A child welfare odyssey

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Wednesday, June 17, 1998

A child welfare odyssey
12-year-old Angie suffered bruises and the state stepped in -- after that, nothing was simple

By HEATH FOSTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STATE CORRESPONDENT

Protecting Angie: A Child Welfare Odyssey
ALMIRA -- As the car sped past the budding wheat fields of Lincoln County and toward the home of a stranger, tears ran down Angie Yarwood's bruised face.

The 12-year-old was with two women she didn't trust, state social workers convinced the angry marks across her nose and on her forehead were evidence of a brutal beating by her mother.

Angie, a hazel-eyed tomboy who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, was sure she hadn't been beaten. But all she remembered was getting a headache so searing that she pushed away her math homework and put her head down on the dining room table. She woke up on her way to the emergency room, her anxious mother, Diane, at her side, explaining she had been found on the floor, semiconscious in the aftermath of a convulsive seizure.

Two days later, the social workers in the car were telling Angie she would have to stay at a foster home, for a few weeks at least, until they made sure her home was safe in the farm town of Almira, 75 miles west of Spokane.

Angie cried herself to sleep that night, and for many of the nights that followed. This whole thing is so "STUPID," Angie wrote her parents in one letter. "Please LOOK at the moon," she said in the post script, "because I look at it."

It would be more than two years before Angie would be home in Almira again.

* * * No one but Diane Yarwood, and perhaps Angie, knows for certain what happened that May afternoon in the family's dilapidated two-story clapboard house. Absolute proof is hard to come by in many of 35,000 high-risk cases of physical and sexual abuse and neglect that the state's Child Protective Services investigates each year. Still, nearly 14 percent of those investigations lead to children being taken from their homes by the state.

The odyssey that began for the Yarwoods in the late spring of 1994 is one that nearly 5,000 children and their families experience in Washington each year. Their story illustrates the often painful complexities involved in resolving cases of neglect and abuse within the bureaucracy of the state's child welfare system.

For parents, dealing with CPS can be a demoralizing, frustrating process in which they are separated from their children while social workers are free to probe intimate, guarded corners of their lives - how well they keep house, how rawly they express anger, how normal their sex lives are.

For those who must respond when allegations of abuse and neglect are made - the army of social workers, child advocates, police officers, judges, attorneys and counselors deployed at state expense in these cases - the view is far different.

In families where poverty, drug or alcohol addiction or simple denial has kept parents from squarely facing abuse and dysfunction, social workers say the state's intervention into families' lives is the only way to achieve often desperately needed changes.

This is the world that Angie entered, a world colored by shades of gray, where absolutes are elusive and truth is sometimes impossible to find. It is a world in which countless children's lives have been saved, but also one in which lives can be drastically altered, and, at times, destroyed.

It is a world in which abuse must be proven not beyond a reasonable doubt, but by a preponderance of the evidence, a significantly lower legal standard. And in this world, parents often fear that honest appraisals about their flawed home lives will only cinch a case for taking their children away.

From the beginning, the Yarwoods believed that state was out to destroy their lives. Both Diane and Dale, Angie's father, came from large, poor rural families. They were accustomed to run-ins with authorities and more than ready to distrust the social workers investigating Angie's alleged abuse.

"They assumed we were guilty," Dale Yarwood says of their first interactions with CPS.

"They treated us like dirt," Diane adds.

But ultimately, their success in getting Angie back would hinge on finding an ally within the system.

Sixteen months and a stack of court orders would pass before the Yarwoods would find that ally in a therapist they came to trust. And even then, the family's fate would be left in the hands of the small-town judge assigned their case, a man unwilling to give up until he was satisfied Angie's parents had made alcohol abuse and angry outbursts at their children a thing of the past.

* * * The emergency medical technician who brought Angie to the hospital on May 2, 1994, suspected immediately that a seizure had not been the source of her injuries. The child's bruises seemed too symmetrical to have been caused by the violent convulsions accompanying a seizure. And the temper tantrum Angie's mother, Diane, threw when she was told Angie had to be held in the hospital a second night cemented a brewing theory among Child Protective Services workers that violence was part of this family's culture.

Angie's case fit just about every criteria social workers use to decide whether to file a dependency - a court process through which an abused child is made a temporary dependent of the state. Dependencies are a powerful tool the state uses to force families to make fundamental changes in their lifestyles and parenting practices to get back their children.

Records showed that Diane and Dale Yarwood had an 8-year history of run-ins with child-protection workers in three states: Washington, Idaho and Minnesota.

Five years earlier, Diane Yarwood's oldest child, a son from a previous relationship, was left in foster care in Minnesota after the boy reported that Dale, his stepfather, had been beating him. And a report by the Washington Department of Social and Health Services noted problems in Idaho, where the Yarwoods previously lived. There all four Yarwood children had been temporarily placed in foster care when their parents were accused of abusing them.

In Angie's case, it was clear that her father had not been involved in this incident. Dale, who was then 35, was in jail at the time, serving 120 days for hanging a dog he said had attacked his youngest daughter, Hether. And this was not Dale's first run-in with the local authorities. In the four years since the family had moved to Almira, Dale had also been arrested for second-degree burglary and trespassing.

Since coming to Almira, Washington's CPS had also received two referrals about the Yarwoods: One caller said Dale was sexually abusing one of his daughters; another said the children were being neglected because the Yarwoods' electricity had been shut off when they failed to pay their bills. And watchful neighbors in the town of 322 reported that, until Dale's latest arrest, Dale and Diane had been regulars at the local bar. Dale seemed to work sporadically as a jack-of-all-trades, and though Diane considered her career to be that of stay-at-home mom, the home reportedly was always a mess.

"These parents have demonstrated a pattern of moving to isolated communities after their contact with social work authorities," an early state status report noted.

That assessment came from Mary Felton, the social worker CPS assigned to Angie's case as soon as the report of suspicious injuries came in from the hospital emergency room. The state is supposed to respond to high-risk referrals such as Angie's within 24 hours.

A veteran social worker well known in Lincoln County for her aggressive approach in taking on families suspected of abusing children, Felton was the first investigator to see Angie's abrasions and bruises.

She responded by having Angie placed immediately in emergency foster care. Then she had Spokane doctor Deborah Harper, a medical expert in child abuse, evaluate the injuries.

Harper saw Angie 17 days after the incident. By then, the bruises had disappeared, so she based her evaluation on photos of Angie and interviews with social workers and Diane Yarwood.

If Angie's mother was telling the truth and convulsions had thrown Angie's body from the dining room table to the floor, bruises should also have covered her arms and legs, Harper knew. But there were none. And more significantly, the photos showed Angie had bruises on both sides of her face. If she had fallen to the floor during a seizure, they would have been concentrated on just one side of her face, Harper surmised. She didn't have much trouble ruling out a seizure.

"The bruises in this picture are definitely non-accidental," Harper wrote in her report.

Connie Bacon, Felton's supervisor in the Department of Children and Family Services at the time, reviewed the photos as well.

"Usually in these cases we see isolated bruises, or perhaps a belt mark," she said. "The extent of the bruising and the number of bruises on this child was pretty extreme."

* * * In the four years that have passed since Angie was first taken to Coulee Community Hospital, records kept by state social workers, the courts, the Yarwoods' state-assigned therapists, as well as Dale and Diane, show that the story each Yarwood tells of how Angie sustained her injuries has remained consistent.

Angie's younger sister, Hether, a straight-A student protective of her soft-spoken sibling, says she came downstairs and found Angie face down, banging her head on the floor. She said she then ran outside to find her mother, who was tending to their rabbits. Diane, a petite, shy woman with blond hair, then 35, has also insisted she found Angie on the floor, extraordinarily pale, semiconscious, and vomiting.

Angie, Hether and Diane all adhere to the theory that that the symmetrical rings across the bridge of Angie's nose were caused by ridges on a sewing machine leg close to the base of the dining room table where Angie was found. She had bruises on both sides of her face, they say, because she hit the dining room table with one side, and the sewing machine and floor with the other.

Diane says she immediately assumed Angie had a seizure because Angie had suffered another one when she was younger, and seizure disorders are common in the family; medical records show Angie's younger brother, Dale II, also has had seizures.

There are other facts that support Diane's version of events. Medical records from a Minnesota hospital show Angie had a seizure in 1988, and Angie's fifth-grade teacher remembers her being sick in school on the day the May 1994 incident occurred.

Lincoln County police say they have never been called to the Yarwoods' home on a domestic violence call, and through all the family's run-ins with child protective authorities, Diane had never been found to be a physical abuser. Lincoln County sheriff's Deputy Stan Ryder said criminal charges against Diane weren't pursued in this case because the emergency room doctor said he couldn't confirm definitively that child abuse had been the cause of Angie's injuries.

In the weeks that followed Angie's removal, Diane, desperate to be cleared of the accusations, collected 20 signatures on a petition circulated around town. "We the people of Almira wish to state our concern that Diane Yarwood is being wrongfully accused of beating her daughter to which we beleive (sic) she did not," it read. "Diane is a loving, careing (sic) Mother. Please return Angie home."

* * * Did Angie suffer the violent seizure Diane and Hether Yarwood described, or was she beaten by her mother?

In child abuse cases in this state, those calls are made by Superior Court judges. Within 75 days of a child's removal, state law says an evidentiary "fact-finding" hearing must be held to determine if allegations are founded.

If the judge concludes they are, the dependency petition filed by assistant state attorneys general is granted. And children such as Angie then become temporary wards of the state.

A little more than a month after Angie was removed from her home, the decision in her case was up to Philip Borst, a trim, graying Superior Court judge with a generous view of human nature.

Diane Yarwood's court-appointed attorney argued her side of the case before Borst at the Lincoln County Courthouse in Davenport. And Borst weighed Diane's explanation of Angie's injuries against social workers' opinion that physical and perhaps sexual abuse was common in the family. He reviewed the Yarwoods' past run-ins with child protection workers in Minnesota and Idaho, and Dr. Harper's medical opinion.

To weigh the evidence, Borst used a standard of proof less stringent than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard applied in criminal courts. Borst had to determine whether by a "preponderance of the evidence" the allegations were true - that more likely than not Angie had been beaten.

State lawmakers have put the lower measure in place because so many abuse cases pit the word of a child against that of an adult. Cases in which children are primary witnesses are more difficult to prove, and lawmakers say the lower standard exists so children can be protected.

In Angie's case, Borst said he especially remembers the "adamant" testimony of Dr. Harper, who said Angie's injuries couldn't have been caused by a seizure. Borst said he didn't doubt that Angie had been abused, and that for the time being, he was convinced she was better off remaining in foster care.

All three of the Yarwoods' children were made temporary dependents of the state, but Borst allowed Hether and Dale II - in a decision the Yarwoods would point to later when arguing their home was safe - to stay with their parents, as long as there were signs of improvement in the household.

Borst ordered Dale and Diane Yarwood to have psychological and drug and alcohol evaluations, take parenting classes, and most importantly, participate in intensive counseling for domestic violence - all mandatory if the Yarwoods wanted to regain custody of Angie.

Individual counseling was to be provided for the three Yarwood children, as well.

Consistent with federal law at the time, the goal for getting Angie reunited with her family was set at 18 months. Progress would be measured at official reviews every six months, with frequent hearings in between to assess the family's development. But from now on, every decision in the Yarwood case would stem from Borst's factual finding that Diane was a physical abuser.

And this finding, which Diane continues to adamantly deny, became a stumbling block so great that the Yarwoods would risk losing Angie for good.

P-I reporter Heath Foster can be reached at 206-448-8337 or heathfoster@seattle-pi.com

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