In re A.I.
| Decision Date | 22 September 2022 |
| Docket Number | 02-22-00176-CV |
| Parties | In the Interest of A.I., a Child |
| Court | Texas Court of Appeals |
On Appeal from the 233rd District Court Tarrant County, Texas Trial Court No. 233-691866-20
Before Bassel, Wallach, and Walker, JJ.
This is an ultra-accelerated appeal[1] in which Appellant F.P. (Mother) and Appellant N.I. (Father) appeal the termination of their parental rights to their daughter Angela[2] following a bench trial. Mother's and Father's parental rights were terminated based on clear and convincing evidence of three predicate grounds- endangering environment, endangering conduct, and failure to comply with their court-ordered service plans-and the best-interest ground. See Tex Fam. Code Ann. § 161.001(b)(1)(D), (E), (O), (b)(2). In five issues, Mother challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to support the four termination findings and the lack of specificity of the service plan. Father's court-appointed attorney filed an Anders brief stating that he did not find any legally nonfrivolous ground constituting error. Because sufficient evidence supports the trial court's findings on endangering conduct, failure to comply with a sufficiently specific court-ordered service plan, and best interest that Mother challenges and because Father's appeal is frivolous, we affirm the trial court's judgment terminating Mother's and Father's parental rights to Angela.
Mother has given birth to seven children since 2014. She does not know all of her children's names because some of the children have been adopted. Some of the children went to live with relatives, while other children, like Angela, were removed from the home due to concerns about the parents' conduct. The children for whom Mother did not have custody were born prior to Angela and were fathered by Husband;[3] Father is Angela's father. The testimony at trial revealed that there were initial concerns about drug use, mental-health medication compliance, and housing stability and that other endangering conduct and service-plan compliance failures came to light while the case was pending. Because Mother raises sufficiency challenges, including a challenge to the best-interest finding, we set forth a detailed summary of the testimony from the termination trial.[4]
B. The Investigator's Testimony
Kimberly Holloway, an investigator with the Department of Family and Protective Services (the Department or CPS), testified that the Department received two referrals in October 2020 regarding Angela, who was a newborn. The first referral alleged that Mother had sought minimal prenatal care, that she had a history of postpartum depression and was not on any medication, that she had two other children in foster care, and that there had been domestic violence in the home. The second referral alleged that the home visit revealed concerns about the smell of cat feces and urine, that Father appeared to be under the influence, that the parents did not have stable employment, and that there had been previous domestic violence.[5]
Holloway met with Mother at the hospital and questioned her. Mother said that she had smoked marijuana for approximately two months in 2018 but denied any current drug use.[6] Mother admitted that there had been domestic violence between her and Husband. Mother mentioned that she had been diagnosed with depression and said that she was not taking medication but was seeing a therapist. Holloway asked Mother about reports that Mother and Father had planned to have Angela adopted but that they were only doing that for financial gain. Mother admitted that she had planned to put Angela up for adoption because she was struggling financially while she was pregnant and that the prospective adoptive parents had helped her out financially for a couple of months, but Mother said that she had changed her mind because she was doing well financially at the time of Angela's birth. Holloway's concerns after speaking with Mother were varied:
[One was the] motive for keeping [Angela]. Due to [Mother's] talking about . . . putting her up for adoption and then deciding, I guess, more last minute that she wasn't going to do that after being helped financially by the adoptive parents, and then, of course, the history with her having multiple other children and not having custody of any of those children, and then not being cooperative with services.
To address these concerns, Holloway developed a safety plan for Mother and Father that allowed them to have only supervised contact with Angela. Angela was discharged from the hospital to Father's cousin and his grandmother.
After Angela went home with Father's relatives, Holloway met with Father at the apartment that he shared with Mother. Father said that he had been diagnosed with ADHD and ADD, "but he wasn't really sure." Father denied any drug history, but he agreed to be drug tested. With regard to the parents' prior plan to put Angela up for adoption, Father said that "he wasn't sure how serious [Mother] was about it, but after he thought about things, he couldn't do it."
Holloway sent Father a text on Monday, November 2, 2020, giving him the information about where he should go to provide a urine sample and a hair-strand sample for drug testing, and he said that he could not go until Friday because he was out of town for work. Holloway testified that this concerned her because "with certain drugs, urine tests [are] . . . only going to show positive for a very limited amount of days" as the tests cover a shorter time period, while a hair-strand test goes back three months. After Father submitted the samples, his urine test came back negative, but his hair-strand test was positive for cocaethylene, cocaine metabolite, marijuana, and one substance that Holloway could not pronounce. When Holloway told Father the results, he said that the urine test showed that he was not currently using drugs and that the positive on the hair-strand test resulted "from something that he had done" before Angela was born.
Mother took a drug test on November 13, 2020. Holloway was notified on November 19 that Mother's hair-strand test was positive for cocaine metabolite. Mother gave several reasons, saying that the epidural and certain medications that she was given at the hospital when she gave birth to Angela could have caused her to test positive. Holloway pointed out to Mother that she and Father had both tested positive for the same substance (despite that Father had not been in the hospital giving birth) and that there was concern that they would be unable to appropriately care for Angela. Holloway requested a removal because the safety plan of placing the children with relatives could not be a long-term placement.[7]
C. The Caseworker's Testimony
Cecilia Moreno, a caseworker with Our Community Our Kids (OCOK),[8]testified that she was assigned to this case because she was also the caseworker for two of Mother's other children. With regard to the other two children, Mother lagged in starting her services but eventually made some progress. Mother, however, was not able to have the other two children returned to her on a monitored return because she had failed to continue engaging in family therapy with the two children and had failed to be successfully discharged from her therapist. Moreno said that Mother eventually relinquished her parental rights to those two children.
Moreno explained her concerns about Mother's and Father's ability to provide a safe and stable environment for Angela when she came into care. The concerns about Mother included her mental health, housing instability, employment instability, failing to engage in services for prior CPS cases, and drug use. The concerns about Father included drug use, mental health, housing instability, and employment instability. Moreno made a new service plan for Mother with regard to Angela's case and went over it with her in December 2020; Moreno also created a service plan for Father. Mother's service plan required her to participate in individual therapy; to undergo a psychosocial assessment, a mental-health assessment, a psychological, and a substance-abuse assessment; to follow through with any recommended treatment from the substance-abuse assessment; to submit to random drug testing, and to attend weekly visits with Angela. Father's service plan required him to participate in individual therapy; to undergo a psychosocial assessment, a mental-health assessment, a psychological, and a substance-abuse assessment; to follow through with any recommended treatment from the substance-abuse assessment; to submit to random drug testing; to complete parenting classes; and to attend weekly visits with Angela.
Moreno testified that Mother had completed the psychological; had completed a substance-abuse assessment, was unsuccessfully discharged, had reengaged in another substance-abuse assessment/treatment, and was successfully discharged; had completed the mental-health assessment through MHMR and was recommended services for medication management; had completed the psychosocial evaluation; and had submitted to random drug testing and had tested negative during the case.[9] Based on Mother's progress on her services, the Department initiated unsupervised visits in increments in September 2021. However, the incremental time of more unsupervised contact ceased the following month when Mother's mother, with whom Mother was living at the time requested that Mother move out of the home; at that point, there were concerns that Mother did not have a safe and stable place to live. The following month, Mother's attorney requested an extension of the...
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