Dr. Lisa Hines had just finished breaking down the baby’s nursery when she got a text message. It was a year after a Kansas court ordered an infant girl removed from her home with her wife, Tesa, and adopted by the Schumms — a husband and wife who already had 14 other children.
Hines read the message and immediately called Tesa, telling her to return to their Wichita home. When she pulled up, Hines ran out onto the porch. “The Schumms,” she said, “have been arrested.”
On Nov. 19, some 140 miles away from the Hineses’ home, Jonathan and Allison Schumm, a Topeka City Council member and his stay-at-home wife, were arrested on child abuse and torture charges. Their children, including Isabella, were taken into protective care.
The court decision placing Isabella in the Schumms’ home devastated the two social workers, plunging the women into a yearlong grief that nearly destroyed their marriage. The court decision also left the women feeling ostracized — they said they believe that the only reason Kansas officials gave Isabella to the Schumms is because they are lesbians.
They are not alone in making these allegations. The Hineses’ struggle is emblematic of the plight of same-sex families attempting to adopt or foster children in Kansas, LGBT advocates said — a process that is shrouded in layers of bureaucracy and secrecy. Those advocates said that Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration has worked to block same-sex couples from adopting or fostering children. There are now growing calls for an official inquiry into the state’s Department for Children and Families (DCF).
Court documents show that the Schumms were charged with aggravated battery or knowingly using a weapon to cause grievous bodily harm, disfigurement, or death; abusing a child or torture or cruelly beating a child under 18; and four counts of endangering a child. The 16 children were placed in protective custody.
Although the criminal case is under seal — keeping many of the details of the charges out of the public realm — the Shawnee County District Attorney has also filed two civil motions, referencing the charges, to have Jonathan Schumm removed or suspended from his elected position as a councilman. The district attorney alleges that between Oct. 7 and Oct. 11 this year, Jonathan took a 12-year-old child into a bedroom, forced him to lie on the ground, and whipped him with a leather and metal belt, lacerating the child’s eye. Schumm is then alleged to have strangled the child and threatened to kill him, according to the documents.
Tesa Hines holds footprints of Isabella in the child's old nursery, now an office, in the Hineses' Wichita home.
Kit Doyle for BuzzFeed News
On Wednesday, Schumm’s attorney filed an objection to the motions, denying all the charges against his client and characterizing the case against Schumm as “an accusation that he was overly zealous in disciplining his children.”
Tesa said she worries what Isabella was exposed to or subjected to while in the Schumms’ home. “I’m worried sick,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I’m horrified that she had to witness any of that as a 2-year-old.”
“I’m just going crazy trying to understand what has happened to my child,” Lisa told BuzzFeed News. “I want her to be safe and I need to know, and I’m not going to stop until I find out.”
Kari Schmidt, the Hineses’ attorney, said she was stunned to learn the news. “I almost vomited,” she said. “And I’m not kidding.”
Schmidt said the court officials should have foreseen problems in the Schumm household because of the extremely large number of children, the family’s limited income, and their small home — issues officials had raised in the past. “It defied logic,” she said. “Every step of the way it defied logic.”
Lisa and Tesa met in 2006 at a San Francisco conference on children who witness domestic violence. Lisa, now 50, was a presenter, and Tesa, 36, an attendee. They became friends, and Lisa dated around while waiting out Tesa’s relationship with another woman. “I told one woman that if Tesa becomes free we’re going to have to break up,” Lisa bashfully admitted.
In 2008, they married in the brief period when same-sex marriage was legal in California. And by 2010, unable to afford a good life in San Francisco, they headed to Kansas, where Lisa accepted an assistant professor of social work position at Wichita State University. The transition came as a shock. “I thought that St. Louis, where I’m from, was conservative,” Tesa said, “and it doesn’t hold a candle to Wichita.”
For years, the pair thought about starting a family. After spending thousands of dollars in unsuccessful attempts to get Tesa pregnant, they looked to become foster parents. The first set of four girls they took in at the one time stayed only a few months after the children’s grandmothers objected to them living with lesbians.
Then, the phone rang: A 5-day-old baby was in need of a home. Isabella — not her legal name but the name the couple has always called her — arrived at the Hineses’ house right from the hospital on Nov. 13, 2013. She was 5 days old, still wearing the plastic medical bracelet around her ankle. “She had on a brand-new baby blanket, and one of the little baby caps that they put on them,” Lisa said. “She smelled so good. I fell in love with her.”
A photo of Isabella's hand with the Hineses.
Kit Doyle for BuzzFeed News
They had just days to prepare. Lisa rushed to the store to buy baby goods, including a bassinet they placed between them in bed. At night, Isabella slept with her tiny hands wrapped around the women’s fingers.
From the beginning, the Hineses knew they wanted to adopt Isabella. With their marriage not recognized in Kansas at the time, it was Lisa’s name that would appear on all the paperwork. But around Thanksgiving, Tesa said they received an email from a state contractor: Another family wanted to adopt Isabella.
Isabella was born to a woman who previously had seven children removed from her custody, according to a court petition Lisa filed. Two of Isabella’s half siblings were removed from their biological mother’s legal custody between 2006 and 2009 and adopted by one family; her other five half siblings were adopted by Jonathan and Allison Schumm in 2013.
At the time, the Schumms had four biological children and two sets of five adopted children already living in their home — meaning they were barred from fostering Isabella due to a state regulation that said their house didn’t have enough rooms. So they sought to adopt her, which had no such hurdle. (In addition to Isabella, it’s believed the couple had also since taken in Isabella’s younger sibling. Allison is also understood to be pregnant with another child.)
By February, “visitations” between Isabella and her half siblings were taking place. The meetings were supervised by Saint Francis Community Services, a faith-based group and DCF contractor, at one of the organization’s offices. All 14 of the Schumms’ children at the time were brought along to bond with the infant, according to the Hineses.
(All statements about the adoption case are from Lisa Hines’ publicly available petition to the Kansas Supreme Court, unless otherwise noted. The Schumms and their lawyers did not return a request for comment on all statements regarding the family. Spokespeople for the DCF and St. Francis said they could not comment on specific cases. However, Justin Thaw, an adoption supervisor for Saint Francis, told BuzzFeed News, “In a case where one family may become adoptive to a child, there would obviously be some interaction with all the children in that family.”)
The Hineses felt the visitations disrupted the bonds they developed with Isabella. “If I put myself in Isabella’s shoes, that would be traumatizing,” Tesa said of the meetings. “If somebody, some stranger, just picked me up, took me from my parents and then took me to a crowd to be touched, that would be traumatizing for me.”
On March 24, 2014, Isabella’s biological parents had their rights formally terminated by a Sedgwick County judge. The Schumms and the Hineses both applied to adopt her.
Despite assurances — from Saint Francis, which makes recommendations, and DCF, which makes the final call — that they were being equally considered as adoptive parents, Lisa and Tesa began to feel Isabella was slipping away from them.
The 30-minute visitations increased to an hour. When Lisa questioned if the change meant the DCF social workers were treating the meetings as “pre-adoptive” visits, she said she was met with no response.
The formal meeting to determine who should adopt the baby was scheduled for July 31 — but the decision had already been made, the Hineses believe. The couple said a St. Francis social worker told them on June 6 that the baby would most likely go to the Schumms. “That’s just the way it is,” the Hineses said the social worker told them.
In response, Saint Francis Communications Director Vickee Spicer told BuzzFeed News, “Best practices would dictate that children are placed with family, which, in this case, was with the siblings the Schumms already had, and therefore, preference would most likely be given to the Schumms. We don’t want to deny children the opportunity to grow up with family and allow the siblings to bond and grow together.”
At the formal meeting, the Schumms were selected as the most suitable adoptive parents. According to an internal Saint Francis letter cited in the Hineses’ court papers, “Saint Francis opined that both families were appropriate placements, but broke the tie in favor of the Schumms solely on the basis that they adopted [Isabella’s] former half siblings.”
On Oct. 2, the Hineses got Isabella ready for daycare, dropped her off, and kissed her goodbye as they went to court. There, the judge denied their attempts to block the girl’s temporary weekend visit to the Schumms pending the court’s final decision on who the parents would be. Isabella was driven to Topeka that afternoon.
The following day, as the Hineses mulled their next legal move, a Saint Francis social worker filed an “abuse/neglect critical incident” report, according to Lisa Hines’ court petition, recommending Isabella not be returned to the Hineses because she had eczema, thrush, and asthma. Isabella was indeed suffering from diaper rash, the Hineses told BuzzFeed News, but none of her doctors or social workers had ever reported any suspected neglect or abuse before.
The timing of the report meant Lisa Hines was not entitled to a 30-day notice of removal of the foster child, which could have delayed the formal transfer. A DCF attorney informally contacted Kari Schmidt to say the claims had been investigated and were found to be unsubstantiated, according to the Hineses, but the formal DCF finding was not made until weeks later. Saint Francis chose not to return the child to the Hineses, they said, because the group felt it was easier to simply leave Isabella with the couple they and the court had chosen for adoption.
Lisa Hines filed an appeal to the state Supreme Court on Oct. 27, which declined on Dec. 1 to hear the case. With money, time, and their will to fight on at an end, the Hineses admitted defeat. They realized that the morning they dropped her off at daycare would be the last time they'd see her.
Lisa (left) and Tesa Hines return Isabella's items to storage in the basement of their home. Tesa said that doing laundry is always painful now because she must be around the items.
Kit Doyle for BuzzFeed News
“DCF used the pretext of a bogus neglect charge in order to avoid the legal duty to give my clients notice of the move that we could have then gone into state court and contested,” Schmidt said. “That was the part at the end of the day where I believed that there was nothing that was going to stop the DCF from giving that child to Jonathan and Allison Schumm.”
Despondent and grief-stricken, Lisa retreated to her room, closed the curtains, and cried for seven days. Tesa tried to comfort her, but eventually the shock caught up with her too.
Tesa began criticizing Lisa for not doing more to keep Isabella. The pair argued more and more. Tesa moved out to go stay with her mom for a few months, leaving Lisa alone in the empty home — the baby’s room still untouched as if she might someday come home.
Allison Schumm liked to say that her family “exploded.” In less than three months in 2006, she and her husband went from having no children to having five. Four were foster children, all siblings, ranging from 10 months to 10 years old. The fifth was a girl Allison gave birth to in October. By December, the couple also took in the foster children’s 5-month-old sister.
“The honeymoon period with these children did not last long,” she told a parenting blog in 2013. The day after the foster children arrived, she let three of them play unsupervised in front of the home, she said in the parenting blog. Some of the kids threw rocks at an adjacent building, she said, breaking 12 windows. “At this point I was starting to realize just 24 hours prior we had taken in furious vandalizing thieves and liars,” she wrote on an archived version of her own now-deleted blog titled the Schumm Explosion. She said she and her husband punished the children — ages 6, 7, and 10 — by making them haul twelve 40-pound buckets of rocks across the yard.
Allison wrote she was determined to ensure the children felt loved and had a stable home. Crucial to that was her desire to keep siblings together. She revealed to the parenting blog that, as a child, she was adopted by one family while her sister was adopted by another family — and was separated from Allison and their two brothers. “She saw the pain and turmoil it had [caused] her sister and she wanted to be able to protect children from having to go through this agonizing separation,” the blog reads.
The Schumms' home in Topeka, Kansas.
Google Maps
The couple are devout Christians and have said they have faith in a higher plan. When asked during foster training classes how many children the couple hoped to have, she wrote that the Schumms replied, “as many as God will provide.”
“We learned very quickly that if you give God [an] offer like that, He will take you up on it,” she wrote. “If our desires truly matched God’s, He would provide for and make them happen.”
After adopting the five foster children in June 2008, Allison gave birth to a son about three months later, and then another daughter in December 2009. The couple had had eight children in five years.
To Kansas officials, the Schumms were the poster family for adoption. In 2011, the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services asked the couple to speak at an event championed by Gov. Sam Brownback to increase adoptions. The state had more than 5,000 children in the foster care system, and another 900 awaiting adoption. “So many kids are still waiting,” Jonathan told reporters.
SOURCE: BuzzFeed
No comments:
Post a Comment