Summary:

  • Traumatic Birth: Baby Evelyn’s delivery involved complications, including a vacuum-assisted birth and emergency c-section, which medical experts said could easily explain her brain bleed but was overlooked by hospital staff. Other asymptomatic injuries on her ribs also pointed to birth trauma, but Doctors at Cook Children’s never even investigated it. 
  • Hospital Diagnosis: At six weeks old, Evelyn was admitted to Cook Children’s Hospital for seizures, where a doctor reviewed an MRI of Evelyn’s brain, found a small brain bleed, and diagnosed child abuse just 2 minutes later, without meeting Evelyn or her parents and without evaluating multiple obvious alternative explanations.
  • CPS Removal: CPS arrived on the scene and removed Evelyn from her parents after a rushed investigation based on exaggerated reports and without speaking to a single doctor about Evelyn’s medical condition. Additionally, the CPS caseworker testified on the stand that she could have avoided the entire removal by just placing Evelyn with a family member while the medical analysis was completed, but she knowingly chose not to do so–a flagrant violation of state law. 
  • Parents’ Defense: The three medical experts testified that Evelyn’s injuries could be easily explained by birth trauma and were not consistent with what would have been expected from abuse. An expert radiologist testified that Evelyn’s particular asymptomatic rib injury is commonly caused by birth trauma, but is only found in less than half of one percent of abuse cases. 
  • CPS Failures: Evelyn’s case exposed failures in the CPS system, violations of state law, and an utter failure of Doctors to conduct their due diligence before reporting a family to CPS and separating a newborn baby from her family. 
  • Advocacy and Reform: The Family Freedom Project launched a campaign to support the #BringEvelynHome and push for CPS reforms, ultimately resulting in the return of Evelyn to her parents in November 2024. 

At six weeks old, Evelyn Boatright was brought to Cook Children’s Hospital for seizures, but her parents never imagined the ordeal that would follow. What began as a quest by two loving parents for answers and medical care spiraled into a legal and emotional battle that has captivated advocates of parental rights and exposed significant flaws in how allegations of child abuse are handled at hospitals in Texas.

This is the story of Evelyn Boatright—a harrowing journey of misdiagnosis, bureaucratic failures, and a family’s fight to be reunited.

Evelyn’s Birth and Initial Hospital Visit

Evelyn was born on December 24, 2023, via emergency C-section after 12 hours of being stuck in the birth canal. Because of the difficult delivery, she was born with molding of the head and caput succedaneum (swelling and bruising of the head), conditions that are common after traumatic births. 

For the first six weeks of her life, Evelyn appeared healthy. However, in early February 2024, Jackie and Juan noticed Evelyn twitching and vomiting, so they rushed her to Cook Children’s Hospital for evaluation. What started as a search for medical aid quickly turned into a nightmare. Evelyn was admitted to Cook Children’s Hospital with concerning symptoms, including seizures. The hospital conducted several initial tests. During the screening process when Evelyn was admitted, the hospital staff noted in the medical records that they had no concerns for abuse.

Then the radiologist reviewed an MRI of Evelyn’s brain. Just 2 minutes later, he left a note in the medical records saying he suspected abuse. A short while later, an x-ray came back showing that Evelyn had an asymptomatic rib fracture (an asymptomatic fracture is one that can be seen on a scan, but which isn’t producing any symptoms such as pain or discomfort). The radiologist again noted in the medical records his belief that the injury was caused by abuse. 

The family was referred to a special team within Cook Children’s tasked with investigating child abuse. However, no true investigation was actually conducted. According to testimony in court, the Child Abuse Pediatrician at Cooks was a relatively new doctor just a few years out of her residency. She interviewed Jackie and Juan (without identifying herself as a child abuse investigator) and told them that Evelyn’s injuries could only have been caused by some severe physical trauma, such as being in a car accident or being dropped off of a building. 

When Jackie and Juan said that nothing like that had happened, the Child Abuse Pediatrician concluded that Jackie and Juan must be lying and that they must have injured Evelyn themselves. 

Cook Children’s staff called CPS. 

CPS Involvement and the Removal Decision

A non-medical staffer at Cook Children’s filed a report with Child Protective Services (CPS) against Jackie and Juan. The report severely exaggerated Evelyn’s injuries, alleging five rib fractures that had all occurred at different times, which CPS took to mean there was a pattern of physical abuse—claims that were entirely unsubstantiated by medical records. In subsequent reports with law enforcement and CPS supervisors, the number of alleged rib fractures continued to inflate without explanation to 7 and then to 9.

In reality, there was one asymptomatic fracture that had mostly healed. 

The CPS caseworker assigned to Evelyn’s case had only seven months of experience. According to her testimony on the stand, after the CPS caseworker arrived at the hospital and throughout the entire investigation, she never spoke to a single doctor. 

Instead, she spoke to the Cook Children’s social worker, who directed her to a police detective who had arrived at the hospital.

In 2023, FFP worked to pass a law that requires a CPS caseworker to inform a parent of their legal rights upon first contact. Failure to do so can make the evidence inadmissible in court. Instead, the caseworker sat in on Jackie and Juan’s interview with the police detective where she was able to obtain confidential information without first informing Jackie and Juan of their legal rights. 

When Jackie and Juan reported that they were not aware of any major physical trauma that Evelyn had experienced, the caseworker concluded that someone had injured Evelyn on purpose and she needed to be separated from anyone who had been in contact with her for the last 48 hours. On the stand, the caseworker testified that the 48-hour mark was based on the assumption that the injuries had occurred within that timeframe, something that no medical professional at any time had claimed. Yet, because CPS did not speak to any of the doctors, they used this criteria to exclude numerous family members as potential placement options for Evelyn, even though those family members were at the hospital and were ready and waiting to help. 

Instead, the caseworker called hospital security and had them escort Jackie, Juan, and all of their family members out of the hospital. 

A mere few hours after arriving at the hospital seeking medical help for their baby daughter, the system had turned Jackie and Juan into alleged perpetrators, accused them of horrific violence, and torn their family apart. 

Even more stunning is what happened next. 10 minutes after the family had been kicked out of the hospital, the CPS caseworker received a phone call from the police detective. The detective informed her that Evelyn’s grandmother was available to take her and that the grandmother was not “in the timeline”–meaning she had not been in recent contact with Evelyn and therefore could not be considered an alleged perpetrator. 

Texas law requires that CPS make reasonable efforts to avoid the need for a removal. It also specifically requires that CPS attempt to solve the problem by allowing a relative to take temporary possession of the child while the case is investigated, rather than conducting a removal and taking the family to court. 

Under questioning, the caseworker admitted that when she received that phone call, she could have stopped the entire removal and allowed the grandmother to come pick up Evelyn. Instead, not only did she choose to continue with the removal, but she also failed to inform her supervisor that placement with the grandmother was even an option. 

As a result, Evelyn was sent into foster care. 

The Initial Battle to #BringEvelynHome

Because Jackie and Juan’s income was so low, attorneys Brad Scalise and Charlott Staples were appointed to represent them and defense consultant Judy Powell joined the case as well. The team immediately got to work setting up a defense for their clients, but the system seemed set against them. 

After Evelyn’s removal, another caseworker was assigned to manage the case which became a new nightmare for Jackie and Juan. This caseworker began fabricating evidence of domestic violence between Jackie and Juan and tried to trick them into saying they were guilty. She also told Jackie and Juan that their family members were all blocked by a court order from speaking with one another about the case–a bald-faced lie. 

In an apparent attempt to divide them, the caseworker lied to Juan and told him that Jackie had come to a visit with Evelyn accompanied by another man “in a muscle shirt.” She even tried to split them up as a couple, telling them that if they stayed together it would mean they were “choosing each other over Evelyn” and that they would never get her back. 

The situation with the caseworker reached its final straw when she failed to move Evelyn out of foster care to live with her aunt after the move had been approved by the court. She failed to inform her superiors that Evelyn hadn’t been moved and then went dark for several days, leaving the supervisors unsure of Evelyn’s whereabouts.  

A complaint was filed with the Office of Consumer Affairs against the caseworker and she was finally fired soon afterward. 

While the caseworker wreaked havoc, Cook Children’s dug in their heels.

Cook Children’s slow-walked the release of medical records, which prevented the defense from getting an independent analysis of the case from outside medical experts. Once the records were finally obtained, the defense petitioned the court to have a medical expert appointed for Jackie and Juan. 

The court had already determined that Jackie and Juan were unable to pay for their own defense (the entire reason attorneys had been appointed in the first place) but the court refused to appoint a medical expert. Brad and Charlott appealed the decision to another judge, but it was denied again. With no medical expert, no defense could be put on. 

Jackie and Juan’s family rose to the occasion. They sold cars and donated from their personal savings to help Jackie and Juan secure a medical expert to review the case. That medical expert was a Child Abuse Pediatrician with decades of experience in the field. And it was just in time. 

Texas law requires that a hearing be held within 14 days of a child’s removal in order to determine whether the removal was proper. Because of the slow walking of medical records by Cook Children’s and the refusal of the court to appoint a medical expert, the hearing did not happen until 6-months into the case.

As Brad, Charlott, and Judy prepared for the big hearing, they made one more call. Having worked closely with the Family Freedom Project on a big CPS medical case in 2019, Judy Powell asked FFP to attend the hearing and consider joining the case. When the hearing finally arrived in July of 2024, VP of Family Freedom Project Jeremy Newman was in attendance. 

Halfway through the hearing, the defense team discovered that the court was not transcribing a record of the case–which courts are required to do under Texas law. Without a transcribed record, the attorneys would have no way to file an emergency appeal. A request was immediately made for a record to be kept, but the request was denied. 

In testimony, Cook Children’s and CPS doubled down on their theory: That Evelyn’s injuries could only have been caused by severe physical trauma and Jackie and Juan were to blame. 

But the Child Abuse Pediatrician expert witness for Jackie and Juan said otherwise. According to the expert, all of Evelyn’s injuries were easily explainable, and even to be expected, from her birth. The injuries, he said, would not even have been surprising from a relatively normal birth, and Evelyn’s was much more traumatic. 

Even so, the judge ruled in favor of CPS. 

Then FFP joined the case. 

The Battle Escalates

Working closely with Brad, Charlott, and Judy, FFP’s team brought on appellate counsel to the case, worked with the defense team to file a special motion for a new hearing before a new judge, and secured three medical experts for the ongoing battle: a specialist in brain damage and bone health, an expert radiologist, and the same Child Abuse Pediatrician who testified in the prior hearing–all of them with decades of expertise in their fields. 

FFP also launched a PR campaign to raise awareness of the case and raise funds to help cover the costs of Jackie and Juan’s defense. 

The motion for a new hearing immediately took the case out of the hands of the original judge and moved it to an elected district judge in Tarrant County. It doesn’t stay there long. 

At the first meeting with the district judge, attorney Brad Scalise immediately requested that a record of the hearing be kept. Just like the first judge, the second judge refused to keep a record. When Brad asked the judge to put her refusal in writing in an official court order, the judge became so irate that she began yelling at the attorneys and threw them all out of the courtroom. Just a few hours later, the judge sent a letter to the attorneys recusing herself from the case and letting them know that a third judge would be appointed. 

Retired judge Randy Catterton was appointed to the case and the new hearing was set for November 2024.

Prepared for War

When the day of the hearing arrived, Brad, Charlott, Judy, and FFP’s legal team arrived prepared for war. Fort Worth attorney Kim Dewey had now also joined the case. 

Over the course of three days, Cook Children’s Hospital and CPS reiterated their claims: Jackie and Juan must be child abusers who had inflicted serious physical injury on Evelyn, nothing else could explain her injuries, they said. 

A parade of witnesses came to the stand, each sitting for hours on end under intense questioning from both sides. 

Of all the witnesses who testified in the case, perhaps none were more astonishing than the testimony of the radiologist from Cook Children’s Hospital. 

On the stand, the radiologist defended his initial actions, where he had reached his conclusion of child abuse within 2-minutes of viewing the MRI analysis. He argued that he had identified on the MRI a particular vein inside the brain called a “bridging vein”, which he believed was ruptured. According to Cook’s radiologist, he was able to tell by looking at a picture of a broken vein whether it had been broken on purpose by a person or on accident by something else–in other words, he claimed he could tell the intent of the alleged perpetrator based just on viewing an image of a broken vein. 

In case his testimony was unclear, he reiterated the point repeatedly and forcefully under questioning: There was no chance he was wrong, he said. It was caused by abuse, and nothing else could explain the injury. Furthermore, he testified that the addition of the rib fracture was proof positive that all injuries had been caused by abuse. He admitted on the stand, though, that he was unaware of the circumstances of Evelyn’s birth and had not reviewed any of those records before reaching his conclusion. 

Cook Children’s Child Abuse pediatrician agreed: The injuries must have been caused by abuse and no other theory was viable, she claimed.

There was just one problem, Cook Children’s hadn’t investigated the other theories in the first place. The Cook’s radiologist acknowledged that other doctors at Cook’s had raised other possible theories for the injuries, but he had not vetted them before reaching his conclusion because he said those theories were not his specialty and, therefore, not his problem. 

On the stand, attorneys for Jackie and Juan asked Cook’s Child Abuse Pediatrician about a report she had authored several days after Evelyn’s removal. In the report, she described multiple additional tests that should be run to determine whether there were other medical explanations for the injuries besides abuse. But at the time of her report, Cook Children’s had already called CPS and Evelyn had been removed. Somehow, the doctor defended the conclusion of abuse and the calling of CPS even though her own recommendations for additional testing were never followed up on by anyone at Cook Children’s.

Then the expert witnesses from the defense took the stand. 

The job of expert medical witnesses is not to stump for either side, but to explain dispassionately what points of medical certainty and uncertainty she’d like on the case at hand. Very quickly after the expert witnesses took the stand, the narrative from Cook Children’s that the injuries were from abuse, only abuse, and not explainable by anything but abuse began to unravel. 

Over a day and a half of testimony, the three experts outlined the situation: numerous medical questions that should have been asked but weren’t, tests that should have been done but weren’t, mitigating factors that should have been considered but weren’t, processes and standard medical procedures that should have been used but weren’t, and common medical knowledge on the subjects at hand that should have been considered but was ignored. 

The expert radiologist testified that Cook Children’s “bridging vein” theory and insistence of abuse was “dogmatic”. She testified that a bridging vein injury could be caused by any number of things and certainly wasn’t proof positive of abuse. Even more significant, she testified that it wasn’t clear from the MRI whether there even was a bridging vein injury in the first place, which was the lynchpin of Cook’s entire theory. The small bleed inside Evelyn’s brain, she said, could easily have been caused by her birth and there was also evidence it could have been caused by an infection, something which had been flagged by Cook’s own medical screenings but which they did nothing to investigate.  

The rib fracture, she testified, was not consistent with typical patterns of abuse injuries. Rib injuries from abuse tend to produce fractures of certain ribs from certain angles. Evelyn’s rib fracture literally sat in the least likely rib at the least likely angle to have been caused by abuse. Less than half of 1% of abuse fractures ever occur in that location, she testified. However, asymptomatic rib fractures of this kind are known to fairly commonly result from birth trauma, something else that Cook Children’s never investigated. 

Testimony from the expert Child Abuse Pediatrician and the specialist on brain damage and bone health was similarly damning. Cook’s own medical records showed a high probability that Evelyn’s brain bleeding could have been caused by an infection, but this wasn’t investigated. The rib fracture, they said, was likely from birth trauma. 

When asked what he would have done differently if he had been in charge of the medical investigation, the expert Child Abuse Pediatrician responded, “I wouldn’t have assumed child abuse from the very beginning.” 

Evelyn’s Hearing and Return Home

Baby Evelyn spent nine months separated from her parents because CPS and Cook Children’s Hospital failed to conduct basic due diligence before tearing the family apart. 

After the last witness at the hearing finished testifying, the parties prepared for the high-stakes closing arguments. Now was going to be the moment when each side synthesized the three days of complex testimony, walked through the relevant legal standards, and made their case to the judge for whether Evelyn should be reunited with her family or kept in the clutches of the state. 

But before the defense had even started their closing argument, the judge interrupted to let everyone know that he was already planning to send Evelyn home. He had heard enough. He wanted the parties to stay there in the courtroom and write up the paperwork so he could sign it right then. 

After 9 months of intense battles, night and day stress and trauma, and vilification by the state and Cook Children’s Hospital, the family was about to be reunited. Evelyn would be going home first thing the next morning. 

After a moment of shock about the swiftness of the judge’s decision, Jackie, Juan, and their family in the courtroom slowly rose and began to exchange quiet hugs, smiles, and tears.  

Finally, on November 15th, Evelyn Boatright was reunited with her parents.

Watch Evelyn’s Homecoming Video

Evelyn’s case underscores the devastating impact of government overreach and the critical importance of protecting parental rights. From the moment CPS intervened, based on a rushed and incompetent diagnosis of child abuse, Evelyn’s parents faced an uphill battle against a deeply flawed system. Yet, thanks to the relentless efforts of their legal team, justice prevailed. 

Evelyn’s homecoming is a powerful reminder of why we must remain vigilant in safeguarding families from these harmful errors. FFP exists because we believe that the best place for children is in homes with loving families. We believe in keeping Texas families free. 

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