On September 1, 2024 my children were removed from mine and their father's, Cyril Darrel-Neals, care at Carle Richland Memorial Hospital by Investigator Avery Liss because my daughter was born with substances in her system. She showed no signs of withdrawal or dependency.
Absolutely no reasonable efforts were made to allow my family to remain together. Neither of my children were in any imminent danger. My daughter was in the hospital nursery and my 2 year old son was blocks away with the babysitter, a responsible adult. Yet this worker went out of his way to remove my children. We have only recently been given any personal information of the foster parents. I was able to retrieve their names from the investigative file. However, those foster parents have been aware of our names and where we live. I have text messages between my son's foster mother and a mutual acquaintance to verify this. Furthermore, my son's foster parents, Sara and Matthew McGee, cut my son's hair on September 3, 2024 without permission from either parent. Requests that I have made to the caseworker, Luke Thompson, for written documentation concerning my son's health, such as his contraction of hand, foot, and mouth disease and, most recently, RSV, were ignored. He even went so far as to tell us that it was not up to him whether or not my children received the COVID vaccine, of which we disapprove. My son's pediatrician, Dr. Kylie Garbie, vouched for us and in our consistency in always taking very good care of our son. But Luke Thompson, Avery Liss, and their superiors are choosing to focus only on the false testimony given by my sister, Tabbitha Wilson. She is also in their employ as an intact worker out of Bethany Christian Services in a neighboring county. My two children have been in foster care in separate towns and with separate families for 8 months now. The file states that my daughter's foster mother had offered to take my son in as well. However, the agency chose to ignore this and keep them apart. To top it off, I recently discovered that my firstborn son, Remington, who is now 4 years old and to whom Luke had previously, in 2022, coerced us into signing our rights of away with threats of taking the child in my womb, is also being fostered within the same family as my 2 year old boy, Roman. We had our adjudicatory hearing on February 7th, and our children were adjudicated neglected. They're even trying to call my son's foster parents fictive kin, even though they're complete strangers. They intend on terminating our rights to our firstborn son unless we voluntarily surrender them. I fear that, in doing so, they will have the means to keep all of my children. Furthermore, we have NEVER had a Child and Family Team Meeting or really any face- to- face interaction with our caseworker besides when we see him at court.
It's in Clay County, IL