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CURTIS KRUEGERFour children gone. A fifth baby taken by the state right from the hospital. But Sabrina wants to prove things are different now.
Sabrina Evans was 18, broke and overwhelmed when she gave up her baby. She asked her mother to please raise little Walter.
She was 20 when welfare workers in Kentucky took her second child, Monica. They said Sabrina tried to hurt her.
Nearly two years later, Sabrina said she awoke and found her third child, Lamos, motionless in his crib, with bluish lips. His death was ruled sudden infant death syndrome.
Sabrina moved to Florida and gave birth to her fourth child, Chyanne, at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. Someone tipped off child welfare workers to all that had gone before. The investigators came and took Chyanne from the hospital. They said Sabrina was mentally ill, not taking her medicine, and that her history with the other children "presented an immediate danger."
So last Halloween, as the pangs of labor stabbed again, Sabrina had plenty to fear. She worried the workers would come back, that they would find her at St. Petersburg's Bayfront Medical Center.
At 24, she was giving birth for the fifth time, and hoping to raise a child for the first time.
The odds were stacked high against her. The claim that she was mentally ill and not seeking treatment, plus the death of baby Lamos, are the kinds of red flags that give caseworkers nightmares.
But in Sabrina's mind, she was a deserving mom. She knew in her heart she had changed since her teenage years, when a baby seemed like too much. Now she dreamed of becoming a mother, instead of someone who just gave birth. She longed to nuzzle and cuddle, to slip on baby booties and slip off diapers.
At Bayfront, Sabrina pushed one last time and brought a 6-pound, 10-ounce girl into the world. Her boyfriend, Isaac Blocker, held the child, overcome. He felt a connection so intense, so strong, it was almost physical. Trying to express the piercing emotion inside, words tumbled out.
Me.
He strung them together, added a syllable, and the girl had a name. I-me-sha.
Now, the question was whether Sabrina could be her mother. And whether Isaac could be her father.
This time, Sabrina vowed to hold on to her child.
Last year Florida child welfare workers launched more than 179,000 child abuse and neglect investigations.
Sabrina and her new daughter would soon be among them, but in a distinct minority.
Most of the moms and dads among those 179,000 didn't lose their children. Slightly fewer than 21,000 children were removed from their homes last year, and many were later returned to their homes. A total of 3,353 children were permanently removed from parents last year.
But because of her history, Sabrina and her new baby set off warning bells.
Just as she feared, workers from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office visited her in the hospital, the day after Imesha was born, and took the girl away.
It was Nov. 1, 2002 - the beginning of Sabrina's yearlong quest to raise her own child.
During that year, she and Isaac opened their lives so a reporter and photographer could witness one couple's struggle to be a family.
For the social workers who dealt with her, it was a year of last chances, a year to see if there was any reason to change their opinion about Sabrina.
For Sabrina, it was a last-ditch struggle to prove she deserved to be a mom.
Sabrina grew up in Kentucky with her parents and two brothers. Her mother, Kathy Evans, says Sabrina seemed troubled from an early age; once, at bath time, "She said "You're going to drown me, aren't you?"' Evans says. A psychological report says Sabrina "was in the custody of the state between the ages of 10 and 18 and was in and out of psychiatric facilities until she was 18."
Sabrina denies these accounts, saying she was a victim of abuse and placed in foster care because of it.
At 24, living in the one-bedroom apartment she shared with Isaac in St. Petersburg, Sabrina often appeared witty and creative. She looked forward to the one-hour weekly visits she and Isaac got with Imesha, and afterward she sometimes sketched portraits of her child and her man. On good days, she put on her nicest dresses, her hair became a shower of dark ringlets, her face glowed.
But not all days were good.
Some days, her mood sank as she thought about how the sheriff's investigator took Imesha from the hospital. On bad days, her hair spread like smoke, her deep brown eyes glazed over. She puffed cigarettes and watched cartoons for hours.
"The whole thing is frustrating, stressful and really stupid," she fumed. She seemed unable to understand why caseworkers took Imesha. Asked to explain it, she said, "I can't answer that because I haven't done anything."
But Denise Taylor, an investigator with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, had spelled out the state's reasons in black and white.
In court papers on Dec. 5, 2002, Taylor wrote that:
- Sabrina had bipolar disorder, a mental illness that "adversely affects her ability to parent her child."
- Sabrina didn't have a stable home and had been kicked out of two homeless shelters.
- In Kentucky, Sabrina was seen "putting her hand over her infant's mouth to smother the infant because she was angry with her boyfriend," and social workers concluded she had neglected a child.
- Sabrina's son Lamos died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1999 and "all three of her children were removed at that point and placed with" Sabrina's mother.
- She did not have a job that would help her support herself and her child.
That paints a harsh portrait. But even in cases worse than Sabrina's, cases with severe and undeniable abuse, the government is required to give parents due process. Moms and dads do get a day in court to explain why they should be given a chance.
Sabrina had plenty to say, if she got the chance. She read over the reasons and disagreed with them. She didn't feel bipolar anymore, though she received disability payments. She had lived half a year with Isaac, which sounded stable to her. She denied hurting her child in Kentucky, and denied any insinuation of responsibility for Lamos' death.
But she knew the five points on this document defined her life now, and Imesha's and Isaac's, too.
So if she needed to get a job and take parenting classes, she vowed that she would. If a doctor told her to take medicine for a bipolar disorder she denied having, she said she would.
"I would give anything and everything. I've got to get my children back and that's it. I would give my life for my children, that's no joke."
For help, Sabrina turned to Isaac.
Isaac Blocker is lean and quick with a smile. He believes in Jah, god of the Rastafarian religion. Sometimes he reads the Bible. To escape, he closes his eyes and plays a Casio keyboard, turning his feelings into jazz.
At 45, he blamed himself for bad choices in his youth, including a marijuana charge in his 20s. He has four children who don't live with him, including a 12-year-old he recently found out about; he sometimes struggles with child support.
But at this stage in life Isaac had decided something basic: A man and woman should raise their children together. Sabrina and Isaac were two decades apart, but two peas in a pod when it came to their longing for a family.
So Isaac did his part, pulling back-to-back eight-hour shifts at a nursing home so they could hold onto their one-bedroom apartment. And he kept dreaming of the whole family package with Sabrina and Imesha: Wife. Child. Himself as Dad.
Isaac was a fighter. He told himself: Whatever it takes, we will get Imesha back.
So two days before Christmas, wearing a gray sweatshirt that matched her mood, Sabrina waited at a bus stop on Fourth Street S. Isaac stood beside her.
Their quest for Imesha was taking them to a pawn shop.
The reason: Sabrina wanted to prove she wasn't bipolar after all. She hoped a psychological evaluation would do the trick. But Sabrina, who hadn't finished high school and didn't have a job, did not have $75 to pay for it.
So Sabrina and Isaac rode a bus to Cash America on 34th Street. They got off the bus and smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. When the store opened, she and Isaac walked in, and Isaac took a videocamera to the counter.
Earlier that morning, Isaac had watched flickering blue images of Imesha on the camera's tiny screen. Baby Imesha was 2 months old now, and they loved to videotape her during their weekly visitations at a foster care agency. Now, he and Sabrina were willing to give up those pictures to get the real thing.
The manager offered $125 for the camera. They took it, no haggling. Sabrina hoped the money would help prove she was sane enough to raise her own child.
No one looked over Sabrina's shoulder to tell her this might be a fool's errand.
On the surface, it made sense: The state says you're mentally ill and takes away your child, so you prove you're not mentally ill after all.
What Sabrina did not understand - and no one went out of their way to tell her - was that the state did not view Sabrina as worthy of another chance. The workers looking over her case saw her as a mom who would hurt her baby. They were leaning toward "expedited termination of parental rights," the child welfare system's harshest penalty.
It meant the Sheriff's Office was going to recommend Sabrina lose all rights to be Imesha's mom, forever. And unlike most cases like this, she wasn't going to get a chance to win Imesha back.
Most moms and dads get a "case plan" when a child goes into foster care. The case plan is a sort of road map for getting a son or daughter back. A case plan typically says: Go to anger management classes, parenting classes, take a drug test, get a job and keep a stable home, and your child can come back home.
A year earlier, Sabrina had been given a case plan for her fourth daughter, Chyanne. But she failed to finish it, and a judge sent Chyanne to live with Sabrina's mother in Kentucky.
Sabrina wasn't getting a case plan for Imesha. The state had decided she had already had enough chances.
Ever since the day after Imesha was born, when the investigators whisked Imesha from Bayfront Medical Center, the girl had lived with a foster family. Eventually, she would either go back to Sabrina or be placed for adoption.
All this time, two months later, three months later, Sabrina assumed she would get one more chance, one more case plan, but she didn't understand why no one gave her one.
"I don't have a case plan, don't have a court date, nothing, nothing," Sabrina muttered anxiously one day after meeting with Ashley Krieger, her caseworker from an agency called Family Continuity Program.
She did have one straw to grasp: In a brief conversation after a court hearing, her court-appointed attorney James Obeso urged her to finish the old case plan that she had never completed for Chyanne. That way, when the state called her back to court, she could show the judge she had been trying. By holding a steady job, taking classes in how to be a good parent, getting mental health evaluations and treatment, she might very well persuade a judge to give her one more chance to be a mom.
By the time Sabrina turned 25, in February, she was working through the list of accomplishments on that old case plan.
She got a job at McDonald's, one of the few times she has worked. She started a parenting class and began asking how to get her GED.
To provide a safe home for her child - a goal of her old case plan - she and Isaac moved from their cramped one-bedroom apartment on 18th Avenue S into a two-bedroom place they could scarcely afford, so Imesha could have her own room.
This was progress. If Sabrina could keep the job, finish the classes, stay in the bigger apartment, her old case plan would be more than half-done.
Imesha was more than four months old now, but Sabrina and Isaac became like expectant parents, giddily waiting for their baby to come home.
They painted the walls of their new apartment white. They set up a crib and filled it with pink, brown and purple stuffed bunnies. They bought diapers and Desitin. Isaac even found the dresser he had used when he was 10 and his old toddler rocking chair.
On a bus journey one Wednesday morning to Help A Child, the agency where they got to visit Imesha for one hour per week, Sabrina blurted her dreams out loud. By now, she had started to believe it was possible to win Imesha back, and maybe her other children, too.
"There's things Isaac can teach them that I can't. He can teach them about what guys are thinking, when (Imesha) gets older. I can teach her how to be a very proper young lady."
Isaac could picture it, too. "It'll give me what I always wanted; an opportunity to be a good father and an opportunity to raise my own children," he said.
"For once," Isaac added, sounding like a starving man planning a banquet, "I'll be able to have it all."
The foster mother brought Imesha, with her blue eyes, tiny tufts of hair, sepia skin.
"Big smile, there's Daddy!" Isaac said, smiling himself like it was Christmas. "Do you miss me, do you miss me? Where's my smile at?"
"Come here my little snuggly-wugglies," Sabrina said.
But often, Sabrina and Isaac based their optimism on little but hope.
Their hearts soared when a volunteer evaluator for the court system asked to visit their apartment in late February. To them, it was evidence the judge in their case wanted to send Imesha home. They scrubbed and tidied all night.
"That gave me hope in the legal system," Isaac said.
No one explained the truth: State law requires these volunteers to visit every mom or dad who is about to lose their parental rights.
Sabrina was battling a bureaucracy that already viewed her as a mom who failed to protect her other kids. But the problem with changing the bureaucracy's mind is that proving someone is a fit parent - or disproving it - is a subjective business to begin with.
Two child welfare officials - people who had nothing to do with Sabrina's case - show how starkly even the experts can differ. At the request of the St. Petersburg Times, both experts reviewed the court papers (without names) in which the Sheriff's Office first argued for removing Imesha.
Chris Card of Hillsborough Kids Inc. said terminating Sabrina's parental rights without giving her a case plan "is absolutely something that would obviously be considered and pursued."
After reading the court papers, Card said what worried him most was that Sabrina had a child die of SIDS and that Kentucky officials accused her of trying to smother a different child.
"You can't leave an infant in the care of somebody that has those kinds of severe problems," said Card, whose nonprofit agency oversees foster care programs in Hillsborough County.
But when former DCF official Don Dixon was asked if Sabrina's parental rights should be terminated without giving her a case plan, based on what he read in the court papers, he said, "absolutely not ... there's nothing here to support that."
That's the option for parents guilty of "attempted murder of a child, severe and aggravated sexual abuse, you know, that kind of abuse," said Dixon, a former DCF regional administrator who now is assistant director of the Hillsborough Children's Board.
Dixon said if he were supervising, he would give Sabrina a case plan, evaluate her mental state and treat any mental illness.
He stressed that even if Sabrina got a case plan, she would need to complete it fully before getting any children back. But for Dixon, "The fundamental question here is not being answered and that is: What has been done to stabilize her mental illness?"
Sabrina had been diagnosed years before with bipolar disorder and even received Social Security income because of it. But she stopped taking medication long ago.
People with bipolar disorder, also called manic-depressive illness, suffer severe mood swings. They cycle between periods of deep depression and elation, or "mania." Symptoms can include restlessness, euphoria, extreme irritability, poor judgment, suicidal thoughts and aggressive behavior.
It's a serious illness that affects more than 2.3-million Americans, but psychiatrists say it often can be treated successfully with proper medication.
Being bipolar doesn't prevent someone from being a good parent, said April Putzulu, a spokeswoman for Family Continuity Programs, which handles most foster care programs in Pinellas and Pasco counties.
"In and of itself, mental illness is not going to be cause for removing children or not reunifying children," she said. But if mentally ill people refuse treatment, that could make them incapable of raising their children safely.
Sabrina wanted to prove she wasn't bipolar after all.
That's why, one Wednesday in March, she rode the bus to the psychologist's office to get the report she had been waiting for since before Christmas. This was the mental health evaluation she and Isaac had pawned the videocamera for, the report on which she had staked so many of her hopes. For months, she had believed if it said she was not bipolar, she could convince her caseworker Ashley Krieger and everyone else she was fit to be a mom.
As for being bipolar, the report said: "She does not meet the criteria for this at this time."
It was her most tangible sign of success yet, but not a complete victory. The report also noted, "There are issues related to whether she is able to care for her child" and said she should continue to have supervised visits with Imesha, rather than time alone with her.
But by this time, other parts of her life were falling apart.
Frustration had been simmering between Isaac and Sabrina for months. It started with a paternity test, the kind of test that is routinely ordered in a case like Sabrina's. But in this case, it hit Isaac like a sucker-punch: It proved he was not Imesha's father.
The news hit him hard. Isaac moved slowly around the apartment and lost himself at the Casio, improvising melancholic songs.
Sabrina grew scared of losing Isaac, and also the "stable housing" he provided by working so many hours. She needed stable housing for her case plan.
On his lunch break one day in February, not long after he learned the news, Sabrina gave him an "Isaac" necklace and a stuffed black bear holding a rose. They were Valentine's Day presents, two days early. Isaac softened. They stayed together.
A month later, in March, the frustration was back. It rankled Isaac to find piles of dirty dishes in the sink; he was working long hours, she wasn't. They argued about his intentions with another woman.
And then he slapped her. He says it was an open palm, the one and only time he succumbed to anger; he instantly regretted it and begged forgiveness. She says it was the back of his hand, his rings jabbed into her cheek, the blow knocked her over.
Now she felt trapped. If she stayed, she worried about getting hit again. If she left, she worried that her caseworker would see her as transient, unable to provide the "stable housing."
Only a few weeks ago, bursts of optimism were bringing smiles to her face; now she felt doomed.
"I've tried everything possible to show that I love my children, but really and truly I don't know what's best. I've put my whole life on the line to get my kids back, but it still seems like there's no way to get my kids back home... It's tearing my whole life apart. The only thing I ever wanted was a family."
The psychologist who evaluated Sabrina had forseen the possibility of this anguish, writing that Sabrina "is experiencing a number of life stressors related to her present situation such as her children not being in her care and financial difficulties."
She had urged Sabrina "to seek counseling to work on self-esteem issues, responsibility, communication and life management skills."
Now Sabrina felt herself spiraling downward emotionally, but she refused to consider this counseling. She was sure her caseworker, Ashley Krieger, or someone else in the state system would use it as evidence she was mentally unfit.
"They'd flip it around ... and make it look like I'm some kind of whack job," Sabrina said.
Putzulu, the Family Continuity spokeswoman, said seeking counseling should not count against someone trying to get their children back. "It actually works for you," she said.
But Sabrina didn't believe that. Pessimism took over.
"I'm not even going to be able to have a family and I actually understand that now. I don't know what I see for my future, or if I even have a future," she said.
"My life is a bottomless pit and I'll never hit bottom."
After an argument at 3 a.m. one night in May, Sabrina left the apartment, walking 19 blocks in the dark to Williams Park, a haven for the homeless in downtown St. Petersburg. She came back the next day for her things, and Isaac argued he had been good to her.
"I still made sure you had cigarettes, I still made sure you had food," he said.
"It don't matter any more, 'cause you said you would make sure that I don't get Imesha," Sabrina said.
"I didn't say that," Isaac shot back, not sure what she was talking about.
"You know my chances of getting Imesha are still good," Sabrina said, without explaining why she thought so.
She put on make-up, changed into a low-cut summer dress and pushed an overloaded stroller full of her things 19 blocks through sweltering heat back to Williams Park, no idea where she would sleep that night.
Sabrina's caseworker called the next day, telling Isaac she wanted to bring Imesha over for a visit - the first home visit of her life.
The timing was unbelievable. For weeks, Sabrina and Isaac had dreamed of having Imesha visit their home, instead of in a distant office north of St. Petersburg. If it happened, they believed it would signal that the system was leaning toward letting Sabrina stay home permanently.
Now Imesha could make her first trip home, but Sabrina and Isaac's relationship was disintegrating.
Not this Friday, Isaac told her. Not when Sabrina had just vanished.
But a week later, Sabrina had moved back in with Isaac, saying she felt safer with him than without him, and Krieger brought Imesha over.
Imesha's eyes, huge, blue and alert, took in the strange apartment, and the mother she knew from weekly one-hour visits. For an hour, Sabrina felt joy.
"You got the hiccuppies?" Sabrina said. "Let's go, Mesha."
Sabrina pulled out a pair of tiny baby shoes. She had bought them months earlier, because her daughter would need a pair when she came home. Sabrina had clung to those shoes like hope - she even draped them across the stroller handlebar the time she pushed her way up to Williams Park - but now she realized Imesha would outgrow those two shoes before she ever came home to live.
She gave the shoes to Krieger.
"Bye-bye baby. Bye-bye sweetheart."
And Sabrina watched quietly while Krieger picked Imesha up to take her back to her foster home.
"Mommy missed baby," she whispered.
By mid June, Sabrina had left Isaac again. She said she walked to St. Pete Beach, then all the way up to Clearwater, more than 30 miles.
Her skin had turned shades darker, her arms had peeled, her nose was mottled. She said she was getting used to having to "f------ go Dumpster-diving just to get something to f------ eat."
After hunting her more than a week, Isaac tracked her down at a homeless shelter in Clearwater and handed her some papers.
Seven months after Imesha was born, the State Attorney's Office had filed paperwork for "expedited termination of parental rights" for Sabrina. The papers gave her a court date, and she figured that was the showdown. The day she would learn if she would ever see Imesha again.
"I'm f------ suffocating because there's no way out," she said. "I don't have no fight left. I'm tired, I'm drained, I'm stressed."
The next day she moved back in with Isaac and received more papers, a "PETITION FOR TERMINATION OF PARENTAL RIGHTS" from Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court, that stunned her.
It said Sabrina "deprived the child of, or allowed the child to be deprived of, necessary food, clothing, shelter or medical treatment ..."
But that was impossible: The state took Imesha straight from the hospital. Sabrina never had the chance to deprive her of anything.
It said Sabrina had "made no provision for the child's support" and had "made no effort to communicate with the child."
Also false. Sabrina and Isaac visited Imesha religiously and moved into a bigger apartment so she would have her own room.
Finally, it said, "there is minimal love, affection or emotional ties between the child and the mother."
That hurt the worst. Sabrina felt only she could see what was in her heart. When she looked inside herself, she still saw a loving mother. "I would die for my children," she said.
Tennis
But standing inside a courtroom on July 7, Sabrina learned that it wasn't over just yet, because her final hearing wouldn't come until October. Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Frank Quesada urged her again to work on her old case plan.
Outside the courthouse, a smile flashed across her face, and a rare look of confidence. Three months more to finish the case plan she already had started?
"The likelihood that come October I won't have my case plan done is very, very slim," she said.
So one day later, Sabrina was back in a parenting class, ready to finish strong, complete her case plan, and relish her success.
By lunchtime, back at the apartment, Sabrina and Isaac got into a small argument that quickly snowballed. Isaac complained that she never finished anything. He said he figured she wanted to leave him again.
Sabrina started wailing. She yelled at him for staying out late, for supposedly seeing a "crackhead whore."
Isaac denied it and called police. Sabrina screamed louder, clutched her chest, struggled to catch her breath. Her anger boiled.
"Guess what, Isaac?" she screamed, "I don't care any more, you want to f-- me up now? You want to f-- me up now, cause I will go ahead and fight back. Let's see what actually happens when I defend myself for once."
Two St. Petersburg officers arrived, and Sabrina broke into tears, hyperventilating. "I probably sound crazy as f-- right now."
Officer Jay Clayton didn't answer that one. But it was clear he wanted to get Sabrina some mental help. He asked when she last spoke to her DCF counselor.
"What counselor?" she said.
"You're pretty stressed out right now," the officer said. "You need somebody to talk to about it." He offered to take her to St. Anthony's Hospital or any place else with counselors.
Sabrina said no. She still believed asking for counseling would count against her and prevent her from getting Imesha back.
"If I get any kind of help they'll flip it around and make me look like a bad person," she sobbed. "I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm scared."
The officers urged Sabrina to call if she changed her mind.
Later that day, Sabrina left. Again. Two months later, Isaac had not heard from her.
He says he wouldn't take her back now. He feels bad about Imesha, but he understands she is not his. Not long ago, he found the folder with court documents, brochures on parenting classes and more of Sabrina's paperwork about Imesha.
He thought about it, then threw it away.
In mid September, Sabrina arrived in court for one more hearing, with a cotton ball in one ear from where a bug had bitten her.
She was there for Imesha but she was thinking about her baby. The new baby. The one she was carrying.
That morning, she learned she was pregnant. And before the hearing, she said, her attorney told her that her chances of keeping the new child would be better if her parental rights had not been formally terminated.
So after a battle of nearly a year, Sabrina decided to give up her dream of raising Imesha.
Five children: One deceased. Three with Sabrina's mother. And Imesha, now destined for adoption.
Plus one on the way.
"I had no choice," Sabrina said outside the courtroom. "It was either her or the baby."
- Times Photojournalist Kinfay Moroti contributed to this report.
- Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or by calling 727 893-8232.