Mom fighting foster parents for son

Holly Cork gave birth to her son Angelo when she was 14 years old. Nine months later, in the spring of 1998, the boy’s father was stabbed to death at a north Spokane party. Cork took her baby and went to live with family in Montana but the pair soon landed in a home for teenage mothers. When Angelo was 2, he was placed with foster parents interested in adopting him.

Since then – for the past eight years – Cork has been fighting to get her son back. She won custody of Angelo from the Montana Supreme Court in 2001. However, when she moved back to Spokane four years ago, Angelo’s foster parents challenged her custody in courts here, and won, on the basis that the home Cork provided was detrimental to Angelo’s well-being.

On Tuesday, the case will reach the Washington Supreme Court.

“I’m not just going to give over my kid,” said Cork, who earns $10 an hour as a nurse’s assistant and lives with her boyfriend, Josh Rich, and their two young children. “I guess I’ll just keep fighting.”

The foster parents, David Nagel and Anita Bangert, of Helena, continued to monitor Angelo’s well-being after he was returned to his mother and felt he was “receiving exceptionally poor care from his mother,” said their attorney, David Crouse, of Spokane. A counselor found that Angelo had bonded more closely with his foster parents than with his mother and that continued placement with Cork “would result in increased depression, withdrawal, rebellion” and violent behavior, court documents show. Crouse said the case is a “traditional” third-party custody case in which the foster parents want to intervene to remove Angelo from what they see as a detrimental environment.

“In this society, we are very slow to terminate parental rights,” Crouse said. “It is a statistical fact … that these kids are traumatized emotionally as a result. It’s not a case of a poor mom being preyed upon. The question is: Is it appropriate for people to step in and say, ‘This child deserves better’?”

Cork was never declared an unfit mother, however, said her attorney, Andrea Poplawski, of Spokane, adding that Cork has custody of her other two children. In their petition for review to the Washington Supreme Court, Poplawski and Spokane attorney Breean Beggs said that as “agonizing as the transition away from non-biological parents might be, that distress may not be used in a placement decision against the fit, biological parent.”

The Supreme Court also will weigh the issue of jurisdiction. Washington courts had no authority to overrule the Montana Supreme Court when Angelo hadn’t established residency in this state, Poplawski said.

“The bottom line is she has the right to the care and custody of her child,” Poplawski said. “They were trying to usurp Holly’s parental rights. You’re opening the door to allow any type of caregiver to come in and … take this child.”

While in his mother’s care, Crouse said, Angelo was sent home from kindergarten because he was hiding under chairs, disrupting class and crying uncontrollably.

Poplawski counters that the record shows Angelo doing fine in kindergarten until the foster parents arrived in Spokane and intervened. After that, he began acting up, she said.

“Where is the detriment really coming from?” she asked. “They were told it would be detrimental to him; they did it anyway.”

Since Cork lost custody, she has had monthly visitation rights and shares the 10-hour round-trip drive to Montana with Nagel and Bangert. She picks Angelo up and brings him to Spokane; they pick him up and return him to Montana. Cork has Angelo with her for a week in the summer and during school breaks. She pays $84 per month in child support.

“He calls them Mom and Dad. He calls me Mom and he calls Josh, Josh,” Cork said. “I know it’s confused him a lot. When he first came back here, it was really hard. All he knew was them.”