A happy ending
Lisa Falkenberg tells how boys, foster moms beat long odds.
The bright-eyed 5-year-old judged his new middle name and his three-button suit by the same criterion: were they presidential?
His foster mothers assured him they were. And so the boy, nicknamed “POTUS” for his unshakable goal of becoming president of the United States someday, was content. He and his 4-year-old brother showed up Thursday in their dark suits, clip-on ties and dress shoes to consummate a goal that just a year ago seemed even more quixotic:
To have parents who would love them, care for them, protect them — and never go away.
When I first reported on this family a year ago, the boys — who had behavioral issues and delays likely stemming from abuse, neglect and being shuttled through foster placements — had just been removed from the loving women they called Mama and Mommy, and the stable home where they tended gardens filled with chickens, vegetables and butterflies.
Angela Sugarek and Carol Jeffery, Houston public school educators whose home was regarded as exemplary, had been deemed uncooperative by the Wharton Child Protective Services office after they repeatedly reported concerns, including suspected abuse by a teen half-sibling elsewhere in foster care whom the boys were required to visit.
The women fought in court to get the boys back. Seven weeks later, they did — but it was only supposed to be temporary. CPS continued to block adoption efforts and to shop around the boys and their sibling as a package deal. The mothers say that after my columns began running, CPS staffers who once praised their care began to nitpick and demean, at one point initiating an investigation about a pedicure one boy received on medical advice, and another time terminating their right to medical consent.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. Just as mysteriously as CPS staff had opposed the adoption by Sugarek and Jef-
Without the court battle, the boys “would have never been given this opportunity to grow up happy and healthy,” said Julie Ketterman, the foster mothers’ attorney.
fery, they consented to it. Maybe they realized the battle was futile.
“We weren’t going to stop fighting,” Jeffery said.
In this business, we live for happy endings. But like everything else in this saga, it didn’t come easy.
At the Thursday hearing, the boys, expecting a celebration, found themselves cooped up in a side room while attorneys duked it out over final issues and visiting Judge Eric Andell questioned whether he even had permission to hear the case. Once he announced he was going forward, a group of supporters let out meek applause.
The foster mothers’ attorney, Julie Ketterman, had another priority: “Judge, one of the boys wants to know if you’ll bang your gavel,” she said.
No one could find a gavel, so Andell made do with a sturdy stapler, banging it on the bench and calling “Order in the court!” with more authority than he ever deployed on the squabbling lawyers. The boys entered the courtroom on their mothers’ hips with smiles that outshined their shoes.
The judge invited them to take his seat behind the bench and pick a piece of chocolate candy. They sat side by side on the leather swivel chair, while the family’s support system snapped photos as Sugarek and Jeffery raised their right hands and became in the eyes of the law what they had long been in the eyes of the boys — real mothers.
‘Angry at the system’
Afterward, on the courthouse lawn, the family snapped more photos, complete with blue poster board signs that jubilantly announced “adoption day!” Below the date were more sobering numbers. Days in foster care, one read: 945 — “or 58 percent of my life so far.”
“It’s a good day,” said Ketterman after posing for a photo. She said the problems seemed to stem from a CPS supervisor’s petty dislike of Sugarek and Jeffery: “So many times, it becomes about anything and everything but the children.”
Without the court battle, the boys would have been lost in the system, Ketterman said.
“They would have never been given this opportunity to grow up happy and healthy,” she said.
She hinted, without elaboration, that the fight isn’t over: “People will answer for what has happened to those little boys.”
On the way back to the car, the mothers said they were elated, relieved and both a little shocked. Mixed in, there was something else.
“I’m angry at the system, because I don’t think we’ll ever know the extent of the harm,” she said. “They still have nightmares. They were put through so much.” And for what? Why take a child with attachment issues and tear him from the best parents he’s ever had? Why force a child who alleged abuse to attend regular visits with that sibling, even as he begs not to go and has violent outbursts before, during and after?
For that matter, why treat exemplary foster parents — sorely needed in this state — like a hindrance?
These boys deserve answers. And while CPS officials should be praised for finally getting this right, they should get to the bottom of how it went so wrong, for so long.
CPS had previously declined comment, citing confidentiality, but after the adoption, an agency spokesman defended the actions taken as in the best interests of all three boys. Patrick Crimmins said CPS investigated the abuse allegations and concluded that the older boy had been unfairly accused. But he said the publicity surrounding the case made it difficult to find a family that would take all three boys, which is one reason why CPS ultimately agreed to allow the adoption of the younger boys to proceed. The older boy is still without a permanent home, he said.
“We, however, are continuing to do absolutely everything we can for him,” Crimmins said.
It should be noted that none of the boys were ever identified in my columns.
The end of visits
When I asked the 5-year-old on Thursday what adoption meant, he said, “to stay here forever. To have a family forever,” but then he added, “And no visits — only with our grandma.”
The mothers, too, were celebrating the end of visits with the older sibling, which they say had no therapeutic value and seemed to re-traumatize the children.
“I don’t have to be worried when my phone rings that it’s CPS to schedule a visit,” Jeffery said later that night as she and her wife sat at the kitchen table looking through the boys’ file from the state — a haphazard pile of hundreds of documents.
Part of moving forward means looking back. They’re still making their way through the file. So far, it’s an apt metaphor.
“Random hodge-podge craziness,” Jeffery blurted out as she thumbed through pages. Many of them are out of order, incomplete, pocked with errors or mischaracterizations, and whole pages are blacked out, while confidential information such as Social Security numbers is left in.
When asked to comment about the file, Crimmins disagreed with my description of the contents.
In the documents, CPS staffers discredit the allegations of sexual abuse by stating that all three boys were never in foster care together. Apparently true. But they ignore that the three lived together with their parents and later with their grandmother.
Jeffery read about a surgery one child had and an abuse investigation into another home conducted while the boys were separated from her and Sugarek. The shreds don’t reveal everything, but the mothers can’t understand why the state didn’t provide some of the information sooner.
I asked what other changes they’d recommend in the foster system. Besides the obvious — putting children first, before egos and personalities and everything else — they said officials should be more concerned with children’s mental health than their teeth.
“Dental, dental, dental,” said Jeffery. “They’ve had so many Xrays, they could probably wear a Geiger counter at this point, but never are they asked to have mental help or therapy or it even advised to have counseling.”
“It should be a requirement,” Sugarek added.
The start of big plans
I asked Sugarek if she feels more like a mother than when she woke up in the morning.
“No, and I think that’s why they’ve done so well with us,” she said. “We never treated them as if there was a difference.”
They do feel the freedom of finally letting the boys be boys. The sight of a bee, or an unexplained bruise, used to bring worry.
“It’s like the bubble wrap is off now,” Jeffery said. “If they want to run barefoot in the grass, under a sprinkler when it’s hot, have at it.”
And now, there’s no reason to hold off on big plans.
“I was thinking on the way home — now we’re going to build their treehouse,” said Sugarek, whose carpentry skills are responsible for fencing and the chicken pens on the property.
She’d been afraid to build it before.
“It was so heartbreaking when they were gone. All their stuff was in their room, and we just had to close the door. I didn’t want to build this treehouse and sit here every morning at breakfast and look out there and just be heartbroken.”
Now there’s no reason to wait. They’ll build the treehouse.
Against all odds, they’ve already built a home.