Melody was robbed of a loving dad. Thanks, DCS

Somewhere out there is a 4-yearold girl named Melody who has been cheated by the state of Arizona.

Cheated by the Department of Child Safety and the Attorney General’s Office and several Maricopa County juvenile judges who fundamentally failed to do their jobs.

Cheated out of one of the most important things a little girl could ever have: a father.

The Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reported on last week’s Arizona Court of Appeals ruling that reversed the childwelfare system’s decision to deny this child her daddy.

The 28-page decision recounts one case in which DCS repeatedly undermined a father’s right to his child then lied about it to the court, which then rubber stamped DCS’s decision to forever remove Melody’s father from her life.

But really, this decision is an indictment of the whole system — one in which DCS wields incredible power, too often with no real oversight and zero accountability.

The Appeals Court lays out the facts in this appalling case:

Melody’s father and mother lived briefly together in 2014 in Sacramento, Calif., but the woman returned home to Arizona once she became pregnant. The by-then former boyfriend told her that if he was the father, he wanted to be a father, but she cut off contact with him in October 2014.

Two months later, Melody was born and DCS immediately took the child into state custody. (The mother’s rights were later terminated.)

Within three weeks of Melody’s birth, the father called DCS case manager Lucero Garcia, explaining that he believed he was the father and requesting a paternity test.

DCS’s response was to amend the dependency case and declare him unfit.

“Father is unable to parent due to neglect,” Lucero wrote, in her petition to the judge. “Father is unable to provide his child with the basic necessities of life, including, food, clothing, shelter and support. Father has abandoned his child. Father has failed to maintain a normal parental relationship without just cause. Father has failed to send cards, gifts, letters or child support since the child’s birth.”

Nowhere in her petition did Lucero mention that this father who supposedly “abandoned” his child had actually contacted DCS three weeks after the child’s birth because he believed he was Melody’s father.

And he was. By April 2015, a paternity test confirmed it and the father — wanting to demonstrate his desire for his child — enrolled in and completed a 13-week parenting class.

Yet the judge sided with DCS’s request to keep custody of the child, citing the father’s “inability to parent due to neglect and abandonment” and setting a case for “family reunification concurrent with severance and adoption.”

DCS didn’t allow the father to have contact with Melody until January 2016 at which time he began sending her videos. By then, she was 13 months old and DCS had known for a month that there was no reason to keep him from his daughter.

California’s child-welfare investigators, asked by DCS to check him out, gave the man a glowing report. His exwife called him “a good father, who cares and provides for his children.” A California social worker wrote that it “is obvious that (the children) feel loved and cared for by their father and that he is very involved in their lives.”

Yet he didn’t get to see Melody in person until February 2016 and even then, only for an hour at a fast-food restaurant.

In April 2016 — five months after being ordered to do so by the court — DCS finally set up a schedule for phone calls and suggested that he visit Melody twice a month.

He started phoning his daughter immediately, in addition to the videos he already was sending her, and he rented a car and came out for a weekend visit. But it’s expensive to travel

frequently when you make $2,000 a month, have $100 in savings and other children to support.

The father told the caseworker that he would only be able to visit “every four months ... so (he could) save enough money to actually be able to come out.”

Her response was to try to sever his rights to his child.

In June 2016, the caseworker wrote that she “no longer believes that it is in the child’s best interest to place her in the care of his (sic) father as he does not appear to be committed in the reunification process.”

The next month, DCS again declared that he had abandoned the child — falsely claiming that he wasn’t even calling her — and moved to terminate his rights to his daughter.

In July 2017, the judge — one of four who was involved in this case over time — concluded he could not “sever rights, because people are poor” and ordered the agency to start paying the father’s airfare or at least to promptly reimburse him so that he could visit his child each week.

Instead, DCS dragged its feet. The father’s reimbursements arrived three to six months later, leaving him unable to continue his visits.

Unbelievably, DCS used that against him, again asking the court to terminate his rights.

And in July 2018, the judge did so, saying the father’s explanation that he couldn’t afford to visit “lack(ed) credibility given that DCS reimburse(d) Father for his transportation costs.”

Yeah, reimbursements three to six months after the fact for a guy living paycheck to paycheck and supporting a family.

And so Melody lost her father. Until last week, that is, when the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed that judge’s ruling, sending the case back for a do-over and taking everyone involved to the woodshed.

Judge Paul J. McMurdie, writing for the unanimous three-judge panel, said DCS had no right from the start to deny this father his child. Once it started down the path, the agency was slow to obey the judge’s orders aimed at reunifying father and daughter and even lied to the judge at points.

“DCS’s lack of diligence at the onset created the circumstance — the absence of a bond — that DCS relied on to maintain Melody in out-of-home placement,” he wrote. “DCS then demanded Father remedy the condition by imposing unreasonable requirements on him …”

McMurdie also questioned the ethics of the Attorney General’s Office, which represents DCS, for even filing the dependency petition given that there was no evidence that the father was unfit.

“The lack of factual support for the allegations in the petition relating to Father’s unfitness creates significant concerns about the ethical propriety of filing the dependency petition claiming Father abused or neglected and abandoned Melody,” he wrote.

He also dinged the judges for rubber stamping a “baseless dependency petition” and severing a father’s rights with no evidence to support DCS’s claims.

“The petition’s generic assertions failed to support the conclusion that an out-of-state parent — seeking to establish paternity of a less than one-monthold child, who has been in DCS custody since birth — abused, neglected, or abandoned the child… ,” he wrote. “Moreover, the record is devoid of any evidence supporting the unfitness allegations in the petition, a fact DCS acknowledged at oral argument before this court.”

Devoid of any evidence … and a child, now 41⁄2, now doesn’t even know her father. I’d say this is a tragedy for Melody, and it certainly is.

But I suspect Melody is not alone in being cheated by the child-welfare system. Certainly, DCS has some excellent and dedicated caseworkers who bust their behinds every day to protect kids from unimaginable abuse.

But there are also horror stories on the other side. The case of the feverish kid comes to mind, in which three children were seized in February after Chandler police broke down a door to check on a 2 year old — who, as it turned out, had a respiratory virus. It took the parents nearly three months to get their children back and even now DCS retains legal custody.

In Melody’s case, the FCRB had concerns about what was going on but ultimately could make no determination because neither the caseworker nor her boss showed up or returned calls.

They get away with it because DCS is accountable, really, to no one. Even when records should be public, it’s virtually impossible to get them in any sort of timely manner. And when records aren’t public, we must rely on the court system to do its job.

It’s a tragedy really. Just ask a little girl named Melody.