Mother Loses Son Behind Wall of Adoption : Family: After a Florida woman finally found the child she hadn’t seen since 1980, his adoptive parents refused to let her visit him.

This couldn’t be happening, Kim Roberson thought. It’s not possible to lose a child twice.

But that is exactly what happened.

The Florida woman’s 3-year-old son, Leroy, disappeared in 1980, when his father took the boy for a custody visit and never returned.

Seven years later, she tracked Leroy down. He had been adopted by an Orange County couple who opposed her having any contact with the boy.

She didn’t ask to take him back--she knew she probably had no chance to regain custody--but she began a court fight simply for the right to see her son again.

In July, she lost that battle.

It was very simple, she was told. Leroy belongs to someone else now.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Roberson, 29, said from her home near Orlando, Fla., where she lives today with only memories of her son. “I wanted to go through the floor. I said, ‘That’s it? It’s over? I can never see my son?’ There’s only so much a person can take before they break.”

Roberson had always held out hope that she could hug her son again. But instead, she has to settle for a sheet of paper outlining the barest of details about the boy, who is now 12.

More than a year ago, in a letter to the attorney for Leroy’s adoptive parents, she had asked if they could tell her what her son is like. The response came back through the lawyer, an emotionless recitation of answers to her questions, numbered neatly on a page.

“It said things like: ‘Five feet tall. Blond hair. Grades are good. Has a lot of friends. Has a girlfriend. Goes to church. Favorite movie star is Michael J. Fox,”’ Roberson said.

Leroy’s mother felt as though she held the tiniest bit of her son in her hand. It was a strange mix of gratitude and yearning.

Today, Roberson is $30,000 in debt from the lawsuit, has two more children to rear and cannot afford an appeal. Divorced from her second husband and waiting tables to make ends meet, she has resigned herself to questions: What is her first born son like? What’s his favorite flavor of ice cream? What does his laugh sound like?

“I just want him to know his mother didn’t run off and leave him,” she said. “He was taken from me. I birthed that child. I was with him through his teething. I potty-trained him. I watched while he learned to walk and talk and all of a sudden he’s gone and it’s as if he never existed. Well, that child didn’t die. He’s still in my heart.”

Roberson’s story is one of loss, but it’s also about an ironic and painful solution to an unsolveable problem. The chief mission of family-law courts is to create stable, loving environments for children. But that can mean their natural parents never see them again.

Buying Presents

For several years after Leroy disappeared, his mother kept buying him birthday and Christmas presents. She imagined him bouncing into the room and tearing them open as if he’d never been gone.

But the brightly wrapped gifts stacked up, unopened. In her mind, Roberson kept flashing on the last time she saw her son: leaving their Nashville home for a court-ordered custody visit with his father, Larry Rose, on Oct. 17, 1980. They never returned.

Roberson drove to St. Petersburg, Fla., her ex-husband’s last address, but he had cleared out of his apartment. For two weeks, she scoured his job site, local parks and neighborhoods. No sign of her ex-husband or her son. The police and her lawyer said they couldn’t help her. Finally, in tears, she gave up.

Six years later, she remarried and moved to Florida. Buoyed by her new husband’s support and dogged by the memory of her son, Roberson renewed the quest for her boy. With the help of missing children’s organizations, she discovered in the fall of 1987 that Leroy had been adopted by an Orange County couple. In Orange County Superior Court, she filed suit against the boy’s adoptive parents in a bid to see or write to her son. She also named the county, claiming county investigators didn’t try hard enough to find her.

But the county steadfastly refused to disclose her son’s whereabouts. Its lawyers said the county met its obligations by conducting an extensive search for Roberson. And once an adoption is final, walls of secrecy protect the stability of the child’s new family unit. A judge agreed.

Court records show that Leroy was first taken into Orange County custody briefly in July 1982 after a severe spanking by Rose, a carpenter who had a history of skirmishes with the law. That December, Rose gave his son to county social workers for good, saying he couldn’t control the boy and was afraid he might hurt him if they stayed together.

Leroy’s father told social workers that his wife left the boy with him in 1980 and never got back in touch, a claim Roberson angrily denies. By April, 1983, the father had disappeared and Leroy was in a foster home. In February, 1985, Roberson’s parental rights were terminated in her absence. Leroy was adopted.

Attorneys defending the county against Roberson’s lawsuit located Rose in 1989 and talked with him, but they will not disclose his whereabouts.

Roberson’s attorney, Jeffrey W. Doeringer, said he still gets choked up when he thinks about the case.

“Kim never wanted to take the child away from his new parents,” he said. “She only wanted to visit or write or share in the child’s life. She believed she had something to share with him. She wanted to make sure he knew she hadn’t abandoned him, but that the system lost track of her and then got between them when she finally did find him.”

In court papers, Doeringer accused the county of failing to follow up a critical piece of data that could have led to Roberson: her divorce lawyer’s name. It was listed on the divorce certificate that county investigators obtained in Tennessee in their bid to locate her.

“You were so close!” Doeringer thought. “Why did you stop there?” But county attorneys defended the Social Services Agency and Probation Department, ticking off all the things their investigators did in searching for Roberson in several states: They checked property and tax records, scoured police, sheriffs’ and postmasters’ files, contacted the FBI and motor vehicle departments, leafed through phone books. The few leads they got turned into dead ends. Their certified letters came back marked undeliverable.

“It was a very hard case” emotionally, said Daniel T. Carreon, the attorney who defended the county. “I’m a human being. I have eight children myself, so I can understand that the loss of a child would create anguish for any parent. But the court made the correct decision. The county fulfilled its duty. It made an extraordinary effort to find her.”

“All the pain I’ve been through, just wondering if he was dead or alive,” Roberson said. “I can understand (his adoptive parents’) want to protect him, but how can you protect a child from his own mother when she’s not even out to hurt him? They’ve only heard one side of the story (from Rose) and they’ve never given me a chance.”

One time, the adoptive mother telephoned the birth mother. But the call was painful.

“She said, ‘What the hell do you want?’ Those were her exact words,” Roberson said. “She said, ‘Get the hell out of his life.’ ”

Roberson still hopes Leroy’s new parents will tell him about her some day and that she might get to see her son. In the meantime, she works the breakfast-and-lunch shift at a small-town Florida restaurant and spends time with her other two children.

“I still think about him all the time,” Roberson said. “Little things get to me every day. His birthday really gets me every year. Just typical questions from people get to me, like how many children do I have. Well, I have three.

“And they ask, ‘Are your kids all ready for Christmas?’ And I think to myself, ‘Well, two are.’ I sure wish I knew about the third.”