Fatal shooting of dad recounted
REPUBLIC, Wash. – Wood smoke rises in a slender plume out of the pine canopy, giving away the location of yet another cabin, the mountain retreat of someone who did not take well to life in the flatlands.
Northern Ferry County is a refuge for many who believe the less government has to say about how people live their lives the better, and that the harshest way to settle a score is to turn a neighbor in to the state division of Child Protective Services.
The agency will keep Stephanie McFee’s children for the time being. Judge Rebecca Baker made that so on Friday during a 4½ hour hearing at which the state took pains to explain events leading to the death of McFee’s partner, Bryan Russell.
A Ferry County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Russell, the 35-year-old father of McFee’s children, as he was attacking a CPS worker outside a cabin near Curlew, Wash., on Feb. 16 in front of everyone he loved.
Since then, McFee has not seen Joseph, 5, Alia, 4, and Mason, 1. Though the state has given her the opportunity to visit them, she has declined, fearing the effect having to leave them again would have on the children.
“I don’t understand why we are proceeding with this hearing, other than to justify what happened on the 16th,” Alexander Wirt, who is McFee’s court-appointed attorney, told Baker at Friday’s hearing.
But McFee failed to convince the judge to grant her simple wish: She wants to take her children back to Colorado to live with her mother.
“You wouldn’t think if kids just saw their dad get killed, they would take them away from their mom,” McFee said in an interview with The Spokesman-Review. “But that’s what happened.”
How a child welfare case could turn into a deadly confrontation, and whether the tragedy could have been prevented, remains a hotly debated question in this rural stretch of Eastern Washington.
CPS investigator Paul Thurik said the agency’s involvement with the family began in November 2003 with an anonymous tip.
Called to the witness stand Friday by Ferry County Prosecutor James Von Sauer, Thurik told the judge that he first visited McFee on Dec. 4, 2003, when the family was living in an apartment in Republic.
He said he found filth and clutter rendering the house a health and safety hazard. Dirty dishes were stacked in and around the sink. There was no bedding on the children’s beds. Closet doors off their hinges leaned against the children’s bedroom wall. The living room carpet was so black with dirt it was impossible to tell what color it was.
Worse, McFee admitted to smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol while pregnant with Mason, Thurik said. He returned to the home a week later with a vacuum cleaner, twin beds for the children and a voluntary contract for Russell and McFee to sign, promising to improve their children’s environment. McFee would stop using marijuana and start visiting a doctor regularly.
Neither McFee nor Russell was employed. The family lived on food stamps and other government assistance. Though the home was cleaner on subsequent visits, McFee continued to test positive for marijuana.
In February 2004, the family left the apartment without telling CPS. Later, Thurik received a call from a Colorado social worker, saying that McFee’s baby was born with a heart defect.
McFee dismissed CPS allegations that her home was unclean.
“It was not disgusting like they tried to make it out to be,” she said.
Also testifying Friday was Carla Newman, a former friend of the family who admits telling CPS about the Russell children’s living conditions and seeing the parents use marijuana in front of them. Russell said he would hurt whoever informed on them to CPS, Newman testified.
“Bryan also said if they ever tried to take the kids, it would be over his dead body,” Newman said.
In April 2004, the family returned to Republic. CPS worker Edith Vance was assigned the case after another anonymous tip. She found the family’s environment much as Thurik had described it, a health and safety hazard. But this time, she also found the family much more resistant to CPS intervention.
“With the exception of one other house, this one was the worst I had ever seen,” said Vance, who still bears the injuries from the machete attack.
Vance gave the parents 48 hours to take the children to the home of Russell’s mother, Marcia Stevenson. When Vance returned, the family had vanished.
The family was located in December. Authorities determined the children were in danger, Vance said, and the family’s government assistance was cut off.
McFee feared CPS would take the children.
On Feb. 15, Deputy Carrol Sharp Jr., Vance and CPS home specialist Sandra Kirk traveled to the Curlew property to assess living conditions. Russell had all but completed construction of a cabin on the Bardwell Road property. It lacked only insulation, McFee said.
The property had no running water. Electricity was supplied by two portable generators.
The deputy and two CPS workers arrived at 9 a.m. on Feb. 16 to find the family living in two old converted school buses, one yellow and one white, while the home was being built. While Vance spoke with McFee outside, Kirk and Sharp inspected the buses.
They found what Vance said was inadequate heat, poorly vented wood stoves, knives and tools scattered about where the children could come in contact with them. Outside, McFee and Vance argued about her son’s schooling.
Then Russell told McFee to show Kirk and Sharp the inside of the cabin. Sharp said it was cold inside, McFee said. She told him that was because the wood stove had not yet been lit that morning.
Kirk walked out of the house first, followed by Sharp and then McFee.
Russell stood in the back door of the yellow bus, McFee said. Vance and Kirk stood nearby. Stevenson and all three children watched from the window of the white bus.
Sharp said he found the living arrangements “unacceptable,” and told the parents he was taking the children into protective custody until the family found an apartment in town. She tried to tell the deputy that the problems he cited could be easily fixed.
“I said can we work something out where we can go to a shelter instead of them taking my kids away from me,” McFee said. “His response was, ‘Absolutely not.’ “
Then Russell jumped out of the back of the bus with a machete and chased Sharp halfway down the driveway, McFee said. “Brian turned around and ran back up to where Edith was standing and started hitting her with the machete.”
McFee screamed at Russell to stop. Vance was on the ground. Stevenson put the baby down on her bed and ran outside in time to hear gunshots and see Russell roll off Vance. He was covered in blood.
“He kept saying, ‘Mom, am I going to die?’ ” Stevenson said. She ran and got a blanket and covered her son. “Sharp told my son, ‘If you get up, I’m going to shoot you again.’ ” They were the last words her son heard. “He died in my arms.”
McFee said law enforcement showed up quickly after the shooting. About seven officers tried to block Russell’s body from view as the children were taken to a patrol car. McFee and the children were taken to the Community Service building in Republic, where the mother was told the children would be taken away for a few days until McFee could sort things out. “Then I could have my kids back.”
She kissed each of them and said she would see them in a couple of days.
McFee acknowledges her irritation with CPS, which she believes hounded the family. But she denies leaving the state to avoid CPS intervention. She was merely visiting her mother, McFee said. She knows Russell was wrong, but she understands why he did what he did.
“He was trying to do right for his children and protect them from a system that is messed up,” McFee said. “We’re not apologizing for what he did. He was wrong. You can’t respond the way he did. But they shouldn’t have pushed us like that.”