Louise is about to do the unimaginable: sign away parental rights to her three children, age 2, 6 and 7.

Walking into court room No. 24 in the Matheson Court House at 450 S. State in downtown Salt Lake City, the 26-year-old then sits down beside public defender Brian Hart. At an adjacent table are Assistant Attorney General Carolyn Nichols and a social worker from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS). Nichols represents the interests of DCFS and its workers.

At another table to the left is guardian ad litem (GAL) attorney Anthony Ferdon. One of 33 Utah GALs, Ferdon is a five-year veteran of the state-funded agency, established in 1994 to represent the best interests of children in juvenile and district court. In Latin, “guardian ad litem” means parental stand-in for legal issues.

 

 

They’re all seated in Judge Andrew Valdez’s courtroom where 40-year-old Ferdon, Nichols and Hart—through a contract with Hart’s law firm—have been permanently assigned. If parents are in conflict, an additional defense attorney, Colleen Coebergh, is called in. It’s a team structure, designed to overcome problems of scheduling. Critics claim it engenders comfortable relationships between attorneys in a juvenile court system which, they say, lacks an adversarial nature. Ferdon disagrees. “We go in there and butt heads.”

Adversarial or not, for Judge Valdez, his court is about “problem solving.”

One such problem was Louise, who requested that only her middle name be used. Until her day in court, Ferdon says, she was a poster child for the success of the juvenile court system.

Valdez had placed her two eldest children in foster care while she underwent addiction treatment. One year later, she was reunited with her children. Since then, however, she’s turned back to meth. Now she wants the original foster family to have the two oldest. The youngest will go to his paternal grandmother.

Ferdon’s comment on her decision is succinct: “Arguably, it is the hallmark of good parenting.”

Valdez advises Louise to return in a week to sign some papers. Louise leaves and the bailiff calls in the next case.

Salt Lake County has nine juvenile courts. Once every nine weeks, Judge Valdez presides over five days of shelter hearings. He rules on whether DCFS’ decisions to remove children from parents accused of abuse or neglect are correct. If he decides for the state, he then begins the process of trying to make the parents drug-free. Parents must kick drugs in eight months to keep a child up to 3 years old, or one year to keep an older child. If the parent fails, then the final step is a trial to terminate parental rights.

“Children deserve permanency,” Ferdon says. “They can’t wait in foster care for years, waiting for parents to get their act together.”

Spend time at those hearings and the picture you get of Ferdon is less what he does than what he deals with. He sees a Salt Lake City most never contemplate, unless a story like that of a 5-year-old child almost starving to death while in the care of her mother’s boyfriend flares across the local news. Utahns can change channels. Ferdon doesn’t have that luxury.

“I don’t know how GALs don’t lose their marbles,” Coebergh says, herself a GAL for a year in the late 1990s. “Perhaps he takes Prozac and wears women’s clothing,” she deadpans.

Even his wife struggles. “He keeps a lot to himself,” she says. “We’ve been married nine years, and there are pieces of him he’s never shown me, but I want to see them.”

Ferdon’s solution to work stress—rock climbing, rafting, hiking and bouldering—lacks scandal. But his passion for skateboarding might seem a little odd for a man of his age. “It’s a good tension release,” he says.

Watch him skateboard, following a line along the wall of the pool in Sugar House’s Fairmont Park, and his facial expression contains the same intensity he shows in court.

That intensity arguably reflects the tightrope he walks. He must be open to let his young clients talk, even if one is an overly optimistic 12-year-old telling Ferdon he’s “fired” because the child doesn’t like his advice. On the other hand, he must maintain defenses that will prevent the parade of the walking wounded from haunting him into the early hours.

One mother admits she took a hit of meth before coming to court. Another stands before Valdez, rake thin, hugging herself around the waist. A third, with lank hair and gaunt features sits down at the defense table only to have handcuffs snapped on her wrists for outstanding warrants. When she pleads with her parents for help, their angry silence is eloquent testimony to all they’ve endured.

But through all this misery, Ferdon’s court demeanor is calm, reserved, unruffled and laconic. It suggests he manages the balancing act better than most.

For Coebergh, a former state prosecutor, the answer seems simple at first. “He’s got his head screwed on,” she says. “The funny thing about Anthony, when you consider what he’s heard, the things he’s seen and how he feels about them, yet he has the facade of the rest of this community,” she continues. “You look at me, and it’s fairly clear I wade through this crap. He seems squeaky clean. But he probably knows more of the ugliness than I do.”

THE KING OF COMEDY

Ferdon’s life has reflected a constant concern and commitment to the most vulnerable children in society. Even when he was a child, whenever his parents drove by the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children in San Francisco, he would say, “Poor little children.”

His current position, at least as he practices it, melds his parents’ professions. His father was district attorney in San Francisco during the infamous Zodiac Killer’s terrifying spree, his mother a social worker.

Ferdon met his wife, Kathleen, at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children in San Francisco called Edgewood. Each day working there left her so exhausted, she slept from the moment she got home to the next day. Ferdon, however, had energy to spare. He was also pursuing a master’s in special education and working as a guide for a company he set up with friends called Yosemite Mountain Guides.

“All the people there ate lunch together,” Kathleen remembers. “He always had them laughing. He has this warped sense of humor. … You’ve got to have an outlet. That’s one of his strengths.” But later she says, “I hesitate to say this, because it makes me sad, but he’s a little more somber now.”

They moved to Utah for the rock climbing, skiing and affordable living. Ferdon worked at a psychiatric hospital, then at John F. Kennedy Junior High School in West Valley City with developmentally disabled children.

Kathleen praises his abilities. “He’s very sensitive, clear and firm. You have to be with kids who’ve been yanked around and had a lifetime of betrayal or hardship in eight years.”

But Ferdon felt something wasn’t right. “There were rapid-fire interactions with those kids, 200 an hour. I was worried I'd burn out and no longer be a dynamic educator."

He went to the University of Utah’s J. Quinney College of Law with the idea of becoming a child advocate, then worked in the GAL’s office as an intern. “He thought he wouldn’t get the job,” she says. “They only hire with 10 years experience. But I knew he’d get it. Ultimately, wherever he ends up, they’re so lucky to have him.”

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

“There’s a long tradition in Utah that children are like property,” Ferdon says. “Everything should be regulated by family first, then church and never the state. You see in Salt Lake City this veneer of safety, of righteousness, of being child-friendly. But look beneath the surface, into the core of the city, and it has the same problems as any other.”

That kind of personal opinion, which the state’s conservative wing arguably sees as endemic in the agency, is one reason the GAL office has been under constant attack from the Legislature for the past five years.

The 2004 Parker Jensen case, involving parents who refused medical treatment for their child diagnosed with cancer, remains a keystone of conservative anger against the GAL and DCFS. Post-Jensen, DCFS is seen by some as trying to placate the right by pursuing fewer removals and putting more emphasis on voluntary services and a wait-and-see policy.

DCFS chief Richard Anderson, however, dismisses allegations of a wait-and-see policy. “The entire nation has been decreasing in removals of children due to the use of kinship care [placing children with relatives] and more resources to maintain children safely with their families,” he says. Regardless, the GAL’s pro-child safety position hasn’t wavered. Inevitably, GAL head Kristen Brewer has found herself bearing the brunt of constant attacks from politicians and pro-parents rights groups. The Salt Lake Tribune in an editorial at the beginning of this year noted Rep. LaVar Christensen’s (R-Draper) “mulish determination to thwart Brewer’s office.”

For Brewer, part of GAL’s problematic public image is a result of high-profile cases such as the Jensens' getting the agency lumped in with Child Protective Services. “People think we’re the ones removing kids,” she says. The right-wing critics ranged against her “don’t want to look at child abuse,” she says. “It’s a case of shoot the messenger.”

Ferdon agrees. “Where we’ve incurred the wrath of many groups, you have to look at the cases they yell about, and they’re all nice white upper-class families,” he says. “It’s hard trying to help while having a target on your back.”

The Parker Jensen case is atypical of Ferdon’s workload. Around 90 percent of the 300 children or 153 cases Ferdon represents are the collatoral damage of parental methamphetamine addictions. To watch him work is an education not only in the insidious impact of drugs, but also in the violence of poverty.

A small dark-haired woman, shackled and wearing an over-size orange jumpsuit, shuffles into court. Her children, 8 months old, 21 months old and 4 years, were taken into care after police answered an assault call. They found her and her three children living in a shack without power, gas or water.

Now she speaks to Judge Valdez in a voice of barely contained despair. “My family turned its back on me,” she says. She tells the judge how she’d been living in a van with her children before staying with her brother. Police called to an alleged assault found a rat-infested shack on the edge of the Jordan River, with no back door to keep the children from falling into the river outside.

“Will my kids stay together?” she asks Valdez.

“Help’s on its way,” he tells her, before scheduling another hearing.

Hearings are supposed to last only 15 minutes, but most run way over that. Valdez, at times harsh, at other times gentle, always makes sure the parents’ understand where they are. “The party’s over,” he says.

Valdez may well have said those same words to Louise nearly two years ago when he, at Ferdon and DCFS’ urging, took her children away.

Raised in Glendale by an alcoholic father who was briefly institutionalized after he became convinced he was Jesus, Louise and her sister, then children, lived on weekends with her mother and stepfather. She claims her stepfather abused her. At a shelter hearing, her biological father told the judge Louise was “ungovernable.” She and her sister were split up and shuffled from one foster home to another. “Nobody wanted us,” she says. “We had too many issues.” It was during her four years of living in foster care she turned to drugs, then prostitution.

Her 28-year-old boyfriend got her pregnant when she was 18. “He took care of us, paid our bills.” After she had a second child, she started doing meth heavily. She kicked out her boyfriend because he wouldn’t let her get high.

Arrested and sentenced to 90 days for trying to cash a fake payroll check, she came before Valdez. He ordered her into a drug-treatment plan. “It was a very slow transition, but I really worked for it,” she recalls. “I learned a lot about myself and my kids. If I’m really in the right state of mind, I can do what’s right.”

Six months sober, she felt she’d accomplished something. Valdez, she says, wasn’t impressed: “He said to me, ‘Don’t think you can come in here after doing six months in drug treatment like a shiny new penny, because that’s one thing you’re not.’”

Valdez doubts he said that. “I tell people who say they’ve been clean and sober for six months, ‘Well, you haven’t quit yet. Tell me that in five years.’”

After reunification, parenting for Louise became harder. “When my kids came home with me they were sad,” she says. “They missed the foster parents.”

After eight months, she slipped back into drugs. She says she planned her relapse. “Once I started, I didn’t want to stop.”

COLD TURKEY

Cases such as Louise’s, Ferdon says, crop up once every couple of months. But he also acknowledges that many parents find sobriety too hard, along with juggling the challenges of parenting, work and therapy. “At the end of the year mark, a lot do relinquish (their rights),” Ferdon says. “They’d rather do that than go through the painful process of a trial, of how they failed.”

The hardest cases involve mothers not necessarily at fault. One woman suffered bipolar depression and post-traumatic-stress syndrome. Ferdon recalls she couldn’t think clearly enough to raise her child, much less put her up for adoption. “We had to go through this heartbreaking trial. Everyone felt so bad.”

Removing children from their parents is not something Ferdon takes lightly. “We’re trained so well in the trauma it does to kids. It’s heart wrenching. Removals are the stuff that keep me up at night. Some people find solace in the judge making the decision. But I can’t just punt it and say he made the decision in a vacuum.”

The GAL’s critics highlight problems of hard-pressed, under-resourced attorneys not having time to meet with their clients. Ferdon says he meets 90 percent of his clients at least once. The ones he has the hardest time facing are premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) who tested positive for drugs the day they were born. Visiting the NICU, Ferdon says, “breaks down the wall, the defenses.”

Carol Kahn, NICU clinical social worker at LDS Hospital, says that after a first-time, 12-hour shift in the NICU, nursing premature babies going through drug withdrawal, exhausted nurses beg a different assignment the next day. “It breaks their hearts to see the babies suffering,” she says.

The neonatal withdrawal inventory list monitoring babies’ withdrawal symptoms on an hourly basis is distressing: tremors when undisturbed, sweating or mottling, regurgitation, irritability, crying, fresh chafing of limbs, continuous crying and frantic fist-sucking in a desperate bid to sooth themselves.

“These babies are inconsolable,” Kahn says. “Nurses latch the babies around them in a blanket and carry them all day, just to provide some comfort.” But if a nurse sits in a rocker with a meth baby, the infant goes ballistic, Kahn says.

WIPE OUT

Ferdon changes out of his suit in his black Volkswagen Beetle and into skateboarding clothes for a skate in Fairmont Park one Thursday lunch home. “Just like Superman,” quips his real-estate-agent friend who’s tagging along.

Unlike the teenagers already boarding the park, Ferdon and his friend don headgear and elbow- and kneepads. Ferdon drops in on his board and follows a curving line up and down the pool wall. Unexpectedly, a teenager waiting his turn drops his board into the pool in front of Ferdon. The GAL attorney hits a pile of leaves and crashes into the concrete. His right arm feels dislocated at the elbow, he complains, and he’s angry about what he describes as a dumb accident. “It throws you for a day,” he says. “It’s hard to shake off.”

That loss of self-confidence as a skater is something his wife sees elsewhere in her husband’s life.

“He’s doing his best to be the same person he has been, but [working at the GAL office] has affected his self-confidence somehow,” she says. “There’s a bleakness that wasn’t there before.”

Ferdon admits his worldview is bleak: “You learn how rampant abuse and neglect are. Leaving one of my boys in daycare, I’d definitely think twice about who’s there. I think about anybody my children are going to deal with. There is no perfect profile of an abuser, it crosses religious, socioeconomic and geographical lines. It’s a bleak thought; it could be anyone.”

Processing so much pain, then going home to be a parent must be difficult. “There’s a theory once you have kids, you can’t do this job,” he says. “You can’t handle the secondary trauma.”

For Ferdon, though, his children, age 3 and 6, are his rejuvenation. “The fact is they do play a role in my mental health. Thank God there are some kids out there who are not living trauma.”

Thanks to legislative cutbacks, Ferdon hasn’t had a raise on his salary beyond cost of living in five years. But that hasn’t stopped him from rolling up his sleeves and delving into the ever-increasing number of red case folders piled on the chairs and the floor in his office. “They keep cutting our funding and widening our scope,” he says, referring to the recent growth in the number of cases coming from district courts.

Perhaps a clue as to what keeps him going can be found in Valdez’s chambers.

Valdez rates Ferdon highly. “He’s a very fine lawyer. I’ve seen him grow up in my court. His heart’s truly vested in the best interests of the kids.”

Valdez’s chamber wall features a painting of hollow-eyed children. Under the glass that covers Valdez’s L-shaped desk are the obituaries of children who’ve died on his watch due to suicide, mistaken shootings, car wrecks and batterings. “These kids don’t leave you,” Valdez says.

Ferdon says if a child died on his watch, his first reaction would probably be quitting his job. Clearly the balance of his profession swings on a most unforgiving crux. The price to pay for a mistake, a loss of focus, a dumb accident: a child’s life.

Perhaps that is why, despite some GALs having a reputation among the agency’s critics of rubber-stamping for the state, Ferdon, for one, stoutly retains his independence.

Several times during the same week, while Nichols and Hart push for findings of neglect for mothers whose drug-taking leads to babies being born with methamphetamine in their systems, Ferdon advocates for the more serious finding of abuse.

At one point Ferdon holds up his business card, the telephone number underlined, to a child he is representing in court. “This is my guarantee to you,” he says. The mix of big brother, lawyer and social worker perhaps explains why some call Ferdon Brewer’s golden boy, even though they’re the same age. She prefers to describe him as the prototype of what a GAL lawyer should be.

For Ferdon, his job might well be defined by a simple, terrible act. “I was holding this baby in my arms. The mother was screaming and being held back in court. It was an awful experience. But it’s the classic GAL role, picking up the baby and sheltering it from the wailing and flailing.”

A NEW LIFE

One week after her first court date, Louise returned to the courtroom to sign the papers.

She says later that, while sitting at a courtroom table, she thought, “I have to make my decision now or my kids are going to get hurt. If I don’t do it now, I have to do everything all over again, just to find out I can’t do it.”

The possibility that her daughter might follow in her footsteps was also nearby. “I don’t want my daughter to be like me when she grows up,” she says. “She’s really flirty with boys. I see so much of me in her, it really scared me.”

Nichols, the female social worker and Coebergh all watched intently as Louise surrendered all rights to her children with one signature.

“This is a brave thing you’re doing,” Valdez told her and wished her luck.

Leaving the courtroom, Louise smiled at the couple now responsible for raising two of her three children, the third with his paternal grandmother. She waved at them, a handkerchief crushed in her hand.

Ferdon didn’t see Louise leave. He was busy preparing the next case.

Whether keeping her children or giving them up, she’d still be doing drugs, Louise says. “I’m not ready to stop my lifestyle.” But since she signed the paper, she feels like life has no purpose. “I don’t wake up in the morning to get the kids to school. I’m walking in circles. I try the hardest not to stop and sit down and think.”

Several days after her last court date, she dropped off school supplies and shoes for her children at the adoptive family’s home. The adoptive mother has told her she can still be part of her children’s lives, that they can be one happy family.

“I still haven’t really cried about it,” Louise says. “I try not to think about it.”

Here, finally, is the tissue that binds Louise and Ferdon. A mother’s instinct, a guardian’s concern.

“At one level it’s shocking, horribly tragic,” Ferdon says of Louise’s decision. He might as well say the same about the GAL office, fighting to protect children in a state where parents’ rights dominate the political stage.

“You’re choosing drugs over your kids, but thank God you’re doing something to protect your kids. It’s ‘damn you’ and ‘thank you’ at the same time.”