Posted on 07/17/2006 8:00:34 PM PDT by dread78645
LOS ANGELES Jul 17, 2006 (AP)— A teenage girl reunited with her father last year after a decade in foster care is suing Los Angeles County for taking so long to bring them together.
County supervisors had said in September that the reunion of Melinda Smith, now 17, and father Thomas Marion Smith was the result of a "groundbreaking effort," and congratulated county agencies for locating the father.
But the lawsuit alleges that the Department of Children and Family Services failed to use "due diligence" to locate Thomas Smith. It claims the agency never notified Smith, who had continued making child support payments, that his daughter was in foster care and never gave him a chance to claim her.
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(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
I hope she wins.
I hope the girl wins. It is too bad the real incompetents responsible won't end up paying the tab.
So where is the money that Dad has been paying the state the last 13 years?
Go ahead blame it on the father, for what ever reasons... Herd it before, till ya have lived it, it don't mean a thing... : ) <<< me
I hope she wins.
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I don't. I hope the incompetent boob who fumbled the ball, and their immediate supervisor, gets fired and publicly reprimanded. I am in favor of accountability, not punishing taxpayers.
Seems to me that the kid was used as a revenue generator for the state of Kalifornia.
It does seem that as she approached 18 and was a placement issue they got busy looking for Dad.
Clinton-Reno would've reunited her with her dad if he had moved to Castro's Cuba.
Hey, how about her family? They'll take her.
I don't know -- the dad had NO connection with her for 13 years. Whose problem is that? The county's? It's HIS KID, for crimony sake. He's so far out of her life that he doesn't even know she's in foster care, and suddenly it's the County's fault? I think that's bogus.
Let's see, mom disappears with kid without leaving a forwarding address.
Even if the dad had asked Child Support Services where she was, they wouldn't have told him short of a court order.
He's paying his support and assumes the child wants no contact or she would have contacted him. How is he supposed to know she has been in foster care since before she could read and has no idea who or where he is.
Why was HE not contacted within days of his child being placed into state custody. The state knew his name and whereabouts. In fact they were the only player with all the information and access to it.
Frankly, he should be suing them for a refund of support monies obtained fraudulently by retaining custody of his child without his knowledge or consent.
Some caseworker and supervisor should be fired for cause over this.
Smith's whereabouts were listed as unknown in court documents on the case, although records show that Melinda's caseworker knew Smith was paying child support and his address was on file with the agency that collected the payments.
The state knew exactly where the father was, but chose to keep the child in order to bleed money from him.
There's simply no other reasonable explination.
Yup, I bet they did know exactly where he was. And all that child support. I'd be hopping mad too. Too bad he wasn't around to protect her, all the same. It's quite fragmented before the county ever got involved.
Why are you assuming the misandrists are incompetent? They probably knew exactly what they were doing.
If she spent a decade in foster care, the child support received from the father probably didn't cover payments made to the foster parents.
There's some incompetence involved to be sure, maybe even some malice on the part of those responsible but I doubt that the state profited from it.
The foster care system was getting paid twice. The father pays and I bet the payment went to the foster care system. I am sure the state and federal government sent money to the foster care system to pay for this child.
Its always about the money. If we get all the kids out of foster care, people would lose jobs.
The father paid the state, the state paid foster parents.
Did his support payments equal the states payments to the foster parents? The article doesn't state how much he paid.
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