After a False Accusation, Police and Child Services Forced a Family Apart for 7 Months

[GURPS]

"We never thought this kind of thing could ever happen," Adam told Reason. "We assumed that law enforcement was competent and we assumed that they obeyed the law. That was a wrong assumption, but that was our assumption."

In the middle of that August 30 phone call with her husband, Jessica heard a knock at the front door of their Albuquerque home. It was the police. They told her they had come to perform a welfare check on the kids.

"I'm sorry, a welfare check?" asked Jessica, according to a court transcript of the encounter. "I don't understand."

Bernalillo County Sheriff's Deputies Catherine Smalls and Brian Thornton explained that someone from one of the kids' schools had called the authorities to report abuse. Jessica was baffled. She asked the officers if they were sure they had the right house. They were sure. She asked them to wait outside until Adam arrived at home. They agreed, but ordered Jessica not to shut the front door.

https://reason.com/2019/04/25/adam-lowther-child-services-police-abuse/

 

[Lurk]

SJW's make it so convenient to SWAT your neighbor without any personal accounability.

 

[Hijinx]

Like now you can bitch about your neighbors gun in Maryland and they come out at dawn and shoot you dead.

 

[GURPS]

The Lowther family of New Mexico found themselves in the crosshairs after a teacher at the four-year-old daughter’s school claimed that the girl reported that she’d been sexually abused by her father and her seven-year-old brother. The district attorney (DA) would eventually decline to move forward with the case because there was no evidence whatsoever, the child’s story changed wildly in the telling and included a number of obviously fantastical details, the father passed multiples polygraph tests, and it’s likely that the girl was really just describing her father helping her wipe after using the toilet (something all parents have done for their children many times). But in between the initial “report” from the girl and the DA’s decision to drop the whole matter, the Lowther family was ripped apart, the children were placed in foster care, the father was fired from his job and labeled a child rapist by the media, the young girl was subjected to lengthy interrogations and extraordinarily invasive physical exams, the family was forced to shell out $300,000 in legal expenses, and the accused father and his wife were both summarily stripped of all parental rights, not to mention their Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment rights as well.

The most frightening aspect of the story is the malicious and underhanded manner with which the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department (CYFD) and local police operated throughout the proceedings. They decided from the outset that Adam Lowther must be guilty (because who has ever heard of a four-year-old kid telling fanciful stories?) and treated him like a child-raping felon, accordingly. These agencies were interested in establishing guilt by whatever means necessary, not ascertaining the objective truth. They also had the advantage of a system that automatically turns entire families into wards of the state as soon as someone in government decides that someone in that family may have done something wrong.

After being contacted by the school, the police forced their way into the family’s home, without a warrant, and forbade the mother, Jessica, from speaking to her children. Eventually, the children would end up in foster care. They were briefly returned to Jessica’s custody (Adam was not allowed to see his kids for several months after the initial arrest), but she had to have her parents move in and act as “safety monitors.” The children were removed from their mother’s custody once again when CYFD got word that the safety monitors didn’t believe in Adam’s guilt.



https://www.dailywire.com/news/46455/walsh-horrifying-case-proves-our-parental-rights-matt-walsh

 

[BOP]

It's not new, and sadly, this kind of thing will never go away. I was living in San Diego while this was going on:
Try googling Dale Akiki. Talk about a man physically incapable of doing any of the often fantastical things children accused him of having done. He was held without bail for 30 months in the old downtown jail while awaiting trial and during it. They said he was a flight risk, but the truth is the district attorney, who was trying to make political hay out of the case was trying to find evidence for much of that 30 months. Given that a jury acquitted him, that didn't work.

Dale Akiki reflects on historic trial

There are episodes in any city’s history from which those involved will scurry away like a bridal party in a rainstorm.

www.sandiegouniontribune.com

 

[Hijinx]

Sadly the people who did this are still working for the New Mexico Children and Youth Authority, and more than likely still think they did the right thing.