How long must this family suffer?
The Family Court system is to largely to blame for the nightmare faced by a grandmother who wants to care for her grandson.
Dorothy Spears’ grandson has been at the center of a custody dispute for nearly the entirety of his life. The boy is almost three years old.
That makes the child another glaring example of the failure of New York’s Family Court system. The social services department in St. Lawrence County, home to the boy’s foster parents, has likewise failed the toddler and the family desperate to raise him.
“I just want my grandson,” Ms. Spears told Times Union reporter Raga Justin, who detailed the boy’s ordeal in a story published over the weekend. “I want him to be loved by his family. He has a right to that.”
To her credit, Ms. Spears recognized that her son, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his girlfriend would be unfit parents for the child they were expecting. So Ms. Spears proffered herself as a guardian, an arrangement to which the child’s parents agreed. That the grandmother and her husband live within sight of an extended familial network, including their children and grandchildren, makes a placement in the home all the more appropriate.
The story should have ended there. Instead, the St. Lawrence County Department of Social Services declared two days after the child was born that it would take the child for Child Protective Services placement. The boy was moved to the home of a longtime county DSS employee.
In other words, an agency that exercised immense statutory power to take the child decided to give him to one of its own people. The conflict of interest is obvious, alarming and outrageous.
The county’s DSS has since banned the practice. And yet Spears’ grandson remains with the county employee and her husband. That’s largely due to the incompetence of a Family Court system plagued by procedural missteps, staffing shortages and turnover, and delayed or postponed hearings. Five — yes, five — Family Court judges have presided over a custody case that crawls along without end.
Ms. Spears and her husband, who live in Tennessee, are caught in a dystopian nightmare. How long must the family fight? How much longer until a judge steps up and makes a decision? How does each of the judges who have presided over this case, however briefly, square this slow-motion disaster with their responsibility to the child?
Perhaps most troubling is the way all this ineptitude has shaped the boy’s life — and could, paradoxically, shape a judge’s eventual decision. The child calls his foster father “dad” and has known no other home. He has never seen his grandparents’ house or played with his paternal cousins.
At this point, moving the child is likely to cause trauma with lasting impacts, for which the Family Court system and county DSS are to blame. They own this. The judges own this. The government made this shameful mess.
And Ms. Spears waits.