‘Don’t take my child,’ California mother begs

Stacey Doss plays with 2-year-old Vanessa at their California home. Doss is in an interstate custody battle over Vanessa, whom she has cared for since she was a day old. The Orange County Register photo by Mindy Schauer

Mindy Schauer, The Orange County Register Stacey Doss plays with 2-year-old Vanessa at their California home. Doss is in an interstate custody battle over Vanessa, whom she has cared for since she was a day old. The Orange County Register photo by Mindy Schauer

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Dayton custody dispute gets national attention

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By Mary McCarty, Staff Writer Updated 1:55 AM Sunday, July 4, 2010

ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — Curly-headed, impish Vanessa Doss has no inkling of the custody battle heating up in a Dayton courtroom.

She has a dog named Raymond — she calls him “Ya Ya” — a golden retriever shepherd mix with whom she loves to romp on the beach.

She has a new trike, a gift for her second birthday.

She has a grandmother she calls “eema” and a grandfather she calls “papaw.”

She’s so attached to her prospective adoptive mother, Stacey, that she cries when she gets up to answer the door.

“It’s her whole world,” Stacey Doss said simply.

Doss has been working overtime to make sure that world doesn’t change, but she lost her most recent, crucial round in her ongoing custody battle with Vanessa’s birth father, Benjamin Mills Jr. of Dayton. Doss has been ordered to return Vanessa to Montgomery County by July 16 pending the outcome of a custody trial set for July 29 before Montgomery County Juvenile Court Judge Nick Kuntz. Doss said she’s devastated by the decision and plans to file an emergency motion Monday in the California Court of Appeal in Santa Ana. “The California courts have passed the buck and given the entire case to the state of Ohio,” she said. “I have until July 16 to save my daughter.”

Doss said she has been told that Vanessa may live with Mills’ mother while the custody case is being decided.

Mills has declined comment but his attorney, Elizabeth Gorman of Legal Aid of Western Ohio, said the details of that transition haven’t been worked out. She said that both Doss and Mills may have visitation rights when Vanessa returns to Montgomery County, and that “my client looks forward to having more parenting time with his daughter.”

Doss and her supporters contend that separating Vanessa from her mother amounts to a form of child abuse.

“Don’t take my child,” she pleaded. “Don’t disrupt her life until this thing plays out. It’s not common sense.”

Doss doesn’t want Vanessa to lose any of her sunny confidence: “She has a big, big, big personality — she’s stubborn, ornery, colorful and loves to imitate, loves to dance.”

Long custody battles extremely rare

Clinical psychologist Arla Wallace said, “After careful observation of Vanessa’s attachment to Stacey as her mother, it would be incredibly disruptive and cruel to remove Vanessa from her home, even on a temporary basis.”

Joe Kroll, executive director of the Minneapolis-based North American Council on Adoptable Children, said such prolonged custody battles are extremely rare — and extremely complicated. “It’s a state law issue, and state law reform tend to be driven by cases like this one,” he said.

The Baby Jessica case in the early ’90s provoked international outrage when 2-year-old Jessica DeBoer was taken from the Ann Arbor, Mich., home of her adoptive parents. “There wasn’t the right work done in relation to the voluntary relinquishment of the child,” Kroll said. “The adoptive parents said, ‘we have raised this child from day one,’ but I’m sorry, the law was broken from day one.”

Kroll noted that it’s disingenuous for prospective adoptive parents to argue that the child shouldn’t be “taken from the only home they’ve known” if they’ve been fighting contested custody since the child’s infancy. He advised, “When you as an adoptive parent sees something that doesn’t look quite right, resolve it as expeditiously as possible. If something hasn’t been done right or by the book, don’t push on. Fighting it is a big mistake because you’ll probably lose in the end.”

Columbus-based adoption attorney Susan Eisenman has successfully represented high-profile cases including “Baby Bridget” and Lucy Rost, the twins whose adoptive parents became embroiled in a custody dispute in which the birth parents based their argument in part on the Indian Child Welfare Act. In the terms of the custody settlement, the twins were allowed to stay with their adoptive parents, Jim and Collette Rost of Columbus, so long as they maintained ongoing contact with their American Indian birth parents.

Whether or not to fight for custody “is a highly personal decision,” Eisenman said: “Most adoptive parents don’t want to take a child from someone. Most of our adoptive parents are not interested in quibbling with the birth mother who decides she didn’t want to place her child for adoption.”

Birth father had filed for paternity

Doss was working with a private agency in California when Vanessa’s birth mother selected her. “Two other birth mothers had picked me, but it didn’t click; it didn’t feel the way it was supposed to feel.”

With Vanessa, she said, everything clicked. She was thrilled with her biracial identity — white mother, black father — because her nephew also is biracial. “I think that’s one of the reasons the birth mother chose me, because she saw from the photos how close I was to my nephew,” Doss said.

She flew to Dayton as soon as the baby was born, choosing the name Vanessa on the plane while the other passengers cheered. Doss and her mother arrived in Dayton on June 14, 2008, the day after Vanessa’s birth. “They rolled her into our private room, and my mom and I saw her, and it was this stunning feeling: ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my child.’ ”

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