02/08/2012 // WPB, FL, USA // Injury Lawyers News // Nicole Howley
Staten Island, NY — New York City is facing a $900 trillion lawsuit after the Administration for Children’s Services took two children away from their Staten Island mother and placed them in foster care in 2008, in which she claims they suffered three years of “terror and horror,” reported ABC News.
The ACS removed the two boys, then 12 and 10, and relocated them to Queens, due to their mother’s refusal for treatment of a mental illness, court documents revealed.
Fausat Ogunbayo, 46, claims that she and her children suffered “over three years of terror, horror, grievous harm, time lost, substantial economic hardship and injuries.”
Ogunbayo reportedly experienced hallucinations and left her sons at home alone for several hours, ABC News reported. In 2008, New York City asserts that ACS had received several reports concerning Ogunbayo’s alleged mistreatment of her two children.
Furthermore, court documents maintain that Ogunbayo told doctors that her children’s skin was becoming darker each day from radiation, and believed that the FBI was after her children.
In New York, mental illness alone will not cause a parent to lose custody of the children, but it is unknown whether her mental illness was a factor in her children’s removal.
“Laws require states to put in place preventive services in an effort to avoid removing children from their families, but if those preventive services are not working as a first-level intervention, they have to be concerned about the safety of the children,” said Alma Carten, associate professor of social work at New York University to ABC News. “Mentally ill people do have children and there is an issue of social justice and civil rights here that must be acknowledged.”
Ogunbayo is representing herself in court.
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