Tell me if I’m wrong – I let twelve bikers in leather vests walk my foster kid into a courthouse and now I’m facing a formal review from my supervisor. Am I the a**hole?
I’ve been a court-appointed special advocate for six years. I’ve had maybe forty cases. Kids in situations that would break you. But this one – this seven-year-old boy, Dustin – he’s the one who keeps me up at night. He’s supposed to testify against his mother’s boyfriend on Thursday, and for three weeks straight he’s been telling his foster mom he’d rather die than walk into that building.
He means it. He’s seven and he means it.
His foster mom, Patty Kowalski (58F), called me two Sundays ago crying. Dustin had locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. He kept saying “he’s gonna be there, he’s gonna see me, he’s gonna know I told.” I drove over. Sat outside that bathroom door for an hour and a half talking about Pokémon cards before he opened it.
That’s when Patty told me about BACA. Bikers Against Child Abuse. She’d seen them at her church. They’re a real organization – background-checked, trained, been doing this for decades. They escort kids to court. They stand in the hallway so the child feels safe. They’re big and they’re loud and they look like the kind of people nobody messes with, and that’s the whole point.
I called the local chapter. Talked to a guy named Hatchet – real name Doug Fernandez – for forty minutes. He explained everything. They don’t interfere with proceedings. They don’t speak. They just show up and make sure the kid knows somebody’s got his back.
I told my supervisor, Candace (51F), about it. She said absolutely not. “We are not bringing a BIKER GANG to a county courthouse.” I explained they weren’t a gang. Showed her their website, their protocols, their references from judges in other counties. She said, “This is not how we do things. Drop it.”
I dropped it. For about a day.
Then Dustin’s foster mom sent me a video. Dustin practicing walking through a door, shaking so hard he couldn’t turn the handle. He’s SEVEN.
So Thursday morning I made a call. Twelve bikes pulled into that courthouse parking lot at 8:15 AM. Doug was in front. They lined up on either side of the walkway in their vests and their patches and Dustin walked between them holding Patty’s hand and for the first time in three weeks that kid wasn’t shaking.
My phone buzzed before we even got through the metal detector. Candace. Four words: “My office. After this.”
She wrote me up. Said I went over her head, created a security concern, and exposed the county to liability. She’s recommending a formal review that could pull me off Dustin’s case permanently.
My friends and family are split. Half of them say I’m a hero. The other half say I violated a direct order from my supervisor and I have to follow the chain of command, especially in a legal setting with a minor.
Here’s what none of them know yet. After the hearing, after everything, Doug pulled me aside in the parking lot. He said Dustin had grabbed his hand walking out and whispered something to him. Doug’s eyes were red. He leaned in and said, “That little boy asked me – “
What Dustin Asked
“Can you guys be here when I come back?”
That’s it. That’s what he said.
Doug had to look away when he told me. Big guy, Doug. Hands like he’s worked with them his whole life. Patches on his vest from chapters in four states. He’s done this dozens of times, he told me later, and it still gets him every single time.
I stood in that parking lot and I didn’t say anything for a while.
Dustin didn’t ask if the bad man was going to jail. Didn’t ask if he was safe now. He asked if the guys in the vests would come back. Because for the first time in however long, he felt like something was standing between him and everything that had been done to him.
That’s the part I keep coming back to when I’m sitting in my apartment at 11 PM drafting my response to Candace’s formal complaint.
What Actually Happened Inside
The hearing was four hours.
Dustin testified via closed-circuit video from a side room, which is standard. He didn’t have to sit in the same space as the defendant. But he knew the building. He knew the man was somewhere on the other side of those walls. That’s what had been eating him alive for three weeks.
The BACA guys stationed themselves in the hallway outside the video room. They weren’t in the room. They didn’t interact with any court personnel. They stood there, arms crossed, quiet as anything, while a seven-year-old told a camera what had been done to him.
I was in the hallway too, for part of it. I watched one of the bikers – a guy with a gray beard down to his chest, patch that said “Wrench” – stand completely still for forty-five minutes. Not on his phone. Not talking. Just there.
The bailiff came out once and looked at them. Looked at me. I shrugged. He went back inside.
Nobody stopped them. Nobody called security. Nobody had a problem except Candace, who wasn’t there.
After Dustin finished, Patty brought him out into the hallway and the guys gave him a patch. A little BACA patch, the kind they give to kids they’ve walked in. Dustin held it with both hands and stared at it like it was something he’d been looking for.
He put it in his pocket. Patted it flat.
That’s all.
What Candace Actually Said
Her office smells like the same plug-in air freshener it’s smelled like for six years. Warm vanilla something. I’ve sat across from that desk a lot.
She was calm, which is worse than when she’s not. She had the write-up already printed. Either she’d drafted it that morning before the hearing or she’d done it the night before when I didn’t answer her calls. I’m not sure which.
She said she understood I cared about the child. She always starts there. She said the issue wasn’t my intentions. The issue was that she had given me a direct instruction and I had circumvented it, and if every advocate in the county started making unilateral decisions about courtroom procedure, the whole system breaks down.
She’s not wrong about that part. I know she’s not wrong about that part.
But then she said the BACA members were “an unknown variable” and that she’d had to spend her morning fielding a call from someone in the county administrator’s office who’d seen the bikes in the parking lot and wanted to know what was going on.
I asked her if Dustin had testified.
She said yes.
I asked her if he’d been able to do it.
She looked at me.
“That’s not the point,” she said.
And that’s where we stopped agreeing.
Six Years of This
I want to be fair to Candace. She has forty advocates under her, a budget that’s been cut three years running, and a county that treats child welfare like a line item to trim when things get tight. She’s not a bad person. She’s a person who has learned to protect the system because the system is the only thing that keeps any of this functioning at all.
I’ve had supervisors who were checked out, who rubber-stamped everything, who didn’t notice when kids fell through cracks. Candace is not that. She notices. She cares. She’s just decided that the way you protect kids long-term is by keeping the machinery running, and you keep the machinery running by not letting advocates go rogue.
I get it.
I also sat outside a bathroom door for ninety minutes talking about Pikachu and Charizard with a kid who’d told his foster mom he’d rather be dead than face a courthouse.
Those two things are both true and I don’t know how to make them fit together neatly. I’ve been trying since Thursday.
The review is in ten days. If they pull me off Dustin’s case, he gets reassigned to whoever has the lightest caseload. Someone who doesn’t know about the Pokémon cards. Someone who hasn’t met Patty. Someone who’ll have to start from zero with a kid who took three weeks just to unlock a bathroom door for me.
What I’m Not Saying
I’m not saying I’m a hero. My family members who are calling me that are making me uncomfortable.
I broke a direct order. I did it on purpose. I knew what I was doing when I picked up the phone and called Doug. I’m not going to pretend otherwise or dress it up as something more noble than it was.
What I did was look at a video of a seven-year-old shaking so hard he couldn’t turn a doorknob, and I decided that my job description and my supervisor’s comfort level were not the most important things in the room.
Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe the people in my life who are telling me I have to follow the chain of command are right, and I’m just someone who got lucky this time and made a decision that could have gone badly in ways I didn’t fully think through.
I don’t think I’m wrong. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that “I don’t think I’m wrong” isn’t the same as being right.
Doug in the Parking Lot
I keep coming back to Doug’s face when he told me what Dustin said.
This is a man who has done this dozens of times. Who has stood in courthouse hallways in a leather vest with a road name stitched on it while children who’ve had the worst things imaginable done to them walk past him toward rooms where they have to talk about it out loud. He’s built a whole part of his life around doing this thing, this specific thing, for kids who need it.
And he was still red-eyed in a parking lot over a seven-year-old asking if they’d come back.
I asked him if they would.
He said, “We’ll be there every time he needs us. That’s how this works.”
He said they’d already talked to Patty. That they’d be at the next hearing, and the one after that if there was one, and that Dustin had their number now, or Patty did, and that was how it was going to be until Dustin said he didn’t need them anymore.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in ten days. I don’t know if I’m keeping this case or losing it. I don’t know if what I did was the right call inside a broken system or just a reckless one that happened to work out.
But Dustin walked into that building on his own two feet, holding Patty’s hand, not shaking.
And he’s got a patch in his pocket.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on. Someone out there needs to know BACA exists.
For more stories that’ll make you wonder who’s really in the wrong, check out My Captain Told Me to Read Page Four of the Complaint. I Wish I Hadn’t. and My Dead Uncle Showed Up at My Block Party. He Had a Letter From My Mother.. You might also find yourself torn after reading A Biker Named Doug Left a Letter for My Daughter. I Still Haven’t Opened It..
