TACOMA — A Pierce County family’s adoption of a teenager in 2019 did not go well: The 15-year-old was physically aggressive, the parents slept in shifts to protect their other children, the mother’s hand was broken and the teen destroyed motel property, according to a recently filed lawsuit in Pierce County Superior Court.
Ultimately, the teen’s last years before adulthood were spent not with their adoptive family but instead institutionalized. Now the teen, whose attorney requested that their name and gender be withheld for privacy reasons, is suing.
The lawsuit, filed July 31, claimed that the Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families and two employees were negligent in the unsuccessful adoption, causing the teen to suffer emotional distress and miss out on a final opportunity to join a family.
More specifically, the state child welfare agency was at fault for how things devolved, the suit claimed, because it failed to turn over records to the adoptive family that would’ve revealed the teen’s history of mental health struggles, behavioral issues and physical confrontations with foster siblings, adults and pets.
Had those challenges been known beforehand to the family of seven, the parents would’ve foregone the adoption out of safety concerns for their five other children, according to the lawsuit.
The family also didn’t meet the profile of the best fit for the teen: a household with no other kids or, at least, no boys, the suit said. But the adoptive family wouldn’t have known that because it was based on two professional assessments that were among the records allegedly withheld from the family.
“The adoptive family welcomed Plaintiff into their home with love,” the suit said. “Given the presence of siblings, the parents lack of knowledge of Plaintiff’s problems and challenges, and the parents lack of knowledge regarding Plaintiff’s treatment needs, Plaintiff was not capable of integrating into the family.”
In an email, DCYF spokesman Jason Wettstein declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing the department’s practice of not publicly addressing pending litigation.
Prior action
The lawsuit isn’t the first legal action to be taken over the adoption.
In a case resolved before it made it to court, the family was awarded $2.5 million to settle a claim they filed over the purported harm they experienced due to the state agency’s failure to provide them with vital information prior to the adoption.
Washington state law mandates that every state agency must provide prospective adoptive parents with a complete medical report containing the child’s known disabilities before an adoption, as well as any available psychiatric or psychological reports.
DCYF didn’t challenge the family’s allegations that the agency failed to disclose information as required by law, that their failing resulted in an adoption that should’ve never occurred or that the adoption harmed the family, according to attorney Michael Schwartz, who’s representing the teen.
But after the teen turned 18 and filed their own legal claim, DCYF rejected it, leading to the current matter landing in court, according to Schwartz.
“In essence, DCYF has communicated the position that they have no liability for any harm suffered because they owe no duty to (the plaintiff) under the law,” Schwartz said in a statement.
Hundreds of relevant pages
The teen grew up in an abusive and neglectful household before they entered into the foster care system. They had the opportunity to be adopted into a household that matched their needs — a husband and wife without children — but DCYF grew enamored with the eventual adoptive family, Schwartz said. Both parents were professionals, had multiple children and lived in a large house.
The family, which already had five children — two with physical or developmental disabilities — was approached by DCYF in 2019 about the possibility of adopting the teen, then 15 years old, who was apparently an unknown distant relative of the family’s father, according to the lawsuit filed by the teen.
A DCYF social worker assured the family that the teen would fit in well, the suit said. The family was purportedly told that the teen had no history of psychiatric treatment relevant to their concerns, no significant behavioral challenges that would disrupt the home, no mental health counseling or medication requirements and posed no risk to other children in the home.
The family received “a few pages of miscellaneous records” from the social worker, which DCYF had said met its legal obligations for disclosure, the suit alleged.
The teen’s file, however, contained more than 1,000 pages — hundreds of which revealed treatment for behavioral issues and a psychiatric diagnosis and emergency removals from foster care families due to disruptive behavior, according to the suit. In one instance, the family had been only given a single benign page from a larger report on the teen’s mental health and behavioral history. If the family had been able to view the report in full at the time, however, they would have not adopted the teen, the suit said.
“Without treatment, and with the presence of five adoptive siblings against which to compete for attention, Plaintiff’s mental status decompensated, and (their) behavior worsened, following the adoption,” the suit claimed. “(T)his competition with the siblings produced dysfunction and, ultimately, uncontrollable efforts by Plaintiff to provoke conflict while demanding attention through extreme negative behaviors.”
None of this would be known to the family until long after the teen’s issues, including physical aggression, had risen to the fore by August 2020. The family learned from the teen’s prior foster parents that their newly adopted child needed professional help. The adoptive family then sought records from DCYF — the social worker claimed to be unaware of prior acts of physical aggression — and filed a formal records request at the agency’s instruction. The family incrementally received eight volumes of information related to the teen’s history over the course of a year-plus, the suit said.
It was the sixth volume, which the family obtained in September 2021, that offered them their first glimpse into the teen’s range of psychiatric and psychological issues and subsequent attempted treatment, according to the suit.
By then, it was too late.
The plaintiff was in some form of residential treatment for more than two years between August 2020 and November, when they were discharged from a long-term inpatient program at Western State Hospital upon turning 18. On two occasions during that period, the plaintiff was either asked to leave a program due to their behavior or left because they didn’t adjust to the programming, according to the suit.
“The adoptive family was devastated both by the disruption and harm done within the family in trying to work with (the teen) as well by the fact they had to institutionalize the child they so desperately wanted to help,” Schwartz said in a statement.
He told The News Tribune that DCYF’s lack of transparency had set up his client for failure.
“Rather than relying on assertions and assurances by DCYF as the family in this case did, families contemplating adoption must do their own due diligence,” he said. “The fact that people looking to care for a child — and children needing and wanting a home — cannot rely on DCYF is terribly sad and terribly unfortunate.”
