I'm a bit of a storyteller, and with that out there, I'll go ahead and start at the begining. My son is 2 years old and my daughter is 3 years old. And thanks for reading...
I got a knock on my door today. I threw a shirt on and answered the door to be greeted by a lady from the department of child protective services. She said that they'd received an abuse/neglect case against my wife and I and would like to come in and talk to me. I did so, and she told me what I was being accused of.
She basically told me that my daughter (no mention of my son), was being neglected and abused. Said that somebody at my daycare reported that my daughter stank almost daily from lack of proper hygeine. Her hair was always ratty and her clothes were filthy. There were times when she had been taken to our daycare in the morning in what appeared to be the same diaper she'd slept in or came home from daycare in the day before. And of course, the big kicker in any abuse case, bruises on her thighs.
I told the lady that I know that my wife changes them as soon as they get up in the morning, before dressing them in clean clothes. Granted, they may be stained clothes cause I'm not buying a new item of clothing every time they get kool aid on them. Kids will be kids. If they showed up to daycare in a dirty diaper, it is what they did in the car on the way to daycare. As for the stinkiness issue, we bath the kids at least every other day. If not more. Hell, I remember being made to take a bath once a week and that was only if I was smelly. As for the bruises, my daughter has a 2 year old brother. They share a room. They play. He's even busted her lip with some toy or another before. Kids will be kids.
So basically the case worker asked all kinds of questions, wrote down 1 page worth of notes and told me to clean the house a bit and to have my wife call and make an appointment. That was basically all that was said.
So I call my wife, she gets hysterical that something like this would happen and has me come pick her up from work. Personally, I'm ready to chew some major you know what. I walk into the daycare and the lady in charge calls me over and said that CPS had come by there about our children. I said well yes, they came by my house too. She said that they'd had an employee (my daughter's "teacher"), who had been fired once before and had been rehired. According to the lady in charge she must have held a grudge, because she'd called in cases about several families from our daycare to CPS. The lady in charge said she and the other employees had never seen any sign of neglect or abuse and that the daycare was not responsible for making that call.
So it would seem that I have a case against this person. I've read a couple of the threads here and have done some research from information I have found posted here. It would seem that if the claim was not made in "good faith", that it would be a felony charge here in Texas. If this was not the first time the person had made a false complaint, it would be a third degree felony. So if this person is truely a criminal according to this law, then I feel I have no choice in bringing this matter to the district attorney.
I'm sure i could just let CPS do their job, and the case would eventually be dismissed, but I'm the kind of person who would not want this to happen to somebody else. If this person did this out of sheer revenge against my daycare, with nothing solid to back it up, I would be morally wrong in doing nothing about it.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Just in case something was misread, I've only had the one visit from CPS just today, and still have to have a second visit from CPS with my wife attneding. I don't know if the daycare has any privacy rights about not releasing the information about the other families, but I'm sure I can find a way to get their information. Besides, I believe I can bring this case to the district attorney with a notorized affadavidt from my daycare stating that this is false. Then all the "immunization laws" that protect the person making the accusation do not apply and all of them will probably be let known about the incident and allowed to participate. Just a guess on my part though. I think the latter part is probably just wishful thinking as the system probably is not that efficient.![]()

