County Critic Accuses Agency of Punishing Her

A grandmother alleged Wednesday that Los Angeles County social workers revoked her right to visit her granddaughter, who is in foster care, because the woman appeared on television criticizing the county for its role in the death of another grandchild, who was killed while in foster care.

Florence Wallace, 51, said the county halted her visitation rights after a television cameraman last month arrived--without her knowledge--at a McDonald’s where she was visiting her 5-year-old granddaughter.

The KNBC Channel 4 cameraman was there to film the child and Wallace, who publicly has criticized the county since her 3-year-old granddaughter, Gilbreania, was allegedly beaten to death by her foster mother last summer.

Najee Ali, an activist who facilitated the KNBC interview and has worked with Wallace since Gilbreania’s death last year, said he would hold a news conference today to warn the county that unless it relents, it will be sued for violating Wallace’s 1st Amendment rights.

“This is just a vindictive vendetta,” Ali said of the county’s action.

Neil Rincover, a spokesman for the Department of Children and Family Services, said the social worker in the case has petitioned Dependency Court to “alter” Wallace’s visitation privileges for “a variety of reasons. . . . It was not solely done on the basis of this incident with the media.”

Rincover said he could not confirm Wednesday afternoon that all visitation privileges had been revoked. But he stressed that a judge will make the final decision on visitation. And he denied that retribution was a motive in the agency’s actions.

“You pick up any newspaper in town or watch television and you’re going to see somebody talking bad about this department,” Rincover said. If the agency waged vendettas against its critics, “we wouldn’t have time to do anything else,” he said.

Wallace was being interviewed by KNBC for a segment that aired Tuesday night reviewing the death of Gilbreania in a troubled foster care agency last summer.

Phil Reeder, the KNBC segment’s producer, said he and a cameraman had arranged to interview Wallace and Ali at Wallace’s Crenshaw area home on April 18. But when he arrived, he said, he only found Ali, who told him that Wallace was visiting with her granddaughter at a McDonald’s. The two and Reeder’s cameraman drove to the McDonald’s.

Reeder said that Ali went inside and that soon a woman cradling a child left the restaurant. Assuming this was the social worker who monitored the visit and the granddaughter, Reeder said he told his cameraman to film and began firing questions at her.

The social worker moved away from the camera, trying to hide the girl’s face and not responding, Reeder said. “I didn’t have any expectations that she was going to open up her arms and embrace me,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to harass her. All she would have to tell me is leave and I would have left.”

Rincover said that the social worker was simply trying to keep the child from being filmed, which would have been a violation of department and Dependency Court policy, and that the county did not blame Wallace for the incident.

The next week, Wallace said, she was told by social workers that she would not be able to have her weekly visit with her granddaughter because she had allowed the girl to be filmed. She said the social workers had blamed her for being late to prior visits, which Wallace denied.

On Wednesday, the day after the segment on Gilbreania’s death aired on KNBC’s 11 p.m. news, Wallace said she again was told that she could not visit her granddaughter this week and that she would need to discuss the matter at her next appearance in Dependency Court in September.

“I don’t have control over somebody taking a picture,” Wallace said, fretting over the possibility of missing the girl’s birthday later this month and not being able to give the girl gifts that already have been purchased.

“They’ve treated me worse” since she spoke out about Gilbreania’s death last year, Wallace alleged.