AP: NC county illegally removed kids from homes
MURPHY, N.C. — When Brian Hogan got a call that his wife had suffered a massive heart attack, he knew he had to get to the hospital fast. So Hogan asked his neighbor to take care of his 10-year-old daughter, then headed 60 miles east to the intensive care unit in Asheville, North Carolina.
What happened next would eventually expose a practice by a child welfare agency that illegally removed potentially hundreds of children from their homes in this poverty-stricken mountain community.
Those same children are now facing the possibility of being uprooted again — including some who have spent years adjusting to their new lives, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Hogan said the Cherokee County Department of Social Services threatened to throw him in jail, place his child in foster care or give his daughter to another family for adoption if he didn’t sign a “custody and visitation agreement,” known as a CVA.
“They gave me no choice,” said Hogan, 38, who told AP that childwelfare workers wanted to remove his daughter because they believed he placed the girl in an “unclean” home while he was caring for his hospitalized wife.
In order to remove child from a biological parent, social workers must get a court order from a judge, said Sara Depasquale, assistant professor of public law and government at the University of North Carolina.
Not only did Cherokee County child-welfare workers bypass that critical legal step with Hogan, they did the same thing with dozens, possibly hundreds, of other parents, according to interviews, court documents and copies of the agreements obtained by the AP.
Because a judge and state welfare officials have determined the practice was illegal, the children are at risk of having their lives disrupted again, AP found.
Some children who are better off in their new homes might not be allowed to stay there because the agreements did not follow proper protocol. In other cases, children never should have been removed from their parents. AP found one mother of three was forced to sign away one child to her mother, but not the other two.
While many of the children were given to nearby relatives, some were placed with family members in other states. And some children, who were removed for safety reasons because their parents were addicted to alcohol and drugs, were placed in homes with caregivers some of who had also been arrested for drugs or faced other serious charges.