Bad choices send Laurell into a spiral
Aliyah’s mother blames others as she misses visits, hearings
Six months after moving to Phoenix, Laurell Florence still had no job and no apartment. Her daughter, Aliyah Randle, remained in a short-term shelter. After a chaotic night in an urgent care center, a state child care worker took Aliyah to a foster home, leaving Laurell with fewer good choices. This is Chapter 3 of a six-part series.
Laurell Florence fell into a depression, like the ocean had washed over her and held her under. She was slipping away.
Some mornings, she picked out an outfit for Aliyah and laid it on her bed.
“What the hell am I doing?” she thought. “She’s not even here.”
Laurell knew she had made bad choices, starting with her decision to move to Arizona without a plan. So many things had gone wrong.
The only good decision Laurell had made was placing her daughter, Aliyah, at the children’s shel
“If I had my daughter, I wouldn’t be so depressed. I wouldn’t give in to my addiction.” Laurell Florence
ter while she secured a place to live.
“It was good in the sense I didn’t know where I was going to sleep the next day. I was here and there,” she reasoned. “I needed Aliyah to be safe.”
Then in March, her drug test came back positive for heroin.
It was the stress of Aliyah being gone, Laurell said. The pressure of getting to parenting classes and visits, while also looking for a job.
“You want me to work or do services? I can’t do both,” Laurell would say.
She began drug treatment and, for three months, her drug tests were negative.
May 2016
Her depression worsened. She cried uncontrollably. She couldn’t get it together. A month passed.
Her only solace were visits with Aliyah, but even those were tinged with heartache. Aliyah had been placed in a foster home in Tolleson after a bad episode at an emergency room. Laurell was allowed regular visits but she worried about her daughter.
Every time she saw her baby girl, her little eyes looked sadder.
Aliyah had three asthma attacks. She complained that her foster mother wouldn’t let her use the phone and had put her on a diet. An 8-year-old on a diet.
Laurell complained to her caseworker.
“Something is wrong for my baby to be so upset,” she said.
On June 1, 2016, Laurell arrived late for a hearing about her daughter’s case at family court in Mesa.
She slid down the wall to the floor, crying. A court staff member told Laurell another hearing had been scheduled for later that month.
“Bless your heart,” Laurell told her. “Thank you so much.”
The day before that hearing, Laurell was nervous. A new caseworker had been assigned. Laurell planned to arrive a half-hour early.
On June 29, 2016, the bailiff called her case. There was a shuffle of paperwork and purses as the attorneys and caseworkers got up from the row of chairs in the lobby and filed into the courtroom.
Laurell was not there.
A pattern emerged. Laurell would arrive late for court and miss the hearing. Sometimes she didn’t show up at all.
Her depression made it hard to get out of bed. When she did get up, she often didn’t have money for gas. Her caseworker offered her bus passes, but Laurell couldn’t make sense of the routes.
She applied for jobs online and spent time with a man she was seeing. The man bought her dinner, took her to church and let her borrow his car. She stopped going to parenting classes and drug treatment.
It was all just too much. How was she supposed to find a job while going to drug treatment, parenting classes and visits with Aliyah? She couldn’t.
Nov. 1, 2016
To get into drug treatment, Laurell needed a referral from her caseworker, but the caseworker didn’t call back. When she got an intake appointment for a drug treatment program, she was sick and didn’t go.
She thought the classes were boring. She lost her driver’s license. Something was wrong with the van.
She blamed everyone else.
“The entire crew wanna put this nonsense off on me,” she insisted, “making comments like I don’t love or care for my daughter because I haven’t completed any of their services.”
Laurell often missed visits with Aliyah. If she had enough gas, she often didn’t have enough money to bring Aliyah a meal, a requirement of the visits. Sometimes, she was so late that the parent aide and Aliyah left before she arrived.
At one visit, she told Aliyah someone had given her a puppy. Aliyah asked if they could name him “Mesa” for the Child Crisis Center. She had been happy there.
If she couldn’t come home, Aliyah asked, could she go back to the shelter?
In November, her caseworker warned Laurell that if she didn’t show up to visits, there wouldn’t be any more. Laurell
made the next visit. Aliyah cried the entire time.
Laurell had never seen her baby so sad. She asked her caseworker to move Aliyah into a new foster home.
In December, Laurell said her boyfriend beat her up, so she wouldn’t see him anymore.
Her caseworker told her Aliyah was being moved to a new foster home.
“She should come back to her harmless mommy,” Laurell said.
Jan. 24, 2017
Laurell slumped in a restaurant booth. She looked exhausted. She was down 82 pounds. It was January 2017, almost a year to the day after she and Aliyah had moved into the apartment.
She had received an eviction notice from the apartment manager. She said it was because the complex wouldn’t accept Section 8 housing. She later admitted she hadn’t paid her rent. She had no place to go, no place for Aliyah to come back to.
“At this point, I don’t have nothing to live for,” Laurell said.
She was using drugs again.
“I’m not going to lie,” Laurell said. “I slip into my addiction. I talk to God a lot.”
She blamed her drug use on losing Aliyah.
“If I had my daughter, I wouldn’t be so depressed,” she said. “I wouldn’t give in to my addiction.”
Her caseworker told her to get into drug treatment. She was running out of chances.
Laurell said she didn’t trust anyone associated with her case, not her caseworker, not her attorney. She believed the place she went for her drug testing was working with the state to keep her away from her daughter.
“I feel like I’ve been backed into a corner. I feel like a fish around a bunch of sharks,” Laurell said. “They point a finger at me like this is all my fault.”
She skipped drug treatment to go for a job interview at a casino. She didn’t get the job.
The puppy, Mesa, was stolen, she said, though it was possible it was traded or sold for drugs. She didn’t want to tell Aliyah.
Laurell didn’t know it yet, but there would be no more visits.
She would go back to drug treatment, she promised. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week.
Her caseworker told her Aliyah was in a new foster home, dropped on the doorstep in December by her former foster mother. Laurell thought it sounded like a good one. A mom and a dad. Other kids. They went to church.
But she was afraid she wouldn’t ever get Aliyah back.
“I can’t live through this. I’m going to die if I don’t get her back,” she said. “It’s like they are ripping my heart right out of my chest.”
Laurell said she would do anything for her daughter.
A court hearing was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Feb. 17, 2017. Laurell was late.
Fortunately, the judge was running behind. “I’m nervous,” Laurell said. She looked thinner than a month ago, in capri-length blue jeans and a black tank top. “Anytime I eat anything, I throw it up.” She was eager to hear how Aliyah was doing. She had not seen her daughter since December. Aliyah had turned 9 earlier in the month.
Five minutes later, the bailiff called her case. When Laurell came out a half-hour later, she was angry. The state — the caseworker and the attorney for Aliyah — had recommended the judge change the case plan.
Change it from reunification to termination of parental rights. It would free Aliyah for adoption.
“What can I do to stop this?” Laurell asked her attorney, Carrie Canizales.
Follow your case plan, Canizales told her. The court had no records of Laurell completing any services — not drug treatment or parenting classes, despite multiple chances. Aliyah had been in foster care for more than a year.
Laurell turned to her caseworker and asked, “What will stop this?”
“You,” the caseworker said.
The next hearing was April 5. Laurell overslept and
arrived late to court.
She had been evicted from her apartment and was staying with a friend. She didn’t have an alarm clock.
Laurell lit a cigarette, spotted her attorney coming out of the court and snubbed it out. The news was bad again. The judge approved the plan to terminate parental rights and free Aliyah for adoption.
It would happen at the next hearing, on Aug. 18.
Laurell paced in the shade, agitated, rambling and cussing. So she hadn’t completed her services. She didn’t understand why she should have to.
“I don’t have no substance abuse problem,” she said. She said the results of her drug tests had been tampered with.
“Whatever they found was recreational. What I do from time to time, that’s my f--king business. What does everybody else do?
“Are the (state Department of Child Safety) workers clean? I don’t think so. But they want to penalize parents.
“I’m a little imperfect. Everybody is a little imperfect. Nobody is perfect but God.”
Laurell relit her cigarette. She couldn’t understand how the state could say she was a bad mother when she never neglected or abused her daughter. Aliyah was taken because of something Laurell said. A joke.
“They were looking for any excuse to take her. Any little excuse,” Laurell said. “Let’s say if I didn’t have nothing in my system, they gonna find something else. They’re just going to dig, dig, dig.”
Laurell gave away Aliyah’s clothes and toys, or it’s possible she sold them, she said. “I can’t even look at that stuff,” she said.
Her only hope was for one of her relatives to adopt Aliyah.
The next hearing, when the judge would make the final decision to terminate Laurell’s parental rights, was at 9 a.m on Aug. 18. Laurell didn’t show up until just after 10 a.m.
It took almost two hours to get there by bus from a park in west Phoenix where she’d been sleeping. The only thing she’d had to eat in the last two days came out of a dumpster.
Two days earlier, she had been arrested and accused of shoplifting.
Outside the courtroom, Laurell sobbed. “I don’t know what to do no more,” she wailed. “I’m sorry, honey,” apologizing to the daughter she hadn’t seen in eight months.
Nancy DeMoss, the case manager from the Child Crisis Center, reached out to hug Laurell, who wore just blue jean shorts and a black camisole. Her hair had come out in patches. She weighed 95 pounds less than when DeMoss met her.
“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” Laurell sobbed.
DeMoss reminded her how she got to this point. She used drugs. She didn’t go to the parenting classes or drug treatment. “We all make choices,” DeMoss said. “You made bad choices.”
“You have to get yourself healthy. When Aliyah is 18, she may come looking for you,” DeMoss said.
“She doesn’t want me at 18,” Laurell said. “She wants me now.”
DeMoss asked Laurell to write a letter to Aliyah, to tell her what she might want to know when she’s older. “Like what?” Laurell asked. “What do you want Aliyah to know?” DeMoss asked.
“That mommy loves her, and it’s not my fault,” Laurell said. “Without her being in my presence, I don’t know how to live.”
She asked if Laurell was taking medication for depression. Laurell shook her head. “You’re just using on your own?” DeMoss asked. Laurell nodded.
“You’ve lost so much weight, sister. These drugs aren’t doing you any good,” DeMoss said. “You need to get healthy.”
“It’s not going to bring her back home,” Laurell said. And then, “I want to tell her it’s not my fault. I won’t tell her I’m sick.”
DeMoss made her promise to write the letter.
“So there’s nothing I can do here?”
Laurell asked.
“No,” DeMoss said. “I’m not going to lie. No.”
“I can’t see my daughter again?” Laurell asked.
“I don’t think so,” DeMoss said. Maybe she could arrange a visit, so Laurell could say goodbye.
“No,” Laurell said, sobbing. “I can’t say goodbye.”
She turned away, crossed the parking lot, stooped to pick up a plastic grocery bag she had stashed under a bush. She boarded a bus. She didn’t look back.