Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Crystal and Jarvis Bryant: Colorado: Another hospital horror story involving a pediatrician trained in child abuse, beautifully reported by Reporter Jennifer Brown of The Colorado Sun, under the heading, "Their baby was taken away and placed in foster care for 164 days. It turns out, he had a bone disorder."..."When a child protection caseworker told Crystal Bryant they were taking her 5-month-old boy, the young mother dropped to her knees on the hospital floor. “Take me,” she pleaded. “For my son to stay home, take me, I don’t care.” She begged God and anyone listening, but “they still took him,” Bryant recalled, shaking her head and wiping tears as she recounted the worst moment of her life. Child welfare and police officers made Bryant and her husband, Jarvis Bryant, leave the Colorado Springs hospital room before a foster mother arrived to take their baby away. Their lives were shattered. The Bryants, who moved to Fountain when Jarvis was assigned to Fort Carson, were charged with felony child abuse, accused of breaking multiple bones in their only child’s body. Crystal’s recently earned nursing certificate was revoked. Jarvis, a U.S. Army specialist, lost his security clearance, stripping him of his job in aircraft and vehicle supply and relegating him to paper shuffling. Worst of all, baby Jace was gone. Their apartment seemed empty. They felt powerless, more than lost — “like death,” Crystal said. The Bryants’ son was one of 4,772 Colorado children removed from their homes by child welfare authorities and living in foster care last year. But their story isn’t the typical tale of a child rescued from abuse or neglect. It’s the opposite. The Bryants’ nightmare lasted 164 days, and its end arrived more like a ripped-from-the-headlines television drama than real life."


PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "As Jarvis drove to the hospital, Crystal told the doctor that her husband had dropped their son in the bathtub. Instantly, they were suspects. Medical staff at Memorial Hospital Central ordered a full-body workup. What they found was devastating: Not only did Jace have a broken leg, he had 10 fractured ribs and two fractured wrists. The leg fracture was fresh, but the rest were in various stages of healing.  The police came, interviewing Crystal, 24, and Jarvis, 27, in separate rooms. A caseworker arrived from the El Paso County child welfare division, and a pediatrician with training in child abuse examined Jace. A detective did “voice stress analysis tests” by recording and analyzing their voices, deciding both parents were “deceptive” — Jarvis about knowing who caused Jace’s injuries and Crystal about whether she hurt her son."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Do you know there is a warrant out for your arrest?” the guard asked, Jarvis recalled. “Did you not pay a ticket or something?” There was a warrant for Crystal, too. Felony child abuse charges, in addition to the civil case to determine whether to terminate their parental rights, had been filed against them. The class 3 felony is punishable by up to 16 years in prison.  The Bryants, neither of whom have any criminal history, were handcuffed and taken in separate military police cars and held on post for an hour and a half, when city law officers transported them to the El Paso County Jail. “Mug shots. The whole orange jumpsuit. Everything,” Jarvis said. They spent the night and were able to post bond the next morning.  While Crystal slipped further into depression, Jarvis was the fire. He contacted the ACLU and the NAACP to see if they could help with legal defense, though Jarvis and Crystal were each assigned two public attorneys for the civil and criminal cases. He spent hours reading medical records and court cases. “This is literally our lives, our son’s life, our livelihood, our well-being, our mental state, pretty much everything that we could ever think of is at stake,” he said. “I’m not going to sit here and let this happen. It’s one thing if you know you did something wrong. But if you know you didn’t do anything wrong, why are you going to go down innocent?” Jarvis went to every hospital and doctor’s office that had seen Jace, beginning with his May 22, 2018, birth at Evans Hospital. He collected 1,200 pages of medical records, along with discs of all of Jace’s X-rays, including those taken before and after his surgery and tube placements. They hardly slept. They fought, wondering if losing Jace would break them."

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "One sleepless night in March, Jarvis stumbled on a YouTube video of TV journalist Katie Couric interviewing two families in 2013 who were wrongly accused of child abuse after their children were found with broken bones. A Texas father was arrested after his 1-month-old daughter was found with nine bone fractures. Another father was accused of abusing his twin infants after they both had leg fractures. Both were eventually cleared because the babies all had a brittle bone disorder.The video led Jarvis to a website called Fractured Families, a network for parents of children with unexplained fractures. And he fired off multiple emails — titled “Can you please help my family?”  Through the network, Jarvis found contact information for more than a dozen physicians and radiologists who were experts in bone fractures and emailed all of them. “We need help from a medical professional urgently to try and fight this matter properly and get our baby back and prove our innocence,” he wrote. “It just doesn’t make any sense how a baby like ours has such a lengthy medical history and no one has done their due diligence to properly rule out everything before they automatically say child abuse. Please help us.” Two doctors agreed to help, for free. Dr. Susan Gootnick, a radiologist in California who began tudying alleged child abuse cases about seven years ago, looked at Jace’s X-rays and noticed immediately that his bones appeared “washed out” because they weren’t getting enough calcium. It made sense, given Jace had not been able to eat by mouth for the first several months of his life. His scans were consistent with metabolic bone disease and rickets, she wrote in a report that Jarvis gave to his attorney. “Obviously, the baby wasn’t getting the appropriate nutrients that he needed to grow,” Gootnick said in an interview with The Sun. “These bones break under stresses that a normal bone would not break under.” What’s more, Gootnick said, the age of the fractures made it likely that Jace’s ribs and wrists were broken by medical staff during one of the many times they reinserted his nasal tube — unsedated."

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PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "The Bryants, who are black, believe they were victims of a racial bias that exists in the child welfare system. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report showed that African American children are placed in foster care at almost twice the rate of white children, and they stay in foster care longer. Two studies in Texas found that even when African American families were assigned lower risk scores in child-abuse assessments, they were more likely than white families to have their children removed.  El Paso County child welfare officials declined to discuss the Bryants’ case, citing confidentiality laws. They said it is extremely rare that parents are accused of abuse and then exonerated, although they could not say how often it happens because the state child welfare data system does not keep track. "

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STORY: "Their baby was taken away and placed in foster care for 164 days. It turns out, he had a bone disorder,  by reporter 00 000, published by The Colorado Sun on February 10, 2020.

SUB-HEADING: The Bryants’ son was one of 4,772 Colorado children removed from their homes by child welfare authorities and living in foster care last year. But their story isn’t the typical tale of a child rescued from abuse or neglect.
PHOTO CAPTION: "Jace Bryant, now 20 months old, lived with a foster family from age 5 months to age 10 months, and then lived with family friends of the Bryants for two more months before he was allowed to return home. 
PHOTO CAPTION:  Crystal Bryant shows the feeding port for her son, Jace Bryant, who was placed in foster care after doctors found he had 13 bone fractures. It was later determined the fractures were caused by neonatal rickets.

https://coloradosun.com/2020/02/10/wrongly-accused-child-abuse/
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"  section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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