By Katy Grimes

SACRAMENTO — It’s audit time for Child Protective Services, part of the California Department of Social Services. A protest rally by 100 people at the Capitol Wednesday morning charged the agency with both abusing its powers and neglecting real cases of child abuse. I took the nearby picture at the rally. Later that day the Joint Legislative Audit Committee of the California Legislature held hearings  on CPS.

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, and Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, made the bipartisan, formal audit request to the committee.  The CPS operates largely in secrecy under the protection of the state courts.

The children

Protesters highlighted the fate of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez from Lancaster. As the Daily News reported May 28:

“A Palmdale couple were charged on Tuesday with capital murder in the beating of the woman’s 8-year-old son, who died last week.

“Pearl Sinthia Fernandez, 29, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, 32, were ordered to be held without bail while they await arraignment June 11 in Lancaster Superior Court.

“The murder charge includes the special circumstance allegation of murder during the commission of torture. The District Attorney’s Office will decide later whether to seek the death penalty against the pair.”

Aguirre allegedly cracked Gabriel’s skull, broke three of his ribs, knocked out two teeth, bruised and burned the boy’s skin and shot BB pellets into him.

Pearl Fernandez, Gabriel’s mother, reportedly told police she saw the beating but did nothing to stop it. Gabriel Fernandez died two days later in the hospital.

At the committee hearing, which I attended, Gatto called the boy’s death “horrifying” and the CPS’s actions “unacceptable.” But this was not a fluke. There had been six previous complaints with CPS about the abuse of the boy, and six separate investigations into the abuse of Gabriel in his mother’s home. Yet CPS social workers did not intervene. The sixth investigation was still open on the day of Gabriel’s death in May.

Overreach

Another case taken up at the hearing is a gross example not of neglect of real abuse, but of CPS overreach. Last week I wrote a story on our site, “Sacramento family fights seizure of child by CPS,” about Alex and Anna Nikolayev and their baby, Sammy, 5 months old.

At the hearing, Anna Nikolayev testified she tried to leave Sacramento’s Sutter Memorial Hospital and take Sammy to another hospital for a second opinion, when she was threatened with a call to the CPS. Sammy was born with a heart murmur.

After a nurse at Sutter Memorial tried to give Sammy medicine that a doctor later explained should not have been administered, Anna became nervous about the quality of Sammy’s care. She said she wanted a second opinion from another doctor.

Nikolayev said she felt the doctors and nurses were “pressing us to do surgery.” She was told by the hospital workers, “You are free to leave this hospital, but your baby is not.” The hospital refused to discharge Sammy, then notified the CPS.

Anna told the committee that she took Sammy from Sutter Memorial and went directly to Kaiser Hospital. She met with a doctor there who said Sammy was healthy, did not need immediate open heart surgery, and was free to go home.

The next day, CPS and the police showed up at the family’s home, claimed they had a warrant and the authority to take Sammy. Anna asked to see the warrant, but the authorities wouldn’t show it to her.  Anna said they told her, “We’re the police. We don’t need a warrant.”

As Alex Nikolayev arrived at home, several police officers pulled him out of his car and “beat him up,” according to Anna. After taking Alex’s keys, the police charged into the Nikolayev home, then took baby Sammy from his mother.

“Give me your son,” Anna said the police ordered her at gunpoint. The police and CPS told her not to resist or fight back.

“Is that not kidnapping?” Anna Nikolayev asked the legislative committee. Her baby was returned to her after three days.

One more audit 

This would not be the first audit of CPS. State Auditor Elaine Howle told the committee that her agency recently audited four CPS offices around the state, in Sacramento, Alameda, Los Angeles and Orange counties.

However, Howle said her agency is equipped to handle audits of three more county offices of CPS. Once underway, the audits are expected to take five to six months. Once completed, the information compiled from the new audits, and the four audits last year, will be compiled into an overall report.

Howle said the audits will examine and scrutinize the protocols CPS uses in deciding the severity of cases, and when a child should be removed from a home.

Follow the money

At the rally and during the hearing, many who testified said CPS is an agency driven by funding, financially incentivizing the wrong actions. The more abuse that’s alleged, the higher the funding for the CPS bureaucracy.

Howle explained her audits would look at the policies and practices in each of the three local offices, and how they reach their decisions. “We also will look at the funding, relative to when law enforcement is involved,” she said.

Lisa Snell, the director of Education and Child Welfare for the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, testified the state needs to change the funding incentives for the CPS. “There’s a lot of evidence that when you change the funding incentives, the number of children removed from homes decreases,” Snell said.

“The motive is funding,” Deanna Fogarty (pictured nearby) testified of her own experience. Fogarty’s two daughters were taken from her by Orange County CPS and were gone for six years. However, Fogarty sued the county and got her kids back. The jury found that two social workers lied to take Fogarty’s daughters away. She was awarded $10.6 million in compensation. The case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2011 declined to hear the case, thus upholding the original jury decision.

“This audit is long overdue as was proven by the powerful testimonies shared at the morning rally and in the hearing,” Donnelly told me after the hearing. “California owes a debt of gratitude to the hundreds of citizens who called their representative, spoke out and raised awareness about this audit hearing today.”

Two women told me stories of having CPS show up at their homes after they had taken a child to the hospital for falling and getting hurt. During the CPS visits, the mothers said, things went very wrong, and the mothers were accused of harming their children. Then the police showed up and took their kids away.

One African-American women testified at the hearing to a similar situation. She had two strokes that debilitated her, and while in skilled nursing her white friend and neighbor took care of her children. CPS got involved, and the social worker asked her how and why she could leave her children with the white woman. Her children also were taken away from her while she was recuperating from the strokes.

Donnelly told me, “Stories like that of the Nikolayev family, who had their fragile baby ripped from their arms for no reason, and stories like that of Gabriel Fernandez, who was tortured and beaten to death, show the unbelievable dysfunction and inconsistency within CPS. It is time for a massive change and I am very excited to see this soon-to-be eye opening audit move forward.

“This is a huge win for the many families who have been victimized by Child Protective Services throughout the years and it is a ray of hope showing that we can achieve system wide reform and accountability soon.”

By Katy Grimes

SACRAMENTO — A modest rally at the Capitol this morning supporting a state audit of Child Protective Services competed with a humongous rally held by the SEIU.

On the South steps of the Capitol, the CPS audit rally was made up of parents and families who are victims of overly aggressive Child Protective Services divisions.

On the West steps of the Capitol, the SEIU rally was made up of thousands of purple t-shirt-wearing SEIU members demanding raises. Their t-shirts were made up for today’s rally and said “2013 CONTRACT TOUR.” The back of the t-shirt said “YOUR CONTRACT STARTS WITH YOU,” and listed the cities for the SEIU “Townhall Circuit” for 2013 contract negotiations.

Yet what should have overshadowed the small gathering of emotional parents, did not. Although, the contrast was stark.

It was mothers and fathers who said their children had been stolen from them by Child Protective Services, versus well-compensated state employees balking at Gov. Jerry Brown telling SEIU and other labor unions currently embroiled in bargaining talks, that new labor contracts need to be “cost-neutral.”

SEIU members walking al around the Capitol said “we do not lead ‘cost-neutral’ lives, and we will not end this contract without money.” Apparently they were regurgitating what SEIU Local 1000 president Yvonne Walker just said this morning in a press release.

Walker said that Brown rejected a proposed pay increase across the board for Local 1000 members and nine other union proposals.

“It is clearer than ever that the most important thing members can do to win a better contract is to project power at our June 5 rally at the Capitol,” the local SEIU website says about today’s rally for the 2013 contract.

“Most of our bargaining team spent the afternoon visiting worksites in the Sacramento area to encourage members to attend our June 5 ‘I’m All In’ rally on the west steps of the state Capitol,” the SEIU website said.” Our bargaining team is making it a priority to go out to talk to members so they know how important it is to attend. If you haven’t already signed up, we need you to make it a priority to be at the June 5 ‘I’m All In’ rally.”

From big labor to big families

At the CPS rally, mothers cried as they told the growing crowd about having their babies snatched from their arms by CPS workers for no apparent reason.

I recently wrote a story about Anna and Alex Nikolayev who ran up against CPS — Sacramento family fights seizure of child by CPS.

Only a few weeks ago in Sacramento, the Nikolayev’s (pictured at right) took baby Samuel Nikolayev to Sutter Memorial Hospital with a high fever, and were told they couldn’t leave until they agreed to allow the hospital do open heart surgery on Samuel. The doctors and nurses became hostile and threatened to call CPS when the Nikolayev’s requested a second opinion. Samuel was born with a heart murmur, and may need surgery, but the fever had nothing to do with his condition, according to Anna.

Instead, after taking him to a second hospital and receiving a clean bill of health from another doctor, CPS and the police showed up at the Nikolayev’s home the following day and forcibly took Samuel from Anna Nikolayev, after assaulting her husband Alex.

Other horrific stories like the Nikolayev’s were told, before the rally moved into a hearing inside the Capitol.

And while the hearing was going on, the SEIU rally boomed through Capitol windows as speakers ginned up the crowd.

“Teachers understand not being respected,” Dean Vogel, President of the California Teachers Association, told the cheering crowd.

“We demand these freedoms, dignity and respect!” Yvonne Walker, president of the SEIU Local 1000, yelled to the crowd. “The fight is on!”

Around the corner on the South Steps of the Capitol, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly said the purpose of the CPS audit request was to ask the agency, “What are you doing with the power we have given you?”