Tell me if I’m wrong – I let a motorcycle club walk my client into court and now my supervisor is threatening to fire me.
I’ve been a social worker for nineteen years in Tulsa County. I’ve testified in more custody hearings than I can count. I’ve seen kids shaking so hard in the hallway they can’t hold a cup of water. But what happened last Tuesday with eight-year-old Marcus Dillon almost broke me for good.
Marcus has been in foster care since January after his stepdad, Gary Cowell (41M), got arrested for what he did to that boy’s mother. Marcus was the one who called 911. He was the primary witness. And last Tuesday was the day he had to sit in a courtroom and look at Gary’s face while he told a judge what he saw.
I picked Marcus up from his foster placement at 7:45 AM. He didn’t say a word the whole drive. Just sat in the backseat pressing his forehead against the window with his eyes closed.
When we pulled into the courthouse lot, Gary’s family was already there. His brother, his mother, two cousins. Four adults standing by the entrance, arms crossed, staring at every car that pulled in. They weren’t breaking any laws. They were just STANDING there. But Marcus saw them through the window and grabbed the back of my seat so hard his knuckles went white.
“I can’t go in there,” he said. “Miss Denise, I can’t.”
I called courthouse security. They said they couldn’t do anything about people standing on public property. I called my supervisor, Pam Whitfield (58F). She didn’t pick up.
That’s when a friend of Marcus’s foster dad – a guy named Hank Briggs who runs a motorcycle club called Iron Hands out of Broken Arrow – pulled up on his bike. Then another. Then six more. Eight bikes total, all wearing their vests.
Hank walked up to my window and said, “Tommy called us. We’re here for the boy. We’ll walk him in.”
I should have said no. I know the protocol. No unauthorized contact. No outside parties engaging with the minor. I KNOW this.
But Marcus was looking at those eight guys on their bikes, and for the first time all morning, he unclenched his hands.
I said yes.
They formed two lines from my car to the courthouse door. Didn’t say a word to Gary’s family. Didn’t even look at them. Marcus walked between them with his shoulders back and his chin up and he looked like a completely different kid.
He testified. He got through every single question.
Pam saw the security footage. She called me into her office Thursday morning. She said I “endangered a minor by involving unvetted civilians” and that I “exercised catastrophic judgment.” She said the club could have been armed. She said I put the county at liability. She said she’s filing a formal complaint that could cost me my license.
My friends and family are split. Half of them say I did the only thing I could for that boy. The other half say Pam’s right, that I got emotional and broke every rule in the book.
Then yesterday, Hank called me. He said Gary’s brother showed up at the foster home. And what he told me next –
What Hank Said
Gary’s brother, a guy named Dale, showed up at Tommy and Renee Fitch’s house at around 8 PM Wednesday night. Just knocked on the door like a neighbor. Renee answered it because she didn’t know who he was. Tommy had never described him.
Dale asked if Marcus was home.
Renee said she didn’t know what he was talking about and closed the door and called Tommy, who was still at work. Tommy called Hank. Hank drove over and sat in his truck across the street until midnight.
Dale didn’t come back. But the fact that he knew the address, that’s what I can’t get past. The foster placement is supposed to be confidential. Marcus’s location is not public information. Gary’s family should not have been able to find that house.
When Hank told me, I was sitting in my car in my driveway and I just stared at the garage door for a while.
I’ve been in this job long enough to know that “confidential” means different things to different people. A clerk types something into the wrong field. A form goes to the wrong fax number. Someone talks. It happens. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does, and usually nobody gets hurt, and the mistake just floats there in the system uncorrected until the case closes.
This one could get a child hurt.
I called my colleague Deb Marsh the next morning. Deb has twenty-three years on me in institutional memory and she’s the one I go to when I don’t know which way is up. She picked up on the first ring, which meant she’d already heard something.
“I know,” she said, before I could start.
“How?”
“Pam told the whole Thursday staff meeting. Used your name, Denise.”
Nineteen Years
I want to be fair to Pam. I do. She has a job to do and that job involves not letting county social workers freelance with motorcycle clubs. I understand the liability argument. I’ve sat in enough depositions to understand it very clearly.
But I also want to describe what those nineteen years actually look like, because I don’t think Pam was there for most of them.
I have driven to a meth house at 2 AM to pull a four-year-old out of a closet. I have sat with a fourteen-year-old girl in an ER for six hours while we waited for a forensic nurse, holding her hand, not saying anything, just being a body in the room so she wasn’t alone. I have written court reports that I knew would destroy a family and filed them anyway because the alternative was worse. I have gone home and eaten cereal for dinner and watched television I didn’t see and gone to bed and done it again.
I have never once let a child walk into a situation I could have made safer and chosen not to because the paperwork was complicated.
That’s not a virtue. That’s just the job.
What I did with Marcus wasn’t emotional. I mean, yes. My chest was doing something when I watched him walk through those doors. But the decision itself wasn’t emotional. I had a child in active distress, I had a threat I couldn’t neutralize through official channels, and I had a resource standing right in front of me.
I used the resource.
Pam would say I didn’t know those men. That’s technically true. But I knew Tommy Fitch, who has been Marcus’s foster dad for three months and who has, in that time, taken that boy to two baseball games and taught him how to change a bike tire and who cried on the phone to me in February when Marcus had his first nightmare and Tommy didn’t know what to do. Tommy knew Hank. That’s two degrees. In my line of work, two degrees is practically a background check.
The Formal Complaint
I got the paperwork Friday afternoon. Email from HR, copied to Pam, copied to her supervisor, a guy named Roland Veatch who I have met exactly twice and both times he was eating a sandwich.
It’s a formal notice of investigation. Not termination. Not yet. But the language is bad. “Willful disregard of established child safety protocols.” “Failure to maintain professional boundaries with unauthorized third parties.” “Potential exposure of a minor to unknown risk factors.”
Unknown risk factors. Eight guys who showed up at seven in the morning because a foster dad called them, who stood in two straight lines without saying a word, who made an eight-year-old boy feel safe enough to walk into a courthouse and tell the truth.
Unknown risk factors.
I showed the paperwork to my husband Carl that night. He read it twice, set it on the kitchen table, and said, “What do you need?”
I said I didn’t know.
He made coffee. It was 9 PM and neither of us needed coffee but he made it anyway and we sat there and I read the document a third time looking for the part where what I did was actually wrong. Not procedurally. I know it was procedurally wrong. I mean wrong wrong. The part where Marcus was worse off because of what I chose.
I couldn’t find it.
What Marcus Did
I haven’t told this part yet because it’s the part that gets me.
After Marcus testified, after the prosecutor finished and Gary’s defense attorney finished and the judge thanked him and he was allowed to step down, he walked out of that courtroom and into the hallway where I was waiting.
He was eight years old and he had just spent forty minutes describing what he watched Gary Cowell do to his mother. In detail. In front of Gary.
He walked out and he looked at me and he said, “Did I do okay?”
I said, “Marcus. You did perfect.”
He nodded like he was filing that away. Then he said, “Are the guys still here?”
They were. Hank and two others had waited in the hallway the whole time. Hank was sitting on a bench reading something on his phone, vest and all, looking like he had nowhere else to be.
Marcus walked over to him and Hank looked up and Marcus said, “Thank you for coming.”
Hank said, “Anytime, bud.”
That was it. No speech. No moment. Marcus came back and stood next to me and we waited for the elevator and he asked if we could stop at Sonic on the way back and I said yes.
I keep thinking about Pam watching that security footage. The exterior camera, the parking lot, eight bikes, four people with their arms crossed by the door, one small kid walking a gauntlet that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. I wonder what she saw when she watched it. I wonder if she got to the part where Marcus’s shoulders changed.
Where It Stands
Dale hasn’t come back to the Fitch house. Tommy installed a camera doorbell Thursday. Hank has been driving past twice a day, which nobody asked him to do.
The placement hasn’t been moved yet. I’ve recommended it be reviewed, which is the most I can do from where I’m standing right now while my own situation is unresolved. Deb is helping me draft a response to the formal complaint. She knows a union rep named Phil Garrett who has handled worse.
I don’t know if I’m going to keep my license. I genuinely don’t know. Nineteen years, and I’m sitting here not knowing.
What I know is that Gary Cowell’s family was trying to rattle that boy before he testified. They were standing there for Marcus, not for Gary. And the only thing that stood between Marcus and whatever that was supposed to do to him was eight guys from Broken Arrow who didn’t have to show up.
They showed up.
I made a call. Maybe it was the wrong call by the book. But Marcus got through every single question.
Tell me I’m wrong.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it along. Someone you know needs to read it.
If this story resonated with you, you might find solace in hearing about a seven-year-old who also had a biker escort to court, or perhaps the tale of someone who stood their ground against injustice in a school parking lot. You definitely won’t want to miss reading about the stranger in the leather vest who saw what a child’s own father wouldn’t.
