My Foster Daughter Froze in That Chair, So I Made One Phone Call

Am I wrong for going behind my department’s back and calling a biker club to escort my foster daughter into court after what the caseworker said to her face?

I’ve been a patrol officer for fourteen years and a licensed foster parent for three. My foster daughter Bree (9F) has been with me and my wife Tammy (37F) since last October. She’s supposed to testify against her biological father next month, and the closer it gets, the worse she’s been sleeping. She stopped eating breakfast. She pulls her hair when she thinks no one’s watching.

Two weeks ago we had a mandatory check-in at the family services office on Randolph. Bree’s caseworker is a woman named Donna Pfeiffer (54F), and Donna has made it clear from day one that she thinks a cop fostering a kid from an abuse case is a “conflict of interest.” She’s filed two separate objections to our placement. Both got denied.

We’re sitting in the waiting area and Bree is holding my hand so tight her fingers are white. Donna calls us back, doesn’t say hi to Bree, doesn’t even look at her. She starts going through the standard questions – is Bree attending school, is she in therapy, has there been any behavioral issues. I answer everything. Then Donna turns to Bree and says, “You know your daddy is going to be in that courtroom too, right? He’s going to be sitting RIGHT there looking at you.”

Bree’s whole body locked up.

I said, “Why would you say that to her?”

Donna said, “She needs to be prepared. You’re not doing her any favors by sheltering her. That’s not what foster care is.”

Bree didn’t say a single word the entire drive home. She went straight to her room and didn’t come out for dinner.

That night I called a buddy of mine from the VFW who rides with a group called Shields on Wheels. They’re a biker organization – big guys, big beards, leather vests – and all they do is escort kids to court. They sit behind the child in the courtroom so the kid doesn’t have to see the abuser’s face. They’ve done it hundreds of times. Completely legal, completely volunteer.

I asked if they’d ride with Bree. They said yes immediately. Fourteen riders confirmed within two days.

When Donna found out, she LOST it. She called my sergeant. She said I was “intimidating the legal process” and “using gang affiliates to manipulate a minor.” My sergeant called me in. My friends and family are split – half of them say I did the right thing, the other half say I’m risking my career and Bree’s placement over pride.

Then yesterday I got a call from the family court clerk. She said Donna had filed an emergency motion. Not about the bikers.

About Bree’s placement.

I pulled the filing up on my phone and when I read the first line, my hands started shaking.

What the Filing Said

Donna was arguing that I had created an “emotionally coercive environment” for Bree.

That by arranging the escort without going through the caseworker’s office, I had “inserted myself into the legal proceedings in a manner inconsistent with the role of a foster placement.” She cited my badge. She cited the VFW connection. She used the phrase “law enforcement adjacency” like it was a diagnosis.

The motion was requesting an emergency review of our placement with a recommendation to transition Bree to a new home before the trial date.

Before the trial date.

Meaning they wanted to move a nine-year-old girl, who already has trouble sleeping, who already pulls her own hair, to a stranger’s house, three weeks before she has to sit in a courtroom and look at the man who hurt her.

I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the Family Services building for twenty-two minutes. I know it was twenty-two because I watched the clock on the dash the whole time. Tammy called twice. I didn’t pick up. I was doing the math on what I was going to say when I got home, and none of the versions were good.

She met me at the door. She already knew. The clerk had called her too.

Tammy taught third grade for eight years before she switched to curriculum work. She does not rattle easy. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw set and she said, “Tell me what we’re doing.”

Not what happened. Not is this bad. She wanted a plan.

How We Got Here

I need to back up a little, because the Donna situation didn’t start at that check-in.

When Bree first came to us last October, she’d been in two placements already in eight months. The file Donna handed us was thin. Not because there wasn’t history, but because Donna had documented almost none of it. No notes on Bree’s sleep patterns. No notes on food aversion. Nothing about the way Bree would go completely still if a man raised his voice anywhere near her, even on TV.

I started keeping my own notes. Not because I’m paranoid. Because I’m a cop and that’s what I do. I write things down.

By December I had a spiral notebook with sixty-something pages. Bree’s good days. Her bad days. What she ate. When she slept. When she didn’t. The first time she laughed at something Tammy said. The first time she asked if she could call me something other than “sir.”

She settled on “Coach.” I don’t know where she got it. I coach exactly nothing.

Donna came for a home visit in January and I showed her the notebook. She looked at it the way you look at something you don’t want to touch. She said, “Foster parents aren’t case managers.” I said I understood that. She left twenty minutes early.

The first objection to our placement came six days later.

It cited a vague concern about “boundary confusion resulting from the foster father’s professional background.” No specifics. The review board denied it in two weeks.

The second objection came in March, after I asked Donna in an email why Bree’s therapy sessions had dropped from weekly to biweekly without any notice to us. That one cited “adversarial communication from the foster placement.” Also denied.

So by the time we’re sitting in that waiting room in May, Donna and I have been doing this dance for seven months. I knew she didn’t like me. I thought I understood the dimensions of it.

I was wrong about the dimensions.

The Bikers

I want to be clear about what Shields on Wheels actually is, because Donna’s characterization of them was a flat-out lie and my sergeant deserved better information than he got.

They’re registered as a nonprofit in this state. They’ve been operating for eleven years. They have a formal MOU with three different county family courts. Two of their founding members are retired corrections officers. One is a retired paramedic. They’ve escorted kids to court over four hundred times. They have a coordinator who communicates directly with child advocates and prosecutors. They do background checks on every rider who participates in an escort.

They are not a gang. They are not affiliated with any gang. They wear leather vests because they ride motorcycles.

My buddy Dale, who made the call to the group on my behalf, is sixty-one years old. He has a son who teaches high school history and a daughter who does something with insurance I’ve never fully understood. He has a golden retriever named Patricia. He has been riding for thirty years and he has never once been arrested for anything more serious than a parking ticket.

When I told Bree about them, I kept it simple. I said there were some big guys who wanted to come with us to court and sit behind her so she’d know she had people there. I said they wore cool jackets.

She asked if they were nice.

I said they were the nicest guys I knew.

She thought about it for about four seconds and said, “Okay, Coach.”

That was the whole conversation. No pressure. No drama. A nine-year-old girl made a decision about something happening to her own body in her own life and she said okay.

Donna called it coercion.

What My Sergeant Actually Said

I want to be fair here, because Sergeant Vickers is not a bad guy and he was put in a bad spot.

He called me in two days after Donna contacted him. He had her complaint printed out. He read parts of it to me. He looked like he’d been eating something sour all morning.

When he was done, he set it down and said, “Is any of this accurate.”

I said, “The part where I called them is accurate.”

He said, “Did you loop anyone in before you did it.”

I said no.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You know I have to document this.”

I said I knew.

He said, “Off the record. Those Shields guys.” He paused. “They do good work.”

Then he picked the complaint back up and we went back on the record and he told me that going forward any contact I had with outside organizations related to Bree’s case needed to go through the appropriate channels. I said I understood. He said the department couldn’t be seen as involved in a family court matter. I said I understood that too.

Then he asked if Bree was okay.

I told him she was hanging in there.

He nodded and that was the end of it. Professionally. Whatever Donna thought she was going to set in motion by calling him, it didn’t move the way she wanted.

The emergency motion was her next play.

The Hearing

It was scheduled for a Thursday. Eleven days after I read that filing in the parking lot.

Tammy and I got a family law attorney named Greta Sloan who had worked foster cases for twenty years and who, when I explained the situation over the phone, said “mm-hmm” in a very specific way that made me feel slightly better. Not a lot. Slightly.

Greta filed a response to the motion within forty-eight hours. She pulled Donna’s two prior objections. She pulled the denial letters. She pulled the email chain about Bree’s therapy schedule. She contacted Shields on Wheels directly and got their nonprofit documentation, their MOU with the county courts, and a letter from the family court liaison who had worked with them on previous cases.

She also pulled Bree’s school attendance records, her therapy notes from the last seven months, and a letter from Bree’s therapist, a woman named Dr. Carol Hatch, who had been seeing Bree every week since November.

Dr. Hatch’s letter was three pages. I haven’t read all of it. It’s protected. But Greta told me the relevant parts and one line in particular has been living in my head since she read it to me.

It said that Bree had, for the first time since beginning treatment, expressed something resembling anticipatory safety in relation to the court date.

Anticipatory safety. Meaning Bree was scared of what was coming, but she also believed something good would be there with her.

The hearing lasted forty minutes. Donna was there with a representative from Family Services. Greta was there with a stack of documents roughly the thickness of a phone book. The judge was a woman named Judge Patricia Mullen, sixty-something, reading glasses on a chain, no affect at all.

She read. She asked three questions. Two were directed at the Family Services rep, not at Donna. One was directed at Greta.

Then she denied the motion.

She didn’t editorialize. She didn’t lecture. She denied it, made a note in the file, and moved to the next case.

Outside the courtroom, Donna walked past us without making eye contact. The Family Services rep stopped and shook Greta’s hand and then shook mine. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

Three Weeks Out

Bree doesn’t know about the motion. She doesn’t know about the hearing. She knows that she’s going to court, that Tammy and I will be there, and that some big guys in cool jackets are going to sit behind her.

Last week she asked Dale’s name. I told her. She practiced saying it a few times, getting the sound of it right.

She still pulls her hair sometimes. She’s still not eating great at breakfast. But two nights ago she came downstairs at nine-thirty because she couldn’t sleep, and instead of going back to her room when I told her it was bedtime, she just stood in the kitchen doorway and said, “Can I just sit with you for a little while?”

She sat at the kitchen table while I finished the dishes. Didn’t say much. After about fifteen minutes she went back upstairs on her own.

I stood at the sink for a while after that, water still running.

Fourteen riders. Three weeks. One little girl who asked if they were nice.

I think we’re going to be okay.

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