‘They took my children’
She tried to stay calm. It was a 20minute drive to her son’s school, but each stoplight was a reminder that she still hadn’t reached her boy.
Maribel Ontiveros had gotten used to rushing to her son’s school in downtown Phoenix. Christopher had started having panic attacks, pleading with her to let him stay home. She says he hadn’t slept or eaten well since he twisted his ankle during a summer trip to Colorado. Doctors diagnosed him with anxiety.
The calls from his school were the same: Christopher is crying and wants to go home. Maribel would drive to school, hold him and plead with him.
But this call was different. School officials told her there were two women visiting and talking to her son. They wanted to talk with her, too.
Maribel finally got to the school. She rushed to the office. She met two women from a health-care organization for low-income families. The women wanted Maribel to take her son to Phoenix Children’s Hospital. She agreed.
At the hospital, Maribel didn’t notice the security guard outside her son’s room. A doctor told her they were admitting her son. After a few days, Maribel says, a nurse told her she was no longer allowed to see her son — if she had questions, call police.
But police had no record yet of her child, Maribel says. She drove home sobbing. Then came the knock on her and her husband’s door at 3:30 a.m. Maribel says it was two women, this time from the Department of Child Safety. “They put the papers on the table and said, ‘Sign it,’ ” she says.
Maribel speaks Spanish and a bit of English. She says the women told her there’d be someone arriving later who spoke better Spanish. For now, they told her to just sign the papers.
“How am I going to sign a paper?” she remembers saying. “It’s 3:30 in the morning, I don’t even know what this paper says, and it’s in English. I’m not going to sign it.” She says the women became angry. They asked questions. Then they told the parents they were going to interview their children. Maribel says she and her husband, Antonio Garcia, were barred from the interview.
At 7:30 a.m., there was another knock on their door. This time, two women had two police officers with them. Maribel’s husband picked up his cellphone and started videotaping.
The women told them the report alleged negligence. What negligence? No one gave them an answer.
For three days, they made calls, tried to see their kids, tried to visit Christopher. They kept asking: Why?
Maribel and her husband spoke with Spanish media. They shared on social media the video of DCS workers raiding their house. Four days later, the DCS returned all of their children except for Christopher, who was still in the hospital. They said they made a mistake. But they offered no explanation.
Maribel and her husband filed a lawsuit in 2017 against the state and Phoenix Children’s Hospital. The suit includes claims that the couple’s constitutional right to due process was violated and that the children were removed from their home without a warrant.
(On May 8, the court granted the parents’ request for a voluntary dismissal of the suit against Phoenix Children’s Hospital without prejudice, which would allow the parents to refile a lawsuit. The court separately granted a joint request by two Department of Child Safety employees, the state and the parents to dismiss the suit without prejudice, which would allow the parents to refile a lawsuit. In an amended complaint filed May 2, attorneys for the parents stated that, “due to the inability to obtain critical and unredacted records from the Department of Child Safety, Plaintiffs are at a significant ‘informational disadvantage.’ ”)
Maribel worries that the DCS will knock on her door again one day. “As a mother, I ask myself, ‘Where’s the negligence?’ ” she says. “That’s the word that will torment me my whole life.”