They stole them with my love

It was the end of July before I was able to see the children again. I was at the county building with bells on. I was so excited to see them; I have missed them so much. Before they even brought them into the room, Ms. McGross took me into her office and proceeded to tell me that AareOna has some bruises and swelling on her face. She said that another little foster boy had some anger issues and took them out on my daughter. I was upset by this. What mother would not be? She led me back to the visiting room without saying another word.

When the kids finally got there, they were very excited to see me. I was also very excited to see them until I got a good look at AareOna’s face. “My god, sweetheart, what happened to you?” I said. She replied as she ran into my arms, “Judas did it, Mommy. Judas hurt me.” I looked up to the two-way mirror, willing them to do something, to get off their asses and find somewhere else for these children to go. However, no one came, so I just sat there holding her as tears slowly rolled down my face. I knew it. I knew something awful was happening there. I took my camera out of my purse and started taking pictures of AareOna. I started to strip her clothes off too. I was looking for any other signs of abuse. This made them get off their lazy asses and come over to the playroom where we were to tell me that I was not allowed to take pictures of my own children. “I bet not,” I said, “Especially not when my daughter looks as if she had been in a bar fight.” She had a black eye and other bruising on the left side of her face. She also had blisters inside her mouth and bruising all over the side of her stomach and back. I also learned that she had been taken to the emergency room the night before last. It was realized there that she had a stress fracture in her femur bone. This injury was at a different level of healing from the rest of her injuries. This only proved to me that she was being abused the whole time she had been there. The doctor that she saw that night, was also concerned about her safety, and as a mandated reporter, he filed a report to the Wrong County Police Department as well as to the Child Protection Agency.

After they came to let me know that I was not allowed to take any photos, I thought to myself that she should have taken the camera and smashed it on the floor if she did not want me taking any more photos because they were not going to stop me. These were still my children. I pretended to put the camera away but only switched it over to video. I set it down in the corner of the room under the mirror so that they could not see it but it could see us. I filmed the rest of our visit.

My daughter told me straight out that her foster father did that to her. I could not understand why they did not pull them out of that house right that second. They did nothing to keep my children safe yet I tried to take a picture of them and they jumped right over here and made me stop. I asked them, “Why the hell are you not doing your job? You are supposed to be keeping my children safe. I would think that you people would be a little more concerned about whether they would live through the night than my taking a picture of them. You people should be looking for another home for these kids, not analyzing the level of my bond with them behind some trick mirror.

It only took them a few hours to come and steal my kids from me after they received one report, with absolutely no evidence of child abuse or neglect. Yet she is full of bruising and clearly telling us that she is being beaten in the foster home and the county is telling me that they will look into it. Look into it? My God! All you have to do is look at her face and hear her words! She is trying to tell us what really happened to her.” They did not listen to either one of us. The law that legally made me hand my child back over to her abusers shook me to my very core. I swear to God that I could hear the emotional bond that held us together being severed in that moment. I feel it rip through my soul, severing something that attached us, something that we needed. Something inside of me died as they pulled her away this time. I knew that we were never going to be the same after that day. This forced hand over was going to change us both forever. I mean, it was really going to change us.

I did what I had to do and handed her back over to her abusers. I looked to Ms. McGross for some kind of answer I could live with, but she only said again that she would look into it. I said, “No, miss, you will look into it right now,” as I grabbed my cell phone and dialed 911 myself. An operator came on the line and said, “911, what is your emergency?” I told the woman that I was across the highway at the Human Services Building and that my daughter was full of bruises and that she was claiming that her foster father has beaten her. I told them that the social worker was making me send her back there and that my daughter really needed their help.” Dispatch said that they were going to send an officer over to the Murtzes’ house to do a well-baby check. They came back with the conclusion that nothing happened there to AareOna but an accident. An accident my ass! I called my attorney next, telling her that I will be in that courthouse come Monday and I would not leave until my children were safe! Monday rolled round and I just showed up at the courthouse. I was informed that over the weekend AareOna received another black eye on the other side of her face. “Why are you not doing something about it then? Why is she still there?” It was as if they were trying to rub it in my face just to see how far they could push me before I totally lost it.

“I am not leaving,” I tell my public defender, “Until we see the judge. They can arrest me and throw me in jail; they can send me to the nuthouse, they can shoot me, but short of killing me they will not shut me up until someone does something!” I was yelling this in the courthouse. I did not care what they did to me but I would not leave this place until my children were safe. “Do you hear me?” It was almost 4:30 p.m. now and soon the Judges would be going home for the day. They were fixing to leave and my children could be dead before they came back again. “Do something, damn you,” I was saying to my attorney when out of the corner or my eye I saw a Judge walking by.

She was trying to leave for the day but I latched on to her and just kept walking with her, trying to tell her my story. She finally stopped and turned to look at me. I must have been a mess. I had been crying straight since Friday, and I only went home briefly to grab a sandwich and a few pops. I spent the rest of my weekend crying outside the Murtzes. I had been sitting outside that house all weekend, only leaving to move the car or get food and drink. Anyways, after the Judge took one good look at me and saw the mess I was in, she stopped and turned around. Then she ordered her people back into the courtroom. She actually heard what I was saying and gathered us up in front of her, but she still gave the county another two weeks to find a placement for my children. I was outraged and screaming venom by the time the hearing was over. Then I heard the county faintly asking the Judge to put an order for protection on my case file. She granted them this wish. “What the hell are you people talking about?” I said. “My daughter is full of bruises and broken bones and you people are worried about protecting my file?” At that point, who really gave a damn about my case file? I sure the heck was not at that moment thinking about my case file. My children were my only concern, the only important thing there in front of that Judge was the survival of two great kids, kids whom I loved with my whole being.

I could not help but to think to myself just what was really going on here. Is this for real? Did the Judge just render an OFP on my case file? Did he truly grant the county social worker two weeks to remove my children to safety?

I was so exhausted after the judge let them keep my kids for another two weeks. I could not even believe it. I was so terrified that she would die there. The kids were never moved. We had another hearing set out for the end of the two weeks, which meant August 16, 2006. This hearing was also the last time I would see Natasha McGross or the district attorney that was working thus far with us. I had a new social worker; his name was Dick Hayes, and he was suddenly the one in charge of our hell.

Dick was real young, maybe in his late twenties. He was tall, skinny, and wore these small-rimmed glasses as Harry Potter wore. There was nothing special about Dick, and he was no different from the women vultures that had worked with me thus far. I found out later that Ms. McGross left her position there. I was not sure what happened to her but she was no longer working for this county. I was thinking I would imagine not after she refused to do her job and a small child almost died because of it. I later heard that she was working for the adjacent county agency. All I could say to them was good riddance and pray that no other child gets hurt by her negligence and incompetence.

On the sixteenth, the county asked the judge for an additional two days and it was granted, which meant that by a Judge’s order they had until August 18. Yet one of the last days of August, over two weeks past due, Trudance Murtz brought AareOna into the Buffalo Hospital emergency room. AareOna was huddled over in pain and vomiting all over the place. There it was determined that something was very wrong with my child and she was airlifted to a pediatrics hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was put on life support there and not expected to make it. She had blood clots in her intestines from blunt force trauma to her abdomen. She was full of bruises and wounds that it was hard to believe that what was killing her at this moment was coming from internal injuries because the outside of her looked horrifying too,

Dick called my cell phone after AareOna was in the air. I was at my friend’s apartment in Becker, Minnesota. I must have passed out when I heard what he was saying because when I came to; my friend was leaning over me, screaming, “What is wrong? What is going on?” She was saying this to me but also into my phone. She saw me coming around, so she walked away from me, talking still into my phone, trying to get the information directly from Dick. Though he refused to give her any information, I finally came out of the horror and grabbed the phone out of her hand. Dick told me that he was on his way to the hospital and that I should meet him there. They were going to need my signature, he said. I asked him about my son then. “Where is Preston now?” “He is at the foster home with Judas,” Dick said. "Are you kidding me right now? I said. I could not believe that you have left my son with the same man that did this to my daughter.” I asked Dick why he had ignored the judge’s orders. I told him that he was in contempt of court! I asked him, “Who is really responsible for this?” Then I replied for him, “You people are, that’s who is responsible. You people are.” With no end to the conversation, I abruptly hung up the phone. Then like a zombie, I walked out to my car, got into it, and drove off to the city. I guess on the way there I called my dad. He said that I was hysterically crying to the point where he could not understand a word I was saying. Then I called my son Lenny, telling him where I was going and why. Finally, I called Bruce’s sister’s house, where Bruce was living at the time, and I left a horrible message. I do not remember any of these calls, or the drive there for that matter. I do not know how I got there. I must have been on automatic pilot because I drove straight there without any memory of driving at all.

When I walked into the room and saw all the tubes coming out of her little body, I ran into her little bathroom and threw up all the contents of my stomach. I rinsed my mouth out with water and splashed a little cold water on my face, and then I opened the door and went straight to her side. Her little eyes fluttered open for just a second and she smiled, saying, “Mommy.” I grabbed her little hand and I crawled in next to her on the bed, and I stayed like that for as long as they would possibly let me.

Dick would not let me stay with her no matter how hard I pleaded and begged him to let me stay. The hospital staff were instructed by Dick to not allow me in her room without Dick or some other social worker from the county present. What the heck did he think I would do? Disconnect the tubes that were keeping my baby alive and run off with her? No, they were the damn child abusers, not me! I said just as much to one of the nurses that came into AareOna’s room while I was there. She gave me this look of disgust and I snapped at her, saying, “Don’t you look at me like that! I did not do this to my child. I am a recovering drug addict, not a child abuser. They did this to my child. Look at him,” I said as I pointed at Dick. “Look at that son of a bitch if you are looking for a child abuser.”

The whole damn thing outraged me but especially the fact that he would not let me stay. All my cussing and screaming almost got me banned from the hospital altogether. I let it go because I could do nothing for AareOna if I; was kicked out of the hospital or worse yet thrown in jail. I did what I had to do and I left when Dick did, but first I made him promise to do all he could do so that someone could come to the hospital tomorrow and I would be able to see her. The next day a Friday, I could not get a hold of Dick or his supervisor. Then on Monday, it was Labor Day, and the offices were closed. Once again Dick and his crew ignored me on Tuesday, then finally on Wednesday I got the okay to see her. I was damn upset by then as any mother could imagine. Six days she fought for her life with no one who loved her by her side. I wondered how do these —— sleep at night? How do they return home in the evening and have supper with their wives, husbands, and/or children, carrying on as if nothing important happened that day?

One would have to be heartless you would think to be at peace with themselves and their jobs. Not only could I not visit her during that six-day period. Dick did not give permission to the hospital staff to even talk to me by phone, so I got no updates about her condition either. This in itself was torturous and unusual punishment. These selfish, unjust acts contribute greatly to my mental state and my stability now.

The good news was that AareOna was out of critical condition; she was still in the pediatric intensive care unit, but for the most part she was no longer in danger of dying. What a relief that was to all of us. I am sure this might have been the only one thing we had in common with Dick. We both desperately wanted her to live, though for very different reasons. My desire and passion for her to pull through was out of pure love and devotion, and Dick’s was out of keeping his job and saving Wrong County’s face from scrutiny.

After that visit, I went home and started making phone calls to every news station and newspaper in the state. I did get one woman from WCCO Channel 4 to call me back, and though she felt strongly for my situation, she could not help me, not in the way I wanted her to. She said that she would call the sheriff’s office to ask them what their intent was for filing charges on the foster family for assault and battery of a child. However, truly it was more like attempted murder. I thought about the county’s blatant disregard for a court order. If they had followed that order this could have been prevented; therefore, my daughter could have been spared from this tragedy. All of her pain and suffering was due to that order not being followed. I just thanked the woman from WCCO for any little thing she could do for us and hung up. Then I got a call from Michelle Bachman’s office and heard the same thing from them, pretty much that they felt for my situation but could not do much to help me. I did correspond, though, with Ms. Bachmann’s secretary She helped me with a presentation I was preparing. We even once had a meeting with her staff to talk about the Reunification Center (which you will learn more about further on in this book).

All the moments not spent at the hospital, I sought once again for someone, anyone, who could help us. Even after all that had happened to AareOna in foster care, I could not find anyone to save us. Some tests that they performed were sent out to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Their report had read that it was in their determination that AareOna had been hit in the stomach by 35-40 mph. force and that a small child could not have inflicted it. Well, that blows the county’s three-year-old foster boy story, does it not? AareOna gradually did get better physically after sixteen days in ICU and an additional eight days in another pediatric ward. She was released, and sent to a new foster home. Her brother Preston was already there waiting.

It still took me four days to get Preston and the other foster children out of the Murtzes’ care after AareOna was airlifted to the hospital. Two week after there was a court order to move them from the foster home, thirty-one days after the first mandated report by a doctor about the possibility of abuse in that home. Thirty-one days my baby lived in hell that she did not have to, thirty-one long torturing days.

The county agency cannot do their own investigation, not when they would be investigating themselves. Their policy was to pass it on for determination to another county; they chose the one that was just across the river from Wrong County. I asked repeatedly what county they had sent the case too. They finally told me that Scherman County had the case. I called there daily; no one knew what I was talking about. Then finally, after several months, I got someone who actually knew something. The woman on the phone informed me that they just received the file. I asked her what could have possibly taken so long. She told me she just did not know, and the only thing I was thinking was that they needed time to destroy evidence and to falsify the reports.

It only took Scherman County a few weeks to come back with the determination of abuse. They concluded that AareOna experienced abuse in the foster home. It was during that abuse she sustained the near-fatal injuries. I really did not need the proof for myself, but I was thinking that was what the county needed, so I took the report and went straight to the sheriff’s office and demanded that they press charges against Judas and Trudance Murtz. They were still trying to tell me that they did not have enough evidence. What did they mean not enough evidence? My baby has been beaten; she has spent almost a month in the hospital because of it. The tests all confirmed that she suffered blunt force trauma to her abdomen. The next county over had determined it was abuse that caused these injuries. AareOna herself told us that it was Judas who did this to her. How much damn evidence do you think they would need? Do you realize how much evidence they needed to take them from me? I want you to understand this; they came into my house without a search warrant, without a Judge’s signature on a court order for a child in need of placement. They had no solid grounds to remove them, and they removed them just a few hours after they received that one report, that one report that was written about an incident that had happened almost a month prior to it, besides the fact that Ms. McGross already knew of the incident.

I do not remember saying anything aloud, but by the time I snapped out of it, the police officer in the window looked concerned or perhaps a little nervous. I think he thought my cheese had just slid off my cracker. I looked at him for a moment, trying hard to gather my wits about me.

For just a second I was not sure who I was, what I was doing, and whom I was doing it for. A few moments must have gone by before it all came back to me, and I knew that I had to collect as much evidence as I could. Then I looked him straight in the eyes and asked him, “Do you know that they pulled her out of my arms, kicking and screaming, with no more than an empty bag? Give me a break. How much evidence did you need then?” I asked.

I was mad. I needed to get someone to pay attention to what was happening there. I began to gather a bunch of poster boards and got on the computer. I made posters and I took to picketing outside the Human Services building. A few good friends and I made posters and took turns in that spot across the street from the building. One of our posters had two 11 x 13 pictures of AareOna. The first one was of AareOna before they took her. She looked all happy and smiling. Then the second picture was after they took her, and she was black and blue. I put two captions along the top of the pictures. The first read “before,” and the second read “after.” Then in bright red letters across both pictures, it said, “Wrong County Child Protection,” and along the bottom of the poster, it said, “Who do you want protecting your kids?” Another poster had seven pictures of AareOna across a four-foot x four-foot sign. The first picture of AareOna was bright and done in high quality, then each picture after that one lost a little more and a little more transparency until you could not see her anymore at all. In big bold letters, it said, “When Thursday’s child is yours and no one cares, honk if you care.” Another poster said, “Have you hugged your kids today? I haven’t!”

I also printed out the notes from my child protection journal from August until now and I handed them out to people who stopped by to read our signs or to those who were waiting for the light to turn green. I also made a website, kidnappedbythestate.com, telling our whole story. This pissed the county off. Well, I figured they were going to let the foster parents go free because they did not want the public to know. Trust and believe that is exactly what this was all about.

If they filed a criminal complaint on the Murtzes, the whole ugly mess would open up to the world. The courtroom doors that until now had remained closed would suddenly open up to its citizens. We, the people, would have the information that until now had remained private. Hell, it might as well have been Vegas because what happened in the Wrong County juvenile courtrooms stayed hidden. The county officials went to great lengths to keep it quiet. They tried to shut me up by offering to drop my drug charge if I took down the signs, stopped standing on the corner, and shut off the website. I told those bastards to go f-themselves. If they wanted to let a child beater go free then I wanted to go to jail for telling the whole damn world about it!

I wondered if AareOna had died what would have happened then. Do you think someone would have been held accountable then? On the other hand, would that still be my fault? I take full responsibility for how my kids got into the system in the first place but, what happened after that is totally on them. From experience, I know that they would find some way to turn the whole thing on to me. Somehow, even her death would have been turned around and made to look as if that was better for her than having a flawed parent raise her.

After I refused their bribe that offered to drop charges, they threatened to file a restraining order on me. They were simply just not going to be held responsible for what happened to AareOna. I would not be able to come within three hundred feet of their building, they said, yet Trudance Murtz is still allowed to work at a hospital taking care of vulnerable people after everything they did to AareOna. Who knows what kind of job Judas holds? Nothing, absolutely, nothing happened to them. I was determined to tell people, the whole damn world if I could reach them, but at least my little corner of it, exactly what kind of child protection system Wrong County was running.

I figured out a way to get my complete case file. I would tell you how but I am afraid I could get someone in a lot of trouble. She was only doing me a favor; maybe secretly she was hoping that I could use those pages to someday hold them accountable. Then I would need a lawyer with some balls to go up against them, and I do not think there is a lawyer in the state with any of those. Instead, I took my box of papers home, determined to fight them on my own, but first they were making me go into treatment. I was going into impatient treatment. Even though I had been clean without mishap for almost two years now, they just would not believe it, so off to treatment I went, and not a cheap one either but one of the most expensive places in the state. What a waste of taxpayers’ money. Not to mention the addicts out there who died while I was wasting their bed. Nevertheless, I went because I wanted my children back. The second weekend I was there I finally had time to take the box out of my trunk and I started going through each piece of paper. It did not take long to see all the evil, traitorous things that Ms. McGross had been working on. She had been working on the termination papers since the very start. She started the paperwork the same day they took my kids. I realized then that they never planned to give them back to me. I knew instinctively that this treatment was there way of keeping me busy while they legally stole my children.

I knew that if she was ready to terminate from the beginning, now for sure they could not return the kids. Not after what they did to us. How would they then justify what happened to AareOna? If they kept them and terminated my rights, then they make everything my fault and not theirs. They were not going to let me pull them into any ties with this thing. No way, no how! They were willing to sacrifice my children to protect their own ugly faces. I was not willing to do that, and they knew it.

I was just starting to understand that I had been jumping through their senseless hoops for absolutely nothing! Could you believe that they wasted all this time and money, they ruined my children’s lives, and they charged the whole fiasco to you, the taxpayer? Can you imagine what a month cost in the hospital ICU? Three surgeries, the entire specialist team that took care of her, and all those tests that were ran? Oh my God, it would be astronomical! Then the treatment that they forced me to go through (even though I had been straight for almost two years and was evaluated and assessed as not needing treatment)All this must have cost us, the people, a half a million dollars. Just on my two children alone. Could you imagine what the cost would be for the almost 500,000 children in foster care today? Then there was all of my daughter’s injuries, to think that she had suffered those for absolutely nothing. They never needed to be in foster care in the first place, like 93% of all the other children in foster care in this county today.

I found that there were big chunks of time where there were no notes added to my file, clearly showing the county’s incompetence. From September until December, we were disregarded. There were pages where many things were blacked out, and the ones that were not were full of lies. It looked as if the only one here that told the truth was me, and if my lawyer was not going to make the court aware of this truth than I had to.

Realizing that this treatment was only another act for their record, I packed my clothes and I left. I was getting the hell out of there and going to work before they wasted another moment of my precious time. That, I am sure, was their plan from the very beginning: distract me while they legally stole my children. Time was ticking by in their favor. I was a fool to just sit there and comply with them. Comply? With what? Comply with losing my children forever? No way was that going to happen I would never in a million years comply to that!

I went home and I went to work. I researched everything about getting a federal court hearing that I could find. The process was very complicated. I was afraid to say it, but it was just too complicated for me to handle right now. I would need an attorney to help me with it. In addition, whom was I kidding? I diligently searched daily for help but it never came. I was never going to find an attorney who was willing to put his neck out on the line for us. I highly doubted one was going to drop in my lap now. I would just have to keep searching for anything, something that would help me win my this thing.

Then I made yet another mistake. I called a meeting with my CPS worker Dick and the guardian ad litem, and I asked them just what we had been doing this whole time when I never had a chance of bringing my children home in the first place. “What kind of sick game have your sick people been playing with me?” I asked. Then I threatened to take what I have and sue the whole damn lot of them. I got up, shaking so bad that I was not sure my legs could even make it across the room to the door, but then I heard it slamming shut. I looked around for a second in a daze before I realized that I was on the other side of it and that it was I who had slammed it. I went like a robot in a trance to the law library.

I had to find a way to beat those bastards, I thought. I studied everything that I could find on child protection and family law. I found me some good stuff. This couple in Oregon had similar problems going on for them, except their daughter was being sexually molested instead of physically abused like AareOna was. They went to the trial to terminate their rights. The father, shortly after it began, stood up and asked the court if he was in a court of record. Then he proceeded to execute a citizen’s arrest on the judge, the city attorney, and the child protection agents. He claimed tyranny and conspiracy to the rape of a minor. I could do that, I thought. So I went home with a thousand more pieces of paper and an idea to put a last-ditch effort together that would save my children, but I knew they were not going to let me win, they were not going to give them back no matter what I did. Therefore, from this point on it was for me; all about justice. We, after all, by our amendments, deserve equal protection of the law, and the way I see it the only ones who were getting any protection from the law were the wrong ones: the social worker, the foster parents, the judge, everyone but my children and me. The father in Oregon was the only one who was arrested that day, and I was ready to go to jail with him, fighting the same cause.

This is happening all around our country, the same basic torture system was set up in every child protection agency in the States. Sad story after sad story, there are countless websites running out there by parents just like you and me. There are 14,000 something YouTube videos on the subject of child protection alone. This is not a solitary story, people. Please take the time to examine what our child protection system has turned into.

Find out for yourselves, research your own answers, but I must warn you that once you know the horrific truth of the matter you may no longer be able to stand by and do nothing to change it. That is exactly my reason for telling all this to you. There is something strange about that, because let me tell you, honestly, when I started this book it was more about revenge than anything else. The county went to such great lengths to keep me quiet so they could continue the setup until my children were gone, hoping that then I would lose my passion about it. But they were not banking on the fact that my love for those two kids went a lot deeper than the dirty little secrets they kept, and nor would I get over it or forgive the unjust practice that stole them from me in the first place. So what better way to sock it to them but to write a book about it then send them out an autographed copy? I wanted every single person that I ever wrote or called begging for their help (help that never came) to have a copy. The ones in charge of this case deserved to be in jail. They really needed to pay the price, just as any other criminal pays the price for the torture of a child, for the cruel and unusual punishment of a child, for the attempted murder of a child. They not only walked free, they also walked away holding the power to do the same thing over and over again. You want to hear something even sadder. While they walk away unscarred, after five years I am still struggling through my life day after day. Now I am doing it with some great mental impairment. To put it bluntly, they messed me up. Not a day goes by that I am not affected because of the brutality of what they did to my daughter. On a daily basis, it still makes me physically sick to think and to write about it here, especially the past few chapters that I have written. They were written in the wee hours off the morning with a completely emptied stomach and still I had to run to the bathroom several times with the dry heaves. This has been going on with me for years now. I know I will never ever get over it. My entire life was and still is affected by what happened to us. I am unemployable, I am mentally unstable at times, I take countless antipsychotic medications daily, I barely sleep because of the night terrors that ravage my nights. I barely eat without throwing it up, and I cry quite often. I get lost for hours in the past. I have driven by my destination, one time by 100 miles, and I did not even realize it until I was far from where I needed to be. I have bouts of amnesia; sometimes they only last for a moment, and sometimes they last long enough to scare the hell right out of me, moments when I suddenly do not know who I am or where I am going. While the county just goes on in their immunity from the law. No punishment for social workers, they are above the law, which leaves them free to continue with their complete immunity to the next brutal acts that will tear someone else’s family apart.

Why do they walk out of this scot-free? Why are they not held accountable for their acts? They should all be jailed for what was done in my case, don’t you think? I totally agree with the late Ms. Schaefer when she stated, “the immunity needs to be stopped because it is protecting the wrong people.” (Schaffer, 1999) (you can you tube or google to get a copy of Ms. Schaefer’s report titled the corrupt business of child protective services) The entire agency and two departments’ reputation should have been shit after what was done to my children.

The true and real fact is, the only single reason they did not press criminal charges on the Murtzes had nothing to do with evidence. It was that; to file criminal charges where they were most certainly due would have opened the court doors that until now were closed. You see, the law protected one and not the other. Clearly, the Fourteenth Amendment to our constitution states that the law has no choice of persons and has to give equal protection to one and to all. Yet AareOna got no protection from the law while the Murtzes had it all. Where is there any justice in that? Where is my daughter’s justice in that? Her only crime was being born to a recovering drug addict who did make some huge mistakes but who loved her. Don’t we all make mistakes at being parents? Don’t we all fall short of perfect? However, most of us, we do not fall short in love. We do not regret the sacrifices we make to protect them, to love them, to care for them, and to keep them with us always.

I had prepared a speech. I read and reread Minnesota’s Constitution, and I was fully prepared for the trial. I was sure to go to jail, but that did not matter to me. I was not free anyways. There was no room for freedom when the police can walk into your home and help the predators of CPS steal your children right out from your arms, kicking and screaming, and then batter them within inches of their lives.

I planned to perform a citizen’s arrest on the judge, the social workers, and the city attorney, and the bailiff if he refused to handcuff the criminals and take them off to jail. I had two other people on board who would be sitting in the courtroom to verify that I had a legitimate claim for a citizen’s arrest. That is all the law requires one to perform it.

It was easy to find two families who had similar dealings with the county and with the criminals who were running it. I. hoped and I prayed that they would give the children to my son Lenny. He had shown up, flying from Louisiana for every single court hearing. I have to admit that I really enjoyed having Lenny around so much. We had been very close once, probably closer than a mother should be with her son. But the truth was he was my best friend. I was so young when he was born and we were so alone in the world that our bond was tighter than most. I’ve heard you can’t be your child’s friend that it is not always the best relationship for a mother to have with her children; but it made us strong, it made us close, it made our connection unable to be tampered with. Together we grew up, though at this moment you would not have known that we were both grown. I had been acting very childish at times throughout this whole ordeal, some would say.

My parents helped Lenny out a lot. His whole life, when he had any problem all he had to do was go to Grandma and Grandpa and they would fix it for him. Now that he was a man, it was no different. Grandma and Grandpa were always willing to go the distance when it came to Grandpa’s little namesake Leonard Lee.

Lenny was the brightest child I have ever seen. No, I do not mean just smart, I mean he was brilliant. He was not even two yet but he could read every movie label in our collection, and believe me when I tell you that he had many movies. He could count to one hundred and above. He knew his ABCs and had put to memory every word of “Sam I am”; “Red Fish, Blue Fish, Green Fish”; and “One Bear on One Bike.” He was the easiest child to raise. He learned things on his own mostly, like potty training—there was none with Lenny, he just one day got up, went into the bathroom, and peed. After that, he never wet in his pants again. He was an amazing child and he is an even more remarkable man. Back then, he was my little companion and I took him everywhere I went. He used to always say, “Just me and my big momma.” He was not only the smartest child but also the cutest and sweetest too.

It felt as if the county was stealing that away from me too, that along with Preston and AareOna I was losing Lenny also. He was being pulled and pushed away from me and it hurt like hell to watch us become strangers. I felt that I was losing him and every court hearing only made that feeling stronger. The county seemed to be slowly poisoning his mind against me, and I missed him so much. I missed the man he was before all this bullshit happened. I missed my best friend, the one I could talk to about everything, and the only one in the world I trusted to tell it too. Even in the last year when he has been so far away, we talked every day. Long distance or not, he was still my best friend. I loved him so much after Jon died. It was because of Lenny that I decided to live. It is because of him that I am still alive. Even in this, in the midst of such heartache, I was happy to be alive. I was happy to have had those kids at all because they have brought so much joy into my life. I just wanted it to be back to the way it was. Life was so lonely without them. I knew for sure that Lenny was never coming home again. That too was my fault. I made him go to Louisiana. Before he left I could see that his life was heading to where mine had ended up. I had encouraged him to move there with my parents and to go to college there, wanting him to get away from the life I hated. I could not stand by and watch his life go up in smoke. I just thought if he went there for a little while he would outgrow the stuff. I never wanted nor expected him to stay. I did not know that I would spend every day of the rest of my life missing him, though fate always has its way. Once again, it had won.

I thank the fates for the win that brought Brittany Lynn into this family. I believe she is one of the best things that had ever happened to us. She is the woman my son fell in love with. I did not always show such love for her, because at the beginning I felt as if she had stolen Lenny. I wonder if all mothers feel that way when their son falls in love for the first time.

In Lenny and Brittany’s first years together, we cleaned up a lot of elephant dung from the living room and just walked around the pink elephant that was creating it. We refused to have a heart-to-heart to make the elephant go away. Therefore, we just walked, or I should say tiptoed, around the elephant instead. We just kept on cleaning up his dung. However, we never gave up. I knew that it would take a whole lot of effort on both of our parts if we were ever going to become friends. However, I knew that we were both strong enough to hold on until we could accept it.

We had just found out that Brittany was pregnant with their first child. I, for one, was so excited about being a grandma. When this child was born, I needed to spoil him, to hold him, to know him. I prayed that the kids would be there before Derrick was born.

The kids should have already been in Louisiana, but Ms. McGross had refused to do the work that it would take to do an interstate compact so that Lenny would be able to take his brother and sister home, safe and sound, and out of danger from the social workers. By the time that Dick had taken her place and started the work, it was too late in the game to get it all done and get the kids to Louisiana before that day.

Ms. McGross, for some reason, would not send in the background check on Lenny and Brittany. She kept claiming that she had not received their release of information forms, though Lenny had sent by fax twenty-eight different copies of the same release to perform the background check. I know this because when I went through my case file I found twenty-eight signed releases from Lenny. He had faxed all of them. The forms were each dated a day or two apart. She had received them. She had gotten every single one of them, but for some screwed up reason she just refused to do her job. I do not know still if she just hated me that much, or if she was plain evil. Maybe she was just that stupid that she did not know how to do it and she did not want to ask for help. All I did know for sure was that if she had gotten on her job and released my children to their brother, AareOna would have never gone through the physical abuse that she had.

I was so determined to do the citizen’s arrest at the trial. I knew that it would mean going to jail, but jail did not frighten me. The thought of never seeing my children again, now that scared the hell right out of me. Losing my rights to them forever to strangers, now that terrified me. I could imagine that every time I saw something on the news about a little boy or girl, missing or dead, I would wonder if that was my child. No way could I live like that. I could not do it. The citizen’s arrest, I would not be able to execute that with the children still in the counties foster care system. I could not risk strangers raising my children. I would be crazy with worry about them.

My mind clouded with thoughts of that hearing. The fantasy that I could seek revenge in their playground excited me. I cannot lie; I wanted that revenge more than anything, to start some huge uproar in their precious closed courtroom. I was hoping to start a big scandal for the news stations to pick up on, and truthfully, I wanted to destroy their personal, individual lives as they had mine. I was hoping to get some media to latch on to this. I had purchased a small video recorder no larger than the point of your ink pen. A pinhead video of the legal procedure that made children orphans though their parents were still alive. I wanted that video bad. I was planning to record the hearing, post it, and become a YouTube star by nightfall. A YouTube video to show the world, make them see. Yeah, I wanted everyone in the world to know just whose freedom rings.

Damn, I had to let go of this anger, this bitterness. I prayed and I prayed for God to take it away from me to give me some type of forgiveness but I found none, not for them, and every day I woke up without my children, I grew more and more angry.

I was starting to be obsessed with that trial, with the citizen’s arrest, with the look on their faces as I stood up in my attempt to arrest them, and the court stenographer typing the entire thing while my camera rolled on in my pocket. I thought about nothing else for weeks. I was so obsessed with the procedure that I would have a pretend trial, playing it out step by step at home. In my huge empty room, I set the courtroom up. I stood when the pretend judge was announced, though I had no damn respect for her at all. As soon as my attorney started to speak, I was going to terminate our client-attorney relationship, and then I would proceed to introduce myself again as the attorney on record. I would ask the court if this was a formal courtroom and if she was a formal judge. After I received two yeses, I would then ask the court to arrest themselves for tyranny to the Constitution and for the conspiracy to kidnap and torture a child under five.

Yeah, I was getting a little obsessed with the whole idea, so I had to find something else to focus on. I would be crazy before the court date ever came. I decided to focus on writing it out. So I started writing. I had dreamed of becoming a writer as a child, and it had always been my passion. However, I was not fulfilling some pent-up passion this time, this time I was only trying to drain the pus from my heart and out of my soul. This time I was performing a cleansing. This time there was nothing to rhyme or sing about. The words continued anyway, and instead of poetry, this came out. It came out of me without rhyme and without reason and I continued to write. Page after page I wrote what was before and what was being done to us now. It felt good to release it all. It felt good to get it out of my head and, on to this paper, to finally tell it all, and hopefully by the grace of God writing it out could eventually heal me! Writing helped a lot. It pushed me along from step to step. It pushed me through each new horror and on to the next. Even if I was only telling this story to myself, it was still exactly what I needed to understand, what my life was becoming and who I was in it.

I must have had a hundred pages of my soul poured out on them, and sometimes I still feel my heart drowning in these pages. However, writing was a good way to use my energy, a good way to process what had been done to us, but most importantly, it was somewhere I could channel the rage that was inside me. I had to burn that off somewhere, that anger, because it was a constant in my head and on my heart. It burned away at me day and night. I had to find a way to get it out. I knew that it would kill me or someone else if I left it inside to eat away at my soul. So instead, I poured it out on to the paper in front of me. This was the heart of the whole matter right here, under my fingers and under my eyes was the whole ugly truth of living in it, the day-to-day accounts of the hell that they had forced upon us. Everything that was eating me alive, I poured it all out in front of me. Leaving my heart drained my thoughts numb, my brain convinced that I was no longer alive, but inside I could still feel that my heart was beating.

My only hope in this was that my children would make it to Louisiana before the trial. I just could not do it any other way. I just could not risk it. And if I pulled this citizen’s arrest before they actually physically allowed Lenny to cross over state lines with them he might never get to. I refused to trade knowing they were safe for holding these people accountable for their evil acts against us. Mothers do not make tradeoffs like that. What a tradeoff: knowing that your children are safe and keeping your mouth shut or screaming aloud and turning this around with a citizen’s arrest and never having peace about their safety again. There were no two ways about it. I simply could not follow through with the plan, unless the children got to Louisiana safely first.

The world had to be blind to what was happening to us, to what was happening to families all over the globe, in every juvenile court room around the world. The people of this country had to be blinded to the truth, because if they were not then I would definitely lose all and any faith I ever had in humankind. I had to believe that if the people knew they would stop all the horror in it. They would change it until it worked for everyone, and until it worked, especially for the children, the very ones it was intended to work for, I needed to make this right somehow. I needed to be a party to that change.

You see, I was never getting my children back, but I was hoping that because of it we could make the difference. We could start the change for a better system. Perhaps one day I would financially have the means to open the doors at The Reunification Center from hereafter called TRC and we would begin saving families. Things might change for someone else because of our pain and then at least our pain and our suffering will have not been for nothing. I wanted change for my grandchildren and for yours and for all of their children. Just maybe if I could stand up in that courtroom and follow through with this plan, things could be different for them.

I had someone working against me who must have spread the word to the county that I was up to something that would most definitely shine some lights on them. Without wasting another moment, they somehow got some bogus search warrant claiming that I was some big part of a money-laundering scheme. For someone without a damn dime, how big could I have been? I could not even afford an attorney to help me fight them. The warrant listed all paperwork and computers, computer disks, and all the data stored on any hard or jump drive. Every piece of evidence that I had worked so hard to collect, evidence that I argued and fought for, evidence that I drove many of miles to gather and evidence that very well

could have broken through their immunity.

I watched as they carried all of it out of my house. Filling their cars with the evidence that proved their guilt. I could have broken a hole through this mess and they knew it, so they came in and they once again legally stole it all back, every shred of evidence I had against them was gone. It was the sweat and the blood in black and white. It was gone, all of it, including page after page of the true account of what really happened to us there. They had come uninvited into my home and stole what they considered a threat to them. They must have wanted the stuff damn bad too because they jumped jurisdiction to get it. It was a Wrong County warrant, executed in Scherman County, as Ironic as that is. I had not lived in Wrong County for a year. I knew for sure there had to be some kind of jurisdictional conflict with their search warrant, but as always, I did not have the wherewithal to hire an attorney and demand my justice. I found out firsthand that if you do not have the money to pay for your rights, you do not have any rights.

They took me to the sheriff’s office, where I answered all their questions. Then I was released. While I was there I talked to a person who was part of the Minnesota State Financial Crime Task Force. I but not his don’t remember his name anymore but then, I tried to reach him for months but I never got hold of him. Even though he had promised to return the computers or at least have forensics retrieve the data from them and return it to me, but he turned out to be a dirty cop too. In my relentless, search of him, I Googled his name. I do not remember exactly what I found there but I know that I came across some work issues and internal investigations he was a party too. I left the jail walking. When I had gotten home I was greeted by the mess they had left. At this point, I was still confused by how I got involved in some financial crime task force investigation. I had not yet realized that this was something very different from what it seemed.

I cleaned up part of their mess and then got into the shower. I let the steaming hot boiling water beat down on my body. Sometimes I would do that; I would put the shower on only hot, as if to punish myself or clean some huge stain, some punishable, horrible fault away from my body. Wash the curse from my skin as if the scalding water could cleanse that, which was inside of me. Today, though, it was the stink of the jail I was trying to burn off my skin. That is where I realized what had just happened. It all started adding up in my mind. Standing under the water, I started laughing, crying, and yelling. I was just starting to understand that it had been CPS, not some task force. Those dirty rotten bastards did this.

They came for the evidence; they were becoming intimidated, waiting for me to break this thing wide open. They were afraid of the evidence, thinking that I could somehow use the evidence to hold them accountable for their pure acts of hatred and discrimination. I could show the world what exactly was happening to the children and to their tax dollars. Billions of federal dollars that are used to support this program that could exercise such cruelty, such brutality to a child. If we are not a republic, people, then we are an oppressed nation, and I believe that we will soon be ran like it. If we do not stand firm now our children and theirs will not have a constitution, or not one, anyway, that would resemble the original document that was wrote in 1776. It has already been taken away from, added too, changed, and altered on a daily basis and it will continue to be if we stand still on this and do nothing about it. You can trust and believe that someday it will no longer exist.

I started working hard at preparing another speech; another citizen’s arrest after the so-called financial task force came and stole the entirety of what I had been working on. I was still determined to hold them accountable for what had been done to us. The only thing was if the children were not in Lenny’s custody by then I could not do it. They knew of my plans by now. They had the whole thing in my computer and now it looks as if they own it. Including my laptop, external hard drives, my jump drive and hard copies too. They knew now that they could not allow Lenny to get the children until after the trial. They were going to hold the children for my submission. They knew that I was truly the only one involved in this who loved them, and because of that love, I would be the only one who would be sacrificing anything for them. There was only I who reacted out of love and not some other callous motive. They used my own words, my own work, and my own love to extinguish any plan that I wanted to carry out in court.

I continued to work on it anyway. I prepared the letters to the news stations and papers, I even wrote a few to media sources outside of the state. I figured that if my own local state were too damn scared to cover it, maybe another state would cover our story. I knew that we would more than likely never make it to the trial. They knew that by using the kids they could control me, and therefore the outcome. They could make their agendas play out like a perfect dance and I knew in my heart that it was over, and that I had already lost. I still do not believe how dirty they played me, what they went through, what they put my kids through so that they could have their way in this. We were five days away from the pretrial. AareOna had just turned three when I got the phone call from my public defender saying the state was offering me a deal. I was thinking, “Oh no, here they go again with their messed up deals. How many times do I need to tell these people that my children are not for sale, bargain, or trade? I was ranting and raving when I heard her say that they could go home with Lenny at the pretrial if I sign them over so that Lenny and Brittany could adopt them. If I refused and took it to trial, I would lose and they would be adopted out to strangers. “The hell with them,” I said. “They are not going to win like this and I slammed the phone down.

The day came when they had done it, when they had finally terrified me enough that I had to give up. No matter how much in the past I was determined that they were not going to scare me out of my kids, in the end that is exactly what they did.

I walked into the courtroom knowing full well that this was only an act, a skit, a dance for justice, a fool playing out some sick experiment of human suffering. A song to uphold this court, this county, and this state, but no regard for human rights. We knew the truth, for we alone lived in its hell, we alone have felt its pain. It was only our story that the judge would not know and no one else could hear. This time it was my child’s bruises that no one saw. I had been screaming at the top of my lungs yet no one has heard me. I had been holding up signs, yet no one has stopped to read them. Everyone still played out their sick role in this thing, the role to simply, not care! The county’s hands are dirty, so dirty that to the public they leave this courtroom closed. No one will ever know the violations that go on inside, or the lives that are ruined there. They will never see or meet the orphans that are made there or the children that have and will die there. This was the room where they handed down capital punishment to free persons who have committed no crime. It is the place where they can hold your child without bail bond or ransom. A place where a child can go beaten for months and no one moves to help her. I had to face the truth, and that was I could no longer protect them from this courts authority.

A social worker, foster parents, guardian ad litem, a county protection system, and a law enforcement agency—these are the people that this court protects. That and the funds they commission.

They have complete immunity, and immunity is like a royal flush in poker; it made them the winner whether we win or loss in this room. Every minute of every day, someone loses, and we lose our lives, our dreams, our futures, right here in this room. No matter what you are dealt, you cannot beat a royal flush. We all know that it would be impossible for a royal flush to be your every hand. We know this means that they are cheating, but to actually prove it, now that would be impossible. Even if you could prove it, it simply does not really matter because they already won! As sure as you are breathing or that my heart is beating, no one gets a fair trial in that room.

As I walked through the door, the first thing I noticed was that Lenny and Brittany were sitting on the wrong side of the courtroom, the enemy’s side, and it broke my heart that they had torn us down like that. Until now, they had always been on my same side. We had gone through this together. I knew the drill and they were putting stipulations on him taking the kids. He had to agree to whatever they said and they said that the kids would never be allowed to see me again. Yes, he could agree to anything that they asked until the adoption was final and then there would not be a damn thing they would be able to do about it. I knew that he had to play this part perfect. He had to make them believe that he would forever follow the rules, but it was still hard to see him and Brittany sitting on the wrong side of the courtroom, and even harder yet to watch him play their “I hate my mommy” card. Lenny had played it out so real that I almost forgot for a moment that he was only acting, and as soon as the adoption was final, I would be near them again, trading my parental rights in for grandparent rights. Not a fair trade by any means but a trade I think I will be able to learn to live with. Better for them to know me as Grandma Angie than to not know me at all, right?

Even though I knew, what was really going on, I could not stop the bile from rising up in my stomach, or the sting of my tears in my throat. I tried my hardest to keep my composure but it was useless. I had gone through a hundred Kleenexes since I woke up this morning. I knew what I had to do. I could not in a million years trust them to put my children in a safe and loving home. I see how dirty they were already, and I knew that they had all the heavy artillery. I was only equipped with my love, and so with it I made the decision in the wee hours of that morning. The only choice that a mother could make was to sign in for their crazy deal. I had to know that they were safe and I knew that I would stop breathing if I never saw them again. So they win, finally they played their joker and they took the game. I slowly turned after the judge rattled on about how proud she was that I made such a choice in my children’s best interest. “The only best interest for my children was to free them from this court, Your Honor,” I said. Then she asked me if I could speak up for the record. I repeated what I had just said as I slowly walked out of the courtroom. I hugged Lenny and mouthed, “I love you.” I could not even speak. I was not sure if I could ever speak again. I think I could live with that being the last this I ever spoke aloud. I realized this morning that even if I could somehow win them back, that some crazy citizen’s arrest could actually get the county to give in, I was still a recovering drug addict and what I have learned in the program and what experience has taught me is that the only guarantee in sobriety is relapse. It was the one thing that sobriety had always given me.

I prayed that this time would be different, but there was no way that I could even bet on those odds at keeping clean and keeping child protection out of our lives. I could never put them through such heartbreak again. Besides, I was too afraid that they would die in the care of the state. I mean, after what had happened to AareOna and with what I had learned about our children in foster care. I could not keep them in the state’s custody. I really only had one choice. The real slim mommy did not need to stand up. It was clear to see which one she is because she is the only one in this room who has sacrificed anything. I had a hard time trusting that they would do what they said so I made them write a contract that explained the conditions to my signature and then under my signature I wrote, “Signed under distress, and with the following conditions (see page two).” They did not like this much but they took it. My love was clearly in the sacrifice; I did not need any pudding to prove who I was.