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Kapanaia Beach North Kohala
Colorado 4th Judicial District (4th JD) -
Magistrate William Trujillo
During FY 2008 the 4th JD (Colorado Springs, El Paso and
Teller counties) had literally three times (3x) the number of
domestic abuse protection orders (POs) as comparable Colorado
judicial districts, i.e., 1st JD 596 POs (population ~535,000,
4th JD 2,410 POs (population ~610,000), 18th JD 817 POs
(population ~846,000) according to the state court
administrator. The numbers alone are prima facie evidence
of gross abuse of process in the 4th JD..
So the first question is where do all these orders come
from? When I look at the
El Paso County court web site I am directed to
T*E*S*S*A in order to obtain a restraining (protection)
order. This is insane and they are publicly funded to the tune
of $2 million a year to simply destroy thousands of lives and
military personnel.
At present many, if not most domestic violence (DV) initial
hearings (Fast Track) and temporary protection orders (TPOs) are
heard by Magistrate William Trujillo. If he has ever turned down
or dismissed one of the thousands of TPOs and DV cases brought
before him it has escaped our notice. Defendants are guilty
unless, and until they can prove their innocence.
A day in court - March 4, 2009
The Equal Justice Foundation works closely with military
personnel and civilians on the five bases surrounding Colorado
Springs and continually works with domestic violence and abuse
allegations. A couple of cases of note recently were brought
before Magistrate Trujillo. On March 4, 2009, a female soldier
suffering from PTSD was brought before Trujillo for a hearing on
a permanent protection order. Note that in Colorado "permanent"
means the rest of your life and you can't even ask for a
modification for four years.
The soldier had been watching a couple's children for
them. Both the parents are soldiers as well and the husband was
in Iraq when the incident occurred. Apparently one of the
children was acting up and the soldier/defendant restrained the
child. The soldier testified she has no memory of what she did,
and dissociative events are common with PTSD. Whatever she did
scared the child but did not injure her. The soldier honestly
reported the incident to all involved at the time. However, when
the father got home from Iraq some months later he insisted his
wife file a protection order against the soldier (men can't get
protection orders against women in the 4th JD).
The matter came on for hearing initially in the courtroom
of Magistrate Robin Chittum, who attempted to resolve the issue.
The soldier will be discharged from the Army in 30 days and she
is then moving back to New York. She is under treatment for her
PTSD with the Fort Carson Warrior in Transition Unit (WTU).
Magistrate Chittum, who is as day is to night compared to
Trujillo, suggested that the temporary order simply be extended
for 45 days until the soldier had been discharged and had moved
out of the state. That wasn't sufficient for the obviously
vindictive mother and father. So the matter was moved to
Magistrate Trujillo's court for a full hearing.
Under oath he soldier testified honestly about the
incident. But Trujillo would not allow her to call a witness in
her defense and presumably he is unfamiliar with the Sixth
Amendment. He did not consider any alternatives and simply made
the protection order permanent for the rest of her life!
One more soldier's life ruined! But the EJF
seems to be the only one counting.
Child "protective" services (CPS) - Safe
Passage
The soldier's case wasn't the only one to be heard on
March 4th. The EJF has a member whose wife is, to put it
politely, emotionally disturbed. She has reportedly attempted
suicide on at least one occasion and threatened it on several
others.
I've known the husband for more than a year but only met
the wife last July after she had been arrested for domestic
violence against her husband. As with many lunachics she calls
911 often and the El Paso County sheriff's department is well
acquainted with her.
As it is a goal of the EJF to keep families together
whenever possible I asked the two of them if they wanted to stay
together. At the time they said they did and I advised them on
steps they should take to get the charges against her dismissed,
which they did. I also recommended the wife seek treatment.
But then the wife began calling the EJF with irrational
statements about getting a divorce, filing a protection order,
going to TESSA (a local shelter group), needing money, etc.
These calls continued for some time until I spoke to her husband
and he persuaded her to stop calling. I was also very concerned
about her threats to get a protection order as the husband
contracts with the Army and carries a top secret code word
security clearance. The EJF has long noted that DV laws are
being used as a
modern variant on "honey traps" for men holding high-level
security clearances.
As the mental problems of the wife became clearer, her
husband also revealed that there is credible evidence that she
is sexually abusing her 6-year-old son and physically abusing
her 8- and 9-year-old daughters, including dislocating the arm
of one of the daughter's. Witnesses to the abuse include the
father, grandparents, and a day-care worker.
As a mandatory reporter I was obligated to report this
child abuse and contacted a supervisor we work with at El Paso
County DHS/CPS. She passed it down to a case worker, who
apparently quit soon thereafter. Another case worker was
assigned, then another, then another, then ..., a story familiar
to most of you who have had to deal with CPS agencies. These
case workers also had a habit of violating confidentiality and
reporting back to the wife any details they learned about the
husband and also called to warn her anytime the children were to
be interviewed. One case worker even went so far as to tell the
father he wasn't doing enough to protect his children and claim
he was the one guilty of domestic violence against his wife, a
redfem tactic many of you have seen in your own cases.
The child abuse case was eventually assigned to
Safe Passage, a local agency that is supposed to provide
help for victims of child abuse, to investigate. It will come as
little surprise to most of our readers that Safe Passage
investigators could find no evidence of the mother abusing her
children despite four adult witnesses.
In frustration, I wrote the district attorney, the
sheriff, and the county commissioners about this travesty after
the father was turned down for a protection order on December 4,
2008, which the DHS/CPS case worker promptly notified the wife
about. My escalation prompted a condescending letter from the
law enforcement bureau chief of the El Paso County Sheriff's
Office and another from the county commissioner of the district
where the couple live explaining how DHS/CPS doesn't work:
From: "Amy Lathen" <AmyLathen@elpasoco.com>
To: Father/husband
Cc: "Dr. Charles E. Corry" <ccorry@ejfi.org>
The director of the Department of Human Services is a
direct report employee to the Board of County Commissioners.
This means we, as a Board, hire this individual and he/she is
employed on a contractual basis. To that end, I view us as
having very direct oversight over DHS.
That being said, the complicated funding structure and
quantity and complexity of mandates requires an experienced
director and we do not insert ourselves in specific cases
because of our lack of ability to lend an educated eye to such
specific situations (and frankly, just no jurisdiction there).
Therefore, our oversight really does include the policy,
administrative and fiscal areas and I do believe that we have
the authority to compel the disclosure of policies, procedures,
etc, as you describe. I would be very surprised if you've been
denied these public documents and will certainly look into the
situation if indeed, DHS has restricted you from any of these
types of public documents.
We have no authority of any kind when it comes to matters
involving the courts and decisions made therein.
I believe I can help if there are public documents which
are not being made available to you, but "public" is the key
word. Anything protected by statute is something I cannot
touch.
I hope this helps in some way.
Amy Lathen
From Commissioner Lathen's explanation it is clear that
this agency operates with no effective oversight whatsoever,
which will not come as a surprise to any parent who has had to
work with DHS/CPS. Of course the county commissioners solution
for this dysfunctional agency was to ask for a tax increase,
which voters wisely denied last November.
Many of you will have guessed that the next obvious step in
this melodrama was for the wife to go to
TESSA and get a protection order against her husband, which
she did on December 31, 2008. Without question the court granted
her a temporary order against her husband and "protected" the
children from their father.
The permanent order hearing was also on March 4, 2009.
Fortunately the issue was heard in Magistrate Chittum's court
and the father retained one of the EJF recommended attorneys.
The wife was offered, at no cost to her, an attorney from TESSA
and a public defender. She fired both of them!
With one of TESSA's advocates sitting by her side the wife
went into her act. Many of you have seen these drama queens in
action and there is little need to elaborate. But Magistrate
Chittum soon saw through her act and, without the need to call a
single defense witness, ruled that the wife was simply
vindictive, there was no evidence of abuse, she was not in fear
of her husband, and she gave one of the most damning rulings
against redfem behavior it has been my pleasure to hear. She
then dismissed the protection order in its entirety.
To no one's surprise the wife was back in court the
afternoon of March 6th demanding another protection order. When
the father learned of this and went to the courthouse he found
his frightened children outside the courtroom. The obvious next
step was for the lunachic wife to call both the Colorado Springs
police and the El Paso County Sheriff, as she has done many,
many times in the past. When the officers arrived Magistrate
Chittum was gracious enough to step out into the hallway and
explain the situation to the officers. If only we had more
judges like her!
The couple are now seeking a divorce and there is no
doubt the false allegations against the husband will continue.
The children will be left in the wife's care where she will
continue to alienate and abuse them. As the wife is suicidal,
in other similar cases the woman has killed the children and
herself, or just the children and pleads insanity. In other
cases CPS waits a few months and decides the woman really is
abusing the children, as everyone has been saying, and puts them
in foster care to collect their bonuses, ignoring the fact that
the father and grandparents are more than willing to protect and
care for these little people.
Horrific as they may sound, the above stories are an
everyday occurrence in the courtroom of magistrates like
Trujillo and agencies like Safe Passage. Consider the following
events.
El Paso County Sheriff deputy goes amok -
Trujillo and Safe Passage protecting us after the fact
According to reports El Paso County Sheriff Detective
Jerald Ray was an outstanding law officer who joined the
department in September 1966. As a major crimes investigator
Detective Day handled some of the departments biggest cases.
According to a February 12, 2009,
Colorado Springs Gazette news story Detective Day was the
lead investigator in the homicide investigation of Jennifer
Warren in a drug deal gone bad, so one presumes he was competent
and functional through at least mid-February.
In a
March 10, 2009, news story the Gazette reported that none of
his colleagues were aware of any problems with Detective Day.
He had been separated from his wife for at least two years
although court records do not show any divorce petition has been
filed. So it is unlikely that major problems with his wife still
existed. Yet on the evening of February 28, 2008, 42-year-old
Detective Jerald Day went berserk.
According to the
press account the incident began when
the Douglas County Sheriff's Office was alerted to be on the
lookout for Day, who, according to the call, was suicidal and
heading north from El Paso County on Colorado 83.
A Douglas County deputy responding
at 10:30 PM found Day heading north in a tan Toyota pickup and
began a pursuit when Day did not comply with the deputy's
attempts to pull him over. Other law enforcement officers in the
area joined in the pursuit, and Day eventually pulled into a
parking lot near Colorado 83 and Colorado 86, in Franktown
northeast of Castle Rock. He refused to get out and displayed
his pistol.
When Day did get out of the truck,
he refused to drop his weapon and surrender. A deputy shot him
with the nonlethal sponge round, but Day continued to refuse
orders. A police dog was released, bit his arm and brought him
to the ground.
Since February 28th Detective Day
has been held in the Douglas County jail on $300,000 bond and
faces charges of two counts of felony menacing, prohibited use
of a weapon, vehicular eluding, resisting arrest, reckless
driving, and driving under the influence.
That apparently isn't sufficient and
on March 2nd
Nicole Malyj,
age 27, went to Magistrate Trujillo's courtroom and obtained a
protection order against Detective Jerald Day, whom she had
apparently been dating. Of course it is pure coincidence that
Nicole Maljy is a family advocate and forensic investigator for
Safe Passage.
With Detective Day safely in jail,
Ms. Maljy was free to tell the Gazette that Jerald Day had been
growing increasingly erratic in the months leading up to the
arrest. In her application for a protection order that she filed
after Detective Day was in jail, she said Day threatened to kill
her and himself during a phone call on the night of the
standoff. "I heard the weapon Œrack' in the background,'" she
wrote.
She also accused Day of following her from
her house to her job the day before and said that he refused her
requests to leave her alone.
Am I the only one who wonders why, as a forensic
investigator, that if Ms. Malyj recognized such irrational
behavior in a trusted senior police officer would she wait until
after the detective's breakdown to bring attention to it? And
why was a protection order needed after he was in jail?
Obviously it would be "blaming the victim" to suggest she
might have been at least part of the reason for this man's
breakdown.
Summary
What we have is a child protection
agency,
Safe Passage,
that can't recognize a woman abusing her children even with four
witnesses. But their forensic investigator can recognize erratic
behavior in a deputy months before anyone else in the sheriff's
office notices anything.
Then we have a magistrate who issues
protection orders like tissue paper to every female who says
she's in fear, even if the man is already in jail and will be
long past the time the temporary order will expire, or the
soldier will be discharged and moved out of state.
And no matter how emotionally
disturbed a woman is,
TESSA
will help them file protection orders for Trujillo to sign and
provide them a free attorney.
What is our legislature doing to help these Three Stooges?
State senator John Morse from El Paso County has
introduced legislation to tax marriages and divorces to
provide them more money. That bill, SB09-068, has passed the
state senate and will be heard by the State, Veterans, and
Military Affairs committee at the capitol in Denver on Tuesday,
March 17th at 1:30 PM. Anyone else available to join me in
testifying against this insanity?
Where is the Greek chorus for this tragedy that is
destroying so many lives? Presently about 1,000 military men and
women in the Colorado Springs area alone are being forced out of
the Armed Forces on specious or false allegations of domestic
violence and abuse. Ofttimes combat veterans also lose VA health
and other benefits, military retirement pay, bonuses, and incur
other penalties as well in these specious cases. There is little
question that the lifetime protection order Trujillo placed on
that female soldier with exacerbate her PTSD and her dreams of
entering law enforcement when she goes back home are destroyed.
And magistrates with the intelligence and compassion shown
by Robin Chittum don't seem to last or progress in our courts.
The legal system isn't kind to those who don't follow radical
feminist (redfem) dogma and I have quite a list of disbarred
attorneys to demonstrate that. I certainly hope Chittum is an
exception and is with us for many years. Good judges are a
rarity in these troubled times.
Charles E. Corry, Ph.D., F.G.S.A.
President
Equal Justice Foundation
About the author
Dr. Corry holds a Ph.D. in
geophysics from Texas A&M and is a Fellow of the Geological
Society of America. He is a widely published and
internationally-known earth scientist whose biography has
appeared in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, Who's
Who in Science and Engineering, among others, for ten years.
After service with 1 st Marines he
became involved with the early space program in 1960, doing
preflight testing and failure analysis on Atlas and Centaur
missiles, including all the Project Mercury birds. In 1965 he
switched to oceanography and did research at both Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and Woods Hole
Oceanographic on Cape Cod. He has also taught geophysics at
university and worked as a research manager for a Fortune 500
company.
His research on domestic violence
resulted from the horrifying experience of watching his former
wife, Theresa, go violently insane between 1995 and 1997. He
began documenting the problems after being acquitted of DV
charges she brought against him and two subsequent restraining
orders were dismissed. She also stalked him for five years. That
experience pushed him from an ivory tower into the DV script
outlined above and the corruption of today's legal system.
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______________________________________________
Charles E. Corry, Ph.D., F.G.S.A.
President
Equal Justice Foundation
http://www.ejfi.org/
455 Bear Creek Road
Colorado Springs,
Colorado 80906-5820
Personal home page: http://corry.ws
Curriculum vitae:
http://www.marquiswhoswho.net/charleselmocorry/Default.aspx
The good men may do
separately is small compared with what they may do collectively.
Benjamin Franklin
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