THE BATTLE FOR BABY TIMMY : An ‘Open Adoption’ Shuts Couple Out

There was somebody at the door, insistent, obviously with a purpose. The pounding startled Bob Stiglitz awake Wednesday afternoon.

He’d been napping, stealing an hour or so while Timmy slept in his crib and his other son, 4-year-old Sean, was playing in another room. Bob’s wife, Marci, had run to the store to pick up some milk.

So it took Bob a few minutes to figure out what was going on. When he came down the stairs and squinted through the peephole in the front door, he didn’t recognize the man he saw. Then the man called to somebody else.

“Alyssa,” the man said, and then Bob Stiglitz knew.

They were here to take Timmy away. Right now . On the orders of the law.

This wasn’t according to plan. None of it. In this tale of an adoption gone awry, it seems that everyone has been hurt.

Alyssa, 17, gave birth to Timmy 15 months ago at UC San Diego Medical Center. The state, after declaring Alyssa destitute when she moved out of her parents’ Coronado Island home, paid her medical bills.

Alyssa’s pregnancy, it seems, had sparked too many fights at home. She’d been in the ninth grade. Timmy’s father, blond and blue-eyed like his son, is a boy that Alyssa hardly knows.

Alyssa’s contact with the Stiglitzs, who live in Huntington Beach, came through A Center for Adoption, Youth and Family Counseling in San Diego. Timmy’s natural father had offered his consent to give the child away.

What Alyssa said she liked about the center and the Stiglitzs was their enthusiasm for arranging an “open adoption,” a relatively new concept that embraces birth parents as part of an extended family. The Stiglitzs have such an arrangement with Sean’s natural mother, and it has worked well.

Eight years of infertility treatments, including a failed attempt at in-vitro fertilization, had convinced Bob and Marci--he is 47 and she 39--that adoption was the best way to make their family grow.

And Alyssa herself is an adopted child. The Stiglitzs and, seemingly, Alyssa felt that all of them would make a good match. She chose them to adopt her child.

“We felt almost inherently that we had some common ground,” says Bob, who works in the maintenance department of the Fountain Valley School District.

“We thought what we were doing was in everybody’s best interest,” adds Marci, a special-education teacher for the same school district.

All of this, of course, was before --about two years ago. Emotionally, however, it seems almost light years away.

Lately, most of the communication between Alyssa and the Stiglitzs has been through the courts. Wednesday afternoon was simply the end of the line.

It started, Marci and Bob now believe, when Alyssa failed to live up to the “open adoption” visiting agreement: The first time she saw Timmy outside the hospital was when he was 5 months old. The Stiglitzs saw that as a sign that she did not care.

When she did visit for the first time, with her mother, Bob recorded the occasion on videotape.

“Timmy cried for about half an hour, 45 minutes,” Bob says. “He was really upset. . . . But I turned off the tape during that time, because I remember thinking I didn’t want to have anything messy for us to look back on.”

Before Alyssa and her mother left, they talked about plans for a Christmas visit. The Stiglitzs say they had no clue that anything was wrong. Then, a few days later, their lawyer told them that Alyssa wanted Timmy back.

The Stiglitzs say that they were flabbergasted and that they tried, without any luck, to get Alyssa to talk about her decision face to face.

When they next met, in Superior Court, the Stiglitzs won the first round. But earlier this month, the 4th District Court of Appeal sided with Alyssa and ruled that she deserved her baby back.

The court said that when she refused to consent to the adoption when the child was 5 1/2 months old, she was within her legal rights.

Two court-appointed attorneys for Timmy, who had argued that the child’s best interests were not being taken into account, were likewise overruled.

“There is simply no discretion to consider whether the child has bonded to the prospective adoptive family or who will provide a better home,” the appellate court said.

Furthermore, the court went on, “we do not wish to see another case of this nature.” The case of Robert S. et al. vs. Alyssa W. was the third in two months in which the appeals court in Santa Ana had overturned an independent adoption and ordered a toddler returned to its birth mother.

On Tuesday, moreover, the state Supreme Court refused to review the Stiglitzs’ plea to keep Timmy with the only family that he has known.

When I talked to the Stiglitzs in the kitchen of their home, it had been less than two hours since Timmy had been spirited out of their lives.

When Marci tells me that she wasn’t even there to kiss him goodby, tears cloud her already reddened eyes.

The Stiglitzs had arranged for Alyssa and her parents, with whom she now lives, to pick up Timmy at 6 p.m. Instead, Timmy was rousted from his nap, up and out, in less than five minutes. The man with Alyssa was her older brother.

“I told Alyssa that I would go get Timmy,” Bob says. “She said no. She said, ‘I don’t want you to ever touch him again.’ . . . All of this caught me off guard. It happened quite a bit differently than we would have liked. . . . I don’t know, maybe it was kinder. I don’t know that there was any honor in it, as angry as I was, but maybe it was kinder than a long, protracted scene.”

So, Bob Stiglitz says, he followed Alyssa, her brother and Timmy out his front door. He pointed out some bags he had packed with Timmy’s things. The toddler was still asleep.

Once they were outside, however, Alyssa and her brother began to run toward their car. Timmy awoke, Bob says, and began to scream.

“You know, I feel that they are victims too,” Bob says, “whether they had bad counseling or whatever. We are angry that this happened. We were advised that we were within our rights. They were advised that they were within their rights. . . . There should be a better way.”

The couple estimates they have spent more than $55,000 so far on legal fees, other related incidentals and--under their agreement with the center--counseling for Alyssa and her mother. They were forced to take out a second mortgage on their house. All of this, they believe, has been for naught.

Alyssa, presumably back in San Diego, did not return my telephone call, but her court-appointed appellate attorney, Donna Groman of Los Angeles, says, “This was a bad adoption in the first place. . . .

“I think the Stiglitzs had bad legal advice. There were all sorts of red flags. . . . Alyssa wasn’t ready to give the child up. . . . And her inability to make a well-reasoned decision was just another red flag. There should have been better screening. The Stiglitzs should have given the child up at 6 months, before any more bonding occurred.”

Now, say the Stiglitzs, it is time to get on with the rest of their lives, to pay more attention to their other son, who still doesn’t understand what happened to the towheaded toddler that he loves.

In the meantime, the Stiglitzs are meeting with other adoptive parents to see if some sort of changes can’t be made in the laws. They feel that priorities are out of whack.

And Bob Stiglitz, in particular, is angry with the treatment the couple received from the appellate court.

“I resent being called a criminal and an outlaw by a learned judge,” he says.

With that, Marci Stiglitz offers a wan smile, and tears again begin clouding her eyes.

“We just hope this doesn’t happen to any more couples,” she says, “what happened to us.”