I should mention
something else about
my meeting with Williams
Right in the middle of our conversation, she tells me she calls CPS all the time.
Out of nowhere.
She just brings it up. In the middle of my report about the potential presence of narcotics in my classroom.
She says:
“Can I tell you how many people I’ve seen lose their jobs?…I have called Child Protective Services and I told the lady you probably think I’m crazy, but guess what? She has Dee Williams name down for every single thing”
like she’s saying an idea out loud as its happening.
Basically Williams told me she’s very comfortable deploying CPS as a response to "every single thing” that she’s “ever questioned”—
and that the people at CPS know her name.
"Stop,
stop,
stop,
we need a control group"
Ok, nerd.
On Friday, May 16th, I was in a friends kitchen being assaulted by two rescue dogs that she allows to live
IN HER HOME
for some reason, only the good Lord knows why.
(although I’m not sure even He thinks they should’ve been rescued.)
He came up with natural selection and I —
I just think we maybe shouldn’t mess with it.
I was in her kitchen getting mauled by these ugly mutts because we were testing the items I took to my car that were “potentially suspicious"
Like ya do.
We’ve all been there.
I’ve known this friend (lets call her Ms. Pontoon)
for almost as long as I’ve been a teacher.
She was a supervisor over the Civics Department
and worked as an instructional coach
and she’s bloody brilliant.
She also helped me get through grad school,
get organized during distance learning,
and has been an advocate for my children
including the foster children we’ve welcomed into our home over the years.
Try hard…
She’s not at Smith anymore but we’ve stayed friends.
You know it’s for life when someone lets you test classroom items for trace amounts of cocaine in their kitchen.
"Should we use salt or flour?" "Pontoon, I really don’t think it matters "
"We need it to be consistent” — “Stop instructional coaching me”
We set out the trace contact wipes on the counter and tested the items that I had stored in the car I was borrowing at the time in a very secure location.
We were going to “carefully” test specific items.
We had gloves on and everything, which makes it super legit.
We started with a glue stick that looked like it had just been to war with the class set of scissors, I used a toothpick to scrape this paste stuff out
it seems softer than a glue stick... I think?
and placed it on the surface contact wipe. It started to turn blue.
"Woah, that’s interesting. Ok, try this stuff"
Pontoon said, pointing towards some mechanical pencils. I took another toothpick and scraped what seemed like semi-dried, off-white toothpaste out of the top (where the eraser should have been) and wiped the specimen on the "sachet"
Yeah, that’s right I looked it up; freaking French it turns out.
It instantly turned bright blue
Right away, Ms. Pontoon whisper-shouted
"That’s f*cking cocaine!"
Then I got the phone call.
It was Stef,
"John, CPS is here.
They’re threatening to remove the kids"
I instantly felt a kind of fear I’ve never felt before. It shot through me in the sharpest way, like when the dentist accidentally hits a nerve.
My blood ran ice cold.
Those words still haunt me to this day.
"Stef, what the hell is happening?!"
"I was asleep on the couch, I woke up when they were knocking” "ok, ok hold on, I’ll be right home"
I grabbed my computer bag
"Pontoon I gotta go, NOW"
I flew out her front door, jumped from her porch, and ran across the front yard to the truck.
I flew towards the house
I didn’t “fly,” I meant like I drove really fast…
The flights from Pontoon’s place to the crib were all booked
How could CPS be at the house? And how could they be justifying removing our kids? And why in the world did I bring this freaking bag with me?!
My mind was flying.
Don’t even.
I listened to part of the recording Stef texted me while I floored it through the red light at Dunbarton and Military Highway:
allegedly*
while Stef fields the two CPS workers and two NPD officers at the door. The CPS workers called 911 again and requested that officers “assist” them for the home visit because, you know, I’m so out of control and dangerous…
(the audio clips below are from the recording
Stef sent me in the text above, she wrote
her thoughts below each of them)
Wait,
“with our children?!”
The police came last night because of stuff going on at John’s work…
What does that have to do with our three?
Did she just say our kids need to be safety planned out of our home? Meaning leave our home!? Why?
This lady has no idea how hard it is to find someone to watch all 3 of our kids…
Okay,
so apparently whatever the officer was worried about last night with information “being continued” is happening.
John’s mental health is in question
because he cares about his students &
brought those concerns to his administration?
How in the world does any of this have to do with the safety of our kids?
If my only options are:
The kids being removed from our home today
or
John having no unsupervised contact,
obviously, we prefer the latter.
Do you know what it would do to our kids to leave our home suddenly?
Do you have any idea we’ve been telling them for years —they are safe & loved & never going anywhere—
in a desperate attempt
to help their brains & bodies believe that!?
You’re threatening to compromise
the only stability they’ve ever known
LETS TALK ABOUT CPS FOR A MOMENT
Before you give me any of the why-are-you-worried-about-CPS-if-you’ve-got-nothing-to-hide bullshit, let’s clear some things up.
First, we’ve all heard horror stories about CPS.* Which is enough reason to be concerned.
Our family is pretty familiar with CPS for other reasons. We’ve been a licensed foster family with the City of Norfolk for 5 years and have taken in 7 1/2 placements
Not like half a human...
(Baby Z is now our godson and… not a baby at all anymore. He’s somehow already three! He was never technically placed in our home, but we were on his care team and we still see him on weekends whenever we can)
When you say yes to a placement, you are also saying yes to all of the court dates, hearings, visitations, FAPT calls, appointments, etc. If a kid enters into care, it’s through a CPS worker. That worker also attends hearings and makes court appearances. We’ve seen a few of those stories play out first-hand in some of the cases involving our foster kids. We know what kind of unchecked power CPS has and what happens when its abused.
THE FIRST CALL
we ever received as foster parents was on Stef’s birthday.
We hadn’t even gotten a call letting us know we’d been officially certified yet…
but when we got the call about a sibling group of three (ages 6, 4, and 4) that needed a forever home, we decided to say yes.
Well, not immediately. I remember we got the call when we were driving down Tidewater
(not flooded this time)
and I instantly whipped the car around in the middle of traffic.
“John what are you doing?!” — “We gotta go by the school! Which school is it? Why didn’t they tell us when we bought the house? That’s gotta be a part of it. When’s soccer practice? How does a pack and play work?”
“Breath John, Breathe” — “I’m iffy on the PTA, I’m not sure they’ll like me…”
The Littles came to stay with us a couple of weekends, then a week, and after that we were convinced I was convinced.
Stef was way ahead of me, like usual
and yes, we were instantly in over our heads.
When we adopted the Littles five years ago, we adopted them out of the foster care system, so the overwhelming reason for our intense aversion to CPS involvement in our lives,
is to protect our children from being re-traumatized.
When the Littles first came to us, they had already lived through hell. Our home was their first experience living free from abuse. They’ve lived through the kind of psychological trauma that grown men often don’t recover from. This means their little brains are hardwired for survival. The traumatic experiences they lived through reshaped the brain by creating overactive survival pathways. Thankfully, the brain has the incredible ability to heal and rewire itself by creating new neuro-pathways through neuroplasticity. But we can’t do it for them, we can only help by creating the best possible environment by making life as consistent and predictable as possible.
Their brains can’t create new neuro-pathways if they’re relying on their old survival pathways.
So, every single day
and in every single situation,
Stef and I fight for their healing by creating an environment where they don’t feel the need to survive and mitigating the fallout if and when it fails. It’s exhausting.
But we love our children and it’s all we can do.
So we fight like hell.
Because they needed a forever home (parental rights had already been terminated and they were waiting in the system to be adopted), we used forever language with the Littles from the the moment they walked in the door of our home—
"you belong here"
"this will always be your home”
“we will be your Mom and your Dad, always"
"we’re right here, we’re not going anywhere"
"your last name will be is 'CARR' one day"
"our home is a safe place"
"you will always have everything you need"
"we love you and care about you"
"our job is to help you and keep you safe"
“don’t forget to remember you’re dearly loved”
“and when you forget to remember what’s true,
don’t forget to remember our love never runs out on you.”
Things like that.
We’ve worked tirelessly on healthy attachment
[and scheduled all the appointments: therapy sessions, IEP/504 meetings, OT appointments,
psychological assessments, parent-teacher conferences, years of speech therapy, etc.]
to help them heal and get caught up on all the things they missed out on because they did not have consistent, loving caregivers during their early years.
We hesitate to share this because we are always conscious of protecting our kids story.
It’s theirs to tell, after all.
But I do think it matters for context in the midst of all of this so I’ll share in brief:
All three of our children have a severe PTSD with complex trauma.
(the same diagnoses that soldiers receive after watching their buddies get blown up right next to them in war)
We fight especially hard for our oldest (who remembers their heartbreaking/terrifying past far better than the younger two) she is quick to revert to skepticism, mistrust, and defensiveness because she was hurt so bad and those things are what helped her survive.
SO,
what I’m saying is,
they’ve seen that white car pull up before
they’ve seen the ladies with clipboards
and heard them knock on the door
and
Every other time its happened,
they were taken away to live in another different place,
somewhere else.
In one instant,
years of healing,
therapeutic intervention,
and trauma-informed parenting
would be unraveled.
They would instantly fully feel the constant state of panic that was just starting to go away and immediately be dead certain that all the things they’ve heard us say for years, were never true.
"I knew it"
"We’re leaving again"
"We’re not safe”
"We’ll never have a forever Mom and Dad”
“Who wants a family or a Mom and a Dad anyway?”
Unfortunately, none of that is guesswork.
We know now.
The Littles were forced to live through another nightmare.
One we promised them would never happen again.
CPS invaded our lives and home on false pretenses justified by arrogant pride and selfishness.
And me and Stef?
We had to watch as all the healing we fought for and the signs of real, genuine, true healthy growth we were just begining to see
get f*cking obliterated.
⌁ All three of the Littles have been severely re-traumatized.
⌁ When my son was interviewed alone, he worriedly kept asking if they were going to have to go “back into foster care”
(CPS documented that as evidence of our abuse and neglect.)
⌁ We are seeing behaviors we haven’t seen since they first came home to live with us
⌁ All three re-entered intensive trauma therapy.
⌁ Our oldest, the one we fight especially hard for?
She was admitted to a partial hospitalization program for almost three months. And had to spend a week in an intensive inpatient trauma center at one pointduring the crisis period.
I cried writing all that
and while editing it
both times
So fair warning, the audio clip below is brutal. I mean it.
It’s jumping ahead in the story a bit but
we’ve just found it so difficult to communicate
the depth of pain and loss
we think it’s important that folks understand,
my oldest would know better than most
I think one day, when she sees this,
she’ll be glad she could help people know.
My oldest daughter called Stef after drop off their first day back at school after CPS inserted themselves into our lives.
That’s her voice on the phone —
So, I’m driving (not flying) towards the house
but I don’t make it there.
Stef calls to put me on speaker phone
and the CPS worker immediately makes a threat:
“we are standing outside your door.”
And she is asking us to sign a plan that will enforce NO CONTACT with my children. Normally, I’d jump at the chance to respond in-kind to that passive aggressive BS but for maybe the first time in my life, I don’t feel like opening my mouth.
It’s just, I mean…
She was holding my kids hostage.
FSW Hunter is reading from a safety plan she is drafting on our doorstep and not making any sense.
She’s frustrated because we’re trying to understand, but we’re really freaking frustrated because she’s talking about our lives and our children as if the details don’t freaking matter.
Over and over, FSW Hunter (CPS) voices her annoyance when we ask whether she meant “no unsupervised contact” or “no contact” and whether I could return after the weekend or after “the recommendation of the agency.”
“Ma’am I’m not concerned about our status as a foster family at the moment”
Is she trying to use our home being open to placements as leverage? What the hell is wrong with her?
How can someone with so much power
(like the power to take your children from you)
be so unbelievably stupid?
Because, she’s talking to us about how we need to comply because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to be a foster family with NDHS
butttt
I’m pretty sure she just threatened if we don’t sign to issue a removal today aka
TO TAKE OUR CHILDREN.
So, I could give a shit about our home remaining open to take foster placements right now…
In those clips, you can hear she’s not interested in clarifying. She wants us to sign the safety plan (so I will be removed from our home and barred from contact with our kids) or threatens to remove our kids.
Not questions—leverage.
I’m asking what the allegation is, what the document says, why police are here again…
and the answer keeps snapping back to the same fork in the road:
Sign / agree… or we go to court.
Pearle even goes so far as to say “If you do not comply with the safety plan then we have the authority to remove the children now and have court intervention.”
Even though I disagreed with every damn thing they said, in order to communicate to the department and show them we do in fact take the safety of our children seriously, we agreed for me to voluntarily leave the house and spend the weekend in a hotel. So I and gave my word to the supervisor over the phone that I would not have any contact with our kids for the remainder of the weekend.
Of course we found out it didn’t matter at all to them. They we’re never concerned about the safety of our kids to begin with (obvious to us now but not so much back then)
Even still, they tried to catch us in every small thing. They would drive by for no reason, park down the street and just sit. We we’re going in an out our back door, pulling the curtains closed. For Stef and I both, white sedans that drive on our block instinctively get a double take.
What we didn’t know had already happened before 2 CPS workers and 2 NPD officers showed up on our porch:
Second Police Dispatch, First CPS Home Visit
FRIDAY MAY 16TH - 12:42 pm Norfolk CPS called for police assistance again.
—this time to support a home visit.
This is the second CPS‑initiated welfare check in 12 hours. The NPD event report states CPS wanted officers to assist them so they can “speak with the male about his behavior,” not to respond to any new allegation of abuse or neglect.
“And what is the wellness check for?” — “The dad was reported to have manic and unusual behavior…and anti-government” “He is a foster parent.”
(She mentions I’m a foster parent because… that fact triggers an escalation of the situation.)
This is how reporting safety concerns at my workplace turned into a child welfare proceeding: the same odd phrases and descriptors repeated over and over until they are enmeshed in systems to sound like established fact.
“NPD responded yesterday, last night, so we’re just requesting assistance to meet with the family.”
you’ll notice she doesn’t say “and officers reported that everything was fine and we didn’t need to be showing up at their house like that.” Instead, in the recording, she makes the situation/me seem crazed and out of control and that’s how they justify needing police assitance, again.
-
911 AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
I swear whatever intern in the Norfolk records room is in charge of redactions intentionally makes the bleeping three times as loud as the rest of the audio.
and if he or she is reading this…
objectively, that’s pretty funny
Near the end of the call, FSW Pearle reveals they are making the 911 call from
our kids’ elementary school
Before anyone knocked on our door that day, Norfolk CPS had already been to our children’s school.
The two CPS workers went to our children’s elementary school and interviewed all three of our kids.
—TJ at 11:30 a.m., T at 11:50 a.m., and A at around noon—
without prior notice to either of us or securing our consent.
Norfolk CPS records confirm these interviews and show that the agency classified this as a Family Assessment, not a formal investigation, yet proceeded with intrusive, investigation‑style interviews at school.
All three of our kids were pulled out of class and interviewed individually, without any other adult present. Interviewing children alone is explicitly discouraged in the CPS policy manual as part of the family assessment track. There should’ve been no need because a family assessment is not an exercise in determining whether abuse or neglect occurred. The goal is supposedly to “offer services” to families as a preventative measure.
There was
No emergency at the school.
No allegation that our children were in immediate danger.
No attempt to verify guardianship or even notify us.
Our three children
—who have already lived through removal, interrogation, and institutional control with PTSD/Complex Trauma diagnoses to prove it—
Were questioned by two CPS workers in a room alone. Alone in the middle of a school day. Alone in a room being asked who knows what. I’m telling you, I cannot describe the rage I felt when we found out our children had been questioned, in a room. Alone.
Each of my children were pulled from class by CPS and made to sit in a room with the two workers that would later show up to our home to force us to sign a plan that hadn’t been written yet.
And like I said,
‘matter fact, like FSW Hunter (CPS) said, this ain’t the first time we’ve met.
Less than a year ago, she removed and placed our former foster son into foster care. When our kids were questioned by CPS you should know this:
Unlike most children in the world, they are familiar with CPS both because of their past
AND
because we continue to be a foster family so they are more familiar with that government agency than most folks
However, when FSW Hunter (CPS) brings up their former foster brother in the interview, they realize she is the one who took him into foster care. And they also know Mom and Dad helped him go back home and the judge didn’t think he should have entered care. By the time CPS showed up at our home that afternoon, they were already carrying one-sided, unverified statements taken from our children in secret.
By the time CPS was on our porch, they had:
ALREADY
been to the school to interview our children
ALREADY
decided how they wanted the interviews to go
ALREADY
wrote each of our children’s full names on their forms
to call down to the office.
They knew exactly who they were.
They knew they weren’t foster placements.
Calling them “foster children” in the safety plan was a narrative choice, not confusion.
That heightens the perceived risk of the case,
triggers a more aggressive agency response,
makes CPS the hero for rescuing wards from a dangerous foster parent
and
erases the legal status and reality that they are our children
EVEN IF CPS lawfully uses their authority to question children without parental consent, they are still required to notify the parents at the earliest possible chance.
You know how we found out?
When CPS finally leaves, Stef immediately races to the kids’ school in time for dismissal where she gets our three plus one (because she still takes our former foster son to and from school every day). Stef found out from our youngest, through tears, that CPS had been to the school before coming to our front door and pulled each of our children out of class to question them alone. No other adult in the room, no siblings to comfort each other, alone. Just alone. The Littles were subjected to secretive interviews at school without parental knowledge or consent. Each of them.
ALONE.
I ain’t steppin’ outta shit, all my papers legit
On SATURDAY, MAY 17TH: Third Police Dispatch, Second CPS Visit
Here we go.
Stef arranged for our kids to stay at different friends’ homes for the day so we could meet briefly at the house, talk through options, and avoid CPS finding any other asinine excuse to torment our children.
Our neighbor texts Stef and says there’s a white car parked in front of her house. The on-call CPS worker had been sent to our home to try to convince us to sign the safety plan.
Again.
This time, the CPS worker is accompanied by three responding units: two officers and a Norfolk PD sergeant. This is now the third NPD contact in roughly 36 hours. The second CPS‑initiated home visit.
The written safety plan presented was not a simple weekend agreement. It stated that:
I was not allowed to return to my home;
I must have “no contact” with my children;
I must obtain mental‑health services and submit to an “assessment” at the department’s discretion; and
These conditions would remain in place throughout the assessment period, with no clear end date and no mechanism for review.
On the porch, I told them
—plainly—
that no reasonable person would sign a document with no timeline, undefined services, and no clarity on what would happen if we disagreed with CPS’s demands.
I also said,
equally plainly,
although we refused to sign, that I was willing to continue staying away from the kids for the rest of the weekend while we consulted counsel.
We also point out, again, that the safety plan referred to our children as “foster children,” even though the agency’s own records list us as adoptive parents.
In my recording, I pointed out to the NPD sergeant and he acknowledges:
We were certified foster parents in good standing with the city for five years;
Our kids were adopted, not in foster care;
The allegation had effectively been “waved off” by NPD two nights before when they found no concerns; and
The same storylines from the school (drug dogs, “drug ring,” mental‑health insinuations) were being blended into the CPS narrative without clear sourcing.
Throughout, Stef and I asked for one basic protection: let our attorney review any document that would bar me from my own home indefinitely and require mental‑health treatment at CPS’s discretion. The sergeant agreed that was reasonable and even suggested we could “line out” clauses, but the backdrop was explicit: if we did not sign, CPS would “go to court Monday.”
In the end,
our CPS files collapses all of that into
“no cooperation”
and my refusal to give the children’s exact locations.
We had already done what CPS claimed to want—voluntary separation and a weekend without contact—while refusing to sign away rights on a defective form built on misclassified “foster children,” undefined treatment demands, and no end date.
“The Family Assessment Narrative” condenses this to a single line: “FSW Hall responded to the home in an effort to see the children with NPD” and I “reported that the children were not there, and that [I] would not provide information on their whereabouts.” (The recording clearly documents Stef, upon their arrival, explaining that each of our kids was with friends and offers to FaceTime them).
“Family Assessment” in Name Only
Under Virginia policy, a Family Assessment is supposed to be the lower-intensity track: voluntary services, no rush to court, collaboration over coercion.
That definitely ain’t what happened.
Instead,
CPS
Secretly interviewed three trauma-survivor children at school
Used the home visit to demand I leave the house immediately
Threatened same-day removal to force compliance
It was procedurally ass-backwards
all the coercive power of an investigation, none of the due-process protections.
-
OUR CASE vs. VDSS Policy / VA Law
All of this did eventually collapse under its own weight—
but not before it destroyed years of progress towards healthy attachment.
AND
TRUST.
THERE’S MUCH MORE TO THIS PART OF THE STORY THAN WHAT WE’VE SHARED HERE.
BUT WE HAVE TO EXPLAIN THE LETTER I GOT FROM CHESAPEAKE PUBLIC SCHOOLS FIRST.
ALSO,
I should mention something about my text messages with Williams…You know the ones I shared earlier?
Well, if you scroll up in our messages,
like a swipe and a half,
That’s not a standardized measurement
this is what you’d see:
And if you didn’t know any better,
those pictures might fit the description:
“three to four foster care children,
all black or hispanic”
You could see that, if you didn’t know any better.
And I’m sure Williams did.
(because, my kids have been in her office,
they’ve made Christmas ornaments for her the last couple years
and she’s given them snacks from the bowl on her desk)
I suppose there’s still a chance she thought they were our foster kids
but you’d find it hard to convince us.
By the way,
We found out it was Williams
who made the CPS report.
And that she is responsible for all of this shit
unfolding in the first place.
We know this because
the SRO wrote it in a police report
Not the one from May 12th about
“a teacher… selling drugs to students”,
A different one, written the day after
I reported to Dr. Shultz and DSSS…
This time, we can say with
complete certainty
who the subject of the investigation is.
ME.
THE
RECEIPTS
-
RECEIPTS GRID
-
CPS REPORT ALLEGATION EXTRACTION TABLES
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911 AUDIO TRANSCRIPT - P25051600322 ECCPH08
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NPD EVENT REPORT P25051600322
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OUR CASE vs. VDSS Policy / VA Law