Gone Baby Gone 

Yadira Medina Garcia was brushing her teeth in a North Salt Lake apartment at 10:45 p.m. on July 18, 2007, when the lights went out. The front door crashed open and a Salt Lake City Police Department SWAT team stormed in. At gunpoint, the 21-year-old new mother to 15-day-old first child, Galilea, and her 36-year-old common-law husband, Rafael Garcia Pintado, were forced to the floor.

Salt Lake City police had tracked the couple to their apartment. Cops found cocaine, heroin and $11,660 in cash in the top shelf of the dishwasher. While neither of the undocumented couple were noted as drug users in the police report, both were charged with two felony counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and one of child endangerment. Rafael has a long list of drug charges under various aliases dating back to 1998, but the birth mother had no prior criminal record. Neither spoke English.

The police report hypothesizes that if the infant’s bottles had been washed in the dishwasher, the baby would have been exposed to narcotics. Yadira, who was later deported and now lives in the Mexican resort town of Mazatlan, claims she didn’t even know how to use a dishwasher.

Caseworkers for the Utah Division of Child and Family Services [DCFS] arranged an emergency-shelter placement for the baby. A few days later, the infant was placed with a foster-adopt family in Bountiful. According to DCFS logs on the progress of Galilea’s case, caseworkers were charmed by the “cute” infant and particularly with the foster mom, Jennifer Hess. Within less than a month, Hess had given the baby a new first name and was telling social workers she and husband Aaron hoped to adopt her. “Jennifer is a fantastic [foster mother],” ran one caseworker entry. “She is so pleasant and understands the system well. She is very low need.” Yadira Medina Garcia’s crime, she feels, was simple: She was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man. And it cost Yadira her child.

The moment the SWAT team kicked down the couple’s apartment door, it set two distinct processes in motion: One was the criminal charge, the other, an up-to-11-month judicial ticking clock to determine whether the birth parents would be reunited with their daughter. The court ordered DCFS to help the parents work towards getting Galilea back. In prison, Rafael did not complete any court-ordered courses. Yadira took all the courses she could. But, the deck was stacked against her. Not only was she in jail, but she faced deportation upon being released. It seemed all but inevitable she would lose custody.

No one counted, however, on Galilea’s maternal grandmother, 50-year-old Rosaura Garcia Murillo entering the picture. In the past two years, she has never lost hope of taking her granddaughter home to the Mexican township of Xalisco, in the state of Nayarit, where she and her family live. Utah DCFS Director Duane Betournay, for one, describes her efforts as “herculean.”

The tenacious grandmother didn’t speak a word of English when she came to Utah on March 20, 2008, on a humanitarian visa secured for her by the Salt Lake City Mexican consulate. For the past 12 months, she has relied on the kindness of strangers, sleeping in spare bedrooms and traveling everywhere by bus with her satchel of court papers, photographs and notes—documents she eventually brought to City Weekly.

Through consolate-appointed lawyers, Rosaura filed a petition for custody on April 10, 2008. Judge J. Mark Andrus denied it on Jan. 29, 2009, because, in part, of a missed deadline and an apparent misunderstanding about custody protocol for international adoption.

Provo-based attorney Paul Dodd reviewed the case at the request of the Mexican consulate. “It’s unjust not to be considered for placement because [Rosaura]’s from Mexico,” he says. Even more so if, as DCFS chief Betournay speculates, “The judge may have had bad information”—the mistaken idea that children are not placed with relatives abroad. In fact, Mexican placements are permitted.

According to Betournay, there are several known cases of children in Utah’s child-welfare system who have ended up either reunited with their biological mothers in Mexico or placed with kin south of the border. That’s thanks to a memorandum of understanding [MOU] that DCFS signed with the Salt Lake City Mexican consulate.

Betournay unearthed an unsigned, undated draft of the document after City Weekly brought Rosaura’s custody fight to his attention. Not only were the judges in this case apparently in the dark about the existence of such an agreement, but they were allegedly told by DCFS caseworkers that birth mother Yadira had failed to keep in touch with DCFS upon being deported to Mexico. According to court documents, the latter was a key factor in Judge Andrus’ terminating the birth mother’s parental rights on Jan. 29, 2009. Yadira says it wasn’t that she didn’t contact DCFS. She claims to have done so repeatedly only to get her caseworker’s voice mail, where she left messages. Her calls, she says, were never returned.

Betournay acknowledges that all things being equal, “placement with kinship is the preferred outcome.” Nevertheless, it is likely Rosaura will not succeed in getting her granddaughter back, whether due to bureaucratic glitches, or, as Rosaura suspects, a degree of prejudice within DCFS and the courts where it is thought Mexican children are better off being adopted and raised by more affluent Americans.

When asked about the state’s handling of the case, one social worker who requested anonymity says, “When you’re making the decisions that God makes, you need to take a little more care.” Because Rosaura does not understand English, she tells a bilingual reporter that the state of Utah “has made me as someone discarded, unwanted,” the same way she felt as a child in Mexico when her biological mother left her with the brother and sister she came to call Papa and Mama. The same way she fears Galilea will feel when she grows up with Caucasian Englishspeaking parents and two older, adopted Hispanic brothers. “It’s very hard to be an adopted child,” Rosaura says. “If you haven’t lived it, you don’t feel it.” Rosaura, a devout Catholic, admits that Galilea’s foster mother loves the child. But so does she, she says. “If they’re going to give her to [the foster mother to adopt], why won’t they give her to me?” She continues, “I’m not saying she doesn’t look after her well. It’s just never going to be the same thing. Family is first.”

SWEET SPIRIT

Yadira took a LDS substance-abuse program and also eight parenting classes from a courtapproved course at Davis High School. Her course supervisors wrote about her “sweet spirit” and positive attitude, even if she didn’t understand much of what was said. That sweet spirit was tested by a system that seemed intent on ignoring her, and particularly by Isaac T. Rodenbough, a Clearfieldbased DCFS social worker. Rodenbough left the division several months ago and declined an interview request with City Weekly because, he says, “he is ethically bound” not to comment on cases. The one person from DCFS who is talking is director Betournay; he reviewed the case, noting, “I can’t say that I saw anything that alarmed me.” Two blood relatives expressed an interest in adopting Galilea. One was Rafael’s sister, Margarita Garcia Pintado, who lives in California. The other was the child’s maternal grandmother, Rosaura. Several weeks after her daughter’s arrest, Rosaura sent Salt Lake City’s Mexican consulate the DIF home-study report. The consulate notified the court and sent the DIF papers to Rodenbough on Aug. 2, 2007. According to DCFS logs, Galilea’s first social worker, Emily Redd, informed the consulate she didn’t know how “to get Galilea’s g-ma custody of her.” The biological parents expressed a preference for the California relative, because, Rafael says, she was a legal U.S. resident.

The court ordered a home study of Galilea’s aunt Margarita through California Child Protective Services. They subsequently would turn down Margarita because of financial and family problems, even though Galilea’s aunt said she would seek employment and wanted the child. A cousin of Rafael’s also came forward, only to be discounted as “illegible” for kinship placement by Rodenbough because he was undocumented.

THE SHORT FAREWELL
Rodenbough first met with Yadira Medina Garcia in jail on Sept. 18, 2007. “I told her that the child would likely be placed with her [common-law husband]’s sister in California or placed for adoption likely with the family that was fostering her,” he wrote in a DCFS log. Yadira told Rodenbough she wanted to get the baby back. He told her he “wasn’t sure it was possible.” Rodenbough visited her again on Oct. 12 and told her if she needed help to let him know. Despite calling him day after day from jail and sending him letters—none of which he replied to— she says she heard nothing. She only saw him again on Feb. 13, 2008, for a brief, final visit. DCFS chief Betournay says, to his mind, best practices “would say we keep the mother up to date regardless of her immigration status.”

On Nov. 11, 2007, Yadira pleaded no contest to a felony possession and intent to distribute narcotics charge and child endangerment. Rodenbough was keen to move things along with placing Galilea.

On Nov. 15, 2007, after only five months into the minimum eight-month-process for reunification with the parents, Rodenbough asked the juvenile court to terminate reunification efforts because “DCFS is unable to work with the parents while incarcerated and as they are likely going to be deported to Mexico.” The judge refused, partly because they hadn’t been sentenced.

“With much affection for my daughter Galilea from her mom Yadira, who never forgets you and carries you in my thoughts always. “God accompany you always and bless you, Gali.”

LIFE SENTENCE
In the wake of Wilkins’ ruling, the Mexican consulate secured a humanitarian visa for grandmother Rosaura and asked her to come to the United States. The consulate hired two lawyers to represent Rosaura’s petition for custody of Galilea.

FAMILY TIES
In Farmington, on Jan. 29, 2009, 2nd District Court Judge J. Mark Andrus made two rulings. First, he terminated the parental rights of Yadira Medina Garcia and Rafael Garcia Pintado. The biological mother, he conceded, had “completed a parenting course while in jail, and had also completed some kind of a twelve-step program.” However, the details were not made available to DCFS or the court, so “it was unknown whether that may have satisfied any of the court-ordered services.”

How could she inform DCFS of her whereabouts, Yadira asks, “if Isaac never answered the phone, never returned my calls [from Mexico]?” Andrus noted that Galilea had been in a foster home for 18 months “and has developed love and affection” for the couple who want to adopt her. And then there was Rosaura Garcia Murillo, he added, “who had gone to considerable time, expense and trouble” to travel to Utah, to develop a relationship with the child and petition the court for her custody.

The Utah Child Welfare Act, Andrus noted, “mandates a strong preference for placing a child with relatives.” But the grandmother, he wrote, “was hampered” by several factors: She was 10 days late, according to Utah law, filling out a kinship application. Her reliance on the Mexican consulate “proved not to be well placed, as they did not help her to comply with Utah law.” DCFS was not able to process it, he wrote, because there was no way to do a criminal background check and home study.

That, however, is incorrect, given DCFS’ agreement with Salt Lake City’s Mexican consulate to work together to place children with relatives in Mexico, where appropriate.

Neither DCFS nor the consulate can find the final signed copy of the agreement so no one, as yet, knows the date it was agreed. “The obvious fact that neither one of us can find a memorandum of understanding would indicate there’s probably some communication breakdown,” DCFS head Betournay admits.

LEFT OUT IN THE COLD
Rosaura allowed a reporter to accompany her to one of her weekly visits with Galilea at the DCFS offices in Bountiful. “Sit down,” she told the reporter in the lobby of the building. “You’re in my home.” Foster mother Jennifer Hess arrived on time, accompanied by Galilea and her two foster-siblings. When Hess learned Rosaura was accompanied by a reporter, she summoned the new caseworker, Kristy Kelly. “I signed a confidentiality clause,” Hess told the reporter. While the two boys played with toys and Galilea toddled up to her grandmother, the social worker and foster mother discussed curtailing Rosaura’s visit. “This is not for public display,” Kelly said. The reporter left and the visit continued.

A week later, Rosaura went for her visit, taking some yogurt treats and summer sandals for her granddaughter. Through an interpreter, Kelly told her there would be no more visits. State lawyers did not want photographs of Galilea going out across the United States.

Rosaura went outside and cried in the wind-swept street. “I have no reason to go on,” she said. Seeing Galilea each Wednesday was what kept her going, gave her hope. “How dare they say, ‘Because she’s born here, she’s ours?’” she cried.

She called her daughter. “Keep fighting, Mami,” her daughter said. “Until the end, whether we win or lose, you can’t give up.”

LEGAL STRANGER

THE FINAL FALL
Good Friday, April 11, was the last day for Rosaura to file a request with the Appeals court for more time to raise funds to hire a lawyer and appeal Andrus’ decision. Good Friday, she says, was when Christ fell three times on his way to the cross, when he uttered the last seven words.

The Appeals court clerk apologized to the grandmother. The interpreter was off that day. The pro se application for an extension was not translated into Spanish.

“Pure English,” Rosaura said, “I’m in the country of English.” She copied the last extension filed on her behalf by lawyer Dodd. As the clerk stamped her papers, Rosaura offered up her own seven words, if not seven sentences. “Ayudarme Padre Santisimo que todo salga bien,” she said. “Help me, Holy Father, that everything comes out all right.”

She stood on the corner of 400 South and State Street, waiting to cross. Why, Rosaura asks, should the child pay for the sins of the parents? Or, it might be asked, for DCFS communication breakdowns, both internally and with the Mexican consulate? The traffic light changed. Rosaura started to cross the street but didn’t see a dip in the asphalt. She fell down, crying out in pain. “Don’t, don’t,” she told the two men who tried to help her up. Finally, she got to the other side of the street.

She sat down on the grass waiting for a bus. “Waiting, waiting,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do.”

Regardless of the outcome of Rosaura’s battle, DCFS has had to take stock. “I don’t want anybody stumbling around in the dark out there and not knowing what to do and end up depriving a family of a child,” Utah DCFS director Betournay says. However, he conceded, that could well prove to be the case as far as the ever-shrinking possibilities of Rosaura taking Galilea home are concerned. He adds that, because of Rosaura’s case, the division soon will embark “on a six-month project to improve working on these cases.”

The week after her visit to the Appeals court, Rosaura found out she was not granted an extension. She remained determined to fight on and, in mid-April, found a lawyer to take her case, even though he described it as an “uphill battle because the judge probably won’t want to revisit his decision,” especially since almost twoyear-old Galilea’s foster family is the only one she’s ever known.

Rosaura is undaunted. “She doesn’t stop being Mexican because her blood is 100 percent Mexican and her origins are Mexican,” she says. “It’s not fair that Galilea stays with strangers simply because she was born in Utah.”