Mom sees social services win as help for others

Published: May 21, 2007 3:00 a.m.
Mom sees social services win as help for others
By PEGGY LOWE
The Orange County RegisterStory Highlights
Seal Beach mother wins case against county, hopes to help families in system.
The threat came first: "If you don't submit to me, you'll never see your kids again."

Then the Orange County social worker produced a document, telling her she must sign it.


VICTORIOUS MOM: Deanna Fogarty recently won a $4.9 million judgement against the County of Orange after social workers wrongfully took her children away from her.

Suddenly, Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick was faced with the social services version of a Solomonic choice: Sign a paper that says you're a bad parent, or lose your children. Fogarty-Hardwick refused to sign it that day in 2000 and the very worst happened: Her two daughters, then ages 6 and 9, were placed in the Orangewood Children's home and then in foster care.

"That's when I thought, 'OK, this is a nightmare,'" Fogarty-Hardwick said. "This is America."

But last week, after a painful seven-year battle with the Orange County Social Services Department, the Seal Beach mother won a second major victory, coming after a record-setting $4.9 million jury verdict against the county.

Superior Court Judge Ronald Bauer handed down a permanent injunction against the agency, ruling that it must have "articulable evidence" to suspect that a child has been abused or neglected by a parent before making any allegations in court.

And in what many parental advocates say is even more significant, Bauer also ordered the social services department to stop requiring a parent to sign what's called an "agency-parent temporary agreement" unless the agency has some reasonable evidence to suggest the parents are hurting their children.

Those rulings won't help Fogarty-Hardwick, who had been wrongfully accused of telling her daughters that their father was trying to take them away from her. She already feels vindicated by the jury's ruling that her parental rights had been violated by the county. But she hopes it will do something to protect other parents she heard from during her trial.

"This is an abuse-of-power case, when someone has incredible power and they exercise it over you," Fogarty-Hardwick said. "If they become part of the problem, how can they help? And if no one is there to hold them accountable, how will anyone know there's a problem?"

The outcome of Fogarty-Hardwick's case shocked lawyers who specialize in these lawsuits, and it set the parental-rights community buzzing. Parents rarely bring cases against social services departments, because of protracted legal battles and governmental immunity laws. The cases also are hard to prove because most of the agencies' decisions are made in secret as a result of confidentiality laws.

Jan Saalfield, a Marin County lawyer who has specialized in child dependency appeals for 16 years, said she has never seen a ruling like the one Bauer made last week.

"This gives the appearance that the court is quite concerned that this is not just a singular event and says it won't be repeated in the future," Saalfield said. "The court is showing substantial concern that this could happen again."

Michael Riley, chief deputy director of the Social Services Agency, disagreed, saying the judge's ruling simply orders the department do to what it has always done, "which is follow the law."

"The whole idea of the premise made by the plaintiff that we remove children in a cavalier fashion is completely unfounded," Riley said.

Citing confidentiality laws, Riley said he couldn't comment on specifics of the case. But he denied that his social workers did anything wrong. The agency always has evidence before making an allegation, and Orange County has one of the lowest removal rates in the state, he said. Of the 34,293 child abuse reports the department received in 2006, only 1,900 children were removed from their homes, he said.

The county is appealing the jury's decision, including the additional $6,000 in punitive damages against the two social workers on Fogarty-Hardwick's case.

During the 16-day trial earlier this year, the county's lawyers told the jury that Fogarty-Hardwick was a former Miss California and called her the "Nordstrom mom" in an attempt to turn the jury against her. That didn't work, as jury members later told Fogarty-Hardwick's lawyers. The county also allowed the social worker that threatened her to testify, and the jury came to believe, as Fogarty-Hardwick's lawsuit claimed, that she and a supervisor had "intentionally misinformed" a judge who then handed down the order to take the children.

After her daughters were put in foster care in 2000, Fogarty-Hardwick decided to give her ex-husband full custody, hoping to protect her daughters. She was then allowed two monitored visits per month for two years, but finally won 50-50 custody in 2006.

Today, Fogarty-Hardwick isn't bitter, nor is she anti-social services. She says with a laugh that she knew the social worker in question was so bad because her first one had been so good.

But she admits that this "unfortunate adventure" has been devastating to her, her parents and their extended family. Her only hope now is that the appeal also goes her way - a process that will take several years - and that other parents won't have to experience what she endured.

"You just try to find good out of something horrible," she said. "We have a wonderful decision that could help a lot of people and must be preserved."


Contact the writer: 714-285-2862 or plowe@ocregister.com


http://www.ocregister.com/news/social-173157-fogarty-hardwick.html