PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — The caretaker for a Port Townsend infant who died said her pleas to the state to intervene fell on deaf ears. Now, new questions are arising about what role, if any, the new ‘Keeping Families Together Act’ played in that decision.
The caretaker for little the baby said his caseworker told her repeatedly, that the child could not be removed from his father’s custody without proof. Proof that he was still on drugs and not clean and sober as required.
Critics said a new law designed to keep families together may be partly to blame.
Both the person who helped lawmakers draft the law and the state said the act was designed to make sure the family court system used “proof” before removing children from their parents. And that it should have had no impact on what happened to the baby.
“I loved him as if he was my own,” said Pamela Andrews. “I really did.”
Andrews knew baby Otis for the entirety of his devastatingly short, three-week-long life.
“He was that special,” she said, her voice breaking. “He just grabs your heart and just hugs it immediately.”
But last Saturday, the father led investigators through the thick brush of a Port Townsend park to Otis’s body, still in his car seat, but already dead.
Andrews said her pleas to Otis’s caseworker to remove him from his father’s custody went unheard. She said she kept being told she needed proof that the dad, who had a long history of drug abuse, was unfit.
And they still left the baby there?
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
Some critics are blaming the baby’s death in part, on the recently enacted ‘Keeping Families Together Act,’ which allowed the dad to have custody in the first place.
“Absolutely the goal was to ensure child safety and also to prevent unnecessary removal,” said Tara Urs, special counsel at the King County Department of Public Defense.
Urs helped lawmakers draft the new act. She said the goal was to require more than just a suspicion that a parent was unfit.
“That the courts need evidence of harm to the child and of the parent’s behavior is causing harm to the child,” she said. “And evidence of substance abuse can be used as harm to the child. It just needs to be the state shows that.”
But none of it will do the one thing Andrews said she wants most.
“I want him back,” she said. “That’s what I want. I want him back. That’s all I want. For him to be here.”
The dad still has not been charged with taking his son’s life.
The Jefferson County prosecutor said he needs the autopsy results to decide whether to charge the father in his son’s death. And those results could be weeks away.
He remains in the Jefferson County jail, held on $200,000 bail.
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