Desperate Effort to Regain Custody Backfires

GRANTS PASS, Ore. —  Brian Christine was an Eagle Scout, active in his university’s Christian fellowship. Ruth taught English to Tibetan refugees and volunteered at a Mother Teresa home for the disabled. Together, they decided to offer their three young daughters a different kind of childhood: home-schooling in a strict Christian environment and a chance to see America in a converted old bus.

They toured the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park, but never made it past this old stagecoach stop in the Rogue River Valley. Today, Brian and Ruth Christine go on trial in Douglas County Circuit Court on charges of kidnapping their daughters, at gunpoint, from the hands of the state child welfare department, which had seized custody of the girls.

These days, there are two photographs of the Christine family in the court file.

The first--the one the Christines like to pull out--shows Bethany, then 5, 3-year-old Lydia and Miriam, 2, in their Sunday school dresses, ribbons in their hair, healthy and happy at the feet of their smiling parents. It was taken during a supervised visit a few months after the girls were taken from the Christines.

The second picture, taken the day the state took custody, shows the girls huddled on a bench--their cheeks hollow, their skin hanging from their bones, their eyes scared and wary. Lydia has a dirty bandage on her forehead from a wound so infected that it smells. The back of her skull is fractured.

Which is the true picture? “The big question mark, and it still is unanswered,” said Josephine County Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Newman, “is whether Brian and Ruth realized that their children were starving to death.”

The case has become a rallying point for groups across the country that are critical of child protection agencies and the government in general. It is a favorite with right-wing talk radio and conservative publications, which seem to have found the story they’ve been waiting for--a righteous young couple battling a government run amok.

“I determined they were pretty good people ... caught up in a system that, without due process, coerces people into signing confessions for crimes they may not have committed,” said talk show host Roger Fredinburg of Medford, Ore. “All you have to do is have a finger pointed at you, and all of a sudden your life is destroyed.”

The Christines had been in Grants Pass for only a few months back in 2000, their bus parked behind the public library, when an anonymous caller told police that Lydia looked dehydrated.

Detective Dan Evans, sent to investigate, concluded that all three children looked malnourished. Lydia had a bandaged forehead and a black eye, Evans said in his report. “She told me her dad hit her

State officials say the girls were not just underweight. Bethany weighed only 25 pounds, half the average weight of a 5-year-old; all three were in the lowest 5th percentile for weight. And Lydia’s skull fracture, which came from an undetermined injury about 30 days earlier, was likely very painful but was left untreated, doctors said. A judge found the girls were “at risk for permanent effects or even death” in the custody of their parents.

The Christines’ lawyer, Edgar Steele, said both Ruth and Brian are slight--Brian, at 5 feet, 10 inches weighs only 140 pounds. “I hate to say this, but it’s only in our generation that the normal kid is fat,” Steele said.

In an interview, Ruth said the family fasted about once a month, skipping breakfast and lunch. “We tried to eat a real healthy diet, a lot of fruits and vegetables. We tried to eat organic food,” she said. “When the police came, we were eating lunch and drinking water. I told them, I don’t think there’s a problem.... But it was a really hot day, and really stressful and really difficult for the children.”

She agreed to let the girls be examined at the hospital, and then was told she would have to leave them with the state. “That was the last time I saw them for eight months.”

The Christines were horrified at what was happening to their children. Although there was no allegation of sexual abuse, “a [state] worker took photographs of our stripped daughters’ bodies and genitalia and tried to submit the photos as evidence to the court.... [They] also administered invasive, painful sexual examinations to our daughters over their objections,” Brian wrote in a statement. “In addition, [the state] violated our daughters by injecting them with live viruses [vaccinations], which is deeply against their religious beliefs.”

The Christines probably would have been able to get their children back from foster care within a few months if they had agreed to undergo psychological examinations and parental counseling. But they refused. They also refused court-appointed attorneys.

After eight months, the state allowed the Christines to see their children, but only permitted three visits. In court papers, officials cited evidence that the Christines might be planning to abduct their children.

A Web site formerly maintained by the Christines talked about protecting children “physically, mentally, and by all other means possible.”

Even some of those who had befriended the Christines in Grants Pass became concerned that the couple was waving a flag of anti-government militancy and not doing everything they could to get their children back.

Bernard Conrad, a writer and remodeling contractor, at first had taken up the Christines’ cause and distributed flyers about their plight all over town.

“Those kids weren’t emaciated. They were small. Thin. As were the parents. I was quite moved by what I thought was the cruelty of the action,” Conrad said.

But he couldn’t understand why the Christines wouldn’t agree to the counseling and psychological testing. “I told them, hey, you gotta go get your kids out. You do that first. Do whatever it takes. Then get your law degree, whatever, fight government your whole life.”

But with Brian Christine, Conrad said, “That was the end of his friendliness to me. He said, ‘No, I’m going to raise hell about this.’”

Finally, the Christines began to cooperate. But it was too late. Deadlines imposed under federal law required the state to find a permanent new home for the children. The state terminated their parental rights and awarded permanent custody to Ruth’s parents in England.

In August 2001--just as the adoption proceedings were coming to a head--the Christines visited their children at a state office in Grants Pass. Then, according to a grand jury indictment, Brian followed the girls and their caseworker to a rest stop on the freeway and seized the youngsters at gunpoint.

He was arrested four days later in Montana. Ruth was found two days after that with the girls, living with friends-of-a-friend, at a home in a remote canyon near Missoula.

Aubrey Jessop, whose father had offered Ruth and her children a place to stay, recalled that the police “came in with full guns and [camouflage] and face paint and arrested her in front of her kids, screaming,” she said. “It was really barbaric. The one little girl was sitting there when the cops came and said, ‘I’m not going with you anywhere.’”

Ruth said one of the sheriff’s deputies brought Miriam, who was crying uncontrollably, to ride with her in the police car. “I didn’t know how to show her it was OK, because I knew in my heart it wasn’t,” Ruth said. “I was so afraid. But at that moment, God made me see that he was in control. And I started singing, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know.’ [Miriam] joined in and ... fell asleep while we were singing.”

But Ruth--who had given birth to a fourth daughter after the state took the three girls away and had left the baby with Brian’s mother in Indiana--was pregnant again. She went through labor in handcuffs and leg shackles.

The baby, another daughter, was taken away six hours later and Ruth was sent back to jail.

“They took her out of my arms,” Ruth said. “I was crying, the nurses and all the midwives were crying, the [police] guards were crying.” The baby was placed with Brian’s mother, and both Christines were returned to Oregon for trial.

Steele said he would show that the Christines were guilty of no more than trying to get their children back. “What they did, if and when proven by the state, will be shown to be an act of ... parents driven nearly out of their minds by out-of-control state agency bureaucrats,” he said. “Nobody, absolutely nobody, should think badly of them for doing what they did.”