No Second Opinion

April 26, 2013 permalink

When doctors diagnosed baby Sammy Nikolayev with serious ailments, the parents wanted a second opinion. Doctors at the second hospital declared the baby was clinically safe to go home. The next day California child protectors and police took the baby by force.

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Sammy

Source: Facebook, news10

Sacramento couple fights to get their baby boy back from authorities

11:53 PM, Apr 25, 2013

SACRAMENTO, CA - A Sacramento family was torn apart after a 5-month-old baby boy was taken from his parents following a visit to the doctor.

The young couple thought their problems were behind them after their son had a scare at the hospital, but once they got home their problems got even worse.

It all began nearly two weeks ago, when Anna Nikolayev and her husband Alex took their 5-month-old boy Sammy to Sutter Memorial Hospital to be treated for flu symptoms, but they didn't like the care Sammy was getting.

For example, one day Anna asked why a nurse was giving her son antibiotics.

"I asked her, for what is that? And she's like, 'I don't know.' I'm like, 'you're working as a nurse, and you don't even know what to give to my baby for what,'" Anna explained.

According to Anna, a doctor later said Sammy shouldn't have been on the antibiotics.

Anna said Sammy suffers from a heart murmur and had been seeing a doctor at Sutter for regular treatment since he was born. After Sammy was treated for flu symptoms last week, doctors at Sutter admitted him to the pediatric ICU to monitor his condition. After a few days, Anna said doctors began talking about heart surgery.

FACEBOOK: Fans talk about the family's story

"If we got the one mistake after another, I don't want to have my baby have surgery in the hospital where I don't feel safe," Anna said.

Anna argued with doctors about getting a second opinion. Without a proper discharge, she finally took Sammy out of the hospital to get a second opinion at Kaiser Permanente.

"The police showed up there. They saw that the baby was fine," Anna said. "They told us that Sutter was telling them so much bad stuff that they thought that this baby is dying on our arms."

Medical records from the doctor treating Sammy at Kaiser Permanente said the baby as clinically safe to go home with his parents. The doctor added, "I do not have concern for the safety of the child at home with his parents."

"So police saw the report from the doctors, said, 'okay guys, you have a good day,' and they walked away," Anna said.

Anna said the next day police and child protective services showed up on her doorstep. Alex Nikolayev said he met them outside a short time after they arrived.

"I was pushed against the building, smacked down. I said, 'am I being placed under arrest?' He smacked me down onto the ground, yelled out, 'I think I got the keys to the house,'" Alex said.

Then police let themselves inside.

On home video shot with a camera Anna set up herself, police can be seen entering her front door on Wednesday.

"I'm going to grab your baby, and don't resist, and don't fight me ok?" a Sacramento police officer said in the video.

"He's like, 'okay let your son go,' so I had to let him go, and he grabbed my arm, so I couldn't take Sammy. And they took Sammy, and they just walked away," Anna said.

When News10 spoke with police, they said talk to CPS; CPS did not say much about the case. Just before 6 p.m. Thursday, Anna said that a CPS social worker told her, the reason they took Sammy is because of severe neglect; however, the social worker didn't elaborate on that neglect.

Sutter Memorial was asked to comment on the story, but the hospital said the case was with CPS and law enforcement and they would have to comment on the case. CPS said they can't specifically comment on this case because of privacy law, but CPS spokesperson Laura McCasland said, "We conduct a risk assessment of the child's safety and rely heavily on the direction of health care providers."

"It seems like parents have no right whatsoever," Alex said.

On Thursday, Anna and Alex were allowed a one hour visitation with Sammy; he's currently in protective custody at Sutter Memorial Hospital.

"His smile, it's everything for me," Anna said. "I was so happy to see him."

Anna and Alex have a court hearing scheduled for Monday.

"We did everything," Anna said. "We went from one hospital to another. We just wanted to be safe, that he is in good hands."

News10/KXTV

Source: KXTV

Russia to the Rescue! Russia's ombudsman will help the family. For Russian research, the Cyrillic name of the boy is Сэмми Николаева.

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Russian Ombudsman to Help California Couple to Return Child

Pavel Astakhov

RIA Novosti. Alexander Utkin, 19:15 28/04/2013

MOSCOW, April 28 (RIA Novosti) – Russian children's rights ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov, said on Sunday he will help a Russian couple, Alex and Anna Nikolayev of Sacramento, California, to return their baby boy, who has been seized by authorities in the United States.

“We will offer the parents to file a complaint to return the child. The process will not be quick but I think we will succeed in this,” Astakhov told RIA Novosti. “The case has been certainly taken under control,” he added.

Five-month-old Sammy has been in protective custody since April 24 when police and Child Protective Services took him from his mother after the family had a dispute with the baby’s doctors.

After Sammy was treated for flu symptoms last week, doctors at the Sutter Memorial Hospital decided that he needed an immediate heart surgery. The Russian parents argued with the doctors and took the child to another clinic for a second opinion without a proper discharge, saying they did not like the care Sammy was getting.

Sammy’s parents said they have known about Sammy's heart murmur since he was born, and the child was regularly seeing a Sutter cardiologist every two to three weeks. They said no one ever gave them any reason to think Sammy's health was in any imminent danger.

Updated at 20.40 with details.

Source: RIA Novosti

Quick success for the Russians.

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US Court Returns Baby to Russian Couple in Custody Case

RIA Novosti. Mihail Fomichev, 05:24 30/04/2013

WASHINGTON, April 30 (RIA Novosti) – A court in Sacramento, California, ruled on Monday that a baby boy who had been seized by authorities in the United States should be returned to his Russian parents, a Russian diplomat said.

Five-month-old Sammy Nikolaev has been in protective custody since April 24 when police and Child Protective Services (CPS) removed him from his parents after the family had a dispute with the baby’s doctors and took him from a hospital without proper discharge.

The CPS officials claimed they had removed the boy due to "severe neglect."

“After five hours of deliberation and analysis of factual information presented by both sides, the judge decided to dismiss all charges against the parents,” Evgeny Avdoshin, Consul at Consulate General of Russia in San Francisco, told RIA Novosti.

“In line with the verdict, the baby will remain with his parents,” Avdoshin said.

The Russian diplomat added that the parental rights of Alexander Nikolaev, who is a Russian citizen, have been fully respected during the hearings of the case in the US court.

The case attracted wide public and media attention both in the United States and in Russia, stirring criticism of unreasonably harsh treatment of the Russian couple by CPS and police.

Source: RIA Novosti

Addendum: On June 25 a judge granted a motion by CPS to dismiss the case against the Nikolayev family. The family will no longer have to put up with visits from social workers and will not have to go to trial.

Addendum: In November Reason TV reevaluated the incident after full disclosure of the medical records. Their video report is on YouTube and a local copy.

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Court Documents Reveal Conflicting Accounts in Baby Sammy CPS Case

Zach Weissmueller|Nov. 6, 2013 12:40 pm

Reason TV has obtained court records in the Samuel Nikolayev case that spurred a statewide audit of California's Child Protective Services agencies. The documents reveal a sharp difference of opinion between doctors regarding the medical condition of the baby at the time he was seized from his parents without a court order, as well as allegations of parental neglect made by social workers and Sacramento County Child Protective Services (CPS).

Reason TV produced a video featuring the case in August, but at the time court documents were sealed, and Sacramento CPS claimed it therefore wasn't legally allowed to comment on the specifics of the story. Sacramento Superior Court gave an undefined timeline for a ruling on Reason TV's petition to unseal the records.

On the day the above video was released, the court called and said the petition to unseal the documents had been approved. When asked, the court clerk denied that the timing had anything to do with the video's release.

Since then, parents Anna and Alex Nikolayev have filed a lawsuit against Sacramento County and will not comment on this story. Sacramento County Health and Human Services Director Sherri Heller also would not comment on the specifics of the case due to the pending lawsuit.

Ongoing Health Problems

At nine days old, Samuel Nikolayev was diagnosed with Ventriculoseptial defect and Atrioseptal defect: essentially two holes in the heart requiring daily medication. For the first five months of his life, Samuel's parents took him in for monthly checkups to monitor his progress, which improved slightly as he slowly gained weight and showed increased energy.

Still, pediatric cardiologist Dr. Hessam Fallah recommended heart surgery as soon as Sammy reached a safe weight, according to medical records. But Fallah said Anna Nikolayev expressed "doubts regarding surgery." Fallah noted that the Nikolayevs spoke of visiting a physician while in Germany who advised against surgery until Samuel reached 8kg (17lbs). He called this advice "not valid."

The Nikolayevs took Sammy to Colorado to visit his grandparents, and it was on that vacation that he contracted the flu. Upon returning to Sacramento, they took Samuel to Sutter Memorial Hospital, where he was admitted to the ICU for Influenza B and "failure to thrive," a medical term to describe an underweight baby.

Stuck in the Hospital

Samuel Nikolayev entered Sutter Memorial Hospital on April 16, 2013 with severe flu symptoms. Seven days later, his mother would pull him out against the wishes of the medical staff and spur Sacramento Child Protective Services into action.

When Reason TV interviewed the Nikolayevs in August, Alex Nikolayev told us, "They were coming up with some random stuff. Finding another thing just to keep us there."

This "random stuff" turned out to be concerns that Sammy was off his heart medication, according to medical records. Hospital staff wrote that Anna Nikolayev admitted to them that she had stopped giving Samuel his medications while on vacation in Colorado for three weeks, and they said Anna tried to treat a hernia Samuel had developed by taping coins to either side of it. The Nikolayevs' attorney has filed an objection to these details, saying they amount to hearsay and cannot be substantiated.

Hospital employees also wrote that Anna refused IVs and feeding tubes that doctors recommended in order to get Samuel the hydration and nutrition he needed, bringing the conflict to a head. On April 23, she left the hospital with Samuel, against the medical advice of the staff.

A social worker employed by the hospital reported Anna's behavior to California Child Protective Services, saying that the baby's life was in imminent danger.

A Second Opinion

The Nikolayevs have always contended that they were unhappy with how employees at Sutter Memorial treated them and that they only wanted a "second opinion." And this is partially confirmed by the fact that they did take Samuel directly to another hospital in the area, Kaiser Permanente.

The Kaiser visit was hectic, with police officers showing up an hour in because of the CPS complaint and then leaving once they found Samuel under competent medical supervision. The Nikolayevs believe this should have been their last interaction with the police and CPS. After all, the doctor at Kaiser wrote that "clinically the patient is well appearing, smiling, tolerating PO formula while in ED and hydrated appearing."

The doctor at Kaiser told the Nikolayevs that removing a child from the hospital "without proper discharge" as they did at Sutter Memorial was not a good idea but said he could understand the mother's concern for her son and her belief that she "can help him improve at home faster than him receiving NG (feeding) tube and IV line." He discharged Samuel hours later with instructions to follow up with Samuel's pediatrician the next day, noting that he did "not have concern for the safety of the child at home with his parents as they do appear competent and concerned [with] the child's best care" and "are aware of how to give medication at home since [they] have been doing this since he was first diagnosed."

A final line in the discharge report reads, simply, "CPS has been made aware from Sutter facility."

"Expressed Frustration"

On the afternoon of April 24, officers and a social worker showed up at the Nikolayevs' apartment, and the removal of Samuel Nikolayev, captured on tape by Anna's camcorder and depicted in the opening moments of Reason TV's video, played out.

So how did the Nikolayevs go from "competent and concerned" with Samuel's care to being raided and having their baby removed within 24 hours? Court records reveal that the Sutter Memorial social worker, who had originally reported the case to CPS, didn't trust the work done at Kaiser.

Although the Kaiser staff consulted with nurses and doctors at Sutter before discharging Samuel, they did not provide enough information to satisfy the social worker, citing medical privacy laws. Upon learning that Samuel was discharged with instructions to follow up with a pediatrician, the social worker "expressed frustration at this because the child needs immediate follow up with his pediatric specialist doctors, including the cardiologist, not just his pediatrician."

It's unclear why, given the relatively benign discharge instructions from Kaiser, Sacramento CPS took the extreme measure of removing a child from the custody of its parents without a court order and without notifying the parents of where he was being taken. Department head Sherri Heller would not comment directly on the case but did defend the practice in an August interview with Reason TV.

"The law is clear that it is appropriate for the agency to act without a court warrant if children are in imminent danger of physical harm," said Heller.

Samuel Nikolayev was taken back to Sutter Hospital and held for eight days, and Alex and Anna were allowed periodic, supervised visits. In early May, Samuel underwent a successful heart surgery, but only after the Nikolayev's received a signed letter from the hospital's cardiologist making clear that the surgery was necessary but "not an emergency."

Audit CPS

All of the information is finally public, but it raises nearly as many questions as it answers. Was this a case of an erratic mother whose stubborn, backwards ideas about medicine put the life of her baby at risk, as Sutter Memorial and Sacramento CPS would like you to believe? Or did hospital staffers and social workers use the power of the state to bully two young parents into accepting their dictums on what constitutes proper treatment and prevent them from seeking a second opinion, as the Nikolayevs say? Was baby Samuel's life in imminent danger, and was it necessary for CPS and the police to storm the house and take him away without a court order, especially given that they sought treatment at a different hospital?

Some of the answers depend on whose words you believe, though it is clear that more than one medical professional believed that an eventual heart surgery was necessary for the baby's long-term survival. It's also clear that the Nikolayevs sought medical attention for their baby on a regular basis in those first five months of his life, visiting a pediatrician at least once a month. They appear to have sometimes ignored medical advice, but how often that was the case is still somewhat unclear.

What remains evident is that this incident would never have come to light if Anna hadn't placed a camcorder on her kitchen counter and pressed "record" moments before the police entered her house and took Samuel. No court document or medical record can come close to conveying the raw terror felt by a mother losing her child in the way that video can. Time and time again, we've seen cheap video equipment answer the question, "Who will watch the watchers?"

But in the case of a powerful agency like Child Protective Services, that's still not enough. A video may have opened up the debate in California, but only increased transparency will begin to solve the long-term, systemic problems.

An audit is underway, and nobody knows for sure whether it will uncover more abuses of power like those documented in Orange County or if it will largely exonerate wrongly maligned agencies and tell a story of social workers doing the best they can in impossibly tough situations. Either way, a one-time audit may not go far enough.

Transparency is about accountability for day-to-day operations. Protecting patient privacy is a legitimate consideration, but in a case like the Nikolayevs', where neither party necessarily wants the court records sealed, it's hard to see who wins by keeping it under wraps. Many other states have open family and juvenile courts that allow the media and public to easily access information that, in California, can require months of waiting and cost hundreds of dollars to maybe, eventually obtain.

Reason Foundation Director of Education and Child Welfare Lisa Snell has made other common sense reform suggestions as well, such as treating child abuse and neglect cases as criminal matters that guarantee due process rather than administrative matters that give CPS carte blanche power to strongarm families.

She also says we should examine funding incentives that increase agencies' budgets based upon the number of abuses reported. For the past 12 years, California has put far more children into the foster care system than any other state in the U.S., more than Texas and New York combined, according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.

There are limits to what any one case, especially one as complicated as the Nikolayev case, can teach us about a statewide bureaucracy. But in the absence of open records and due process protections--the most basic elements of transparency and accountability--it's impossible to even know the extent of the problems that may need fixing.

Source: Reason