Discriminating Judges

What is this world coming too when a 42 year old man beats up on his children, punches his daughter in the head and chokes his son and the mother is put on trial for trying to protect  her children? How many families need to be treated unfairly before this judge is removed from her ‘throne’? Does it have to come to something extreme happening before she realizes that she (the judge) needs to do her job and look into the case files further before hearing a case and not make her decision based on the fact that she doesn’t like women? When a child is put in harms way due to an unfair judges ruling, are there any repercussions for this judge when that child ends up being abused again?

On January 25^th, 2011, my ex beat up our 15 year old daughter. He punched her in the side of the head, pulled her hair and pushed her down on the ground, where he continued to hit her on the head. I found out about this several hours later when she borrowed her little brothers phone to text me and tell me she needed to go to the hospital. I had the police meet me at his house to remove my children from the home. Of course he denied striking my daughter, but here is an excerpt copied straight from the police report.

“Ptl. @@@@@ and I then spoke with Michael, who confirmed that he did pull Victoria’s hair. He said that he does not put up with his children getting out of hand. Michael denied ever striking her and said, “If I hit her you would know. I’ll punch my kids in the face if they deserve it and I would not deny it. I’ll tell the cops that I did it and be arrested if I felt like they deserved it.” I explained to Michael that there is a difference between discipline and abuse. He stated that he knows that he would be arrested, but he is the boss in his home. He again stated, “I’m telling you now that I would punch my kids in the face if they needed it.”

Her father punched her on her left temple. There weren’t any visible marks on her but I was very concerned about any neurological injuries. About five years ago, Tori had been hit by a car while riding her bike and suffered a severe concussion on that same left temple. They did a cat scan and some other neurological tests and determined she had a closed head injury (a trauma in which the brain is injured as a result of a blow to the head, or a sudden, violent motion that causes the brain to knock against the skull) and needed to be out of school and/or sports for a minimum of 5 days.

While we were in the emergency room, my son stated that he was very upset that the police officer never came back to talk to him. When I asked him why, he said because he was going to tell her everything. It was then that I found out that he had been abusing them for quite some time. I don’t see anything wrong with a spanking…but a spanking on the butt isn’t hardly the same as punching  a 15 year old girl in the face and head, with a closed or open hand or pulling hair. It’s not the same as pinning a 13 year old boy up against the wall by his throat while you scream at him or pinning him down on his bed while punching him in the chest.

I cannot even express to you how my heart broke.  My babies had been going through this for well over a year; how did I not know? Tori’s attitude had changed so much too; she had become rather mean and quick tempered. She was quick to raise her hand to anyone who messed with her or her friends. My absolutely gorgeous, red headed daughter with her spunky personality was turning into a raging mess. Puberty and teenage hormones, I thought.

And Ty, my little loverbug, had become so sad and emotional. Ty is the goofiest kid you’ll ever meet. Just one look at him is enough to make you giggle and want to hug him. He has such a big heart and is such a loverbug, but at the same time is the class clown. He’ll dance around and do the goofiest things to make people laugh. And his laugh is so hearty that that alone can send anyone into fits of hysterics. He never even had to try to get good grades, he just got all A’s and B’s with little effort. But he started failing classes and seemed sad and depressed. Meetings with teachers and tutors didn’t help. It was also chalked up to puberty.

Not once did they mention what was going on. They love their dad, and understandably so. Him and I split up when I was pregnant with Ty. But there was never a time when he wasn’t there for his kids. He was active in their lives from day one. We got along great and worked with each other and each other’s schedules to make things as easy as possible. Our children were more important than anything in the world and neither one of us were the type to use our children to get to each other or for spite. We made our own visitation arrangements and child support arrangements. We worked together every step of the way. Don’t get me wrong, we had the occasional blow out…but we got over it and continued to work as a team in raising our children.

We went to court once, about 8 years ago, to establish custody. We had an argument and he threatened to keep the kids from me. I know they were just words said out of anger and not meant, but it prompted me to go to court to protect myself. They gave me residential custody and him parenting time and raised his child support from $150 to $224 a week. About a week or so later I went back to the court house and dropped the child support order. I felt that $224 a week was way too much for him to have to pay and we went back to the $150. When he was buying his house, I lowered it even further. Parenting time was about 3 days a week for him but if he wanted them more, that was never a problem or if he needed me to keep them, that wasn’t a problem either. And vice versa, if I had plans and wanted to switch nights, it was never a problem.

I was accommodating to him and he was to me. We appreciated that about each other. What happened to make all that change? I knew something was going on for at least the past year with him because he was snapping at me for every little thing. We no longer had a civil relationship, it was constant arguing. How did I not put two and two together? His behavior changing, the kids’ behavior changing.

I took the kids to a couple counseling sessions in the next couple of months. More information came out during counseling. Such as, Tori informed us that he keeps pill bottles without labels in the kitchen cabinet, and his girlfriends’ prescription for Oxycontin is kept in the console of his truck. We also found out that on several occasions, he told Ty that both toilets in the house were broken and he had to pee in a cup for him. Although Tori was able to use the toilets but Ty, being so naïve, didn’t realize it and just did it.

I was advised by the chief of police to press simple assault charges on behalf of Tori. Mike received six months of anger management classes. In six months he would be reevaluated to see if he needed any more anger management or not. If in those six months, he had any other domestic violence altercations, the assault charges would then stick. If he didn’t, then the charges would be dropped.

The kids hadn’t seen their father since the incident in January and DYFS told the kids that if they were afraid of him that they didn’t have to go see him. Also, one of the counselors told me that I needed to bring the kids to court with me. I had no intention of bringing them but she said it was very important that I bring them to court so that they could tell the judge what happened and how they felt in private. The kids also agreed that that is what t hey wanted to do. Ty’s grades started coming up; his goofy personality was starting to come back. Tori seemed to be calming down and they both were happier.

Now the day of family court approaches…three months later. The judge, Colleen Maier, didn’t like me from the start. I had heard a lot of rumors about her. I had heard that she never sided with the woman because she just didn’t like women. I heard horror stories about a little girl that lives a few blocks away from me, who’s older step sister stripped her naked and tied her to a bed by her arms and legs. Judge Colleen Maier’s response…”Kids will be kids!” and ordered that the little girl continue to be sent to her father’s regularly scheduled visitation. I also heard that in this same family, the father is such a prick that he brings the mother to court every six months or so and Colleen Maier gives him whatever he wants. One of the police officers at the Gloucester County Courthouse told me that most people describe her as the bipolar judge, he said TO ME that she’s an awful person and he can’t understand why she’s still handling cases of child abuse and neglect when everyone knows how biased she is. But I wasn’t worried! My kids were with me to testify, I had the police report and even though he didn’t admit to striking her with a closed fist, everything else that was in there was enough to prove his character. I had the emergency room report with her diagnosis, I was prepared and there was no way that she could possibly be that awful of a person to ignore all of it just because she didn’t like me.

She immediately flipped out on me for bringing the kids to court. She said she would not hear the case because I needed to take the kids back to school. She postponed court until the following week and ordered that I send my kids to their fathers for their regularly scheduled visitations. She screamed at me for having kept the kids from their father for that length of time and they were to immediately start going back. That woman never even looked at the police report or the ER report  that she claimed she didn’t have….that was sitting right in front of her because I brought the paperwork to the courthouse and had it put in with the case file. That’s when the tears started rolling and I could no longer keep my composure. I started yelling back.  I told her ‘no’, that I absolutely was not sending my kids to him. I was screaming as fast as I could what he had been doing to my kids. The whole time, in my mind I knew that I was going to be arrested, but I couldn’t control myself. But surprisingly she listened.  I told her that I had been advised to bring the kids to court and that’s the only reason I did and that DYFS had told me that I didn’t have to send the kids to his house if they were afraid. She disagreed and told me I was wrong. She said that I needed to file for an emergency order to show cause or something like that. She continued to yell at me for handling things the wrong way. I argued back, I told her that I did things exactly as I was supposed to. That the very next morning I went to the courthouse to file the paperwork and that if I was supposed to file something special then the staff should have advised me of that. I sat with a caseworker the entire morning explaining what happened and we filed the paperwork that she gave me to file. She also confirmed that DYFS was correct about the kids not having to go to his house, that it would be handled at court.

The second court date wasn’t much better. The police officer at the scene that night was summoned to court and they did a conference call with DYFS as well. The police officer told the judge what happened and what was said, she told the judge about Mike’s arrogance. She confirmed that she checked Tori for bruising and didn’t see any but that Tori’s hair was so long and thick that she wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. None of this mattered to Colleen Maier. Mike never said a single word throughout the entire thing, he didn’t have too. He abused our children and was treated as though he was a victim because the big bad mother of his children wouldn’t put her children back in that harmful, abusive environment. The kids never had their chance to speak up for themselves. She didn’t care about my children at all, she didn’t care that she was sending them back to be abused again.

Then the matter of child support came up. Mike makes $88 an hour as a Union Boilermaker. I have an office job and I make $16 an hour.  It was all totaled up that Mike should be paying $195 a week. That apparently didn’t make Colleen Maier very happy. Poor Mike shouldn’t have to pay so much. Then Mike informed the judge that he had been laid off the day before. She spent a good twenty minutes trying to come up with ways to lower that amount. I just sat there, in total disbelief. All those years that he should’ve been paying way more than he was but didn’t because I wasn’t a spiteful person, didn’t because I just wanted to keep the peace.  The worst part is, that he’s frequently laid off from work and then called back. It’s the nature of his work. And he turns a lot of work down as well because when he’s laid off he’s getting more than what I even thought the max was of unemployment and he works under the table for his various friends  businesses. She came up somewhere in the middle, at $175 a week and asked me if I approved (as if it mattered whether I approved or not!) I told her that $175 was fine. I told her that our daughter has braces and he’s been deducting $20 a week out my child support for that anyway so $175 was fine. And then, just to make things harder on me, she went on to say that as far as medical, I have to pay the first $250 deductible and then 39% of any out of pocket costs thereafter.

So Mike lied about being laid off, he’s been working ever since, in fact he’s working six 12’s! On top of that he’s deducting the $20 off the $175 and paying me $155. I tried to explain to him that that was wrong and not what we agreed upon.  His response, “Then take me back to court!” Why, so I have to go in front of Colleen and she’ll just yell at me because she’s had her period for the last five years?! And the kids have informed me that his entire house is in the process of being remodeled! Months ago before all this happened he had knocked out walls to make the dining room part of the kitchen, with all brand new cabinets and appliances. I saw it all, beautiful cabinets, more cabinets than I imagine anyone could ever need! Beautiful marble countertops, brand new refrigerator, stove, dishwasher and amazing recessed lighting. And apparently he’s now starting work on the rest of the house. But he has to rip me off that extra $20 ….just because I’m a single mom with three kids, because I work full time and don’t make a whole lot of money and struggle to make ends meet, because I live paycheck to paycheck and am just barely getting by....so deducting that extra $80 a month, in my opinion, is just for spite. It's because he know's I won't take him back for that.  

When Mike was growing up he was abused by his mother. From the stories I’ve heard, she hit him with whatever was nearby. She hit him in the head with a cast iron frying pan. She hit him with a high heel shoe and had to take him to the hospital for stitches from the heel being lodged in his head! He was badly abused by his mother and holds onto so much anger and resentment towards her for it. I would think that because of that, he wouldn’t want to do the same to his children. I’ve learned that that’s just not the way it is though. He will do it again; he will put his hands on my kids again. He will use excessive force. And what do I do then? Do I take matters into my own hands at that point? It’s been made more than clear to me that the justice system isn’t on the side of me or my children and their safety and well-being. The state of New Jersey has crowned a queen to sit on her thrown and make rulings about other peoples’ lives; and she rules by her emotional state, not by evidence and fairness. The children and families that live in Gloucester County better hope they don’t ever have to seek justice from her because they won’t get it and nothing will ever be done about it. I’m not the first person to complain about her and I won’t be the last. And nothing any of us say will change anything.