Tell me if I’m wrong – I let a motorcycle club walk a seven-year-old into a courthouse and now I’m facing a disciplinary hearing.
I’ve been a social worker in Maricopa County for nineteen years. I have a caseload of forty-three kids right now. One of them is a boy named Dominic, and what’s happening to Dominic is the reason I might lose my career.
Dominic is seven. He’s been in foster care since January. He’s supposed to testify against his mother’s boyfriend in a preliminary hearing, and for three weeks straight he’s been waking up screaming because he knows that man is going to be sitting fifteen feet away from him in that courtroom.
His foster mom, Patti Hendricks, called me on a Tuesday night in tears. Dominic had locked himself in the bathroom and was saying he’d rather die than go back to that building. He’s SEVEN. Those were his words.
I’d heard about an organization – Guardian Riders, local chapter out of Mesa. Big guys, beards, leather vests, patches. They escort kids to court. They sit behind them in the gallery. They walk them in so the kid feels like nobody can touch them. I’d never used them before but I called their chapter president, a guy named Doug Fessler, at nine the next morning.
Doug didn’t hesitate. He said they’d have eight riders at the courthouse steps Thursday at 7:45 AM.
Thursday morning I pulled into the lot with Dominic in my backseat. He hadn’t said a word the whole drive. His hands were shaking so bad he couldn’t unbuckle his seatbelt.
Then he saw them.
Eight guys standing in a line by the courthouse entrance. Vests, boots, arms crossed. Doug stepped forward, got down on one knee, and said, “Hey buddy. We’re your guys today. Nobody gets close to you unless you say so.”
Dominic grabbed Doug’s hand and didn’t let go. He walked into that courthouse like a different kid. Head up. No tears.
The hearing went fine. Dominic testified. The Guardian Riders sat in the second row directly behind him the entire time.
Then Monday morning my supervisor, Connie Aldrich, called me into her office. She said I’d violated protocol by introducing “unauthorized civilians” into a minor’s case without departmental approval. She said the judge’s clerk had filed a complaint about “intimidating individuals” in the gallery. She said I’d put the county at LIABILITY.
I told her those men were the only reason that boy walked through the door.
She said, “That’s not your call to make, and frankly, the optics of a county social worker coordinating with a biker gang are not something this office can defend.”
I said they’re not a gang. They’re volunteers. Every single one of them passed a background check through their own organization.
She said it didn’t matter. She’s referring me to a formal review board. My friends and family are split – half of them say I did exactly what Dominic needed, the other half say I should’ve gone through proper channels and I knew better.
Maybe I did know better. But proper channels don’t hold a seven-year-old’s hand.
The review board meets Friday. But yesterday afternoon, Patti called me. She said Dominic drew a picture at school – eight stick figures in a row with a little one in the middle. He wrote something across the top in green crayon.
She sent me a photo. I opened it, and when I read what he wrote – ## What Nineteen Years Looks Like
I want to back up for a second, because I think context matters here.
I did not come into this job naive. I was twenty-six years old when I started, fresh out of ASU with a master’s degree and a supervisor named Ruthanne Kowalski who told me on my first day: the system is not set up to help children, it is set up to protect itself, and your job is to find the gaps. Ruthanne retired in 2017. I think about that sentence roughly twice a week.
In nineteen years I have had kids removed from homes in the middle of the night. I have sat in hospitals waiting to find out if a two-year-old was going to make it. I have testified in court against parents I genuinely liked, because liking someone and believing their child is safe around them are two completely different things.
I have also watched kids fall through every crack this system has. I’ve filed the paperwork, followed the protocol, checked every box, and still gotten a call six months later that tells me the box-checking didn’t matter.
So when Patti called me that Tuesday night and said Dominic was on the bathroom floor saying he’d rather die – I heard that differently than maybe a newer worker would. I heard it as: we are out of time.
The standard options weren’t nothing. I could have requested a child advocate. I could have pushed for a continuance. I could have asked the prosecutor’s office about their victim-witness support program, which, in Maricopa County, currently has a four-to-six-week wait and one staff member covering the entire east valley.
I knew all of that. And I still called Doug Fessler at nine in the morning.
The Part Nobody Asks About
Here’s what I haven’t seen anyone mention in the comments when I’ve talked about this situation: Dominic’s mother’s boyfriend, a man named Terry Sloan, had been out on bail for eleven weeks by the time that Thursday rolled around.
Eleven weeks. Walking around. Dominic knew that.
He’d seen Sloan’s truck parked outside the Walgreens near Patti’s house twice. Maybe coincidence. Maybe not. Patti reported it. I reported it. We were told there was no restraining order in place against Sloan related to Dominic specifically, only the mother, so there wasn’t much to be done.
Tell me how you explain that to a seven-year-old. Tell me what protocol covers it.
Dominic stopped sleeping in his own bed around week four. He slept on the floor outside Patti’s bedroom door with the dog. Patti’s a good woman. She put a sleeping bag out there and didn’t make it weird. She just let him do what he needed to do.
By the time I put him in my car Thursday morning, he’d been carrying that fear for three months. Three months of waiting for a day he knew was coming, knowing that Sloan would be in the room.
His hands were shaking so bad he couldn’t unbuckle his seatbelt. I reached back and did it for him. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say anything. He just looked out the window and I could see his jaw working, grinding his back teeth the way he does when he’s trying not to cry.
Then we turned the corner into the lot and he saw them standing there.
Eight Guys in a Line
I’ve tried to describe what it looked like a few times now and I keep getting it wrong.
They weren’t performing anything. That’s the thing. They were just standing there. Eight men, biggest one probably six-four, all of them in their vests, not talking much, just present. Doug was at the end nearest the parking lot and when he saw my car pull in he straightened up a little. That was it.
Dominic saw them through the window and went completely still.
I said, “Those guys are here for you today.”
He said, “For me?”
I said yes.
He looked at them for another few seconds and then he said, “The big one has a dog on his vest.” Which was true – one of the guys, a man named Gary, had a patch with a German shepherd on it. Gary, I found out later, runs a rescue out of Gilbert. Has eleven dogs at his place right now.
Doug came to the car door. Got down on one knee in the parking lot asphalt, which looked like it cost him something physically, and he looked Dominic straight in the eye and said his piece. We’re your guys today. Nobody gets close to you unless you say so.
Dominic thought about it for a moment. Then he took Doug’s hand.
He didn’t let go until they were inside and seated. And even then he kept looking back at the second row, checking. Every few minutes. Just checking.
Doug gave him a thumbs up every time.
Dominic testified for forty minutes. He was scared. He cried twice. But he did it. He looked at the prosecutor and he answered the questions and when he had to point at Terry Sloan he did that too. His voice didn’t break.
The Guardian Riders sat in that second row the whole time without moving. No disruption. No drama. Just eight men making themselves a wall between a little boy and everything that scared him.
What Connie Aldrich Saw
I want to be fair to Connie. I don’t think she’s a bad person. I think she’s a supervisor in a county department that has been sued four times in the last decade and she is conditioned, professionally, to see liability before she sees anything else.
When she called me in Monday morning, she had a printout on her desk. The clerk’s complaint. Two paragraphs describing “a group of approximately eight individuals in motorcycle club attire” who had created an “atmosphere of intimidation” in the gallery.
I asked Connie if anyone had complained about Dominic’s testimony being compromised. She said no. I asked if there had been any incident, any disruption, any contact between the Riders and Sloan’s defense team. She said no. I asked if the judge had said anything.
She paused on that one.
The judge, apparently, had not said anything. The judge had, according to the clerk’s own notes, “made no comment regarding gallery attendees.”
But the clerk had feelings about the optics.
And Connie had feelings about the liability.
And so here I am.
She used the phrase “biker gang” twice in that meeting. I corrected her both times. The second time she looked at me the way people look at you when they’ve already decided the conversation is over and they’re just waiting for you to finish talking.
I have a union rep. His name is Phil Burke, twenty-two years with AFSCME, and he’s seen weirder things than this. Phil thinks the review board will probably result in a written reprimand in my file rather than termination. Probably. He said it with the exact amount of confidence that did not make me feel better.
The Picture
So. The picture.
Patti called me yesterday afternoon. She said Dominic’s teacher had sent it home in his folder. He’d drawn it during free time – not an assignment, just something he did on his own.
Eight stick figures in a row. They all had what looked like rectangles on their chests, which I’m pretty sure were meant to be vests. The figures were all roughly the same size except one in the middle of the row, shorter, which was Dominic.
He’d written something across the top in green crayon. Patti read it to me before she sent the photo, so I knew what was coming, but I still sat in my car in the parking lot of a Filiberto’s for about four minutes after I opened the image.
MY SAFE GUYS.
That’s what it said. In green crayon, in the uneven block letters of a seven-year-old who’s been working on his handwriting.
MY SAFE GUYS.
I don’t know what the review board is going to decide on Friday. I don’t know if I’m going to walk out of that meeting with a reprimand or something worse. I’ve been in this job for nineteen years and I have never once done something I thought would hurt a kid, and I’m not starting now.
What I know is that Dominic testified. What I know is that he slept in his own bed Thursday night for the first time in weeks – Patti texted me at 10 PM to tell me that, unprompted, because she knew I’d want to know. What I know is that somewhere in Mesa there’s a man named Doug Fessler who got his knee dirty on a parking lot asphalt and told a scared little boy that nobody was going to get close to him.
And what I know is that a kid in second grade drew eight stick figures with rectangles on their chests and wrote MY SAFE GUYS in green crayon across the top because that’s the truest thing he knew how to say.
I’ll take the reprimand.
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If this one got to you, share it. Someone out there needs to know these guys exist.
For another difficult decision involving a motorcycle club, check out The Officer Sat Down Across From the Biker and Said, “Does Anyone Know Who You Actually Are?”, or read about a similar situation with a young client in My Client Is Seven Years Old and I’ve Never Raised My Voice at Work Before Last Tuesday. And for another story where I question if I was wrong, take a look at My Regulars Walked Out of a Hospital and Left a Man to Die Alone. I’m Still Not Sure I Was Wrong.
