Once again, the State Dept. of Children & Families (DCF) and State Attorney Kirk Zuelch have been unable to back up efforts to convict a Key West parent on bogus child abuse charges. After failing to make any kind of a case in court last July, they have voluntarily dismissed all charges against local artist Pat Lloyd.
Last March, Lloyd, a divorced mother of three, asked the DCF to help with her unruly 15-year-old son. She said he was staying out late, refusing to go to school and was becoming increasingly abusive to her, both verbally and physically. But instead of helping her, DCF officials charged her with child abuse and placed the boy in a foster home.
"I was not opposed to a foster home on a temporary basis if he was going to be supervised and counseled," Lloyd said.
But under the "supervision" of the DCF, the boy reportedly tattooed his fingers— with the word "thug" on one hand and "life" on the other. He was also arrested at Key West High School with an empty baggie that allegedly smelled like marijuana. He told police that a friend had stuffed the baggie in his backpack, and the friend confirmed that.
"But when that happened, the foster parents picked up their house key and told him not to come back to their home," Lloyd said.
At that point, hapless DCF officials sent the boy home to his mother— even though they had previously charged her with child abuse and had removed the boy from the home. During the threat of Hurricane Debby, officials had even forced her to get a court order to allow the boy to evacuate the Keys with his family.
"Obviously, the DCF people knew from the beginning that Pat Lloyd never abused her children," said Attorney Mick Barnes, who is representing Lloyd. "Otherwise, they would not have returned the boy to her care."
Initially, abuse charges against Lloyd involved only her 15-year-old son. But when she refused to plead guilty, the State Attorney's Office added allegations that she had also abused her two younger children, an 11-year-old son and a daughter, 7.
"Then they told me that, if I would plead guilty to the original charge, they would drop the new charges," Lloyd said. "I didn't realize it then, but now I know that piling on those other charges was just a strategy to try to coerce me to plead guilty.
"Even the court-appointed lawyer I had at that time pushed me to take the deal. But I couldn't do that. I hadn't done anything wrong."
Zuelch and the DCF put Lloyd on trial last July 25. But when DCF Investigator Karla Buzzell took the stand, the state's case fell apart. She simply could not provide any evidence that Pat Lloyd had ever abused any of her children— although the state had taken action against Lloyd based on Buzzell's recommendation!
After only two hours of testimony, Judge Mark Jones abruptly stopped the trial and recused himself.
"I don't know why the judge quit," Lloyd said, "but I do know that the state didn't have a case. That was apparently obvious to the judge, too."
Buzzell was also the investigator in the controversial case involving Nick and Carrie Nowatney, falsely accused of child abuse last year. The DCF held their two young children in foster care for 200 days before Judge Jones finally threw the case out of court.
At that trial, Buzzell admitted that she really hadn't conducted much of an investigation before recommending to Judge Sandra Taylor that the Nowatney children be taken. Taylor blindly went along with that recommendation, thereby becoming, herself, a victim of the DCF.
Following that fiasco, State Rep. Ken Sorensen, who is vice chairman of the Children & Families Committee in the Florida Legislature, wrote a letter to the head of the DCF in Tallahassee extremely critical of the agency. He said he wanted the heads of those responsible to roll.
Key West The Newspaper has learned that Buzzell has been transferred within the department. She is no longer an investigator.
Nine days after the DCF charges against Pat Lloyd aborted in the courtroom last July, the State Attorney and the DCF dropped the charges involving the two younger children— but not the charges involving the older son.
Question: If these charges concerning the younger children were unfounded, why were they ever filed in the first place? And why would the State Attorney and the DCF ever want to plea bargain away legitimate child abuse charges?
Finally, on Sept. 26, the State Attorney and the DCF also dropped the original abuse charges concerning Lloyd's 15-year-old son. In their notice of voluntary dismissal, they said that dismissal was justified because Lloyd had agreed to family counseling.
What a crock. They dropped the charges because, again, they didn't have a case!
"I asked for counseling for my son in the very beginning," she said. "In fact, that's why I went to the DCF for help in the first place."
Let's get real here. There are a couple of reasons the DCF dropped charges against Pat Lloyd and neither had anything to do with counseling.
1. Accustomed to getting easy convictions, even when charges cannot be substantiated, Zuelch and the DCF seem to get befuddled when a defendant musters up the gumption to plead innocent and face a trial— especially if he or she are able to hire an aggressive attorney who's not "in bed" with the State Attorney.
2. They had just had their lunch eaten in the Nowatney case and it was looking like the Lloyd case was turning into another scandal.
3. Zuelch is in the middle of a reelection campaign. He doesn't need another scandal.
At least the State Attorney and the DCF may have learned something from the drubbing they took in the Nowatney case. If they don't have a case, they may have figured out that they should drop the charges— rather than just bulling ahead, hoping that the defense attorney won't be too aggressive (which seems to be all too common here) and/or one of their in-pocket judges will rule for them anyway.
But we'll continue to watch. Stay tuned.