When the State of Louisiana Chooses the Wrong Emergency
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- Jul 21
- 15 min read
Updated: Jul 22
For most of my career, I believed Louisiana’s child-protection system existed for one purpose: to protect children. I still believe many of the people working within that system genuinely entered the profession wanting to do exactly that. What I no longer believe is that the system consistently distinguishes between a child facing an actual emergency and a family caught beneath an allegation that should have been investigated before the government began tearing lives apart. I know that because, for approximately one month, I stopped being the attorney watching the system operate from inside a courtroom and became the mother trapped underneath it.
It began the way far too many small-town disasters now begin. A stay-at-home mother with no investigative authority, no journalism standards, no editor, no publisher, no professional code of ethics, no obligation to seek my response, and no institution capable of disciplining her for publishing something false sat down at a keyboard and posted sensational criminal allegations about me on Facebook. She was not law enforcement. She was not a prosecutor. She was not a trained investigator. She had not interviewed the people involved, reviewed the evidence, spoken with my attorney, or verified the location of my children. She had apparently heard some version of small-town gossip, where facts are treated less like fixed objects and more like decorative suggestions, and published a grotesquely inflated version of my private life as though she were reporting the findings of a completed investigation.
I want to make my position unmistakably clear. I wholly, unequivocally, and without reservation deny the allegations against me as they were portrayed on Facebook. I deny that I committed a criminal act. I deny that I committed a violent act against myself or any other person. I deny that I threatened anyone, endangered anyone, or engaged in the horrific conduct the public was encouraged to believe had occurred. Those are not carefully arranged lawyer words designed to preserve some technical escape hatch. That is my position in plain English. The criminal, violent, threatening, and dangerous conduct attributed to me did not occur as it was portrayed online, and no criminal charges were ever filed against me arising from those allegations.
I am equally unwilling to manufacture my own convenient fiction by pretending I behaved perfectly. I hold myself accountable for the way I reacted during the verbal argument at the center of this story. I became angry, I raised my voice, and I should have walked away sooner. But I will not allow accountability to erase context. I had approached someone I loved, trusted, and believed I could speak openly with about anything, sometimes calmly and sometimes almost timidly, because there were things I needed to discuss honestly. Instead, I was met with a brief but sustained period of hostility. My reaction did not arise on an otherwise peaceful day, and I did not initiate an unprovoked verbal attack. I reacted badly to that hostility, and I own the reaction. I do not accept a version of events that pretends nothing happened before it.
That distinction matters. Context is not the same thing as an excuse, and accountability is not an agreement to carry responsibility for conduct that did not occur. I should have disengaged. I should have recognized that no productive conversation was going to emerge from continuing. I should have protected myself and everyone involved by walking away. That failure belongs to me. What does not belong to me is a fictional narrative in which I entered a peaceful home on an ordinary day and launched an inexplicable attack against an unsuspecting person. I will own what I did. I will not own what someone else needed the story to become before posting it on Facebook.
There is another fact that disappeared almost immediately once the internet selected the most scandalous available version of events: my children were not present. They had already been at my parents’ home for a sleepover with their cousins before the argument occurred. They remained there during it, and they were still there afterward. They did not witness the disagreement. They did not hear it. They were not exposed to it. The underlying argument lasted only minutes, while my children were elsewhere for the entire surrounding twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour period. Yet a Facebook publication somehow transformed a brief private disagreement my children never observed into a public allegation that they had been placed in danger.
People have repeatedly asked why law enforcement was called at all. It is an obvious question, and it is probably forming in the reader’s mind now. That explanation is not mine to provide for another person. I know the explanation I was given. I know what I believe. I know that the questions a reader may now be asking are probably the same questions that have played through my mind for months with the enthusiasm of unwanted tenants who refuse to pay rent or vacate the premises. Beyond that, I am not going to use this article to speak for anyone else.
What I will say is that law-enforcement authorities did not bring criminal charges against me. My understanding from the agencies involved was that the conduct described did not support criminal prosecution. Despite that absence of criminal action, and despite the fact that my children had not been present, the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services moved with breathtaking speed.
Before anyone meaningfully interviewed me, before anyone meaningfully engaged with my attorney, and before the public allegations had been carefully tested against the objective facts, the State of Louisiana exercised one of the most profound powers government possesses. My children were removed from our care. My youngest daughter was taken from her father’s arms even though he was not accused in the Facebook publication of having harmed her. The father of my older children, who had nothing to do with the argument, was also swept into the consequences and could not simply receive his own children. Multiple parents who had not been accused of harming these children were treated as though their parental rights could be temporarily suspended by proximity to an allegation published online. In fact, DCFS workers verbally threatened my husband (a law enforcement officer) to put our children in foster care immediately if my husband did not hand over custody of our daughter on the spot. No interview, no investigation, no court hearing, no judicial input, no oversight, no competence. None.
The absurdity would be funny if it had not been so destructive. My children had already been safely staying with my parents before the argument ever began. When the State formally removed them, they were placed in the same home where they had already been sleeping peacefully with their cousins. DCFS disrupted an entire family to accomplish what the parents had voluntarily arranged before anyone ever typed a word on Facebook. The government took the children away so that it could place them exactly where they already were.
My father was so afraid that his position as a judge could be twisted into supposed proof of influence or corruption that he was frightened even to appear beside his daughter in the courtroom. The Facebook narrative had alleged, directly or indirectly, that my family’s connections to the legal system explained why I had not been criminally charged. That accusation transformed the people who should have been able to support me into people who feared that merely sitting beside me would be portrayed as interference. There was no concealed prosecution being suppressed by a judge. There were no criminal charges. Yet the rumor that my family possessed enough power to manipulate one part of the legal system appeared to become justification for another part of that system to move against us with extraordinary force.
My 9 year old daughter had to testify in Court, asking the Judge how lies about her family can cause so much damage. To the Judge’s credit, he knew what she was asking him, and he handled it with absolute professionalism and grace and explained the situation as best he could to her little heart.
For approximately one month, my children remained outside our care while the State investigated allegations I categorically denied. Eventually, the child-protection proceeding was dismissed, and my children came home. There was no viral correction. There was no equally dramatic Facebook publication announcing that the accusations had not produced a criminal prosecution or a sustained child-protection case. No crowd returned to restore what it had helped destroy. The internet is remarkably energetic when it believes it has been invited to watch a woman burn and mysteriously exhausted when someone asks it to help rebuild what remains afterward.
The spectators moved on. I went back to work.
That is where this stopped being only a story about my family.
I returned to a legal practice in which I regularly encounter children living inside circumstances far more serious than an overheard marital argument repackaged for Facebook. I watched a case involving a father accused of beating his six-year-old son badly enough to send that child to the hospital. The father was arrested and remained jailed, yet meaningful DCFS involvement appeared difficult to identify despite the agency being contacted. I watched another matter in which a six-year-old child was reportedly found neglected, physically abused, and sexually assaulted while in a parent’s care, and a probation officer could not obtain clear confirmation that DCFS had investigated or meaningfully followed up. These were not vague rumors from an amateur internet correspondent. These were cases involving law enforcement, arrests, physical evidence, professionals, medical concerns, and allegations of direct harm to children.
I found myself sitting at my desk asking a question that has become impossible to put away: How can an unverified Facebook post generate enough urgency to separate several children from several parents within days, while law-enforcement officers, probation officers, healthcare professionals, visible injuries, criminal allegations, and hospitalized children sometimes struggle to produce confirmation that anyone from DCFS has even followed through?
That question would still matter if my case were the only one. It is considerably more serious because Louisiana’s own public institutions have already documented profound failures within the department.
In March 2024, the Louisiana Office of State Inspector General issued a report concerning DCFS’s actions before the fentanyl-overdose death of two-year-old Mitchell Robinson III. According to the Inspector General’s investigation, Mitchell had twice been taken to an emergency room unresponsive and responded to Narcan. Medical professionals attempted to report the child’s opioid exposure to DCFS. The agency initially declined to accept the reports for investigation. A later report was accepted, but Mitchell died before meaningful protection arrived. This was not gossip. It was not speculation from someone staring into Facebook while avoiding the laundry. It was a toddler requiring emergency medical intervention after exposure to fentanyl, followed by warnings from trained healthcare professionals. The State was alerted. The child died anyway.
The Louisiana Legislative Auditor has also examined DCFS’s Centralized Intake process—the front door through which reports of child abuse and neglect enter the system. From fiscal years 2018 through 2022, DCFS received approximately 249,000 reports and accepted approximately 37 percent for investigation. The audit found that the agency lacked sufficient performance targets for matters including hotline wait times, abandoned calls, and callbacks. During fiscal year 2022, callers abandoned more than 1,100 calls per month on average, while more than 1,100 additional callers requested callbacks each month. The Auditor concluded that without proper standards and measurements, management could not adequately evaluate whether reports were being processed promptly and effectively.
That audit contains another point that should concern every parent in Louisiana. Intake decisions necessarily depend upon what a reporter says and how the intake employee interprets it, using that employee’s judgment, experience, and training. That may be unavoidable to some extent, but it also creates a dangerous vulnerability. The language selected by an accuser can determine whether an allegation sounds like an emergency, while the assumptions of the first government employee receiving it can influence whether the State moves immediately, moves eventually, or does not move at all. A sensational narrator can make an ordinary fact sound catastrophic. A poor intake decision can make a catastrophic fact sound ordinary.
In June 2025, the Legislative Auditor issued another report examining child-welfare staffing and caseloads. The Auditor reported that the average active Child Protective Services caseload increased from 9.3 cases per worker in fiscal year 2023 to 15.9 cases per worker between July 2024 and January 2025. The report further showed that significant numbers of workers received more than ten new investigations during at least one month. Staffing pressure may help explain why the department acts inconsistently, but it does not make the inconsistency harmless. An overwhelmed agency remains capable of exercising overwhelming power.
Louisiana also created an independent Child Ombudsman to monitor agencies responsible for children, review complaints, evaluate the delivery of state services, examine whether procedures protect children’s welfare and rights, and recommend systemic reform. The existence of that office is itself an acknowledgment that ordinary internal review was not enough. During 2025, the Child Ombudsman division received and processed more than 350 complaints from parents, relatives, foster and adoptive families, attorneys, agency employees, hospital administrators, mental-health professionals, school personnel, and other service providers.
The Ombudsman’s 2025 reporting identified complaints involving failures of communication, misinformation, relative-placement concerns, separated siblings, policy violations, and children remaining in psychiatric hospitals after they were medically ready for discharge because suitable placements had not been arranged. In some reported cases, foster children remained hospitalized for months beyond the point when hospital-level care was considered medically necessary. Louisiana’s child-protection system was therefore not merely failing to intervene in some homes. It was also failing some children after the State had already assumed responsibility for them.
In April 2026, Louisiana legislators publicly confronted DCFS leadership following reporting about 307 alleged policy lapses documented through the Child Ombudsman process. Frequently reported concerns included lack of communication, insufficient or incorrect information from caseworkers, relative-placement issues, and failures involving children awaiting appropriate placement after discharge from mental-health facilities. These were not allegations invented by one angry family. They were concerns formally collected and reported through Louisiana’s independent oversight structure.
I am not citing these failures to argue that every DCFS employee is malicious, that every removal is unjustified, or that every missed intervention resulted from deliberate indifference. That would be intellectually dishonest and almost certainly false. I am citing them because they demonstrate that my experience did not occur inside an institution with a spotless record for accuracy, consistency, communication, or sound judgment. It occurred inside an agency that Louisiana’s own Inspector General, Legislative Auditor, Child Ombudsman, lawmakers, and public reporting have repeatedly identified as capable of catastrophic error.
Sometimes that error is failing to act until a child is dead. Sometimes it is failing to secure an appropriate placement for a child already in state custody. Sometimes it is losing reports, calls, time, or critical information inside an overwhelmed bureaucracy. My case forces the State to confront the other side of the same institutional failure: whether DCFS can also act with devastating speed before adequately testing the allegation that triggered its power.
These are not opposite problems. They are symptoms of the same disease.
A system that cannot reliably distinguish danger from noise will inevitably ignore some real emergencies and manufacture others. It will respond to whichever allegation is presented most dramatically, whichever case threatens public embarrassment, or whichever report happens to reach the right employee using the right words on the right day. Meanwhile, the quiet child with bruises, the toddler who required Narcan, the six-year-old sitting in a hospital, or the probation officer waiting for a returned telephone call may remain exactly where they were.
Every unnecessary emergency also consumes resources that cannot be used twice. It consumes investigators, supervisors, agency attorneys, appointed counsel, emergency judges, court time, relative placements, home visits, reports, hearings, and months of administrative attention. While the State was mobilizing against my family over allegations arising from a verbal disagreement my children did not witness, another child somewhere in Louisiana may have been waiting for an investigator whose caseload was already impossible.
That is why unnecessary removals and missed interventions cannot be separated. Every time DCFS chooses the wrong emergency, there are two potential victims: the family unnecessarily traumatized by government intervention and the child facing real danger while the system is looking somewhere else.
I am not asking DCFS to become timid. I do not want investigators hesitating while a child is being beaten, sexually abused, starved, exposed to narcotics, or abandoned. I want an agency with the competence and resources to move immediately when immediate action is justified. I want it to believe doctors, teachers, officers, probation officials, and credible witnesses when the evidence demonstrates that a child may be in danger.
I also want it to understand that public outrage is not evidence. Virality is not corroboration. Repetition is not an investigation. A Facebook post is not a police report merely because someone typed it confidently. Removing a child from a parent is one of the most violent acts government can perform without drawing blood. Sometimes that act is tragically necessary. Precisely because it can be necessary, the State must be able to distinguish necessity from noise.
I refuse to present myself as a flawless victim because I am not one. I participated in a verbal argument. I reacted badly. I wish I had walked away. I take responsibility for that reaction because accountability is not something I demand only from witnesses, opposing counsel, defendants, government agencies, or other people’s families. It applies to me too.
But accountability cannot require me to erase what preceded my reaction. It cannot require me to pretend that I initiated hostility on an otherwise peaceful day. It cannot require me to confess to criminal, violent, threatening, or dangerous conduct I maintain did not occur. It cannot transform an imperfect emotional response into whatever grotesque narrative generated the most likes, comments, and small-town excitement.
I will carry my mistakes. I will not carry someone else’s inventions.
For months, I have asked myself how this happened. I am finished asking only myself.
I want to know who made the original intake decisions, what information was supplied, how it was characterized, what facts were verified, and what efforts were made to determine where my children had actually been. I want to know who decided that parents who had not been accused of harming these children could not immediately care for them. I want to know what supervisors reviewed those decisions, what information was presented to the court, what information was omitted, what contradictory evidence was known, and why no one meaningfully spoke with me or my attorney before the State moved against my family.
I want to know whether the decision-making was affected by social-media pressure, assumptions about my family, fear that my father’s judicial position would create public criticism, confirmation bias, poor training, overwork, institutional panic, or something else entirely. I do not yet know the answer. That is why there must be an investigation rather than another round of rumors.
This is not a promise of revenge. Revenge burns hot, briefly, and stupidly. This is a promise of documentation. I intend to obtain records, construct timelines, compare representations with known facts, examine agency policies, identify decision-makers, review public audits, and ask the same direct questions I would ask in any case involving the exercise of enormous governmental power. I will not answer rumor with more rumor. I will answer it with documents, dates, policies, testimony, contradictions, and evidence.
The State of Louisiana acted against my family based upon a story that should have been carefully investigated before it was accepted. I intend to investigate the State with considerably more care than I believe it showed us.
My children eventually came home. The proceeding was dismissed. But dismissal does not return a month of childhood. It does not erase the experience of being separated from parents. It does not restore the safety a child loses when she learns that strangers can enter the life her family built and decide, before hearing the complete story, that she belongs somewhere else. It does not erase the moment a father’s daughter was taken from his arms, or the fear that left a grandfather afraid to sit beside his own child in court.
Nor does my family’s eventual reunification answer the larger question raised by children whose stories ended differently. Mitchell Robinson III did not get to come home after Louisiana finally understood that the warnings were real. Other children remain in homes, hospitals, temporary placements, and bureaucratic files waiting for the State to choose the correct emergency.
Louisiana’s child-protection system does not earn public trust merely by acting quickly. It earns trust by acting accurately, consistently, and courageously. It must know which children require removal, which families require services rather than destruction, which allegations require investigation, and which evidence demands action before another hour passes.
Every unnecessary removal is a child traumatized in the name of protection. Every missed intervention is a child left in danger while adults explain why the system failed to move. Louisiana’s children and families deserve better than governmental roulette in which urgency depends upon who tells the story, how loudly they tell it, and whether the allegation catches fire online.
I am accountable for my reaction. I have said that plainly, and I mean it.
DCFS must be accountable for its power.
This time, someone is going to investigate the investigation.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney at Law
Hampton Law Firm
SOURCES AND PUBLIC REPORTS
Louisiana Office of State Inspector General — Investigative Report: DCFS and the Death of Mitchell Robinson III, March 18, 2024
Louisiana Legislative Auditor — Centralized Intake of Child Abuse and Neglect Reports, Department of Children and Family Services
Louisiana Legislative Auditor — Child Welfare Staffing and Caseloads, Department of Children and Family Services, June 4, 2025
State of Louisiana Child Ombudsman — 2025 Annual Report
Louisiana Legislative Auditor — State of Louisiana Child Ombudsman
Louisiana Legislative Auditor — 2026 Annual Report, including the Child Ombudsman division’s 2025 complaint data
WAFB — DCFS Faces Scrutiny Over Policy Lapses and Whistleblower Breach, April 27, 2026
WDSU — Louisiana DCFS Report Raises Concerns About Child Fatalities, Foster Care, and Extended Psychiatric Hospital Stays, April 28, 2026
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