Abducted sisters to remain in foster care
Relatives interested in raising the girls are being screened.
A Williamson County judge on Tuesday determined that two sisters safely recovered in Colorado after being kidnapped will remain in foster care while screenings are being done on relatives who have expressed interest in raising them.
Lilianais Victoria Griffith, 14, and Luluvioletta Bandera-Margret, 8, were abducted from their Round Rock home where their mother, Tonya Bates, was found slain Dec. 31. Terry Miles, their mother’s 44-year-old roommate, has been charged in the kidnapping.
When police arrested Miles near La Veta, Colo., officials said, they found the girls unharmed in the back seat of the car he was driving. They said Miles is a person of interest in Bates’ death.
The attorneys representing the girls agreed at a court hearing Tuesday it would be best for them to remain in foster care in Hays County while their relatives are interviewed. Investigators will examine several factors, including the motivation of the people wanting to foster or adopt, as well as their opinions about discipline and their sensitivity toward abused and neglected children.
The girls were not at the hearing Tuesday.
Relatives in Arkansas as well as Lilianais’ father, Greg Griffith of Louisiana, have expressed interest in having the sisters live with them. Officials have been unable to find the 8-year-old’s father, who is believed to be homeless in Washington state.
After the girls recently met with their aunt and an uncle from Arkansas in a supervised visit, they said they wanted to live with them, according to a court filing in the case.
A man named Josef Scheffler, who said to reporters after the hearing Tuesday that he was Bates’ common-law husband, is seeking custody of Luluvioletta. Scheffler said he lived with Bates and the girls on and off from 2010 through late 2017 and helped raise the 8-yearold, according to an affidavit supporting his intervention in the case.
County Court-at-Law Judge Suzanne Brooks on Tuesday approved allowing Greg Griffith and the relatives in Arkansas to have supervised visits with the sisters and call them on the phone while they are in foster care.
The next hearing March 1 will be about Scheffler’s motion to intervene in the case and an opposing motion by the Department of Family and Protective Services against his intervention.
With an end to the federal government shutdown, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tried to argue that, contrary to popular belief, he was not the driving force behind the previous government shutdown in 2013.
Back in 2013, Cruz — then a junior member of the Senate’s minority party — had tried to end funding for the Affordable Care Act. He pushed for language to defund Obamacare in spending bills, which would have forced then-President Barack Obama to choose between keeping the gov- ernment open and crippling his signature legislative achievement.
As the high-stakes legislative game played out, Obama and his fellow Democrats refused to agree to gut the law, and the Republicans, as a minority party, didn’t have the numbers to force their will. After a 16-day shutdown, lawmakers voted to fund both the government and the Affordable Care Act.
Cruz was widely identified at the time as the leader of the defunding effort. Most famously, Cruz spoke about defunding Obamacare on the Senate floor during a 21-hour speech, punctuated by “Green Eggs and Ham” as a bedtime story for his children.
Many in Cruz’s own party, even those sympathetic with his goals, blamed him for a tactical blunder. During the spending impasse, his Republican colleagues launched “a barrage of hostile questions” at a GOP-only lunch, questioning whether Cruz had thought through the endgame.
By the time Cruz was running for president in 2016, some Republicans were willing to criticize his approach publicly. Grover Norquist, an influential anti-tax activist, told The Washington Post no longer