NEOSHO, Mo. - When they came to take Gloria Owens' five remaining children from her in September 1999, the two youngest ones threw their arms around her and wouldn't let go.
They had to pry the girls, then 9 and 6, from their mother where she sat in the living room of their trailer home on Jaguar Road in Newton County.
"I didn't want to let them go," Owens, 48, recalled in an interview last month. "But they said if I didn't, they'd arrest me."
Her 17-year-old daughter, who'd raised a sexual-abuse allegation against her father more than two years earlier, sat down on the floor of the home and refused to go with the investigator and caseworker from the Missouri Division of Family Services, and the Newton County sheriff's deputy.
They had to drag her across the floor of the home and out the door, and then peel her hands from a post she grabbed on the porch to try to stop them, her mother said.
The Newton County Juvenile Court and the Division of Family Services did not remove the children because of the girl's sexual-abuse allegation. Gloria Owens had asked her husband to move out of the home when the allegation first arose so that she could keep the children. The allegation had never been substantiated, and the father was never charged.
The reasons the state gave for removing Owens' children in 1999 were that she was unable to provide for their care and support, that her trailer home was dirty, that some of the children had chronic head lice, and that they were not all properly immunized and enrolled in school.
The daughter who had made the allegations against her father was returned to her mother's care the next day since she was 17 and the court no longer had jurisdiction over her. But the other four, one boy and three girls, were placed in foster care, and a lengthy struggle for Owens to get her children back began that has now taken the Newton County woman to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Although she went unrepresented by any attorney and without any court hearing for two years, Owens now has counsel and is challenging the constitutionality of two state statutes at the heart of Missouri's child-welfare system regarding the removal of her two youngest daughters, now ages 13 and 11, and the state's eventual termination of her parental rights with respect to them.
Owens has not seen either of those girls since February 2001. She and her husband had nine children altogether. Seven of them are adults now. Four were already adults when the five youngest were removed.
Plagued with personal health problems that make employment impossible, and currently without any income, Owens is financially destitute.
But her oldest son, who is 28, recently helped her get a rental home in Joplin.
She still wants her two youngest girls back.
"I was never given my parental rights, not from the very beginning of it all," Owens said.
Housekeeping
Owens admits the trailer she was living in with her children at the time of their removal was not a model of good housekeeping.
"When you've got five children and yourself living in a trailer, you've got a lot of laundry," she said.
There were clothes lying about the house, there was a box of dirty dishes she'd bought at a rummage sale on the floor of the home waiting to be cleaned, the girls' room looked "like a cyclone had hit it," she admitted. But the home was not unlivable, as the state contends, she said.
Her two oldest girls, then 17 and 14, had been sent home from school for having head lice. It had been a struggle for their mother to keep them free of lice. The girls had long hair. Gloria Owens is Apostolic and has raised her children with the belief that a female's hair is her glory and should not be cut. She'd spent hours going through her daughters' hair.
"I could get the bugs," she said. "But it was hard for me to see the mites."
She said it is true also that the children had not been to school yet that school year. School had started in August, and she was waiting on a welfare check due that first week in September so she could afford to buy them school supplies and the gas needed to transport them there and back.
She was keeping the 9-year-old girl, who was having emotional problems, out of public school with the hope of getting her placed in an alternative school setting instead. And, even though she was not required by state law to have the 6-year-old in school, she said she intended to enroll her once the check arrived.
The Division of Family Services has repeatedly contended in court filings that neither of the two youngest girls were properly immunized, but Owens denies that. She said she had always been reluctant to immunize her children as babies because of the trauma the shots inflict on them. Her practice was to wait until they were of school age. But she had gotten both of the girls in question immunized in August 1999, and she provided the state with records of that, she said.
Her attorney, Sherrie Hansen of Anderson, told the Globe that the Division of Family Services reported to the court for three years, including in its petition to terminate Owens' rights with respect to her two youngest girls, that she had failed to immunize the girls when, in fact, she had gotten them their first series of shots less than one week before the children were removed.
Owens said that sort of misrepresentation of the truth has been typical of her long ordeal with the DFS.
"I have often thought they were just picking on me and my children because we were poor," she said.
DFS officials have declined to comment on the case outside of court proceedings.
No religious matching
When the DFS removed the children in 1999, the two youngest girls were placed with a foster family in Seneca. Owens' then-15-year-old son was placed with another family in Newtonia, and the two oldest girls with a family in Neosho before the oldest one was allowed to return home the next day.
Owens was allowed to see the four who remained in state custody once a week, at church.
Although the DFS told her they were trying to find a family with which they could keep all three girls together, no effort was made to match the children with a family of the same faith in which they'd been raised, Owens and her attorney contend in court filings.
"Immediately, their clothing was changed and their hair was cut," Hansen told the Globe.
Apostolics believe females should wear dresses with at least three-quarters-length sleeves, below-the-knee hemlines and no splits, Owens said. They also should not wear jewelry or makeup, she said. Not only was her girls' hair cut, but they were suddenly being dressed in pants, shorts and bathing suits, against their upbringing, she said.
The DFS contends in court filings that Owens failed to meet reunification requirements over the next three years before the termination of her parental rights with respect to the two youngest children in November of 2002. Those requirements included steps to make Owens more financially stable and her home more suitable for raising children.
The state wanted her to get a divorce, but it was against her religion, she said.
"I went as far as filing," she said "But when it came down to it, I just felt too guilty."
The state also claims that in that period, she made little progress in counseling that was offered to her, and that she repeatedly missed meetings with her caseworker. Owens admits she had deep psychological problems to work out, stemming from verbal abuse she had suffered, but she claims the missed meetings were more the fault of the caseworker than her.
"She'd belittle me and humiliate me," Owens said. "She wouldn't even sit on my furniture. Sometimes she'd come out and I'd be gone, but I didn't have any way to know she was coming."
The DFS has also contended that Owens did not sustain employment and did not support the children while they were in foster care. Owens told the Globe that she had not worked for 27 years before the removal of her children, and obtaining employment and keeping it was difficult without a work history and with her health problems. She has had heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes and edema.
She had worked as an in-home health aide for about a year but lost that job when the transmission of her vehicle went out.
Adoption track
Owens' case languished in Newton County Juvenile Court for more than two years before a hearing was held, according to her attorney.
The state maintains in court filings that she signed a form consenting to the DFS taking her children without the usual hearings and to acting as her own attorney. Owens said all the DFS told her she was signing was a release form for the children to get medical treatment whenever they needed it while in state custody.
The DFS began allowing her to have therapeutic visits with the two youngest girls at a counselor's office in Joplin in 2000. But her chances of getting them back in her care and custody seemed to diminish significantly early in 2001, when the DFS switched from its reunification track to its pre-adoptive track.
The two girls were moved to their current adoptive family's foster care in March 2001, and they were given new names. Owens last saw them in the Joplin counselor's office on Feb. 13, 2001.
"I didn't know that day as I was leaving that I'd never see them again," she said.
Her youngest son was placed in the custody of her oldest son in July 2002, after he'd turned 17, and her third-youngest daughter was allowed to come home in May 2003.
But Owens fears her youngest girls have been lost to her forever. The girls' current foster parents filed for termination of her rights in July 2001, and the DFS followed suit a few months later. Owens collapsed in the courtroom during a hearing on the termination of her parental rights in October 2002 and was hospitalized for heart failure.
Three judges were involved in the Newton County Juvenile Court case. Circuit Judge Tim Perigo had the case for the first 2 1/2 years. Associate Judge Gregory Stremel had it briefly after the foster parents filed for termination. Associate Judge John LePage ordered her rights terminated.
Her petition before the Missouri Supreme Court challenges the constitutionality of a state law that says if a child remains in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months, the state will start termination proceedings. The law was designed to bring Missouri's child-welfare system into compliance with the federal Adoptions and Safe Families Act.
Owens' lawsuit seeks to have the rule overturned as arbitrary in light of the state's alleged failure to meet a number of its own policies and procedures for handling child-removal cases.
It also challenges another statute empowering juvenile officers to remove children when an "emergency" exists. Owens says the law is vague as to what constitutes an emergency. Owens' attorney says the children were removed without sufficient cause and without a court order.
"Even with an 'emergency,' they should obtain a court order from a judge," Hansen told the Globe. "That can be done. Judges are on call 24 hours a day. I think it's really scary if the state can come in and remove kids without a court order based on the whim of a social worker."
Oral arguments were heard by the state Supreme Court on Dec. 5, and the court's response is expected within the next month or two.
DFS Brief: https://www.courts.mo.gov/SUP/index.nsf/fe8feff4659e0b7b8625699f0079eddf/f52665935d0d567d86256dc500770865/$FILE/SC85120_Division_of_Family_Services_brief.pdf
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The Newton County 40th Judicial District Judges
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