Posted on 08/10/2005 11:30:42 AM PDT by JZelle
RICHMOND -- The Virginia Court of Appeals yesterday upheld a judge's decision to terminate the parental rights of a man who kept his eight children isolated in a tiny, dilapidated home without electricity or plumbing. A three-judge panel rejected Granville Frazier Toms' claims that there was insufficient evidence to terminate his rights and that officials should have tried to help him before taking his children. The family's primitive living conditions came to light when Hanover County sheriff's deputies responded to a domestic disturbance call on Jan. 28, 2003. All but one of the children fled into the woods, without coats or gloves to protect them from near-freezing temperatures. They emerged about eight hours later, at 3:30 a.m., and were taken to a hospital for evaluation. Deputies described the Toms residence as a trash-filled, 16-by-16-foot unfinished structure with no separate rooms. The family used an outdoor bathtub and a crude outdoor latrine, and the yard was littered with liquor bottles and beer cans. Toms showed up about 30 minutes after deputies arrived. He refused to help find the children and was arrested, and the children were put in foster care.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I wish the article had given more info...the ages of the parents and the kids. A picture of the parents would have been nice too.
"Deliverence" does come to mind here.
Ha! The ole' country music song model. Whatdaya get when you play a country music song backwards?:
Your wife back, your truck back, your dog back!
Oh, the parent (s?) obviously have serious issues, & I'd probably terminate the rights too, but even the beer bottles/whiskey bottles thing is iffy - if you came by our house after the storm blew our outdoor trashcan over, you'd have found some cans in our yard too. We picked them up of course, but the fact remains that they were "littering the yard" - for about a day, till the storm ended & we got back from work. I've seen how CPS fakes this stuff - a catbox with a small quantity of litter kicked onto the floor becomes "floors covered with animal feces."
Three quarters of the people on the planet have no electricity or running water, and they'd be thrilled to death to have even a 16 by 16 one room cabin.
If DFACS has evinced any sort of interest, seems to me a good insurance policy would be to have some family snapshots squirreled away in a safe deposit box somewhere - showing tidy house, neat yard, clean well-scrubbed children, etc.
if you came by our house after the storm blew our outdoor trashcan over, you'd have found some cans in our yard too.
(snip)
I've seen how CPS fakes this stuff - a catbox with a small quantity of litter kicked onto the floor becomes "floors covered with animal feces."
Did you actually read the article? A sample:
"Testimony at yesterday's hearing indicated that the children had received no education or health care. They scored below the first percentile on developmental tests and initially communicated with a court-appointed guardian only by grunting and body language. "
This is a bit more that a wind-blown-over garbage can and a tipped-over litter box. What he did to those kids is the definition of abuse and neglect.
Where's your sarcasm tag. A lot of the people here a humorless and take everything literally. Careful, you might get zapped! Of course with a name like Monte Python you'd love it.
The judge always makes the termination decision. That isn't made by bureaucrats. But what's being dealt with here is the separate decision to attempt reunification. And that also has to be made by the judge. It has always been the law that the DFACS/CPS need not attempt reunification if it would be a danger to the children, or futile. Typically what we see around here is parents who are hopeless drug addicts, so mentally ill they can't care even for themselves let alone a child, or convicted in a criminal court of molesting or torturing the child. Another factor is children with special needs that the parent can't meet.
In those sorts of cases, the judge can conclude that the termination proceedings ought to get underway without a period (typically six months to a year) of parenting classes, rehabilitation, drug and alcohol counseling, etc. to see if the family can be reunified.
Here, you have a combination of a guy with serious mental and alcohol issues, criminal convictions, and kids with serious mental/emotional problems as a result of past treatment. Seems like a pretty clear case for a judge to decide that six months to a year would be wasted when it ought to be spent in dealing with the kids' problems.
Thanks. That was my understanding of the process (at least in Georgia) and I may have been reading the story wrong.
Courts frequently rely on outside advice in all kinds of cases. Most likely, in this case, state law specifies a role for social services officials. Defendants can always appeal a ruling (as this defendant did), and case base the appeal on a claim that the testimony or other formal advice from an outside source is invalid for some reason (e.g. unqualified, was bribed, had a personal interest in the case, information contradicting facts, etc.). But judges can hardly be expected to do a full first-hand evaluation of the mental and physical condition of the adults and children in these cases.
I like to leave mine on my boat trailer. It hardly ever gets used and takes up too much space.
The report, the decision not to attempt reunification, and the termination were long in the past by the time this decision came down.
Hard to judge with the info in the article.
"They scored below the first percentile on developmental tests"
-- bad, but somebody's got to be the dumbest...
"...and initially communicated with a court-appointed guardian only by grunting and body language."
-- "initially" ... so they didn't like being taken from their home and at first didn't want to talk to the people who kidnapped them (as far as they understood I bet).
The first part of that sentence is the part I would have bolded - I can see frightened kids copping an attitude & refusing to answer anything - testing in the first percentile is a dead giveaway. I'm not saying there wasn't abuse, or that these kids shouldn't have been taken, but the derogatory attitude towards home amenities, the lack of which was commonplace within the last fifty years in THIS country, and are far BETTER than what most of the planet has, that ticks me off. My grandmother's siblings didn't get running water or indoor plumbing till 1970, and they managed just fine. I remember there being an electric fence for the cattle, but I don't remember any in the house.
The courts around here are very careful not to fault parents on the basis of what Burns called honest poverty. Squalid conditions due to drug addiction, mental illness, or just plain trashiness, combined with neglect or abuse of the kids, are another story.
I have seen kids dog tests before, but all 8 seems a bit unusual. If they had refused to answer anything, the tests would probably have been invalidated (depending on what tests were given). And the fact that two were not recommended for adoption but made wards of the state indicates a problem (as was discussed up the thread).
One other thing to consider is that this was an appellate decision, which will summarize and compress the findings of fact and conclusions of law of the trial court. It also tends to leave out the REALLY gory details. So a lot of facts have been left out and we are working with the shorthand that an appellate court uses in affirming termination cases. . . so we don't have the whole picture.
This sounds to me like a very extreme case, though. I can only recall one or two cases in 25 years of practice that were this bad.
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