(Texas Scorecard) – A judge has ruled in favor of parents who said that Child Protective Services and hospital staff wrongly accused them of child abuse and removed their daughter from their custody.
Evelyn Boatright’s parents, Jackie and Juan, took the child to Cook Children’s hospital in Fort Worth after she began vomiting. The baby was removed from her parents’ care after hospital staff viewed an x-ray of a partially healed fractured rib and an MRI revealing a small brain bleed and reported child abuse to CPS without proper investigation.
The parents said their daughter’s injuries were due to a traumatic birth.
Family Freedom Project Vice President Jeremy Newman said Judge Randy Catterton immediately announced he would send the baby home with her parents.
The Family Freedom Project assisted Evelyn’s parents throughout legal proceedings.
The investigator who conducted the removal of the Boatrights’ daughter admitted that she did not speak to any doctors before making the decision. She also testified that she got a phone call from a police detective letting her know that the baby did not have contact with her maternal grandmother within the 48 hours that CPS had suggested child abuse took place.
After being asked by an attorney whether she made any attempts to avoid removal and place the child with her grandmother, she said no.
“Texas law actually requires caseworkers to conduct what’s called reasonable efforts to avoid removal,” Newman told Texas Scorecard. “In technical terms, her testimony itself necessitated the return of the child because they literally admitted on the stand they didn’t conduct the minimum necessary steps that you have to conduct to do a removal.”
Additionally, three medical experts who testified on behalf of the family said that Cook Children’s had assumed child abuse and dismissed all other explanations for the baby’s injuries.
A neuropathologist and the radiologist testified that an explanation for the baby’s brain injuries could have been a viral infection. Cook Children’s never investigated alternative reasons for the baby’s injuries, explained Newman. The radiologist also testified that Baby Evelyn’s rib injury is extremely unlikely to have been caused by abuse, as it is an injury existing in less than half of 1% of child abuse cases.
“In the words of the experts in their field who testified for the parents, the doctors from Cook were dogmatic from the beginning about the idea that child abuse must be the explanation. The cost of that was that a baby was removed from her family for nine months,” Newman said. “The parents have now missed almost the first year of their baby’s life.”
The Boatright family was defended by attorneys Brad Scalise, Charlotte Staples, Kim Dewey, and Chris Branson. Judy Powell was a medical consultant.
Baby Evelyn was reunited with her parents on the morning of November 14.
Cook Children’s did not respond to a request for comment.
