--:-- Rachel Abrams: Hey, everyone. It's Rachel. We're doing something a little different today. We're going to take a pause this week from the culture specials that we've been sharing on Sundays, because today we wanted to share the first episode of a new series from our colleagues over at Serial.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: It's called The Preventionist. Like so many of their shows, it's a remarkable story. This one is about a bunch of things, including families navigating surprising and enormous challenges, and a public official who's trying to do the right thing in a very complicated situation. It's really good.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: The episode we're sharing today is the first of a three-part series, which you can find by searching The Preventionist wherever you get your podcasts. And, take note, the whole series is available for free for a limited time. So binge away.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Okay, so the Sunday special team will be back with the show next week. And here is the first episode of The Preventionist.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: One evening in August of 2023, I watched a woman step up to the mic during a meeting of local government officials in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was young, early 20s, strikingly pretty, wearing a pale pink blazer. She's short, five foot nothing. So she had to stand on her tiptoes to reach the microphone.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: She had five minutes to convey basically any parent's nightmare. My two-month-old son was happily drinking milk from his bottle when he quickly started choking, turned blue, and went limp.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: My boyfriend transported our son to the changing table as I grabbed an anti-choking device and my boyfriend began assembling it. I never ran so fast up the stairs screaming at the top of my lungs for help.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: She described the panic in the house, a baby not breathing. She and her boyfriend, the father of the child, lived with her parents. Everyone was home when the baby started choking.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: My father rushed downstairs and immediately started doing chest compressions as I dialed 911. Two pumps of the device and my son was conscious, gasping for air and coughing up milk. It worked. Thank God, they thought.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: They were relieved, but rattled. They wanted to make sure the baby was okay, so they sent him to the ER. We saved his life that night. But upon arriving at Lehigh Valley Hospital, the diagnosis quickly became something so different, something nobody could have ever prepared me for.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: A lot can be said in five minutes, it turns out, and she still had four to go. She described how the whole family went to the hospital, she and her boyfriend, her parents, later his parents too.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: But after their baby was examined, she and her boyfriend were asked to leave, because it turned out one of the doctors had a theory. She stated to my father and mother-in-law that we are young first-time parents who got frustrated with our baby and violently shook him to make him stop crying.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And a confession would only make things easier for us. Their story about the milk and the choking and the life-saving device, the hospital was saying, that's a lie.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And that these young parents should just admit that they'd lost their patience and shaken the baby. Hard. They were told to leave the hospital without their baby, and he wouldn't come home for seven whole months.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: I'm a 21-year-old mother who lost seven months with her firstborn son. I'm a nursing mother who lost her milk because she wasn't allowed to feed her baby.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: I'm a first-time mom who watched her first child meet milestones over FaceTime. I'm a postpartum mom dealing with the grief and the trauma of my son being ripped from my arms.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: I'm a concerned mother in a hospital looking for help, but instead we were treated like criminals. And I'm a mom who lost everything in less than 24 hours due to one doctor's misdiagnosis.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Enough is enough. This wasn't my first time hearing a story like this. I've been reporting for a few years on the child welfare system, and I've written about similar situations.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Parents who say they were falsely accused of abuse, that their kids were taken from them without cause. In 2023, I got a series of emails from people in the Lehigh Valley, a part of eastern Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, where small towns bleed into rural pastures.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: I got phone calls from people there, too. One person said, essentially, if you think that last story you wrote was bad, you won't believe what's happening in the Lehigh Valley.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: So I started looking into it, which is how I ended up at this public meeting, hearing about a baby who choked on milk and was taken away from his parents for most of his infancy.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And now, after two years of talking to families and medical personnel and caseworkers, I can tell you, that caller was right. Whatever was happening in the Lehigh Valley, it was not normal.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: I'm Diane Neary, and from Serial Productions and The New York Times, this is The Preventionist.
--:-- Diane Neary: I want to explain how this extraordinary situation in the Lehigh Valley came to light in the first place, because it almost didn't, except that this one guy would not let it go.
--:-- Diane Neary: His name is Mark Pinsley, and he's not an activist or a medical expert or an aggrieved parent. He's a controller, a money guy.
--:-- Diane Neary: I barely knew what a controller was until I met Mark. Mark barely knew what that was before he became one.
--:-- Diane Neary: He'd run for state Senate on the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania and lost. And when I came off that loss, the party came to me again and said, hey, would you like to be controller of Lehigh County?
--:-- Diane Neary: And I was like, what is controller of Lehigh County? So I really had no idea.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark learned a controller is in charge of auditing the county's finances, making sure there's no fraud, no waste of taxpayer money.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark had studied finance, and he'd manage budgets for both big and small companies. He still owns a small skincare business.
--:-- Diane Neary: It seemed like a good fit. So that's what I did. I ran and I won controller.
--:-- Diane Neary: And my goal was to figure out how I could help the people using that position and being creative around financing.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark's an ambitious guy. He wanted to use his skills to do more than just audit the county's payroll. And he was good at it.
--:-- Diane Neary: In his first few years, he investigated a big pharmaceutical company that was overcharging for prescription drugs. And he discovered a county nursing home had failed to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars.
--:-- Diane Neary: His audits have saved the county and its taxpayers millions. To hear Mark tell it, the idea for his next big project kind of came out of left field.
--:-- Diane Neary: One day, he and his wife were out grocery shopping. I hate waiting in lines. and my wife was in where we were in line to, you know, pay for groceries.
--:-- Diane Neary: And I'm like, I'm just gonna go watch TikTok. And so I was watching TikTok, you know, just kind of wasting time scrolling away.
--:-- Diane Neary: And a video came up. Your favorite author here, speaking to tell you about a complete win. A week ago.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark almost swiped away because for one, his favorite author is Stephen King. And this woman, he didn't even know who she was.
--:-- Diane Neary: But he lingered. And then she said Allentown. And like, so then I paid attention.
--:-- Diane Neary: And then she said Children and Youth, and I was paying more attention. Allentown is in Lehigh County, and the Office of Children and Youth Services is a county agency.
--:-- Diane Neary: In other words, Mark's territory. And the woman talking in the video was not only an author. She was a lawyer who'd represented a couple in a year-long fight against the false accusation, made by a local hospital of child abuse.
--:-- Diane Neary: They'd won. The county had withdrawn its petition to remove the couple's child. Mark wondered if the county was wasting time on losing fights, it might also be wasting money in the process.
--:-- Diane Neary: I'm like, eh, there might be money there. Let me go find out. And so, like, I immediately emailed right away.
--:-- Diane Neary: He wrote to the couple mentioned in the TikTok, saying he wanted to understand more about what had happened.
--:-- Diane Neary: He wrote, quote, To be upfront, I have always had a good feeling about the people that work for children and youth.
--:-- Diane Neary: I have felt that they were overworked and underpaid, end quote. But he said, If you're willing to share more, I am willing to listen.
--:-- Diane Neary: Thank you for your time, Mark. And by the time I was done emailing, I helped starting to unload the groceries.
--:-- Diane Neary: Within 24 hours, the couple wrote back. Mark set up his conference room for a video call with the mother and the lawyer.
--:-- Diane Neary: And on his screen, he saw their faces pop up. They walked me through, like, the basics. I mean, it was more than just the basics, but, you know, it was an hour and a half phone call.
--:-- Diane Neary: The mom did most of the speaking. She told Mark about how both her boys had complex medical needs.
--:-- Diane Neary: One had autism and an autoimmune disorder. The other had autism and a metabolic disorder. She said she and her husband had spent years working hard to find their boys the right therapists and treatments, medicines and vitamins and supplements to get them stable.
--:-- Diane Neary: And by her account, they mostly succeeded. But then one day, one of their boys started to behave erratically.
--:-- Diane Neary: They took him to the Lehigh Valley Children's Hospital in Allentown, where the mom said a doctor puzzled over the case and what seemed like too many interventions for the boys.
--:-- Diane Neary: She said that without ever meeting with her or her husband, the doctor diagnosed Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder in which a parent fakes their child's illnesses for attention, or even intentionally hurts them and then seeks treatment for those injuries.
--:-- Diane Neary: It's a popular storyline in movies, but in reality, it's a rare condition. In this case, the mom said both she and her husband were accused of having it and both of them were barred from seeing their son.
--:-- Diane Neary: The hospital declined my interview requests for this series, but in an email, a representative wrote, We feel strongly that Lehigh Valley Health Network has done nothing wrong and that the good doctors and nurses working at this hospital have actually done a good thing.
--:-- Diane Neary: They have taken steps to protect against child abuse which are legally required under Pennsylvania law End quote.
--:-- Diane Neary: In the video call, the mother and her lawyer explained to Mark that the child abuse accusation progressed quickly from the hospital to an investigation by children and youth to family court.
--:-- Diane Neary: The parents lost custody of their younger son for a month, their older son for a year. And so it was a very emotional story.
--:-- Diane Neary: Like, you can't come away as a parent and be like, well, hey, who cares? At first, I just thought that, like, this is two unfortunate souls.
--:-- Diane Neary: So the husband and the wife got caught up in something. And then I started looking in and it just became very quickly apparent that there was a problem.
--:-- Diane Neary: Very quickly. This family knew of other families whom they put in touch with Mark. He made a spreadsheet assigning each family a color so he could keep track.
--:-- Diane Neary: The green family, the blue family. The couple he just talked to were the gray family. He knew he couldn't take their stories at face value.
--:-- Diane Neary: So he started fact-checking them, which he hated. It was awkward to ask people for proof, documentation.
--:-- Diane Neary: But they produced it. And then he had to read that documentation. Medical paperwork and child welfare reports. Hundreds of pages.
--:-- Diane Neary: And I was a neophyte about this when I started too, right? So like, I didn't know what certain terms meant.
--:-- Diane Neary: And so in the beginning, I'm like writing down the terms, like so that I would remember them. And so many times I would have to go back later and reread a section.
--:-- Diane Neary: And it had a whole new meaning to me. He searched Google, got some help from someone on his staff.
--:-- Diane Neary: He began to decipher the system. He learned that in Lehigh County, if a parent is suspected of child abuse, in this case, suspected by a doctor at the hospital, that doctor calls the state child abuse hotline.
--:-- Diane Neary: An operator there takes down the report and sends it to Children and Youth Services, known as CYS.
--:-- Diane Neary: And then CYS has two months to make a determination. You have 60 days as a caseworker to decide whether something is unfounded, meaning we really don't suspect child abuse at all, indicated, which is supposed to mean that there's a lot of evidence that kind of makes it suspicious that you might well be a child abuser.
--:-- Diane Neary: Or a third category, founded, meaning that both CYS and a court have found that you're an abuser. There was one more term Mark had never heard before, which kept popping up in the paperwork.
--:-- Diane Neary: Child abuse pediatrician. Mark realized almost all of the allegations in the family's files have been made by this kind of doctor. A child abuse pediatrician. CAP for short.
--:-- Diane Neary: More Googling, and Mark learned this. CAPS are doctors who are trained specifically in how to tell whether an injury is the result of abuse.
--:-- Diane Neary: To tell the difference, say, between an arm broken by falling off the swing set versus an arm broken after being twisted by force.
--:-- Diane Neary: They often work in children's hospitals, including Lehigh Valley's Children's Hospital. And they play a crucial role in keeping children safe.
--:-- Diane Neary: According to the most recent government data, every year, more than 3 million children in the U.S. are victims of suspected abuse.
--:-- Diane Neary: CAPS helped figure out which of those children need protecting. The stakes are obviously high.
--:-- Diane Neary: In 2023, about 2,000 children died from abuse or neglect. Mark was noticing, reading the family's files, how much influence a CAPS opinion carried, which made sense to Mark.
--:-- Diane Neary: After all, the caps are the medically trained experts. But then again, what happened if the cap got it wrong?
--:-- Diane Neary: In the case histories he was reading, there were examples of that happening. The file he'd labeled the Yellow Family, for instance.
--:-- Diane Neary: This mom had talked to me about, like, and she was a nurse. So she had talked to me about this case where her husband called her and said that the child wasn't able to sit up.
--:-- Diane Neary: This was a kid who could normally sit up. He was 18 months old, and the husband said he had fallen off the couch while playing with his siblings.
--:-- Diane Neary: The next morning, he seemed hurt and couldn't sit up without falling backwards. So she calls her pediatrician. The pediatrician says, you know, take them to the hospital.
--:-- Diane Neary: And in this particular instance, like, there was a fracture of the ribs. I think it was two fractures of the ribs that were healing.
--:-- Diane Neary: Further testing revealed the child had a total of four broken ribs in various stages of healing. As in, fractures that could not have all happened that day by, say, falling off the couch.
--:-- Diane Neary: The story the parents had told didn't match the injuries doctors were seeing. So this one was a harder one for me because the child had broken bones.
--:-- Diane Neary: Right? And you're like, okay, well, like this one seems a little off. The doctor, a cap, was suspicious of the father.
--:-- Diane Neary: Fractures at various stages of healing could point toward a pattern of injury. And the father was the one who claimed the child had fallen.
--:-- Diane Neary: And the mom was just like, she was adamant. Like, the father didn't do this. You know, like, there's no way, you know, it took us a long time to get pregnant, all that kind of stuff.
--:-- Diane Neary: The mom was a nurse, and she started her own research. What else could explain the injuries? A genetic condition, maybe?
--:-- Diane Neary: Meanwhile, the cap in this case was firm in her finding of abuse. According to the mom, the doctor even suggested the unthinkable.
--:-- Diane Neary: That she leave her husband, take the children, and quote, never look back. The mom said CYS, quote, badgered her to file for divorce in order to keep her children.
--:-- Diane Neary: And eventually, she actually got a divorce. And I would have done the same thing, right? Even though like my gut instinct is like, I'm not going to let this happen.
--:-- Diane Neary: Well, there's no way I'm going to let this happen to my kid. And the mother was like, no, like, I just don't believe it. I believe there's like something genetic going on. I believe this.
--:-- Diane Neary: The husband or the former husband, now she divorces him, right, goes to jail. And in the meantime, the mother keeps working.
--:-- Diane Neary: She can't get a genetic test for whatever it was, two and a half months. When she finally did get a genetic test at a different hospital, a diagnosis came back.
--:-- Diane Neary: Type 1 osteogenesis imperfecta. And wouldn't you believe it, the child has brittle bone disease. That same day, her now ex-husband was released from jail.
--:-- Diane Neary: And one month later, all the criminal charges against him were dropped. Like, I can't stand it.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark had interviewed more than a dozen families by this point. And he'd reached his limit. Like, I can't live knowing that America is like that or that Pennsylvania is like that.
--:-- Diane Neary: Like, I have to do something about it. A reminder, Mark is a controller. He has zero oversight of child welfare services.
--:-- Diane Neary: He can't intervene in CYS procedures. He can't dictate hospital policy. But what he can do is look at the money, find out what all this was costing the county.
--:-- Diane Neary: And he could make that public. He could write a report that might put pressure on the people who could change policy at CYS, the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark started tallying up the costs. Caseworkers, attorneys, judges. The county pays for their time.
--:-- Diane Neary: The county pays for foster care and for mandated psychological evaluations. When a judge orders parents and kids to do therapy, the county pays for that, too.
--:-- Diane Neary: If the abuse allegation turned out to be wrong, that seemed like financial waste to Mark. He was on a tear now, thinking about these families.
--:-- Diane Neary: I mean, as I learned more stories, I couldn't sleep at night for two reasons. A, I knew that I'm putting them through their trauma again.
--:-- Diane Neary: And B, I actually now believe them. And I'm like, you know, I can't get this report done fast enough. Like, I literally can't get this report done fast enough.
--:-- Diane Neary: I am like, now I'm waking up at six o'clock in the morning starting to write the report. I'm not going to bed until midnight to get this report out.
--:-- Diane Neary: Apart from the money, Mark also crunched the state's annual data on child abuse allegations. and what he saw when he compared the Lehigh Valley to the rest of the state was striking.
--:-- Diane Neary: A third of the state's cases of Munchausen by proxy, a third of those diagnoses in all of Pennsylvania, had come from the Lehigh Valley region.
--:-- Diane Neary: The numbers were small overall, but still, that high percentage made no sense to him, especially since the region is home to just 3% of the state's under-18 population.
--:-- Diane Neary: So something's not right. There is a problem. I start contacting all of the commissioners. I'm calling each one of them.
--:-- Diane Neary: Like, I really want you to take a listen to this. Are you willing to talk to families? He contacted each of them repeatedly, trying to set up meetings.
--:-- Diane Neary: Most of the commissioners avoided him. Some agreed to talk. He said he told them about the crazy high Munchausen stat, and that if Munchausen syndrome was being misdiagnosed, he thought there was certainly cause to investigate that.
--:-- Diane Neary: And all of it, aside from being wrong and damaging to families, could open up the county to lawsuits, since CYS is the agency responsible for removing the kids.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark says some of them were willing to listen, but none was willing to take action. He even offered to put them directly in touch with some of the families.
--:-- Diane Neary: They declined. On top of that, Mark says he contacted the county directors of CYS and the Department of Human Services.
--:-- Diane Neary: I contacted county officials, including the chair of the commissioners, to hear their version of events. In response, I received an email from the county's attorney, saying that unfortunately, they couldn't discuss any matters involving the Office of Children and Youth due to legal concerns.
--:-- Diane Neary: Ditto the county directors of CYS and the Department of Human Services. Mark knew that publishing a report had the potential to tank his career.
--:-- Diane Neary: It was an election year, and to voters, it might look like he was being an apologist for child abusers. Members of his own staff suggested he wait until after the election to release it
--:-- Diane Neary: But Mark thought about how he feel if he held off and then re He would have missed his chance to speak up So he pushed ahead He gave the county leadership a heads up.
--:-- Diane Neary: The report was coming, along with a press conference. He also gave them advanced notice of his recommendations for changes he hoped they'd make at CYS.
--:-- Diane Neary: Chiefly, require caseworkers to get a second opinion from a doctor when considering whether to remove a child based on a medical finding.
--:-- Diane Neary: And he wanted them to hire an outside firm to investigate CYS procedures. Before he published his report, Mark had a few questions for the solicitors, the county's lawyers, his lawyers in a way, since he was a county official too.
--:-- Diane Neary: He had all these records containing sensitive information about kids' medical issues and family court proceedings.
--:-- Diane Neary: So he asked them, what could he legally include in a public-facing report? When the response came back, it was short.
--:-- Diane Neary: Basically two words, C attached. So when you say it's a PDF attachment, you know it's going to be long.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark didn't have a great feeling about this. He made a cup of tea, printed the PDF, and settled down to read it.
--:-- Diane Neary: That's after a break. The PDF from the solicitors was long. It was on county letterhead, and the subtext, to mark at least, was clear.
--:-- Diane Neary: His report was dead on arrival. One of the first lines of it read, The most significant overarching concern is whether your pursuit of this information, for the reasons you have stated, goes beyond the scope of your authority as the controller.
--:-- Diane Neary: The solicitors were saying, documenting really, that if Mark would have published this report, he might be acting beyond his authority as controller.
--:-- Diane Neary: And he might get the county sued by a behemoth health network, perhaps, which happens to be the region's largest employer, or by a doctor who was named in the report.
--:-- Diane Neary: Or Mark himself might get sued personally. And then he'd be on his own. This was just like, hey, you're going to get us sued.
--:-- Diane Neary: And you're going to get sued. And maybe other people are going to be sued. That's what this was.
--:-- Diane Neary: And we're telling you in order to scare the shit out of you. That's what they're doing. Were you scared? Hell yeah.
--:-- Diane Neary: I would be terrified if I had an attorney, and that's what they sent me. That's how I knew immediately he's no longer my attorney.
--:-- Diane Neary: Right? Like, as soon as you read this, you're like, they are not going to help me, and they are going to throw me under the bus.
--:-- Diane Neary: Like, you just don't put this kind of stuff in writing unless you're covering your ass. I confess, I can halfway see the county's argument here.
--:-- Diane Neary: After all, Mark's report, titled The Cost of Misdiagnosis, was actually pretty mushy regarding the county's financial burden due to misdiagnosed child abuse cases.
--:-- Diane Neary: He'd calculated it as anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000 a year for each kid in foster care, to untold millions of dollars on the high end if the county were to get sued by the families.
--:-- Diane Neary: Not exactly conclusive. And it was true. He was using the finances as a way to talk about a different, bigger problem.
--:-- Diane Neary: But he saw nothing wrong with that. He was, in his own words, a bulldog of a controller.
--:-- Diane Neary: He firmly believed he was within his purview. A week later, two things happened.
--:-- Diane Neary: First, Mark heard from the county's lawyer again. He wanted to make sure Mark understood that his staff could also be held liable.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark was like, noted. And then Mark got a separate call from a member of his staff saying someone from the county's finance department had just stopped by.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark's budget was being cut. He would have to lose two employees, 25% of his staff, effective in four months' time.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark was appalled. The controller's staff hadn't been cut in years. This can't be a coincidence, he thought.
--:-- Diane Neary: The next day, Mark called his staff into a conference room. He tries to comfort them as he broke the news.
--:-- Diane Neary: We're sitting down the next day, my employees, they're learning that their jobs are going to be cut. They're learning that they might get sued.
--:-- Diane Neary: And I'm trying to say to them, don't worry. Everything's going to be all right. And they're pretty worried. And I get it because I'm not not worried either.
--:-- Diane Neary: I'm pretty worried. At this point, were you considering, maybe I shouldn't do this? Is it worth it?
--:-- Diane Neary: Oh, yeah, I didn't know what to do. Mark says the meeting was long and heated.
--:-- Diane Neary: The staff was only eight people total, and they urged him not to publish the report. One of them argued, look, if it's our jobs or the report, you got to choose us, right?
--:-- Diane Neary: But Mark felt like, I wasn't elected to protect your jobs. Then again, you don't deserve to be booted over this.
--:-- Diane Neary: Finally, after a couple emotional hours, he conceded on one condition. He'd talk to the families. And if they were okay with it, he'd pull the report.
--:-- Diane Neary: And so that's what he did. And so, you know, I then call the solicitor's office of the county and I say, everything's off.
--:-- Diane Neary: We're not going to have the press conference. We're not going to bring the families in. Everything. You guys won. I literally see it say, you guys can pop the champagne. You won.
--:-- Diane Neary: So I come in the next day and I am like, you know, eyes are red, not from being tired, but from being pissed. Right.
--:-- Diane Neary: Like I am just mad. And so I got to this particular person in the finance department.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark, it's OK. They put the two positions back. Wow yeah I expected it you expected it so did it confirm in your mind that this was a direct response yep yeah how did you feel
--:-- Diane Neary: I i felt two things relief i felt relief that was probably the biggest feeling i felt because i did not want to screw these two employees and like i'm gonna have to be mad later.
--:-- Diane Neary: I knew that I was going to be pissed. I knew this just felt so wrong. It felt like I want to take a shower kind of wrong.
--:-- Diane Neary: But I was just relieved. And that afternoon I told all the employees the budget's back.
--:-- Diane Neary: I did check with the county on all this. And the county executive, who oversees its finance department, said staff cuts were being considered in many departments that year, and Mark's department was among them, yes, but those cuts were never formally proposed, and they weren't retaliatory.
--:-- Diane Neary: With no staffing cuts on the line, Mark had a new choice to make. He could bury his report in a drawer and keep his head down.
--:-- Diane Neary: Or he could ignore the county's advice and go ahead and release it. He decided to hire a lawyer friend, asked him to pore over the document, and advise him on the risk.
--:-- Diane Neary: The lawyer told Mark to cut the names of the doctors. Cut any mention of Lehigh Valley Health Network. The 50-page draft shrank by 11 pages.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark got his staff's approval to release the new version, but he didn't want to publish it until the budget actually went to print.
--:-- Diane Neary: He was paranoid by this point, maybe. Or smart. The county budget is like a physical book.
--:-- Diane Neary: Once it was printed, Mark knew the commissioners wouldn't cut his budget. Because if they did, the public might interpret the move as punitive. since the original number was right there in the budget book in black and white.
--:-- Diane Neary: And every day I called the finance department. Has it gone to print yet? Has it gone to print yet? Has it gone to print yet?
--:-- Diane Neary: And Wednesday morning, it went to print. I saw, I literally saw the woman leave with the flash drive to go get it to the printer.
--:-- Diane Neary: I called the solicitor. I'm like, I just want you to know, the report's going out today. And there's going to be a press conference.
--:-- Diane Neary: And we're coming to the commissioner's meeting tonight. And he's like, don't do it. Like, don't put it out.
--:-- Diane Neary: And I'm like, no, we're putting it out. Mark published his report to the county website on a Wednesday morning, issued a press release, and immediately got to work coordinating with the families.
--:-- Diane Neary: The commissioner's meeting was that same night, and all these families had to get ready, fast. The yellow family, who had the baby with brittle bone disease.
--:-- Diane Neary: The gray family, who had been accused of Munchausen. The blue family. The orange family. All these people Mark had spoken to privately.
--:-- Diane Neary: He'd been encouraging them all along to tell their stories. But he knew it was a big ask. And so they, I can't imagine what it was like being on their end.
--:-- Diane Neary: But I can imagine there's a lot of conversation going on about like, do we really want to do this? Like, our neighbors don't know right now. Right?
--:-- Diane Neary: Our neighbors don't know that we're considered child reviewers. There's only our closest friends and family know, and we are now going to announce this to the world.
--:-- Diane Neary: And then that night, you saw, like, there was a line that went from, I mean, like, you don't get the picture of this, you know, without seeing it.
--:-- Diane Neary: But there was a line that went from the door out to the street. And that is not a short amount of people. That's a lot of people to make that happen.
--:-- Diane Neary: Close to 100 people had shown up. It was unbelievable. It just, I can't even describe what the feeling was.
--:-- Diane Neary: Because it's like, you don't even know how to feel. Do you feel happy or do you feel really sad? I'm going to call this meeting of the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners to order.
--:-- Diane Neary: Mark stood against the wall, close to the door, in a view of both the families lined up at the lectern and the commissioners at the front of the room.
--:-- Diane Neary: The commissioners who up to now pledged to take action hadn responded to his report who hadn wanted to meet with the families Now Mark hoped they have to engage
--:-- Diane Neary: They'd see these people, hear these people, and maybe they'd be moved. Obviously, they weren't going to fix the problem on the spot, but maybe they'd feel compelled to say something meaningful.
--:-- Diane Neary: And then maybe, down the line, they'd do something meaningful. Would everybody please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance?
--:-- Diane Neary: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. About a dozen people headed straight to the lectern to form a line behind the microphone.
--:-- Diane Neary: They were holding pieces of paper with notes, prepared statements. They looked serious, a little nervous.
--:-- Diane Neary: Before I open the floor to citizens' input, a couple of housekeeping rules related to citizens' input. He says everyone can have five minutes to talk about non-agenda items.
--:-- Diane Neary: They begin. Hi, I'm speaking on behalf of my wife and myself. One man says he and his wife brought their baby daughter to the hospital because of a scary incident when she'd stopped breathing.
--:-- Diane Neary: Instead of looking into the issues our daughter was having that led us to the hospital in the first place, they saw a small bruise and immediately wanted to paint a picture.
--:-- Diane Neary: She accused me of abusing our daughter without even talking to me. Our daughter was ripped from a loving family.
--:-- Diane Neary: We were escorted out by both the Lehigh Valley security guards and Salisbury Township police officers.
--:-- Diane Neary: Another father heads to the mic. Our son was taken to the hospital. Our 11-year-old autistic son did not see a family member for over a week and spent his favorite holiday in a hospital room.
--:-- Diane Neary: We lost custody of our son for four months with no investigation. A woman who had never met us or our son simply decided that he fit her criteria.
--:-- Diane Neary: One after the other, they talk about their confusion, about how they still can't really understand what happened.
--:-- Diane Neary: About the astonishment, for some of them, of receiving a Munchausen by proxy diagnosis. We were immediately banned from the hospital and accused over a weekend of suffering from a psychological disorder by doctors who never met us.
--:-- Diane Neary: Expert physicians, multiple psychologists, teachers, and school staff, over 15 witnesses tried to get a hold of CYS to dispute allegations, but none of it mattered.
--:-- Diane Neary: There is no investigation. To this day, we have never had contact with our son again.
--:-- Diane Neary: The speakers represent 13 families accused of abuse. Their stories are both super specific and part of a pattern of parents walking into a Lehigh Valley hospital to get help for a child, only to leave without them.
--:-- Diane Neary: It's overwhelming. In my opinion, if you are taking your child to Lehigh Valley hospital, you are putting your child and family in danger.
--:-- Diane Neary: I brought my child to the ER for complaints of
