N's Court Date

When the CASA arrived at court, she learned that DFCS was planning to ask the judge to continue the case for another month.

That was news to me. When I had met with the new caseworker, she didn't tell me much. (She told me she'd just come back from medical leave and been assigned a staggering number of cases. I want to say she said 80, but that seems ridiculous. Surely I'm misremembering that number? Maybe she said 40?)

I told her a lot. The history of the case, the care I have witnessed the family give, the lack of evidence that I have heard that there was any abuse here, the concerns raised by the community panel about the detective in charge of the criminal investigation (whose report fairly oozes racism), the general consensus at the last panel that it was time to reunify this family, the steps that we have taken to restore his bond with them so that he can go home without a transition period.

I thought we were all on the same page. That's why I didn't go to court. (That and the logistics of having a one-year old at the courthouse when court is "everybody show up at 9:30am and wait." They didn't get called into the courtroom until nearly 1pm.)

I wondered why the CASA called me that morning to ask about his last visit with his parents and whether I had any concerns about him going home that day. I thought she was just being thorough. I wondered why she called me later that day to ask me for the name and number of the parent aide.

It wasn't until it was all over that I learned that she was fighting DFCS right up until the case was called to convince them not to drag this out any further.

CASA won, but just barely. She told me she wasn't sure she'd changed their minds until about 5 minutes before the case was called.