after receiving written permission from the Johnsons, acknowledges that sometimes DES mishandles a case but believes the Johnson case represents instead an example of why many DES adoptions fail. “This case is more typical of the problems we encounter when the adoptive parents are regular folks who see an adorable child on `Wednesday’s Child,’ who hooks their hearts, and they pursue an adoption with not much experience of what’s involved in raising a difficult kid,” she says.
“Most people think if you give a child a lot of love and a healthy environment, no matter what their beginning was like, you can work things out,” she says. “It just isn’t that way. These kids don’t trust adults, especially parenting adults, and when they get into a close parenting situation, problems can come to the fore that never surfaced in the foster home.”
She contends that Pauline Johnson misperceived the “support group” and says it actually was a parenting course tailored specifically for people who adopt abused children. “We were offering this family both counseling and a class that would speak to the very issues they were raising,” she says. “The fact is, for them to have made it as a family, they would have had to change their view of what would be helpful.
“They were hanging on to a vision of what would be helpful, the old Freudian belief that if you find the basis of a problem, that will cure it,” she says. “Realistically, with a kid like this, it’s going to be a long haul, and much of the therapy will be done in the home by the parents.”
The Johnsons dispute the thrust of Sedalla’s report, saying she emphasized their negative feelings and overlooked the depth of their commitment to Joy. Sedalla herself is at a loss to explain, in light of her own impressions, why the couple subsequently fought so hard to keep Joy. “I just don’t know; I wish I had been able to spend more time with them,” she says. “I saw them only the two times and my contact with the case covered just one little slice of time.”
The Johnsons claim Sedalla, perhaps unwittingly, precipitated the crisis that led to Joy’s removal from their home. They say Sedalla suggested, during a discussion of their options, that Pauline and Cedric explore the idea of temporarily placing Joy in a “therapeutic” foster home where she could receive treatment. Sedalla doesn’t recall who broached the idea but agrees the idea was briefly discussed.
“She didn’t explain what a therapeutic foster home was, and I assumed it was something like the residential substance-abuse treatment programs, where you go and stay for a while, or go during the day,” Pauline says. She later learned that therapeutic foster care simply means a foster home in which the parents have taken additional training from DES to handle children with emotional or psychological problems.
“When I followed Jo’s suggestion and asked Jesse about the possibility of therapeutic foster care, he just blew up,” Pauline says. “He started screaming, `How could you do this? You want to give the baby away! You don’t want her!’
“His reaction floored me,” Pauline says. “I told him, `No, I don’t, Jesse. I’m just exploring the ideas we got from Jo.’ But he wouldn’t listen. I told him he needed to come to the house so we could discuss it because I was at work at the time.”
Cedric says Baeza then called him. “He announced, `Pauline wants to give Joy back.'” Cedric says he attempted to assure Baeza that both parents loved and wanted the child. A week later, however, after conferring with Sedalla, Baeza notified the Johnsons that DES had decided to remove the child.
The DES decision hit the couple like a bolt out of the blue. “They later claimed their decision was based on long-standing concerns, but they never had called us in for a meeting to express their concerns, or told us they felt the adoption was in trouble, or spelled out what they wanted to see us do to satisfy their concerns,” Cedric says.
ONCE DES DECIDED to remove Joy from the Johnsons, it was as if the decision were set in stone. And, as tends to happen when a powerful bureaucracy operates with little or no accountability outside itself, events began to take on an evil energy all their own.
Whatever the agency’s role in the failure of Joy’s adoption, it was now focused on justifying the decision to remove her. Every conversation with an official, every new development, each new player seemed to feed the momentum taking Joy farther and farther away from her adoptive parents. Or so it seemed, and still seems, to the Johnsons.
“We really began to feel we were being set up,” Cedric says. “We felt like they were attacking us to cover up their culpability.”
Jeanette Woods, Joy’s court-appointed attorney, at long last appeared on the scene, but her presence was anything but reassuring, the Johnsons say. “When Jeanette finally made contact, she was very defensive,” Cedric says. “She said she’d been in a car accident and said she’d been swamped with other cases once she recovered and returned to work.”
“She demanded to know the address of Joy’s baby sitter so she could go talk to her.” Cedric said he and Pauline implored the attorney to meet with them to discuss Joy and to call church friends who were familiar with the family. Cedric says she didn’t seem interested. “To my knowledge, she never contacted any of the names we gave her,” he says.
According to Pauline, who took leave from work to be present when Woods arrived at the baby sitter’s home, the attorney ignored her and the baby sitter and went directly to Joy. Woods told the four-year-old, “I’m your attorney, Joy. You remember me, don’t you?”
“Jeanette handed Joy a piece of candy and said, `Where do you want to live? Do you want to live with the Johnsons or do you want to go live with the [previous foster family]?'” Pauline says Joy responded that she wanted to live with the foster family.
“Later, Joy told me, `I don’t want to leave,'” Pauline recalls. “I think she was very confused by Woods’ visit, who she hadn’t seen since she’d lived in the foster home. And I think she may have been a little intimidated. I don’t think it was the right way to approach a child with such a question.”
The Johnsons attempted to convince Baeza and his supervisor that they loved Joy and did not want to give her up but were told the agency now felt she had too many problems for them to handle.
DES directed them to prepare the child to leave their home. The Johnsons believe Joy’s reaction to the news illuminated feelings of love, pain and sorrow. “She started crying and said, `But this is my permanent home; this is my room, you’re my mom,'” Pauline says.
On the day Joy was removed, Pauline says she overheard the girl in her room, playing with her dolls. “She was saying to her dolls, `I hate you. I hate you so much I’m going to kill you.'”
ON MARCH 3, Jesse Baeza arrived at the Johnson home to pick up Joy. Cedric handed Baeza a letter expressing the parents’ opposition to the removal and their love for the child. Joy busied herself making sure all her toys and clothes–the only things that had ever been exclusively hers–were packed.
As had become her way, Joy displayed no emotion as she bid her parents good-by and got into Baeza’s truck. Her feelings remained buried deep within her.
Boulin Johnson believes those feelings remain buried, waiting to explode one day in the future. “The rupture was so complete, and so final, she has no way to come to a resolution of her feelings,” Boulin Johnson says. “She cannot return to face the people she feels betrayed her.” The anguish of those last days remains so close to the surface neither parent can describe what happened in full. They each contribute their own memories, as if recalling the death of a child.
And like a death in the family, the pain rippled outward, touching everyone around the Johnsons. Boulin Johnson says none of the those close to the Johnsons shared the impression they were fed up with Joy or reconsidering their decision to adopt. “They were just frustrated that DES had been so unresponsive,” she says. “Otherwise, their feelings were just what all parents experience.”
Boulin Johnson says her own two children, who played with Joy at church, were devastated by the loss of their friend. “The day my son learned Joy was leaving, he cried all the way home from church,” she says. “He was so upset he couldn’t eat his dinner that night. He said, `Mom, we have to do something to save her, we have to help her.’ It was heartbreaking.”
Joy’s playmates in the neighborhood became anxious about their own security after seeing their friend disappear. “Several of the children began asking their parents if someone might come and take them away, too,” Pauline recalls. “One of the children, a little girl closest to Joy in age, began having nightmares and wetting her bed, her mother told me.”
Boulin Johnson believes DES, and the court which eventually upheld the state, was grossly insensitive to the effect of the removal on Joy. “She fitted in so well that most people thought she was their natural daughter; it was very clear to me that Joy saw herself as belonging to that family and that community.
“A child’s relationship with the surrounding community has a lot to do with their character development and personal identity, and if you rip that away, it’s going to be traumatic,” Boulin Johnson says. “When a child is told this is her home, and then to be ripped out of it, you can imagine the hostility she must feel toward the people who encouraged her to trust them.”
After Joy’s removal, the Johnsons began going up the DES chain of command in an effort to persuade the agency to overturn the decision and return Joy. But the harder the Johnsons fought to preserve their new family, the more adamantly DES insisted that they were wrong for Joy. No one they contacted was willing to review additional information, talk to their friends and neighbors or reconsider the decision, Cedric says.
Eventually, they went directly to then-DES director Bill Jamieson, who referred the case to Marsha Porter. Jamieson declined to comment about the case but called Porter “the best social worker I’ve ever known. I trust her judgment implicitly.”
Porter acknowledges that the agency does not have a set procedure to appeal a decision but contends “no decision to remove a child is made by one person alone.”
“When we receive a complaint, we evaluate it on two levels,” she says. “First, we look at whether department procedure was followed and if it wasn’t, what to do about it. Second, we look at the basic decision itself. Even if there was a procedural problem, we may find the basic decision to be sound.”
The Johnsons say their appeals did produce some acknowledgment by agency higher-ups that proper procedure had been violated. They claim officials admitted the adoption papers had been improperly put on hold and the couple should have been brought in earlier to discuss the agency’s growing concerns. But, they say, Porter and other DES officials continued to stand by their decision. Having failed within DES, the Johnsons now took their case to court. In May they petitioned the Maricopa County Juvenile Court for the immediate return of Joy and completion of the adoption.
But the more pressure the Johnsons brought, the more energy the agency put into building a case against them. Most frighteningly for an agency charged with protecting children, it began using Joy and her problems to defeat them.
After ignoring repeated requests to get Joy into treatment while she lived with the Johnsons, DES quickly scheduled an evaluation with psychologist John DiBacco after her removal from the home. The agency didn’t blink when he reaffirmed the Johnsons’ plea: Joy needed immediate therapy. DES then approved weekly visits with another psychologist, Sheryl Harrison.
DiBacco’s report also suggested–to the Johnsons’ horror–that they might have sexually abused Joy. Based on that, the agency lodged a report with Scottsdale police saying it suspected the Johnsons of sexual abuse. Joy later denied to police the claims she allegedly had made to DiBacco, and no charges were filed.
Even after the police investigation fizzled, however, the agency continued to assert the abuse claims in court as the Johnsons fought to regain custody. In fact, now it became one of the agency’s main points to justify its unwillingness to return Joy to the home. The agency used fragments of information from the psychological evaluations, damning one-liners offered without supporting or explanatory information, to refute the Johnsons’ claim that Joy had been happy in their home.
Psychologist John DiBacco saw the child only twice. He observed no trace of erotic behavior and wrote that the foster mother reported none as well. DiBacco, however, quotes Joy as saying, “Pauline was giving me nasty touches” and that she did not want to return to the Johnson home. “They look bad and ugly,” DiBacco reports the child as saying.
Harrison reported that Joy also stated that the Johnsons were “mean” and “bad” and that Cedric had touched her vagina. Harrison, however, offered no additional information and was unwilling to point a finger at the Johnsons. Harrison eventually testified that all that could be determined was that Joy had been abused by someone, sometime in her past.
Marriage and family counselor Pat Collinsworth, who later testified on behalf of the Johnsons, pointed out serious shortcomings in DiBacco’s and Harrison’s evaluations, raising doubt that they presented a clear picture of the situation. “Both evaluations lacked depth and made little attempt to probe or explain Joy’s statements,” Collinsworth says. “A major shortcoming was not interviewing Cedric and Pauline and not observing the child in their presence. I can’t imagine an evaluation being done without these things.
“These techniques are the standards of the profession, and they weren’t followed in this case,” she says. “Instead, they took the words of a four-year-old and made a report. It’s ridiculous, as far as I’m concerned.”
Lawyers for the agency succeeded in blocking the Johnsons’ effort to have a more thorough evaluation done by someone not under contract to DES, arguing that it would confuse the child. The agency also blocked the Johnsons’ request to make contact with the DES psychologists when those evaluations were conducted.
Never did the agency acknowledge the emotional damage–confusion, at least, and probably anger–inflicted on the child by such an abrupt, and permanent, removal from people who had promised to love and protect her forever.
Despite the agency’s tactical advantage, it looked as if the Johnsons might succeed when their petition to regain Joy was first heard in May: The court quickly determined that DES did not have a legal right to remove the child without first obtaining a court order showing that she was in imminent danger.
At that point, the judge could have ordered DES to return Joy and complete the adoption. But the agency played for time. It sought and was granted a continuance. Macre Inabinet, the assistant attorney general who represented DES, denies that the continuance was an effort to stall. “We don’t play lawyer games in this agency,” she says. “If the court granted a continuance, it was because it believed the matter deserved a full hearing and the court didn’t have the time to hear it then.”
When the case was finally heard in August–five months after Joy was removed from the Johnson home–it was clear that time had worked to the advantage of DES.
By then, the case had been transferred to Judge Jacobs, a former assistant attorney general who had represented DES while working for the state.
Jacobs rejected the state’s evidence besmirching the Johnsons, saying,
“There is no evidence of any physical or sexual abuse having occurred in Petitioners’ home.”
But after reviewing the situation, Jacobs concluded, “The simple fact remains that today, this four-and-a-half-year-old child is now in her sixth (possibly seventh) placement. “Reunification with Petitioners would entail a lengthy re-integration period and . . . a `difficult time ahead’ with no guarantees of success,” he said, noting that Joy had returned to one of her previous foster homes and was reported by psychologist Harrison to be making “slow progress ” there. “The court is unwilling to experiment or gamble with this child’s well-being.”
JOY WAS NOT at the trial, and the Johnsons have not seen her since the day she was removed by the DES caseworker. They know they may never see her again, but it doesn’t matter, they say. “A new family was created the day she came into our home, and we can never be the same without her,” Cedric says.
“Joy will be greatly missed and always loved. As for Pauline and me, she will always be Joy Johnson.
