Roberts: How could DCS take this 5-year-old from her mother? (Easily, as it turns out)

Last month, 1,144 Arizona children were taken away from their parents by the state of Arizona. Those children joined nearly 18,000 other children in foster homes and group homes and with other relatives because the state has deemed it simply too dangerous to allow them to live with their parents.

Tracy Allen is one of those apparently dangerous parents. Her 5-year-old daughter was taken by the Department of Child Safety on Jan. 5. Allen found out hours later, when the kindergartener didn’t get off the bus after school.

“I flipped out,” Allen told me. “I couldn’t believe it had happened. How could they do that?”

Fairly easily, as it turns out. And facts? Well, they don’t always seem to matter.

Cue DCS, in explaining to a judge why it took Allen’s daughter: “Reportedly, mother uses methamphetamine and marijuana on a daily basis.”

Or, as it turns out, not.

A spokesman for DCS declined to talk about the case, citing state laws that require confidentiality.

Tracy Allen, however, is furious and she’s talking plenty.

First, some background. Allen served nearly two years in prison for a drug-related offense and has been on probation since her release in June 2013. Before that, DCS received eight reports alleging abuse or medical neglect, from 1998 until 2011. The DCS records don’t indicate how many of those reports were substantiated.

Allen says she hasn’t been involved with drugs since 2010. When she left prison, she collected her daughter from the child’s father and has been raising her on her own. Within weeks of her release, Allen went to work for a chemical supply company and submits to random drug tests both for her employer and her probation officer.

Allen’s involvement with DCS began in November, when an anonymous caller reported that she was using drugs in her daughter’s presence.

Allen says she told a DCS investigator that she’d recently kicked out a friend who had been temporarily living in their Mesa home and that he had threatened to retaliate by calling DCS.

DCS asked her to take a drug test but she refused, saying she already did testing as a condition of her probation.

Fast forward to January when Allen’s 29-year-old son, Randy, was arrested in Show Low for possessing and growing marijuana. Detectives searching his computer found a picture of his 5-year-old sister trimming a marijuana plant.

The picture was forwarded to DCS on Jan. 4.

According to a DCS report, an investigator told Allen she needed to take a drug test and have a state-approved safety monitor move into the home. Allen told DCS she was already taking a drug test that day for her job and didn’t see the need for two tests.

DCS took the child on Jan. 5. Three days later, the agency went to court to seek temporary custody, saying Allen’s “inability to maintain a safe household environment is greatly affected with the use of methamphetamines and marijuana.”

“Mother continues to deny her substance abuse problem,” DCS wrote.  “Tracy Allen needs to show an extended period of sobriety and engage in services of substance abuse treatment and drug testing, parenting classes and substance abuse classes.”

The report also notes that she allowed “an inappropriate person” to care for her daughter and expose her to drugs.

Allen says she didn’t know her son was growing marijuana when she sent her daughter to visit for a few days last May. At the time, she was spending most of her time at the hospital with her 19-year-old son,  who had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

A judge awarded temporary custody to DCS and ordered Allen to take a hair follicle test, something she did immediately.

DCS has told Allen that both the urine and hair follicle tests turned up no evidence of drug use.

So, to recap, DCS took Allen’s daughter based upon an anonymous call and a picture taken seven months earlier when the girl was visiting her brother, 179 miles from home.

Allen is raising her daughter alone. Her boss calls her an “exceptional” employee. Yet in its report seeking temporary custody, DCS says “the substance abuse by both parents in the home has a direct affect (sic) on their ability to maintain employment and financially care for their child.”

What?

DCS investigators have tough jobs. They have to figure out whether a child is “at imminent risk of harm” and when they get it wrong, families suffer. Children suffer.

The question is, how often are they getting it wrong?

In the last five years, the number of children taken from their parents has increased 43 percent – an increase DCS attributes to increased reporting of infants born exposed to drugs and alcohol.

Me? I’m wondering how many Tracy Allens are losing their children.

It’s been over a month now since the state saw fit to “protect” Allen’s daughter. Since then the 5-year-old has changed schools twice – once when she was put into a group home then again when she was sent to live with a paternal aunt. She gets to see her mother twice a week, for two hours each visit, and they talk by phone every night.

“Every single night, she cries ‘Mommy, I just want to come home,’” Allen says, fighting tears. “Why isn’t she home?”

It seems she soon may be. Last Wednesday, the day after I called DCS about this case, Allen says she got a call from her case manager, telling her that DCS is asking the judge to dismiss the case and send the girl home.

Yet a week later, DCS still has Allen’s daughter.

She remains, one of 18,915 Arizona children who won’t be going home tonight.