Five months after Child Protective Services (CPS) tore their four-year-old son from their arms, a Texas homeschooling family is finally free of CPS’ threats after the agency agreed to drop all charges against them.
On Tuesday, Kaufman County family court judge Tracy Gray signed the dismissal order officially concluding CPS’s high-handed, totally unnecessary case against Daniel and Ashley Pardo — a case in which CPS had taken away their son on the grounds that his parents were “seeking medical care the child did not need,” reported CBN News.
According to CBN:
The Pardos’ problems apparently stem from a hospital stay in the spring when their young [son] Drake, who has had numerous health challenges, suffered from complications during a medical procedure. As a result, he had to remain in the hospital for several more days. During that time, the Pardos say their son’s doctor, who had performed the procedure, did not come by to check on him at all. After he was released, the Pardos got a new doctor and filed a complaint against the doctor at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas for not properly caring for their son.
LifeSiteNews stated that the doctor had refused to visit Drake because he disagreed with his parents’ desire for a second opinion on which type of feeding tube the boy needed.
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After the Pardos filed their complaint, to which the hospital said it would respond within 45 days, the doctor turned over Drake’s medical records to the hospital’s child-abuse office. Dr. Suzanne Dakil, who heads the office, then authored an affidavit expressing concern that Drake was a victim of “medical child abuse.”
On June 20, 46 days after the complaint was filed, CPS, along with uniformed police officers, appeared at the Pardos’ home. Previously, the only indication that CPS had a beef with the family was a business card left on their door two weeks earlier. CPS did not respond to requests for information from either the Pardos or their attorney in the interim. Instead, they “suddenly declared an ‘emergency’ and forcibly removed Drake from his home,” according to the Texas Homeschool Coalition (THSC).
At a July 2 hearing, CPS contended that “the ‘emergency’ which justified the removal of Drake was their concern that the family might seek medical care in the future which CPS believed might be unnecessary,” noted THSC.
During the hearing, Dakil admitted that she had never met any of the Pardos, including Drake; had no firsthand knowledge of his medical conditions; had only offered unconfirmed speculations about what might happen; did not consider his situation an emergency; and had not requested that he be taken from his parents.
CPS, meanwhile, confessed that they had never seen or talked to anyone connected with the case aside from Dakil; had not even tried to resolve the matter short of removing Drake; had no firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing by his parents; and decided there was an “emergency” based on both Dakil’s affidavit and the fact that Daniel and Ashley Pardo had failed to appear at a June 10 meeting requested by Children’s Medical Center — a meeting CPS had intentionally not told the Pardos about. What’s more, CPS was found to have failed to respond to valid discovery requests from the Pardos’ attorney.
Nonetheless, the judge not only upheld CPS’s seizure of Drake but slapped a gag order on his parents.
Drake remained in foster care until October 24, when the Texas Supreme Court ordered CPS to return him to his parents. However, wrote THSC, “CPS continued its interference in the family’s life and its unfounded allegations against the family.”
Finally, on December 3, CPS agreed to drop its case against the Pardos on the condition that Daniel and Ashley jointly make medical decisions for Drake, something they have always done, according to THSC.
“The fact that CPS has decided to simply walk away from the case after dragging the Pardo family through this trauma for more than five months shows that there was never a case against the family to begin with,” THSC director of public policy Jeremy Newman told CBN. “The Pardo family is not able to walk away so easily. This trauma will follow them for years, possibly forever.”
Michael Tennant is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The New American.
