Am I wrong for threatening to report a foster mother after she tried to block a group of bikers from taking her foster son to his court hearing?
I’ve been a court-appointed special advocate for six years. Forty-three cases. I’ve seen kids sleep through their own custody hearings because nobody told them it mattered. I’ve watched judges make permanent decisions about children who weren’t even in the room. So when I tell you I take my job seriously, I mean I take it like it’s the only thing keeping some of these kids from disappearing into the system forever.
Dillon is eight. He’s been in foster care since he was five, placed with a woman named Pam Kirchner (51F) for the last fourteen months. Dillon has to testify in court against someone who hurt him. I can’t say more than that. What I can say is that this kid shakes so hard before hearings that he’s thrown up in my car twice.
About three months ago, a family court judge connected me with a motorcycle group that escorts kids to court. They’re called something like Bikers Against Child Abuse – big guys, leather vests, patches. They ride with the kid to the courthouse so the kid feels safe. They sit behind the child in the courtroom. I’ve seen it work miracles with other cases. Dillon met four of them at a supervised visit last month and for the first time in six months, I saw that kid smile with his whole face.
Tuesday morning, the day of the hearing, I pulled up to Pam’s house at 7:45 AM. Six bikes were already lined up along the curb. The guys were standing in the driveway, helmets off, talking quietly. Dillon’s small helmet – they’d bought him his own – was sitting on the porch steps.
Pam was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. Dillon was behind her, backpack on, ready to go.
She wouldn’t let him out.
She said, “These people are NOT taking him anywhere. I don’t care what any judge says. Look at them.”
I told her this had been approved by the court. She’d signed the paperwork. I had copies in my bag.
She said, “I signed that before I knew what they LOOKED like. I’m not sending a child off with a bunch of tattooed criminals.”
One of the bikers, a guy named Doug who I later found out is a retired middle school principal, stepped forward and said very calmly, “Ma’am, we’re just here for Dillon.”
She told him to get off her property.
Dillon started crying. Not loud. Just silent tears running down his face, his hands gripping the straps of his backpack. He kept looking at Doug, then back at Pam, then at me.
I told Pam she had ten minutes to let Dillon walk out that door or I was calling the caseworker AND filing an obstruction report that would go directly to the judge overseeing Dillon’s placement.
She got in my face. Close enough that I could smell her coffee. She said, “You do that and I’ll make sure everyone knows what kind of advocate puts a child on the back of a MOTORCYCLE with a STRANGER.”
I pulled out my phone. I started dialing. And Dillon did something none of us expected – he pushed past Pam’s arm, ran down the porch steps, and grabbed Doug’s hand.
Pam screamed his name.
Doug looked down at Dillon. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at Pam. And what he said next made every single person in that driveway go still.
What Doug Said
He didn’t raise his voice.
That’s the thing. Six-foot-something, forearms like fence posts, a vest covered in patches I couldn’t read from where I was standing. And he spoke at the exact volume you’d use to tell someone their shoelace was untied.
He said, “Dillon asked us to come. We came. That’s all this is.”
That was it. No argument. No explanation of who he was or what the organization did or how many children they’d helped. He just looked at Pam and let the sentence sit there.
Pam opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
Dillon was still holding Doug’s hand. His knuckles had gone white around two of Doug’s fingers, the way small kids grip things when they’ve decided they’re not letting go. He wasn’t looking at Pam anymore. He was looking at the bikes.
One of the other guys, a shorter man with a gray beard who’d introduced himself to me earlier as Terrence, crouched down to Dillon’s level. He said, “You still want to ride up front with me, bud?”
Dillon nodded. One small, serious nod.
I finished dialing. Not because I needed to anymore, but because I’d told Pam I would and I don’t make threats I don’t follow through on. The caseworker, a woman named Greta who has seen everything and is surprised by nothing, picked up on the second ring. I told her what was happening. She said, “I’ll call the court. Get him there.”
Pam stepped back inside and closed the door.
The Ride
I drove behind the six bikes the whole way.
They didn’t gun it. Didn’t show off. They rode slow enough that I could keep pace in my 2019 Civic without breaking a sweat. Dillon was up front with Terrence, wearing his helmet, both hands on Terrence’s jacket. I could see his head turning side to side, watching the road.
We hit one red light on Garfield, and the guy directly in front of me, a big man named Keith who I’d spoken to maybe four words to all morning, turned around and gave me a thumbs up through my windshield.
I don’t know why that got to me. It just did.
We pulled into the courthouse parking structure at 8:34. The hearing wasn’t until 9:15. Dillon climbed off the bike and immediately started telling Terrence about a video game, something about building and zombies, talking with his hands the way kids do when they’ve forgotten to be scared. The other guys gathered around without making a production of it. Just stood there. A loose circle. Casual, like they were waiting for a food truck.
I sat on a concrete barrier and watched and thought about the fact that this kid had thrown up from anxiety in my car. Twice.
He ate a granola bar Keith had in his jacket pocket. He showed Doug something on my phone. He laughed once, real and sudden, at something Terrence said that I didn’t catch.
The Courtroom
The guys can’t go past the security checkpoint in full gear, so they stow the vests and walk in as civilians. They don’t make a big deal of it. They just do it.
They sat three rows behind Dillon. He knew exactly where they were. I watched him check once, right after he sat down, a quick look over his shoulder. Doug gave him a nod. Dillon turned back around and straightened up in his chair.
I’ve been doing this six years. I know what a child looks like when they’re bracing for impact. Head down, shoulders up, hands in their lap, waiting for the world to do something terrible to them again.
Dillon sat with his back straight.
The hearing ran long. These things always do. There were delays and sidebar conversations and a fifteen-minute recess where Dillon sat in the hallway with me and Doug and ate another granola bar (Keith apparently carries multiples) and talked more about the video game. When we went back in, Dillon walked through that door like he’d decided something.
What he had to do in that courtroom was hard. I’m not going to dress it up. He’s eight years old and he had to say things out loud in front of people in suits and a judge he’d never met, about things that happened to him that should never happen to any child. His voice got very small at certain points. He stopped once, for almost a full minute.
But he didn’t fall apart.
When it was over, he walked out into the hallway and Doug was right there, and Dillon just walked straight into him and Doug put one big hand on the back of the kid’s helmet and that was it. No words. Dillon stood there for a while with his forehead against Doug’s jacket.
I counted the floor tiles. Twelve across. I don’t know why I counted. I just needed to look at something else for a second.
What Happened With Pam
Greta filed a formal note with the placement supervisor. Not a removal action, not yet, but a documented incident. Pam called me that afternoon, calmer than she’d been in the morning, and said she wanted to apologize. I told her I appreciated that and that I hoped she understood why I’d made the call I made.
She said, “I just got scared. They looked like…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
I didn’t finish it for her.
What I did say was that Doug is a retired middle school principal. That Terrence taught shop class for twenty-two years. That Keith is a grandfather of four. That every single person in that driveway had been background-checked, vetted by the court, and approved specifically because Dillon needed people around him who looked like they could keep him safe. Not safe in the abstract. Safe in the way that eight-year-old boys who’ve been hurt understand safe: big, solid, and not going anywhere.
Pam said, “I didn’t know that.”
“You could have asked,” I said. “You had the paperwork.”
There was a long pause. Then she said she wanted to do better by him. I told her I hoped she meant that. Dillon’s been in four placements in three years. He doesn’t need another move. What he needs is someone who actually looks at him instead of at the situation and decides she already knows what she’s seeing.
I don’t know if Pam is that person. I genuinely don’t know yet.
The Part I Keep Thinking About
That night I sat in my car in my driveway for a while before going inside.
I kept coming back to the moment on the porch steps. Dillon pushing past Pam’s arm. Not asking. Not looking at me for permission. Just deciding, on his own, at eight years old, that he was going to walk toward the people who showed up for him.
Kids in the system learn very fast that the adults around them make decisions about their lives and the kids just have to absorb whatever gets decided. That’s the water they swim in. Most of them stop expecting to have any say. They go quiet in a particular way, a careful, managed quiet, that looks like compliance and is actually just survival.
Dillon pushed past her arm.
I’ve been doing this six years and I have forty-three cases in my head and I can tell you: that kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when a kid has, somewhere, somehow, gotten hold of the idea that he is worth fighting for.
I think Doug and Terrence and Keith and the others gave him that. In one visit last month, and then again in a parking structure on a Tuesday morning with granola bars and a video game conversation.
I filed my report. I’d do it again in six seconds. And no, I don’t think I was wrong.
—
If this one hit you somewhere, pass it along. Someone you know might need to read it today.
If you’re curious about what happened next, you might want to read about my supervisor pulling me off Dustin’s case because I called the bikers or how my captain told me to read page four of the complaint. You could also check out this story about a biker named Doug who left a letter for my daughter.
