My Story Of The Unjustness In Chautauqua County Family Court

I’m in the hospital, they give me a pill of some sort, and send me on my way home. My mom drives me to my brothers house where I just hold my son in my arms for the next hour or so. My mother and sister in law then take my son to wherever they decided to do the exchange to give my son to his father. This pill they gave me in the hospital works amazing because I just curl up in a ball and go to sleep for the rest of the day. The next day, I HAVE to act like everything is ok because I have my 6 year old daughter who notices something is different, but I must stay strong for her and take care of her. The first thing I start to take care of is setting up my visitation hours with someplace in Jamestown that does supervised visits. It comes to my attention very much later on that I could have somehow had my mother supervise my visits, but I was told by the judge that my visits are to be at this place in Jamestown for now. They had no availability for me to see my son that first week, so we set up a visit for 2 weeks from now. 2 weeks without seeing your 1 year old whom you’ve hardly spent time away from… what an awful feeling this is. In the meantime, my nursing classes start up. At least this keeps me busy, occupies my time, and gives me something to look forward to. I was in nursing school full time with a 6 year old at home so I did not work during this time, I had my mother to help support us for the time being, but on September 9, 2019, Jeremiah filed for me to pay child support. Yes it was only $25 per month since I did not work, but being a nursing school student whom just spent hundreds of dollars on textbooks and scrubs, getting $0 a month in income, $25 was hard to come up with. I asked the courts what was I supposed to do? Go around town and collect bottles and cans? They just apologized because they did understand. – August 26, 2019: Our first Pre Trial. No agreement – September 2019, in the town of Portland Court (where country fair is located), I must say that the judge was very nice to me, kind and understanding. My lawyer D. Civilette spoke to the district attorney for a little while in another room and immediately 3 of the 4 charges against me were dismissed. They told me they had to keep at least one because they can’t just dismiss everything without a trial. I didn’t have the money for a trial and just wanted to get this over with so basically, I agreed to do probation for 6 months then it would be dropped. I had to see my probation officer, she was a female and very nice to me, once per week just to check in and be on my way. Easy! She actually somewhat became a friend of mine and I’m happy I got to meet her! Lets talk for a minute about this supervised visitation and what its like. It would occur on a weekday during school hours so I would sign my daughter out of school early once a week to come with us to see my son. We would get in our own separate room from others having visitation time and my kids would play together the entire time and they actually had fun! I asked the people supervising if we could go to the playground behind the building and they claimed they were short staffed and we were not allowed to go to the playground or for walks around the block or anything. We had to stay in this room for 2 hours. One of our visitation days, my son came in and was all of a sudden walking around and saying “mama”. He also came in once with a new haircut. The person supervising handed me an envelope which stated “Anthony’s First Haircut” with a chunk of hair in it. All of this mess made me miss out on my sons first steps, first words and first haircut. And I feel like Jeremiah giving me this envelope was just a slap in the face. But thanks I appreciate it…. I suppose. I remember going into the kitchen of this place to warm up a bottle or food, and seeing another mother feeding her child who couldnt have been any more then 9 months old. No words were exchanged, but the look on this mothers face was just about as sad and depressed as mine was. I have no idea why she got her child taken away, but it was just a sad sad sight and a sad memory to this day. One visitation day we ended up being about 5 minutes late. They would always have the visiting party (me) come 15 minutes early before the visitation time started. So say our visitation time was 11:00. We arrived at 10:50 instead of 10:45 and we were told we could not have our visitation this day because we did not call ahead of time to say we were running late. After they told me this, they then called Jeremiah whom was already parked right out front with my son in his truck and he then left. We were all right there and available for this visit! I was mad, my mother was upset and my daughter started crying because we had to go. It took everything in me to not flip out because this made no sense to me and I was never notified verbally or in writing that we had to call if we were running late. The staff there were far from friendly, they watched every little thing we did, I think one time I had a cup of coffee and my son reached for it and I gave him a tiny sip and let him smell it and the person watching me ran into my room yelling “you can’t do that!” Again, it took everything in me to keep my mouth shut. We were able to bring in pumpkins to carve together, overall the kids had fun. Again, my daughter was young and not exactly understanding what was going on, but she drew a picture at one point during these few months of a tall person (her) holding up a little person (her baby brother) and at the top of the picture it reads “Missing” at the bottom it reads “Help”. Looking at this picture today breaks my heart for her. – October 23,2019: Second Pre Trial. No agreement Remember how my lawyer D. Civilette told me to go around and get a mental health evaluation? Well, I went to a few different places and people that I knew and had them all write to him and the courts. My counselor, my nursing instructor whom also did background checks on me, the priest at my local church, my doctor, my kids school principal and my daughters school teacher ALL wrote up a statement about me as a person and mother. Not one negative remark from any of those people. The girl at the mental health clinic was significantly younger then I was (seemed like a new graduate) and stated that I have depression. Well yeah I do now, didnt before I got my kid taken from me. Court just seemed to be going nowhere during these pretrials and D. Civilette kept telling me the next step is a trial and there is nothing else he can do for me in the meantime. Every time I would ask him, “But can’t we do this or can’t we do that”, he would stop what he was doing, look me in the eyes and say to me, “You are not understanding what I am telling you. Nothing more can be done for right now. The next step is a trial”. All of a sudden, D. Civilette tells me that he does not do family court trials. When all of this started, I knew of Civilette as a great criminal lawyer. When I originally hired him for my criminal case, he stated to me that the same person (him) who is handling my criminal case should probably also handle my family court case. Of course why would I not believe him? After all, he is the professional right?! Now suddenly he’s telling me he doesn’t do family court trials. I said OK. In my head I was thinking “You suck anyways”. It was at this time that my mother and a friend of mine helped me out financially and I retained the best lawyer one could get their hands on in this county! Someone who will fight for you and all that is right. Sally Jaroszynski. Best decision I ever could make for myself and my children.