Chicago, Illinois May 24, 2023 (Issuewire.com) - The DCFS Illegally Took Illinois Woman’s Baby for Being a Single Black Mom.
Tameka Esco claims the DCFS forcibly took away her baby without any probable cause after her baby’s pediatrician made racist remarks about her and called the services.
Date of news publication (Chicago, Illinois): An Illinois woman is seeking justice for herself after she claims her baby was illegally and forcibly snatched away by the Department of Children and Family Services.
Tameka Esco is a single, black mom, to (baby’s name), aged (baby’s age), and is calling out the systemic injustice in the country that preys on vulnerable people, particularly minorities. She alleges that the federal and state organizations are unwilling to help people like her and give them their basic human rights – including the right to keep the mother and baby together.
Esco’s ordeal started on Feb 16, 2022, when she took her 6-month-old baby to his pediatrician, Dr. Hannah Lo for a routine check-up. Dr. Lo had been serving as Esco’s baby’s primary pediatrician for six months and she says she put a great deal of trust in her since she was the one who caught Esco’s postpartum preeclampsia after her child was born.
However, on the day of the appointment, Esco noticed a strange change in the attitude of Hannah Lo. The pediatrician started by asking Esco why she had not applied for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and whether she was buying her baby’s food out of her own pocket.
The doctor’s comments implied that since Esco was a single black mom, she was unable to take care of her child properly without assistance. Esco says her child had steadily put on weight at every previous appointment she had with Dr. Lo, so she knew she was feeding him the right nutrition. Esco herself is an accomplished woman who is able to earn for herself and her family –she has been a nurse for 7 years now and recently got her real estate broker license as well.
Esco informed Dr. Lo of her achievements, but the pediatrician didn’t seem impressed. Instead, she called one of her colleagues, Dr. Raj, in the room. Dr. Lo said she just wanted to show how cute Esco’s baby was but when Dr. Raj saw him, she said, “Oh my, he is so beautiful. I love his straight hair.”
The comment made Esco feel a bit uneasy since it seemed borderline racist. According to the mother, the baby is African-American, but he looks biracial.
Esco said she and her older kids both felt skeptical about the appointment. However, they decided to let it go. On Esco’s next visit to the doctor, she brought all her children with her to show that they were all healthy and thriving.
During that appointment, Dr. Lo said that she wanted to be the primary physician of all of Esco’s children, making it a family thing, so Esco agreed. However, when she checked the baby, the pediatrician said that he had lost one pound, which is equivalent to an adult losing 15 pounds. She said that Esco needed to take her baby to Stroger Hospital in Chicago, where she worked also, and get him checked up.
The terrified mother started crying and rushed to the hospital with the baby, where he was admitted on suspicion of malnutrition. However, when the nurses came to the baby’s room, they said they expected to see a small baby, but Esco’s baby seemed normal-sized to them.
The nutritionist at the hospital also checked the baby’s muscle tone and said he did not look like he was suffering from malnourishment. Esco claims the nutritionist also said that every doctor uses a different scale to measure a baby’s health and maybe Dr. Lo’s scale was a bit off. She also suggested to Esco that she should consider changing her baby’s pediatrician.
By that point, Esco was very upset with Dr. Lo. She called the doctor and told her that Stroger Hospital informed her that her baby was not malnourished and also told her what the nutritionist said. This seemed to upset Dr. Lo. Esco further said that if her baby’s test came back normal, she would be switching to another pediatrician. At that time, Dr. Lo said she respected Esco’s decision.
However, soon after, Esco got a call from the office of DCFS stating they got a report of a malnourished baby. At that time, the baby was still in the hospital, undergoing all kinds of genetic testing.
Later, a physical therapist from the pediatric unit came to see the baby and asked Esco why he was sticking his tongue out. She suggested that it could be a sign of Down’s syndrome. However, Esco informed her that her baby was perfectly healthy and did not have Down’s syndrome since he was tested for it in the womb.
However, Esco claims the physical therapist seemed to be determined to find something wrong with the baby. She said the baby was unable to sit up on his own, which was something that Esco said he could do. However, the physical therapist dismissed everything she told her about her baby.
The next day, Esco arrived at the hospital to find the back of her child’s head shaved off. When she asked the nurses why his head was shaved, they said that the doctors had performed an ultrasound on him. Esco asked them what the results were and they said the baby was normal.
At that time, Esoc noticed another unusual thing about her baby – he kept flapping his hands like a bird, which is something he never used to do before. As an experienced nurse, Esco said she knows that hand flapping is associated with children with autism. She asked the physical therapist about who taught her son to flap his hands because that was not his normal behavior, and the therapist told her not to be concerned with the flapping as long as it was a forward motion. She then performed a few exercises with the baby.
At this point, Esco alleges that the baby started screaming while looking into his mother’s eyes. When Esco reached out to take the baby, the physical therapist slapped her hands away, stating “They wanted him to know how to put his pants on when he would turn 18 years old.”
The physical therapist then came around the baby’s bed to Esco and said, “See, look,” and started touching her back and making different parts of her body move. At that point, Esco knew that she was the one who taught her baby to flap his hands.
The physical therapist then suggested to Esco that her baby should get an MRI, during which he would be sedated. Esco refused this suggestion on the grounds that all her baby’s blood tests and urinalysis came back normal. She also informed her that she was not aware of the ultrasound and did not consent to it, but the physical therapist was very dismissive of her concerns and said it was only done to spot any bleeding in the brain.
Esco asked the physical therapist why she suggested an MRI when there was no probable cause to which she replied that the baby’s case was very unusual and she hadn’t seen anything like that before in her 20 years of being a therapist. She said the baby could no longer do things that he previously could.
However, what made Esco uneasy was when the therapist started asking me incriminating questions that implied Esco somehow abused her child. The therapist asked if Esco did anything to him and looked her directly in the eyes to see if the mother was lying. Esco told her ‘no’, and the physical therapist demanded Esco show her pictures of the baby on her phone. However, when Esco complied with her demands, the therapist said the pictures looked old.
Esco needed to go home because the DCFS investigator, Nina Campbell, had a meeting with her. Esco was requested to show her all the food in the house and all her baby’s food. At the time, she informed Nina Campbell that she believed my baby’s pediatrician was racist. She also told her that the physician prescribed her Chantix, but later Esco got an email stating the medicine was recalled and black boxed and they couldn’t understand how she got a hold of it.
After a day, Esco got a call from Dr. Raj, who said Dr. Lo briefed her on what was going on, and that the DCFS should never have been called on her. She requested that Esco come to Stroger Hospital to talk to her. However, Esco declined her request because she did not want to deal with any of Dr. Lo’s associates anymore.
At the hospital, Esco’s baby’s diagnosis changed from “malnutrition” to “failure to thrive.” In addition, Esco claims Stroger Hospital falsified her baby’s medical record stating Dr. Raj, not Dr. Lo, was the baby’s pediatrician.
Stroger Hospital then entered the baby into an early intervention program, where the physical therapist could continue to do physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy on the 7-month-old baby. Esco then received a call from the DCFS stating she could pick up her baby from the hospital.
However, Esco’s relief was short-lived when her baby started vomiting at discharge. The mother also saw that the baby’s stomach had distended big and he had bruises all over his tiny body.
Horrified by the treatment at the hospital, Esco told the staff they would never see her baby again. She also filed a complaint against Dr. Lo and took her baby to another pediatrician, Natalie Parker. There, her baby was diagnosed as perfectly normal.
Esco also got a call from DCFS’s Nina Campbell, stating that she needed to see her and her kids one last time before they closed her case. Esco allowed the visit and thought her nightmare was over.
However, two months later, she heard back from Nina Campbell again, who claimed she got another complaint about her kids. Campbell said that a call came in that Esco had left her eldest child at the school. Esco showed Campbell the documentation that stated she was scheduled to be a court at the time. She also showed Campbell the text message which informed the children’s teacher that she was in court and that the children should wait in the office until she came to get them.
Esco explained that she spoke to her eldest daughter about being in court so the young girl called her father, who was on the children’s pick-up list. Esco believes he was the one who made the call to the DCFS. Esco informed Campbell that she and the children’s father were not on good terms and that he had been withholding child support since 2020. She also claimed the man had threatened her if she reported the issue to child support.
Esco claimed that the children’s father was jealous of her success, her career, and how well she was raising her beautiful children. She thought that would be enough to convince Campbell but the very next day, Nina Campbell burst through her door along with the children’s dad and his family.
She demanded why Esco did not tell her she was bipolar and Esco realized that the children’s dad must have lied to her about that. Nina Campbell told her that if she did not sign a safety plan, all of her children would be going into DCFS custody. However, that wasn’t true since the children’s father was allowed to take away the kids from there. Esco signed a consent form that allowed her friend to take her baby to her home while the new investigation took place.
She then hired a lawyer who told her she worked for the DCFS so Esco believed that she would be the best person for the job. However, she was also unable or unwilling to bring justice to her.
After a year of Esco not seeing her kids, her lawyer handed her her case file on April 23, 2023, stating she was withdrawing from her case. She also revealed that Nina Campbell wrote an affidavit to Kimberly Foxx, the lead state attorney in Chicago, to make the baby the Ward of the State. Judge Tiesha Smith approved the motion before Esco even had the chance to step into the courtroom.
The documents that are with Esco say that the baby can be found at her friend’s house; however, this is false. She alleges that the DCFS has taken away the baby from her for no reason at all. According to the safety plan she signed, the baby was supposed to go to PCC Community Wellness Center with Natalie Parker; however, the DCFS had her baby on Stroger Hospital Services.
Esco states it has been a year since she has seen any of her kids. She claims that her baby was human trafficked by the unjust system. Esco is now seeking justice for herself and her child. She believes that her basic civil rights, due process, ABA rules, and judge’s rules have all been violated. She has written to the FBI, the IDFPR, the IDPH, and ABA, as well as to some news reporters so that they can hear her voice and help her in any way they can.
Esco is not the only one in this situation; that is a harsh reality for many, many single black moms in the country who have great burdens but few resources willing to help them out.
Esco is sharing her story to highlight how her human rights have been eradicated and her voice has been stifled. But no matter how corrupt the system is, she says she will continue to fight for her child.
She is now encouraging all women who have endured similar nightmares to come together and raise their voices against this systemic injustice so that together, they may prevent the DCFS from stealing helpless little children from vulnerable mothers.
If you want to offer support to Tameka Esco or know more about her stories, you can reach out to her at (add contact details like email).
Media Contact
Justice For Jacovi tmkesco@gmail.com (312)576-8309
