Family together again
Brothers reunited with foster parents after powerful response from the community
Outside a blue bungalow in North Lindale, Angela Sugarek sat hunched in the front yard Monday afternoon with a screwdriver in her mouth, assembling a pedal cart.
“Mommy, are we almost ready?” a chubby 3-year-old with tight brown curls asked. “We are so close,” she told him. Her wife, Carol Jeffery, stood in the garage and asked both boys to cover their eyes as she pulled out an Amazon Prime box with an inflatable swimming pool inside.
To passers-by, it probably looked like a family making the most of the afternoon sun. To anyone who knows how close these brothers came to losing their loving foster parents, it seemed like a miracle.
Seven weeks after Child Protective Services caseworkers removed the boys following their foster mothers’ repeated complaints about suspected abuse by an older sibling living elsewhere in foster care, a CPS supervisor brought them back.
The move followed a contentious court hearing and a series of private meetings in which the mothers say CPS never acknowledged an error but agreed it was best to return the boys to the home where they had flourished. A CPS spokesman declined comment.
The boys came running into their mothers’ arms on Monday, Jeffery said, although “Dion,” the youngest, at first maintained the shell-shocked gaze he’d had when CPS first brought him to the door last fall.
After a few minutes of running under the old magnolia tree and checking out how much the garden he’d helped plant had grown, Dion came to Jeffery with a message:
“He said, ‘Mommy, I want to stay with you. My house is blue.’ ”
“What’s your address?” Jeffery asked a bit later.
Both boys recited the house number and street name as though they’d never left.
Then they ran through the house and made sure all their toys were still there. They played with their train set and assembled a Hot Wheels ramp that jutted out the bedroom door. They fished out popsicles from the freezer. The 4-year-old, “Darius,” fell back on his comfy
twin bed and made snow angels in the bedspread. They made notes of all that was different.
“You should hear him,” Jeffery said of Dion. “He goes to the bathroom and says, ‘Mommy, you changed the soap.’ ”
The foster mothers weren’t sure they’d ever see this day.
In a column last month, I wrote about how the boys had become little nomads in the dysfunctional foster care system before they ended up with Sugarek and Jeffery. By foster care standards, the troubled boys — one with a speech delay and violent outbursts and the other diagnosed with PTSD from previous abuse — struck gold. With their new foster family, they attended good schools, made a community of new friends in the Heights, played sports and lived an idyllic agrarian lifestyle with a backyard full of vegetable gardens, trees and chickens.
For a time, the foster mothers, who wanted to adopt the two, considered adding on to their house to take in a teenage halfsibling.
Reported abuse
But red flags began to crop up whenever the 15-year-old was around. Dion would throw tantrums before visits and regress afterward, often wetting himself. Sugarek and Jeffery say Whartonbased CPS officials discouraged them from reporting the episodes unless they witnessed abuse. The last straw came when Dion returned from a CPS-supervised visit with his teen brother with an anal injury. The foster mothers reported it, and CPS quickly relocated the children.
Sugarek and Jeffery went to court. Their lawyer, Julie Ketterman, filed a motion to intervene in the case and threatened sanctions against CPS and others who had failed to act in the boys’ best interests.
In a series of meetings last week, Ketterman and the foster mothers say CPS told them an investigation found the teen had not abused the 3-year-old. They said CPS and the CASA advocate suggested the problem was miscommunication, even though the foster mothers had meticulously detailed every concern for months. At one point, Sugarek said, CPS suggested the anal injury may have been caused by pinworms. She found that ridiculous, saying Dion’s pinworms had healed months earlier after he came to live with them.
But the foster mothers agreed to disagree on the abuse and negotiated to have the children returned. Sugarek and Jeffery say they’re back on track to adopt the two boys and look forward to discussing that at a hearing next month.
Meanwhile, the boys will have only supervised visits with their older brother. The foster mothers say CPS has asked for help in finding a placement for the teen somewhere in the close-knit Heights community.
An amazing village
So what led CPS to bring back the boys? Sugarek cited, in part, the powerful response to the columns on the case. She said after I published a CPS program director’s name in the last one, over 70 emails from people at the 4-year-old’s school poured in to the woman.
“He only had 22 kids in his class,” she laughed.
On the Sunday the first column ran, a Chronicle reader drove all the way from Cypress and was at their doorstep by 11 a.m. with a check. A thousand miles away, neighbors on the Pittsburgh street where Jeffery’s parents live walked door to door, column in hand, to raise money for the boys. A GoFundMe account for legal expenses brought in more than $20,000.
“We have a fantastic, amazing village,” Sugarek said. “There’s no way you can have that level of response and get away with something like this.”
Still, she worried about the families across Texas whose stories will never be told and who don’t have the resources to fight. The foster mothers also worry about the boys and whether the separation will have lasting effects on their ability to love and trust.
“Looking at him makes me sad, because he’s not the same kid who left us,” Jeffery said of Dion, who was riding his training wheels through the sprinkler. “I miss his squealing. A little bit of his light is out. I’m hoping it comes back.”
CPS has finally done the right thing. This story may indeed have a happy ending.
But the boys never should have been ripped away. We can blame negligence, ego or incompetence.
Somebody at CPS better learn a lesson from this.