Last year, on Christmas Eve, Jacqueline Morales Boatright gave birth to a daughter, Evelyn. It was a traumatic experience; Jacqueline had an emergency C-section, and Evelyn was born with bruises and swelling. But the baby pulled through, and Jacqueline and her husband Juan took Evelyn back to their Fort Worth, Texas, home.
Unfortunately, the Boatrights returned to the hospital—a different one—six weeks later, after baby Evelyn developed some strange twitches and started to vomit. The worried parents brought her to the emergency room at Cook Children’s Medical Center. Doctors examined Evelyn and took her for testing. Significantly, they noted in her record that she bore no signs of abuse or neglect.
The hospital ordered an MRI and an X-ray. The MRI came back with signs of small brain bleeding, and the X-ray showed an old partial rib fracture that was mostly healed. This led the radiologist to immediately classify Evelyn as a suspected victim of child abuse, even though her injuries were well explained by the circumstances of her birth.
“It seems [the radiologist] never even inquired about the circumstances of her birth or other possible explanations,” Jeremy Newman, vice president at the Family Freedom Project (FFP), which became invovled in the case, tells Reason.
Instead, the state’s child protective services agency, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), ordered the parents to leave the hospital and placed the baby in foster care.
“It took two minutes, 120 seconds, for someone who never met me to determine I can’t take care of my daughter,” said Juan Boatright.
The Boatrights were given state-appointed lawyers. The lawyers asked the associate judge assigned to the case to provide them with a medical expert to go over the test results as well as the birth circumstances, and provide a second opinion. When this request was denied, the Boatrights’ relatives sold their cars to hire an expert of their own, according to Newman.
This expert, a child abuse pediatrician named Dr. Marcus DeGraw, testified that child abuse should be a diagnosis of exclusion. That is, only after medical experts have ruled out everything else—illness, accidents, congenital issues and, of course traumatic birth—should child abuse be considered the explanation.
In this case, the hospital seemed to have started with the diagnosis of child abuse and never considered other possibilities, says Bradley Scalise, Jacqueline’s court-appointed attorney.
DFPS declined to comment.
“CPS cases are confidential, per state statute,” says Tiffani Butler, a DFPS media specialist.
Despite the testimony of DeGraw, the judge ruled that the Boatrights had abused their baby and she must be kept in foster care.
The Boatrights immediately asked for a new hearing. Unfortunately, the judge decided to recuse herself, and the case went nowhere.
But just last week, the Boatrights finally secured a hearing in front of a third judge. Retired District Judge Randy Catterton heard from the case worker and two doctors on behalf of Cook Children’s Medical Center; he also heard from the Boatright’s three experts who each said that child abuse was, in fact, not the only potential cause of Evelyn’s injuries. One of these experts testified that the baby’s rib fracture is found in only 0.05 percent of abuse cases but is a common birth injury.
The judge did not even wait for final arguments before ruling that Evelyn should be returned to her parents immediately.
Over the past year, the Boatrights were allowed to see their baby just one or two hours per week under strict supervision. Even after Evelyn was finally moved out of foster care and into the home of a family member—an aunt—the Boatrights were not allowed to visit her there; they could only visit with their baby at a third-party location.
On November 14, when Evelyn was finally allowed to return home, she leapt into her parents’ arms.
The family is looking forward to spending Christmas, and Evelyn’s first birthday, together.
