Romanian Child Taken From Simi Valley Family : Dispute: Aid agency officials say the couple treated the 6-year-old boy as their own. Personality conflicts are also acknowledged.

Three months ago, Simi Valley residents Debbie and Steven Cook took in a 6-year-old Romanian boy who needed a home while he underwent a series of operations to straighten his deformed feet.

But although Alexandru Ivanescu is only about halfway through his medical treatment, he was moved from the Cooks’ home last weekend by representatives of the nonprofit Romanian aid agency that is sponsoring him on his U. S. trip.

Officials at the agency, the Free Romania Foundation, said they removed Alex for his own good.

The problem, said the agency’s executive director, Peter Klegg, is that the Cooks treated Alex as if he were their own child.

“It’s a matter of the host family exceeding the limits of its role,” said Klegg, who works out of the agency’s Boston headquarters.

Both the Cooks and Free Romania Foundation officials agree that there is a personality conflict between Debbie Cook and the two women who are the Los Angeles representatives for the foundation.

“The main conflict is Debbie Cook’s personality, her style of being irate with anything and wanting only what she wants,” said Christine Nelson, a Fullerton resident and volunteer worker for the foundation.

Nelson, who coordinated Alex’s trip to the United States to receive free medical treatment through a charitable program at Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, is his legal guardian while he is in the United States.

Debbie Cook acknowledges that she has a strong personality and has gotten into yelling matches with Nicolina Markou, the director of the foundation’s Los Angeles chapter, who is supervising the case locally. But Cook and her husband maintain that Markou also has a strong and difficult personality.

Alex is now at the Reseda home of Markou, who could not be reached for comment.

The boy, who arrived in this country June 24, underwent his first operation in late July to correct deformities in his feet, which turn toward each other, making it difficult for him to walk.

Since that time he has been wearing casts on both feet and using a wheelchair, Debbie Cook said.

Now the Cooks, who were chosen as Alex’s hosts after contacting the Free Romania Foundation about adopting a child, say they are devastated.

The couple, who have two other children, eventually hoped to adopt Alex, a hope that agency officials were aware of.

“We were just in the middle of getting to know him and getting him into the family,” Debbie Cook said Monday. “I bathed him. I fed him. I took him to the bathroom.

“He was just my son,” she said about the frail but cheerful boy.

She said she is upset at the way Alex was taken, as well as the fact that he is gone.

Markou had arranged to take him for the weekend, picking him up Saturday and returning him to the Cooks on Monday.

But after a phone conversation between Steven Cook and Markou on Sunday erupted into an argument, Markou announced that she wasn’t bringing the child back.

Nelson said she and Markou had been considering taking Alex from the Cooks for several weeks.

She said the problems began shortly after Alex arrived, when Debbie Cook began calling Nelson and complaining that the Romanian nurse who had accompanied Alex to the country was too harsh with the child.

The nurse, Iuliana Grigorovici, 35, was also staying with the Cooks. On Sunday, she went to Markou’s home when she learned that Alex would be staying there. Grigorovici said she did not want to comment on the conflict between the women.

Then, earlier this month, the Cooks enrolled Alex in the Simi Valley Unified School District as Alexandru Cook rather than Alexandru Ivanescu.

Debbie Cook said she enrolled him under the family name to ease paperwork.

But Nelson said the foundation plans to send Alex’s school records back to Romania with him and thus needs his real last name on the papers.

“The child is a Romanian child,” Nelson said. “He’s going back to Romania.”

On Monday, Grigorovici said Alex is unaware that he will probably not return to the Cooks. He is comfortable with Markou because he has met her before, she said.

Nelson said she and Markou expect to find a family through a local Romanian church that will let Alex and the nurse stay with them for the remainder of his medical treatment, expected to take at least another three months.

Alex, who has learned some English since he came to the States, will be enrolled in another school district.

Jetta Bernier, the president of the board of the Free Romania Foundation in Boston, said late Monday that the board may review Markou’s and Nelson’s decision to move Alex.