[Rhodes22-list] Could I Have Another Helping of Big Government, Please?

[Herb Parsons]

I'd love to see the exact times of this incident noted, and a study done 
tracking how many children where shown to be abused during the same time 
period.


Brad Haslett wrote:
> You would think after the almost three years of post-Katrina Gubment
> bullshit I've witnessed I'd be immune to this stuff.  Nope, it still pisses
> me off.  By all means, let's have mo Gubment to "help us". Maybe it's just
> an age related cranky thing, but you folks who think you need mo gubment in
> your lives deserve it.  Keep it out of mine, thank you very much.  Brad
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> BRIAN DICKERSONHard lemonade, hard priceDad's oversight at Tigers game lands
> son in foster care
>
> BY BRIAN DICKERSON • FREE PRESS COLU
>
> If you watch much television, you've probably heard of a product called
> Mike's Hard Lemonade.
>
> And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their
> 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches
> much television.
>
> The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have
> known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a
> lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's
> ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to
> speed on the commercial beverage industry.
>
> Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.
>
> Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of
> Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he's more likely to be
> excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching "Dancing with the
> Stars" -- or even the History Channel, for that matter.
>
> The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade
> existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their
> seats in Section 114.
>
> "I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann
> Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected
> when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."
>
> But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park
> security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.
>
> "You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.
>
> "You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the
> security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.
> Mistake or child neglect?
>
> An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at
> Children's Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had
> dispatched Leo -- by ambulance! -- after a cursory exam.
>
> Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police
> officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy
> admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.
>
> The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard
> lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo's blood less
> than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats
> detected no trace of alcohol.
>
> "Completely normal appearing," the resident wrote in his report, "... he is
> cleared to go home."
>
> But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife,
> U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and
> nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.
>
> And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you
> should pay a little less attention to who's getting booted from "Dancing
> with the Stars" and a little more to how the state agency responsible for
> protecting Michigan's children is going about its work.
> Doing their duty
>
> Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the
> state was probably overreacting.
>
> The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said
> she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her
> supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective
> Services.
>
> And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away
> seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. "This is so unnecessary,"
> one told Ratte before driving away with his son.
>
> But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were
> just adhering to protocol, following orders.
>
> And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying
> himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective
> Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside,
> wondering when they'd see their little boy again.
> A vain rescue mission
>
> Child Protective Services is the unit of the Michigan Department of Human
> Services responsible for intervening when someone suspects a child is being
> abused, neglected or endangered. Its powers include the authority to remove
> children from their homes and transfer them to foster parents who answer
> only to the state.
>
> By law, CPS officials are forbidden to discuss the particulars of any
> investigation.
>
> But Mike Patterson, Child and Family Services director for the Wayne County
> district that includes Comerica Park, said that in general his agency's
> discretion is limited once police obtain a court order to remove a child
> from the parental home -- usually authorized, as in Leo's case, by a
> juvenile court referee responding to a police officer's recommendation.
>
> "Once the court has authorized a child's removal," Patterson told me, "we
> cannot return the child to the parental custody" until the court has OK'd
> it.
>
> But that doesn't explain why CPS refused to release Leo to the custody of
> two aunts -- one a social worker and licensed foster parent -- who drove all
> night from New England to take custody of their nephew.
>
> Chris Ratte's sisters, Catherine Miller and Felicity Ratte, left
> Massachusetts at 10:30 the night of the fateful lemonade purchase after the
> police officer who'd reluctantly requested a removal order told Ratte the
> state would likely jump at the chance to place Leo with responsible
> relatives. But when the two women arrived at the CPS office early Sunday, a
> caseworker explained they would not be allowed to see Leo until they had
> secured a hotel room.
>
> The sisters quickly complied. But by the time they returned to CPS around
> 10:30 a.m., their nephew had been taken to an undisclosed foster home, where
> he would remain until a preliminary court hearing the following afternoon.
>
> By that Monday, April 7, when Ratte and his wife returned for a meeting with
> Latricia Jones, the CPS caseworker assigned to their case, no one in the
> family had been able to talk to Leo for a day and a half.
> More investigation needed
>
> At a hearing later that day, Jones recommended that Leo remain in foster
> care until she had completed her investigation, a process she estimated
> would take several days. It was only after the assistant attorney general
> who represented CPS admitted that the state was not interested in pursuing
> the case aggressively that juvenile referee Leslie Graves agreed to release
> Leo to his mother -- on the condition that Ratte himself relocate to a
> hotel.
>
> Finally, at a second hearing three days later, Graves dismissed the
> complaint and permitted Ratte to move home.
>
> Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university's Child
> Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically
> that the most remarkable thing about the couple's case may be the relative
> speed with which they were reunited with Leo.
>
> Duquette says the emergency removal powers of CPS, though "well-intentioned"
> are "out of control and partly responsible for the large numbers of kids in
> the foster care system," which is almost universally acknowledged to be
> badly overburdened.
>
> Ratte and his wife have filed a formal complaint with the CPS ombudsman's
> office.
>
> "I have apologized to Leo from the bottom of my heart for the silly mistake
> that got him into this mess," Ratte wrote in the complaint. "But I have also
> told him that what happened afterward was an even bigger error, and I would
> like to be able to say to him that institutions, like people, can learn from
> their mistakes."
>
> *Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or
> bdickerson at freepress.com<http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080428/COL04/mailto:bdickerson@freepress.com>
> .*
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