Wake Co., NC, Return Child with Bone Disease to his Innocent Parents Now!
- by: Susan V
- recipient: Wake County Assistant DA, Melanie Shekita and Human Services Director Regina Pettaway
A Raleigh, North Carolina mother wanted a child so bad she endured eight miscarriages before her son Micah was born in in 2014. But Marty Peele didn’t know that her miscarriages were likely related to a vitamin D deficiency that also caused Micah to have brittle bones - until after Wake County took Micah from her and she was charged with child abuse.
Marty’s story of abuse at the hands of NC's child welfare and justice systems was told by Health Impact News’ Medical Kidnap in 2015 and last month by Raleigh's ABC News 11.
According to both sources, Marty was elated over Micah’s birth and doted on him, and when she picked him up one day at four months old and heard a “popping” under his arm, she and his father, Derrick, quickly took him to the hospital. Xrays showed that Micah had suffered numerous rib fractures, and Marty was not only blamed, she was viciously attacked by a police detective and demonized by initial reports in the press.
Since July 2014, she has not been allowed to even see her son.
However it was not long before Marty found the cause of her son’s fractures, and she now has several medical experts backing her. The ABC report notes that hospital records had already revealed evidence of Micah’s infantile rickets before the experts weighed in - a vitamin D deficiency. But despite all the evidence of Marty's innocence, Wake County Child Protective Services and the courts still refuse to return Micah to his parents.
Sign this petition to demand that Micah be returned to Marty and Derrick immediately!
To Wake County Human Services Director Regina Pettaway and Wake County Assistant District Attorney, Melanie Shekita:
The evidence overwhelmingly supports Marty Peele’s and Derrick Dover’s innocence, and yet you continue to torment these parents and abuse their child’s right to be with them, without justification.
Your actions and conduct fly in the face of what the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services says in its mission statement and elsewhere on its website version of its DSS Manual, which states: “We believe that the family is the fundamental resource for the nurturing of children and that children have a right to their own families.”
The manual also states the following:
Judgments about families are often based on incomplete information, and can wait. A crisis can be an opportunity for change; inappropriate intervention can do harm. It is our job to instill hope because even families who feel hopeless can grow and change. This means that we as an agency arrange our schedules to accommodate the child and his/her family, that the family’s ideas and resources are given the same legitimacy as those proposed by professionals, and that mutual agreement in decision making is a primary goal [emphasis added].
Based on what the state Department of Health and Human Services says about the certain harm caused by removing a child from his biological parents, about reserving judgment and instilling hope - about giving legitimacy to the family’s ideas and resources - it’s very clear that Wake County DSS actions are not in line with what the state says is proper.
This case with Micah is not the first time a Child Protective Services agency has overstepped its authority and failed to accept expert opinion about a child’s diagnosis.
ABC news says that ”Cases have been popping up across the U.S. about parents losing their child to rare bone diseases.” And this source cites three other recent cases.
Another, less recent, highly publicized child removal case, where a genetic bone disease was misdiagnosed as child abuse, occurred in Virginia and was documented in a 2007 Reader’s Digest story.
Although it was established that the child in the Virginia case had a genetic bone disorder known as Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or OI , according to the RD report, Virginia caseworkers not only ignored that diagnosis, they pressured some doctors to amend diagnoses that favored the parents innocence. In the end Attorney Dorothy Isaacs sued the State of Virginia on behalf of these egregiously wronged parents and won a near million-dollar settlement based on the negligence and wrongdoing committed by caseworkers and medical professionals as detailed below:
“On October 11, 2005, Isaacs and her co-counsel began laying out the details of how the family had been shattered. After reviewing a thousand pages of records, experts in both child abuse and OI concluded the military doctors “breached the standards of care” by too quickly assuming Liliana had been abused by her father, by not doing a differential diagnosis, by not testing her, and then by insisting she had been abused even after the OI diagnosis was made.”
Despite the VA case and a number of others like it, Wake County has failed to even consider that the agency, doctors and the police may have made a very serious and harmful mistake.
Are lawsuits like the kind Attorney Issacs won in Virginia and those (with much higher awards) like Attorney Shawn McMillan is winning in California what it’s going to take to get Wake County to return Micah to his parents?
Although Wake County failed to reserve judgment, as NC DHHS directs your agency to do, and punished this family severely, your agency still continues to torment these Raleigh parents and continues inflicting the certain harm they have already caused Micah, which could not possibly be in his best interests.
The police detective whose interrogation exposed in the ABC report shows he had no respect for Marty and Derrick’s human rights or the presumption of innocence, and the press that demonized Micah’s parents owe them an apology and compensation for the trauma they have put them through.
But there is no way Wake County can ever make up for what it has done not only to Marty, Derrick and their son, but also possibly to other children because of the fear it has instilled in parents over taking their children to doctors to be checked for physical concerns.
There have been no rational or just decisions in this case so far, and it should now be clear that Marty and Derrick are innocent and that Micah suffered from a disease that caused brittle bones and other conditions that led to his fragility.
Therefore I, the undersigned, and others who join me in supporting this petition, demand that you return Micah to his parents at once and that you drop the charges against this innocent mother.
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