Now do not think I am complaining.  It was comforting for you to ‘snuggle’ up to me.  After all, you are part of me.  Just as I am part of you.  Our “Selfs” are one in the same. 

          If you find that difficult to understand, consider the “Christian” Trinity.  Ask a reputable minister/priest to explain their Trinity to you; it is less difficult to understand how you and I are one in the same.

          “Love one another as I have loved you.”  “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”  With you and I it is simpler still, as we are one in the same, how could I not love you as I love myself? 

          I took you with me practically everywhere I went.  You were my companion.  There were a few times I could not take you with me for various reasons; that is when I chose a reputable responsible sitter for you.  There were three different sitters:  My niece, Becky Hinkle, a friend and a hired sitter.  They took care of you when I could not.  You were never with any of them for more than 8 hours at a time.  The rest of the time you were with me. 

          I played with you various ways.  You would reach for my mouth and I would grab your hand[s] with my mouth and growl like I was chewing them off.  Same with your feet.  I would also growl and chew on your belly and ribs.  That got the most, and loudest, giggles.  I whiskered your neck and chewed off your ears and nose, too.  Fathers that love their babies do that sort of thing. 

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          You were just beginning to articulate “daddy” when, the evening of November 14, 2006, I stepped out of the room just long enough for you to turn over and wiggle off the side of the bed.  I was on my way back to you when you did this; I immediately picked you up and comforted you as best as I could; you were an infant and the fall was, I can imagine, terrifying.     It did not take but a moment for you to stop crying and I laid you in the centre of the bed and gave you your evening bottle.  As was usual, you went to sleep before you finished it.  I will go into detail of this event later, in a document I wrote to your attorney.  I gave this document to Mikah McCray, of the Pawnee D.H.S. to give to him. 

          You slept soundly through the night. You rolled over twice and I got up from our bed in the AM at 0700 hours.  You did not wake for another half hour---perhaps a little more.

          When you did wake you were on your back.  I changed your diaper, wet but not muddy, and lifted you to give you your morning bottle.  You cried and with the non-movement of your right arm told me that your arm had been hurt.

          I did not dress you but went out to the truck and started it; brought in the car-seat and carefully wrapped a blanket around you and put you in the car-seat and took you to the truck that had just begun to warm up.  I took you to the nearest hospital for professional medical assistance/opinion , in Cleveland, 17 miles away. 

          I don’t know what time I arrived at the hospital but I had to wait in the reception area almost an hour before you were seen and taken to X-ray.  I was told your right humerus [upper arm] had a possible fracture from the accidental fall the previous night.  I was not allowed to see the X-rays.  Nor was I allowed to see and comfort you!

          I was instead greeted by two armed officers: Steve Melton of the Pawnee County Sheriff’s department and Dale Howard, a Cleveland policeman.  Also Mikah McCray from the Pawnee Department of Human Services.  She advised me that she had brought a previously prepared “Emergency Protective Order” and was taking custody of you. 

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          I heard you crying in the next room and was refused permission to go comfort you in your distress.  I was told you were being transported to Tulsa Regional Medical Center and I could see you there.  However, when I got to that hospital I was refused permission to comfort you; Mikah McCray told me you had a “radial” fracture and I was not going to be able to see you…period.  She accused me of breaking your arm.

          Mikah McCray attempted to get the three physicians that attended you to state that your injury had been “inflicted” and not an accident but none of the three would cooperate with her.  I went to court to contest you being taken from me the first time without an attorney.  I was then and there charged with “depriving” you, “neglecting” you, even “assaulting” you and inflicting the injury to your arm.  This was ridiculous! I lost.  What no one cared about was that you lost, too. The judge ordered you to be put into a foster home…I was not to know where.  I was promised weekly visits with you but weather mandated that it was not safe to take you outside and the first visit was a two weeks in coming. 

          Your so-called “broken arm” was never put in a cast.  Our first visit you had a sort of loose ‘sling’ around your arm but it did not prevent you from moving it and using your right hand.  The second visit you did not have the sling and you moved your arm freely and quite well.  The third visit you held your bottle with both hands with no problem.

          Our first visit you greeted me with your huge smile.

          Each visit thereafter you lost notably more of your heretofore extremely good happy nature.  You had been deprived of my virtually constant disbursement of love for you as you were now with strangers.  December 20^th, your aunt Mary’s birthday, you did not greet me with a smile at all; I was becoming a stranger to you. 

          I know what is done in foster homes.  You were put in a ‘play pen’ and left for hours at a time.  How much you cried for attention that you had been getting from me but were now deprived of cannot be known; but it is seen in the brightness of your eyes fading with time.

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          You were withdrawing as you had no one to truly love you.  Mikah McCray was happy that she had taken you from me and now had total control over you…and was the cause of you being deprived of your father.

          I asked her plainly about getting you back and she gave me the “standard” answer that DHS always tries to unite families as quickly as possible…a snake lying through her teeth.

          I still had faith that she could be telling the truth…until Friday, December 22, after the offices at the court house were closed and the judges had gone home for the holidays, when Deputy Steve Melton drove to our home and served me with an arrest warrant. Bond had set at $10,000.  I had been charged with  “willfully and Maliciously forcefully breaking your arm in a spiral fracture.”

          You can thank your aunt Mary Porch for raising the money to bail me out that evening. 

          I had not been charged earlier at the hearing to determine the ‘length of time’ you would remain in the custody of DHS…an order for DNA testing had made.  This was nothing but a ‘delay’ tactic as not only had I never hinted that you could not be my son but signed a state document June 9 declaring that you are my son.  Nonetheless, I submitted to it to prove paternity and the hearing had been set for the 9^th of January, 2007.

           I hired an attorney, Jon Carter, of Cleveland, and had paid him a $3,500 retainer to represent me in getting you back home with me where you belong.  Where you were needed and loved.   The hearing was unnecessarily delayed to January 23, 2006.

          But now I had been charged with causing, deliberately and maliciously inflicting the fracture to your arm.  

          At this point in time the physical injury to your arm had long since healed.  The emotional trauma that was factually inflicted by DHS by keeping you from me continues.  Each day you withdraw a little more.  Each time I visit you I see this withdrawal. 

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          As I write this I wonder:  Is this in the best interest of Elan?  Does Elan want his father to go to prison because of an accidental injury?  Does Elan want to live with strangers to be passed from one to another for years to some?  Does Elan want to never know or see his father again?  Elan can not know that his father is in poor health and could not survive in prison a year…much less in jail!

          Does Elan want his father to die in jail or prison?  Isn’t this somewhat severe punishment for an accident that has left no lingering scars or pain?  Is it in the best interest of Elan to make Elan an orphan?  Won’t doing so create a lifetime of deprivation of what Elan is factually entitled to:  Love and education from knowledge of his natural father who is 70 years of age and has significant insight into things not taught in common public schools?  There are so many things Elan will never know if he is deprived of his father’s knowledge. 

          One small example is “Anger Management.”  Without his father, Elan will be taught how to ‘manage’ his anger.  His father, on the other hand, can teach Elan not to have anger that needs ‘management.’  His father can teach Elan how anger is the most damaging of emotions.  How not to have anger at all. 

          Your father, Elan, has the desire to raise an intelligent child with skills and experiences that are foreign to the mainstream of public schooling.  Your father, Elan, desires to teach you how to think!  How to use your brain to its greatest potential.  How to ask the right ‘why.’

          You were created and brought into this world to be an extension of your father’s life into the future.  You are physically ‘made up’ of me.  You are a physical extension of me.  What I implant; teach you, of my being would be the extension of my consciousness in you.  Just as I am an extension of my long physically deceased father.

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