Adoption Ends Seven-Year Struggle : Happy Ending for Carlos

The six-year fight over “Baby Carlos,” which pitted Don and Beverly Collard, the child’s foster parents, against the natural mother and the county adoption agency, has ended with Carlos an irrevocable member of the Collard family.

Before the Covina couple received the final adoption decree from a Los Angeles Superior Court judge Sept. 5, Carlos had been the center of a well-publicized court fight.

When Carlos was born in Los Angeles in 1979, his mother, a citizen of Mexico, agreed to give him up for adoption. But she changed her mind a few months later, tried to regain custody and took Carlos to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1981 in defiance of a court order.

Tears of Joy

Beverly Collard and her son went to Mexico to try to find the boy, and, with the help of Mexican police, traced him to the neighborhood where he lived. While searching the area, Collard’s son spotted Carlos walking down the street, and the two brought him back to Covina.

After learning earlier this month that the adoption of Carlos, now 7, finally had been approved, Beverly Collard said she shed tears of joy.

Carlos, shuffling baseball cards and reluctantly posing for pictures, did not want to talk to a reporter when he was asked about how he felt.

“Carlos is very quiet. You don’t know a lot of his internal feelings,” said Beverly Collard.

But Carlos did agree that he is happy that his days of going to court are over, and he confirmed his adopted mother’s report that his first reaction was relief that he could stay in the United States.

Efforts to reach the attorneys who have represented the natural mother, Guadalupe Rodriguez Nunez, were unsuccessful.

Carlos will continue to grow up in a Covina household that even the county officials who fought the Collards’ effort to adopt Carlos agree has extraordinary warmth and love, often taking in children that the county cannot place anywhere else.

Long-Term Caring

Don and Beverly Collard are in their early 50s, an age when most couples are long past the daily routine of changing diapers, warming milk bottles and rocking crying babies in the middle of the night.

But the Collards have been caring for foster children for 24 years and now have Carlos as well as six other children, ranging in age from 4 months to 7 years, in their home. For the Collards, 2 a.m. feedings, temper tantrums and bawling babies are a way of life, not a trial that must be endured and will pass.

Over the years, the Collards have sheltered more than 200 children, youngsters taken to them by county social workers for temporary care while the parents are in jail, on drugs, impoverished or otherwise unable or unwilling to care for them.

Typically, a child will stay a year or two, long enough for his parents to straighten out their lives or for another relative to assume the child-rearing burden.

Beverly Collard said she is always being advised to guard against forming emotional attachments.

“But how do you take care of a child without being emotionally involved?” she asked.

And so it was with Carlos. He was 3 months old when a social worker took him to the Collard home in Covina in 1979.

His mother, who had come to the United States from Guadalajara, was 19 years old and separated from her husband when she gave birth to Carlos at County-USC Medical Center and relinquished him for adoption.

For 16 months, the Collards nurtured Carlos, watched him learn to walk and begin to talk. They never heard from his parents.

Then, when Carlos was 19 months old, they said, a county worker informed them that the mother wanted Carlos back and the county had agreed to send him to Mexico.

The Collards said they were told the mother could not afford to come for the child herself, but someone would pick Carlos up, drive him to the border and give him to relatives or a friend.

Hand Carlos over to strangers? Sentence him to what might be a life of poverty? The Collards refused and hired a lawyer to file for guardianship.

Transfer Ordered

The most dramatic events occurred in 1981 when Carlos was 2. After hearing the competing custody claims, Pomona Superior Court Judge William McVittie issued an order designed to transfer Carlos from the care of the foster parents to his natural mother gradually, through a series of increasingly lengthy visits.

But the Collards contended that the visits were making Carlos distraught and demanded a psychiatric evaluation. Nunez fled to Mexico with her son in September, 1981, in defiance of McVittie’s instructions.

After it became apparent that the U.S. legal system was powerless to return Carlos, Beverly Collard and her 16-year-old adopted son Dale went to Mexico, plucked Carlos off the street and whisked him back to Covina.

By now the news media were intrigued. Beverly Collard described to reporters and television cameras how she found Carlos in a poor Guadalajara neighborhood of adobe houses, with dirt floors and blankets for doors. Although Carlos was clean when he was found, she said, there were sores and insect bites on his body.

The Guadalajara address the mother had given the court was false, Collard said, and the search for Carlos took days even with the help of a doctor in Guadalajara who had been contacted through acquaintences and had arranged for police cooperation.

Collard said she had almost despaired of finding the boy when she turned to God. “I got down on my knees and gave Carlos to the Lord, and that’s the day we found him,” she said.

An attorney for Nunez responded to the Collard press conference by arranging for Nunez, who spoke only Spanish, to talk with reporters through an interpreter.

Nunez denied that her family was impoverished, insisting that her husband, a maintenance supervisor, earned “more than enough for all of us.” She said that she lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and that Carlos had been found in a poor neighborhood because the family was on an errand to buy quilts.

Support and Criticism

Beverly Collard said the public airing of the custody case brought her both support and criticism. Some people congratulated her for protecting a child, who was, after all, a U.S. citizen, but others accused her of denigrating life in Mexico and of trying to separate Carlos from his heritage.

She said she never meant to imply anything against Mexico. “I have a lot of respect for the people there,” she said. “I resent the way they have to live.”

If she had gone to Mexico and found Carlos living in good circumstances, she said, she might have left him there. But she could not leave him to what appeared to be a life of poverty.

Today, Collard said she sympathizes with Nunez but does not understand her actions.

Although attorneys for Nunez claimed that the mother’s efforts to regain custody of her child in the months after the birth were frustrated by bureaucratic delays, Collard said a county worker testified that Nunez was invited to reclaim Carlos when he was 3 months old but failed to act.

“I feel sorry and hurt for her,” Collard said, “but I don’t understand her.”

Permanent Guardianship

After Carlos was brought back from Mexico, Judge McVittie canceled the plan to transfer custody to Nunez. He awarded the Collards permanent guardianship in 1983 after Nunez failed to appear at a hearing and her attorney said he had lost contact with her.

In April of this year, another Superior Court judge ruled that Carlos was free to be adopted and the Probation Department filed a report saying that the Collards would be suitable parents.

The Collards said Nunez has not visited with Carlos since 1981 but did testify in April against the adoption.

Beverly Collard blames the county for the prolonged legal battle. In the beginning, she said, she was ready to turn Carlos over to his natural mother if she would come to Covina and get acquainted with him first.

But, she said, the county refused to make the arrangements and insisted that the Collards were in no position to set conditions.

“Had they done what I wanted to do,” she said, “I think Carlos would have bonded with her (Nunez).” And Carlos would be living in Guadalajara, not Covina.

Helen Ramirez, an assistant director in the county Department of Children’s Services, said that although Judge McVittie and others criticized the county’s handling of the case, a state agency looked into the matter and filed a report that said the county followed proper procedures.

Despite the legal battle with the county, the Collards have continued to serve as foster parents.

“I don’t work for the agency,” Beverly Collard said. “I work for children.”

Room for One More

The Collards currently have four foster children and are serving as guardians for two others. They also have three children of their own, three adopted children and six grandchildren.

Their 28-year-old daughter, Lisa Lanzarotto, helps care for the seven young children during the day, but otherwise Don, a retired cement finisher, and Beverly, manage on their own.

Lanzarotto said her parents’ strength lies in their patience with children.

Jacqueline Fox, a Beverly Hills attorney who was appointed by the court to represent Carlos in the adoption proceedings, said she has been working with child-custody cases for 10 years and has “never met anybody like the Collards.”

Accepting the Unwanted

She said they take “foster children nobody else wants” and give them an environment of warmth, patience and love.

Fox said adoption proceedings are confidential, so she could not discuss the case itself. But what is remarkable about the Collards, she said, is that they have not been discouraged from being foster parents by “a very negative experience” with the county but have redoubled their efforts to help children.

“Carlos is a very lucky child,” Fox said.

Although they have adopted some children and become guardians of others, the Collards said most youngsters in their care leave within three years.

Beverly Collard said some departures elicit from her only a sigh of relief. “There are some children--I must be honest--that I’m glad to see leave,” she said.

Don Collard said not all the children brought to their home are endearing. He said some children threaten and cajole foster parents and badger authorities into moving them from one family to another until they find parents who are suitably permissive.

But other departures bring tears. These are the children, she said, who “take a layer of your heart with them.”

The four foster children now in their care were all “drug babies,” youngsters who inherited addiction to cocaine, PCP or other substances from their mothers and require special care, sometimes including oxygen. The county compensates for the extra care by paying foster parents $552 a month to care for a drug baby, compared with $294 a month for a healthy infant.

Legal Costs

The struggle for custody of Carlos left the Collards with about $20,000 in legal expenses. Friends have held bake sales and yard sales to try to cover the cost. Beverly Collard is talking about collaborating on a book about the experience in order to raise money to pay off the debt.

Dr. Michael Durfee, a psychiatrist who runs the county health department’s child-abuse program and has treated Carlos, said Beverly Collard has unusual skill in taking care of children.

Durfee said he has told her: “It isn’t so much that you are noble, it’s just that this is what you’re good at.”

And yet, Durfee said, the efforts that the Collards make to help others, and their clarity of purpose and determination are simply remarkable. For the Collards, not helping is unthinkable.

“Beverly Collard went to Guadalajara without language skills and with very little resources to find a boy named Carlos,” he said. “I would have raged and ranted and complained. She went to Guadalajara.”

The Collards said they intend to keep opening their home to foster children indefinitely. Don Collard said he thinks having children around all the time keeps him young, and Beverly said she expects to care for children “until the day I die. I’ll probably go to heaven with a babe in arms.”