Orange County advocates for a baby who was callously taken away from his parents in Sacramento thanks to Child Protective Services (CPS) up there are holding a rally right now in Orange to demand a criminal investigation into CPS workers in Palmdale returning a second boy to his mother who is now accused of beating her son to death.
Why Orange? Beats the hell outta me.
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It was to begin at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Lamoreux Justice Center on The City Drive by the Orange County-based group Americans Demand CPS Reform, which was formed after Sammy Nikolayev was snatched from the loving arms of his parents. Their crime? After being denied a doctor's second opinion in an emergency room treating the baby, the Nikolayevs had the audacity to take him to another hospital for that consultation. Sacramento CPS workers then called the cops, and Sammy was taken away.
Today's rally concerns the story we've all seen in the LA-based news about other parents warning Palmdale CPS workers that Gabriel Fernandez was being abused by his mother and her boyfriend. But the 8-year-old was allowed to stay with his mom, who along with her b.f. is now on the hook for his murder. The coroner said Gabriel had a fractured skull, three broken ribs, BB pellets embedded in his chest and groin, cigarette burns on his skin and teeth knocked out of his mouth.
So, yeah, very worthy causes both. By why here? Yes, the sponsor is based in Orange County. And our own CPS system has taken criticism recently.
See:
Attorney Unveils Suit Alleging Cover-up of Disgusting Child Abuse by DA, County Agency
Lawmakers OK Child Protective Services Audit Request Partly Sparked by OC Case
Octomom Nadya Suleman Says Child Protective Services “Supports” Her Stripping and Porning
And the Sammy case has become a cause célèbre for Fox News, which has spun it into a indictment of California's left-leaning political system (talk about a nanny state!). Orange County, of course, does have many, many Fox News viewers, although several did die off before you got to this point in the blog post.
My point is rallying in Orange about these two CPS cases seems to make about as much sense as drawing attention to San Francisco's Asiana Airlines crash … in Omaha.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.