Pubdate: Sun, 13 May 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Nina Bernstein
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm (Women)

AT HALE HOUSE, BROKEN BONDS AND PAIN FOR A LITTLE GIRL LOST

Amanda was the last of the babies Lorraine E. Hale showed the 
would-be adoptive couple as they walked through Hale House in 1993. 
The couple said they were told the child's mother was in prison and 
had no interest in her. The grandparents did not want her, either.

"She was standing up in the crib, arms out, like, "Take me!' " 
Shellie Bransford recalled of Amanda, an 8- month-old who instantly 
captivated her and her husband, David Seavey. Weeks later, approved 
by Hale House as potential adoptive parents, they took Amanda home. 
The next five months brought the joy of her first Christmas, first 
birthday and first steps. And then Lorraine Hale, president of Hale 
House, suddenly demanded a meeting, seized the baby, and sent her far 
away.

The painful consequences are still playing out today - for the 
couple, the mother and a lost little girl.

In retrospect, everything about the brokering had been odd. Hale 
House, the nationally heralded refuge in Harlem for what it called 
unwanted babies, had required no formal paperwork. And despite the 
couple's requests, they had not communicated with the imprisoned 
birth mother.

It turned out she had known nothing of her child's placement, and in 
fact had been begging for information in unanswered letters to Hale 
House. And far from being indifferent, an ailing grandfather in 
California had once threatened to sue Hale House over Amanda's care.

With her rushed journey, Amanda began a spiral from place to place, 
and from family into foster care. At one point, at age 6, she was 
placed by an Arkansas court with people who put her to work in their 
traveling cleaning business. She is 8 now, newly adopted by the last 
of many sets of foster parents. But throughout, Amanda's picture 
stayed on Hale House's Web site, helping it collect millions in 
donations.

Amanda is only one of the hundreds of babies who passed through Hale 
House, and her case may not be typical. But her story, pieced 
together from interviews, Arkansas foster care records and documents 
provided by her birth mother, illustrates that at Hale House, where 
raising money was a priority and government oversight an 
afterthought, the interests of children could get lost.

Questions about those children have sharpened as Hale House has been 
buffeted by weeks of revelations that charity money was misspent, 
birth parents misled, government officials duped. A criminal 
investigation is under way. State investigators are reviewing the 
dozen Hale House adoptions they know of. A new Hale House board has 
said it will force Lorraine Hale to resign.

In response to questions about Amanda's case, Dr. Hale and her 
husband, Jesse L. DeVore, who has served as the agency's public 
relations director, would only issue a statement through a lawyer. "I 
have devoted my life to the service of children and acted in their 
best interests as God has given me the light to see, following my 
mother's example. My husband has assisted me. We have treated the 
children in the care of Hale House with love, respect, and 
single-minded dedication."

Hale House in recent years has become mainly the recourse of 
imprisoned mothers eager to keep their children, although it 
continued to call the babies castoffs. It stated its first mission 
was reuniting families, but it also maintained an obscure - and 
unmonitored - corporate authority to handle adoptions.

In practice, said Luther Jones, who has a master's degree in social 
work and who worked as a consultant there from 1990 to 1995, Hale 
House ignored the basic requirements of the casework needed either to 
reunite children with their mothers or to place them for adoption.

Little effort, he said, was made to identify fathers or reach out to 
mothers, or even to collect birth certificates. Mr. Jones also said 
that Dr. Hale often spoke of the parents with contempt. Yet he never 
knew Hale House to complete a termination of parental rights, and it 
lacked a lawyer qualified to handle one in court.

"These children were warehoused in Hale House," he said. "These 
children were nothing but property."

In the case of Amanda, what became an unforgettable bond for one 
couple started almost accidentally.

Ms. Bransford and Mr. Seavey, administrators at Riverside Church in 
Manhattan, had not even considered the famous baby shelter when they 
first sought to adopt. But Dr. Hale's husband showed up at the church 
in the fall of 1993, saying that he had heard they were looking.

Only later would it make them uneasy that at the time Mr. DeVore owed 
the church $5,000 in rent for his production of a financially 
ill-fated musical about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and that it 
was Ms. Bransford's job to try to collect the debt. "He invited us to 
come talk to Lorraine about a Hale House adoption," Ms. Bransford 
recalled. "He said, `We can set you up.' "

They had been to Hale House once before, after they had organized the 
Riverside Church funeral of Dr. Hale's mother, who in the 1980's 
became a national icon as "Mother Hale" when Ronald Reagan praised 
her for taking in babies born addicted to drugs or alcohol. But this 
time, said Ms. Bransford, who has since left her church job, the 
visit began a sequence of events that became "so confusing, so 
fraught with strangeness," and ultimately so shattering, that she had 
tried to set down the facts as they happened in letters to Dr. Hale 
and notes to herself.

The couple knew the birth mother would have to relinquish rights 
before a formal adoption process could begin, but they said Dr. Hale 
had assured them that the mother, who had given up her first child 
years before, would in time do the same with Amanda. Dr. Hale's 
advice, Mr. Seavey summarized, was "Be patient, go through the 
process, bond."

But the first scare came only a week after they had been approved and 
allowed to take Amanda home to a small West Side apartment and a 
large house in Stroudsburg, Pa. They had set up a nursery, bought a 
car seat, and introduced Amanda to colleagues at church.

Then Dr. Hale suddenly commanded Amanda's return, relenting on 
condition that the baby spend three days a week in day care at Hale 
House - to keep contact, she said.

Mr. Jones, the social worker who had approved the couple, cited 
another possible explanation: Amanda's fair coloring, a rarity in the 
Hale House nursery, was important in motivating wealthy white people 
to make donations, he said. Amanda's mother, who is white, had said 
that Amanda's father was black.

There were other troubling observations that Ms. Bransford and Mr. 
Seavey recorded, and that former Hale House employees support. The 
Hale House doctor, for unexplained reasons, was not authorized to 
write prescriptions. Hale House had failed to seek Medicaid coverage 
for its wards, and at the clinic where they were taken, the bills 
were so overdue that once, when Amanda fell ill, she was denied 
treatment.

Yet Dr. Hale's executive suite in the adjacent brownstone was being 
renovated with brass chandeliers and hand-carved doors. None of it 
mattered, the couple added, so long as they had Amanda. When Mr. 
Seavey came to Hale House to get her from day care, he recalled, 
weeping, she would recognize his voice, shake the safety gate at the 
top of the stairs and call to be released into his arms.

"This child was bonded to them," recalled Mr. Jones.

The rupture was total and without warning. Standing in the executive 
office doorway on March 21, 1994, Dr. Hale said that they could no 
longer have Amanda, Ms. Bransford recalled. Pleas for contact with 
Amanda's family were ignored, she said, and the door was shut in her 
face.

When the couple managed through clergy to get a letter to Amanda's 
mother, Desiree Brimberry, her own nightmare began. She realized for 
the first time that Amanda had been away from Hale House, she 
recalled in interviews last week, and became terrified that, without 
her knowledge or consent, "these people are trying to take her away 
forever."

She had served 11 months on a drug offense at Albion Correctional 
Facility, a New York State prison four hundred miles away, and was 
due to be paroled. She had counted on Hale House to keep Amanda out 
of the foster care system, she said, and later to help her make a 
home for her daughter. "I love my daughter Amanda," she wrote in an 
April 1994 letter full of misspellings and emotion. She called her 
baby, "the most inportant person in my life."

"I did not know Amanda was going to anybody house," she added. "I 
write Hale House once a month, and they don't write back."

She made a panicked call to her father and stepmother, Paul and Wanda 
Brimberry, in Fontana, Calif. In fact, Wanda Brimberry said in a 
telephone interview from Hillsboro, Ohio, where she lives now, she 
and her husband had already agreed to take the baby until Desiree 
could care for her, and had been calling Hale House for updates.

But Paul Brimberry was a psychologist laid low by drink, divorce and 
heart disease, Wanda said. She was working two jobs to try to make 
ends meet. As they had told Dr. Hale the previous summer, they lacked 
the money to travel to New York.

At one point, she recalled, a Hale House staff member told them that 
volunteers from the church had been allowed to take the baby home for 
a weekend, and were refusing to bring Amanda back. It was the only 
hint they ever had of the couple's existence. "My husband was very 
upset," Wanda recalled. "He said they'd better get the child back, or 
he'd sue. I think Dr. Hale got scared."

Mr. Jones agreed. "Lorraine Hale panicked," he said. "She knew that 
David and Shellie couldn't adopt the child, and she felt that 
Amanda's mother would give trouble."

The result was that Amanda was living at Hale House again.

Amanda's mother came to see her when she was paroled to a halfway 
house in the city in April 1994. But, she remembers, Hale House would 
not let her take Amanda out, even to the park. At 28, Desiree had a 
long rap sheet, the record of a woman who had begun running away at 
10 from the molestation of her alcoholic mother's boyfriend. In and 
out of jail for prostitution, strung out on drugs by 19, she had no 
job, no schooling, and during three weeks of supervised visits with 
her daughter, no help from Hale House, she said.

In May, Dr. Hale sent a Hale House employee to take Amanda to her 
grandfather in California. Two hours after seeing them to the plane, 
Desiree Brimberry said, "I relapsed. I got loaded to stop the pain of 
losing her." By June, arrested near Times Square on another drug 
charge, she was headed back to Albion.

As for Amanda, when she first arrived at the Brimberry house in 
California, she followed the Hale House employee, Melanie Barnes, 
from room to room. "Maybe she was afraid somebody was going to leave 
her," Ms. Barnes, now a teacher in Mount Vernon, said last week. 
"Everybody had left her before."

In fact, only months after Ms. Barnes's departure, the Brimberrys 
split up and had to sell their home. With Amanda, Dr. Brimberry went 
from a son in Washington State to a married daughter in Arkansas, and 
then for a time lived in a borrowed trailer on a stranger's farm. 
Finally, working as a hypnotherapist at a hospital, he found an 
apartment for himself and Amanda in Beebe, Ark.

"He idolizes her," Wanda wrote in 1996 to Desiree, who had been 
sentenced to 4  1/2 to 9 years on the drug charge. But on July 27, 
1997, when Amanda was 4, she woke to find her beloved grandfather 
dead at 69. Her Arkansas aunt, Kimberly McMenamin, turned her away. 
And Amanda passed to the Arkansas Department of Human Services. "I 
washed my hands of it," Mrs. McMenamin acknowledged. "I have some 
animosity against my sister, and I guess it came out against Amanda."

As the authorities decided what to do with the little girl, Hale 
House's performance came back to haunt her. The state said the 
custody agreement sent with Amanda to California was legally invalid, 
leaving Wanda no claim to the child. And the court ruled that at 62, 
Wanda was too old to be a foster parent.

Instead, to the distress of Paul Brimberry's co-workers, the court 
eventually put Amanda into the custody of Melody Moon, who was her 
sometime baby sitter when Amanda was a toddler living in a trailer. 
 From 1999 to last June, Amanda traveled with the Moon family cleaning 
business, "home-schooled" between their jobs tending foreclosed 
properties around the state, often missing her mother's weekly calls. 
"We weren't child slave masters," Mrs. Moon said. "Amanda would pick 
up things out of the yard or in the house so we could vacuum. And she 
got paid just like the others." She added, "I received no pay for 
her, no Medicaid, no nothing."

Desiree, whether in prison, paroled or on the run, kept making 
tearful calls to her court-appointed lawyer in Arkansas about her 
daughter's treatment, the lawyer, James Petty, said. Finally, in 
White County Chancery Court, he demanded that the child be taken from 
the Moons, and Judge Robert Edwards agreed last year. But, impatient 
with Desiree when a new relapse put her back in jail, the judge also 
terminated her parental rights, and in March granted an adoption 
petition by Amanda's most recent set of foster parents, who are 
chicken farmers.

Desiree, who had visited her daughter for a month in 1999, is now 
paroled, working and in drug treatment, but no longer allowed to 
speak to Amanda. "It's hard for me to know she's going from doorstep 
to doorstep," she said. "I went through that as a child - you always 
feel abandoned." Then, just like the couple who wanted to adopt her 
baby, she cried over the old snapshots.

But on the Hale House Web site, Dr. Hale and Amanda still smiled.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe