Parents confront troubled past

Parents confront troubled past
Counseling and cooperation precede decision on Angie's future

Protecting Angie: A Child Welfare Odyssey

ALMIRA -- Angie Yarwood, a few months past her 12th birthday, didn't exactly hate staying with her Aunt Dee Dee and Uncle Lenny. Angie loved animals, and they had rabbits, a horse and even peacocks on their farm. Sometimes, when Uncle Lenny got out of the car to open the cow gates, he would let Angie drive through.

But the prospect of being separated from her mom and dad all summer made Angie desperate. She had already been away from home for two months, ever since she came to the hospital with bruises covering her face.

Angie knew the counselors involved in her case didn't believe her mother's explanation that Angie had suffered a seizure that threw her violently to the floor. They were always asking her if she could remember how she got bruised. Angie knew they thought her mom had beaten her, but Angie couldn't remember and the whole situation made her feel trapped.

"Dear family," she wrote in her careful cursive in a letter home that summer of 1994. "I miss you so much I could cry rite (sic) now. Could you bring my bike to where I am visiting with you guys, Please!"

Angie's parents, Dale and Diane Yarwood, wanted her back, badly, but that meant following Lincoln County Superior Court Judge Philip Borst's stern orders. Borst had concluded the allegations of abuse against Diane were founded. And he ordered Diane and Dale into counseling for domestic violence, anger management, parenting and drug and alcohol abuse.

Their therapists at the Lincoln County Counseling Center in Davenport quickly developed a theory about violence in the family. They believed that Dale had been an abusive father. But when Angie suffered her injuries, Dale was in jail on unrelated charges. So, the counselors theorized that Diane stepped into that abusive role while Dale was away.

"They said Dale was beating me, so I was beating the kids, and the kids were beating our animals," Diane Yarwood remembers. "They kept telling me about safe houses I could go to to get away from Dale."

Added Dale: "They would say to me, `We know you're the protector and Diane is the one beating the kids,'" he said. "It was ridiculous."

Where the Yarwoods saw a conspiracy, their two social workers from the Department of Children and Family Services, Mary Felton and Linda Eastham, saw an irresponsible couple unwilling to face reality in order to win their daughter back.

In a November 1994 progress report, Felton said Dale and Diane were in "extreme denial." She added "lack of cooperation, abrasive treatment of therapists ... and an unwillingness to participate has frequently been demonstrated by both parents."

Worse, she wrote, during supervised weekly visits with Angie at the counseling center, the Yarwoods were encouraging their daughter to blame the state for her problems too.

On Jan. 17, 1995, nine months after Angie was first sent to foster care, social workers concluded any further therapy for her parents was pointless. Their state-funded counseling services were terminated.

"You might as well close the case now," Dale is reported as saying in a final session. "I guarantee we won't be coming back."

Progress toward reunification in the Yarwood case was at a standstill, and the 18-month window for returning Angie home was shrinking fast. If Dale and Diane continued to stubbornly resist treatment, the state would have no choice but to begin planning for a future in which Angie would be put up for adoption.

Through the summer of 1994, Angie had looked forward to returning to the Almira school in September. There, she could see her younger siblings, Hether and Dale II, and send notes home through them to her parents, who would sometimes send notes back.

But Dale and Diane's decision to write Angie was against the rules imposed by social workers, who insisted their contact with Angie should be supervised. When they learned Angie had been receiving notes, Felton and Eastham wanted to put an immediate stop to it. And Angie's Aunt Dee Dee was concerned that Dale Yarwood might turn his frustration with state social workers investigation into an attack on her, said Connie Bacon, Felton and Eastham's supervisor.

The agency decided that Angie needed the protection of a foster home farther from her parent's reach.

Two weeks into the sixth grade school year, Angie was moved to the home of Cliff and Karen Stahl, two kind, experienced foster parents who lived nearly 60 miles and a school district away from Almira, which is about 75 miles west of Spokane.

State social workers reported in May 1995, soon after Angie's 13th birthday, that Angie "appeared happy" and had made "a good adjustment" to her new school. But Angie's memory and letters she wrote, but never sent, to her family from the Stahls show that it was a lonely, painful time for her - despite their kindness.

In one letter she wrote that a friend had told her, "I have love in my heart for (the Stahls) somewhere, but I don't have any for them anywhere. My heart is on you guys and Hether and Dale - our family of Love! I miss you guys so much!"

Her therapist would later conclude that Angie was simply was too attached to her own family to invest emotionally in a new one.

Angie's suffering didn't prevent the Stahls from becoming deeply attached to her. Based on what social worker Mary Felton had relayed to them about Angie's past, they were convinced Angie's parents were monstrous. Angie remembers nothing of her beating, Cliff Stahl believes, because her mother's first blow was so hard it knocked her out.

He said family pictures Angie drew while living with them showed a pyramid with her Dad and brother on top, her mom and sister next, and herself of the bottom - proof, in Stahl's view, that Angie was the rejected "ugly duckling" in the family.

"We got really attached to her," said Karen Stahl, a school bus driver. "So many of the kids we see have serious problems because they've been abused. But she didn't really seem to have any serious problems."

After the Yarwoods were terminated from counseling in January 1995, the Stahls were thrilled when they said Felton told them they could likely become Angie's guardians. Felton's supervisor, Bacon, said the state's official goal remained reunifying Angie with her family. But given the Yarwoods' recalcitrance, Felton also had a responsibility to "explore all options if it looked like the child may not be able to go home," Bacon said.

The complexities of Angie's case were not lost on Judge Borst, a former prosecutor who has handled hundreds of dependencies in his nine years on the bench - cases, he says, that are "full of damaged people."

Borst, 57 ((age)), can recall in sad detail the four occasions on which he has had to terminate parents' rights to a child. "If I'm going to err, I'm going to err on the side of the child's safety," he said in a recent interview at his home on a ridge overlooking the wheat farming town of Wilbur, just down U.S. Route 2 from Almira. But he adds that he has become convinced over the years that "having the child in the family is the best thing, if at all possible."

Bacon, who has been before Borst on many occasions, said he has a small town judge's way of taking ownership of the cases he handles. "He doesn't like to let them go until he feels he has done everything he can do" to keep a family together, Bacon said.

In May 1995 - a year after Angie had been put into foster care and four months after the Yarwoods had quit counseling - they came before Borst for yet another review hearing. Borst knew he couldn't let Angie return home yet. But he said he wasn't going let her parents continue to refuse to cooperate, no matter how difficult it was to face their past.

"Sometimes it's pretty tough to admit where you have come from and what your life has been. ... Especially when you've lived as they lived," he said.

Borst gave the Yarwoods two options: Either go back to counseling or lose Angie for good.

"You're telling me this child is your priority - now do something to show it," he remembers telling them.

Although still angrily fixated on what she saw as an unfair DSHS investigation, Diane returned to the Lincoln County Counseling Center in June. Dale soon followed.

This time, Majil Fausel, the center's clinical director, who specializes in the toughest cases, took over the Yarwoods' counseling.

Detailed progress reports Fausel kept during those months show that for the first time since child protective authorities entered their lives, the Yarwoods found someone in the system they trusted.

During months of counseling, Fausel, a determined and husky-voiced woman in her 50s, found ample evidence of alcohol abuse, neglect, and poor parenting skills in the Yarwood family. Particularly troubling to Fausel were the dynamics that had caused the state of Minnesota, nearly six years earlier, to remove Diane's son from another relationship. The boy had been taken largely because of physical abuse by Dale.

But Fausel ultimately concluded, except for the isolated incident that led to Angie's removal, that there was no indication the Yarwoods had been physically abusive with the three children they had together.

During counseling, Fausel convinced Diane, and later Dale, to set aside the issue of whether they had beaten Angie and begin talking earnestly about their shortcomings as parents. Dale and Diane say that Fausel treated them with respect. She didn't, as Mary Felton and earlier counselors had, act as if they were a worthless set of parents, they say.

With Fausel, Dale spoke for the first time of the steady beatings he got from his stepfather as a child, and of being offered drinks in the bar his mom hung out in when he was as young as 5.

He said that when he and Diane married, when they were both 22, he had promised her he would never repeat the mistakes of his stepfather. But he admitted being overwhelmed by the 3-year-old son Diane had when she was still in high school. He also admitted that his harsh spankings of the child were undeniably child abuse.

Now sober for a year and a half, Dale also recognized that alcohol abuse had a lot to do with his family's problems; drinking made him alternately depressed and belligerent. He admitted to once slapping Diane.

Diane, too, faced her own childhood in those counseling sessions. Born the youngest of 13 kids in a poor family in rural Idaho, Diane had been parented more by her older sisters than her mother and alcoholic father. She realized that many of the behaviors considered acceptable in her family, such as leaving young kids in the care of older siblings - which would later lead to accusations of neglect by child protection workers in Minnesota and Idaho - weren't OK.

Dale and Diane were finally making progress. But Angie had made only a few friends in her new school. She had also started smoking, and according to a report by her counselor, her grades had dropped from steady A's and B's to C's and D's.

"I act like I'm happy but I'm very angry," Angie told her counselor as she approached her 14th birthday.

As Dale and Diane's realizations and admissions of past mistakes accumulated, Fausel came to believe Angie would be safe at home. And she presented that conclusion in a February 1996 report to Judge Borst.

Encouraged by the Yarwoods' progress with Fausel, in April 1996, Borst decided to allow Angie to have brief visits with family at home under the supervision of a state social worker. If the Yarwoods stuck with counseling and if the visits went well, Borst would consider allowing Angie to return home for good that summer, after she finished seventh grade.

Based on the Yarwoods' continued lack of cooperation with state social workers during those and other visits, caseworkers Felton and Eastham, however, did not think the Yarwoods had significantly improved. Roy Harrington, regional supervisor for the Department of Children and Family Services in northeastern Washington, said they believed that Fausel had developed a "blind spot" for the family by "overindentifying" with them.

Fausel dismisses that assessment as "nonsense." In fact, Fausel said she believes that agency workers had prematurely suggested to the Stahls that they could become Angie's guardians.

"It was amazing that Diane came back to the therapy," Fausel said. "It was the last thing CPS ever expected." Fausel said she believes Felton and her co-workers had concluded that Angie would be better off with the Stahls, a supportive, middle-class couple. But she said the question was not whether the Stahls would make better parents for Angie. It was whether Angie's own parents had progressed enough to ensure Angie would be safe at home.

"One can look at this situation and say, `Gee, isn't it a shame that Angie can't be raised by nice people like the Stahls, instead of these parents who on the surface look like low lifes?'" Fausel said. "Angie is a lovely young woman, and it would be nice if her father was more stable. But parents aren't replaceable parts."

The Lincoln County Counseling Center and the Department of Children and Family Services were at loggerheads. And after two years of court hearings, everyone involved in the case wanted a resolution.

After consulting an outside professional and assessing the Yarwoods' progress, Angie's desire to go home, and the state's concerns, Borst made a final decision in May 1996.

If the Yarwoods continued family counseling, weekly meetings with their church pastor, swimming lessons for the kids, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for Dale, and allowed Angie, who had started working at a 4-H Club, to continue, then, Borst said he would allow them to regain custody.

The Yarwoods agreed. And two years and one month after she was first rushed to Coulee Community Hospital, Angie came home.

Now 16, Angie says she slept in her sister's room for weeks that summer. She avoided her own room, afraid she says, "that they would come take me again."

In the two years that have passed since her return, the Yarwoods' lives have not been free from turmoil. Two years of counseling did not transform them into perfect parents.

Last year, Dale started occasionally drinking and was arrested in December for driving under the influence. He lost his license, and his inability to drive cost him his job as a farmhand. Today, he's still looking for permanent work.

Having exhausted their limit, Dale and Diane are no longer eligible for welfare, and the family's electricity was recently turned off. They have been surviving on food stamps, odd jobs and on the good will of Almira neighbors - one of whom has lent them an extension cord to power their refrigerator and a few lights.

Still, Dale and Diane say they learned "a few things" about being better parents during the time Angie was gone. And they have continued to spend a lot of time with their children, taking them swimming and fishing and organizing softball games. On any school night, friends say the Yarwood kids can be found at the dining room table doing their homework.

Angie, who will be a sophomore in high school in September, is again bringing home report cards with mostly A's and B's.

She says she's looking forward to getting her driver's license and hopes to go to college, maybe become a veterinarian. Even without electricity, Angie says being at home is a whole lot better than being with parents who aren't her own.

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