For Elizabeth, the moment still burns in her memory when the sexual trauma she suffered during her military service was thrown in her face during her children’s custody case. What was meant to be a seemingly straightforward evaluation of a 13-minute change in her kids’ commute time turned into a nightmarish scrutiny of her worst trauma and fitness as a mother.
“It is worrisome that she continues to be treated for PTSD from events that occurred over a decade ago and were not life-threatening,” read the parental evaluation report of Elizabeth and her ex-husband written by psychologist Terri Finney. “This gives rise to the hypothesis that her mental health issues have become more personality issues and as such are permanent to her psychological functioning.”
Elizabeth, who is using a pseudonym at her request, had a custody evaluation done in her divorce case. The psychologist who made the evaluation report used Elizabeth's sexual trauma from her military service against her to call into question her fitness as a parent. The mother of two holds her therapy dog in her daughter's bedroom Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)
The biting assessment came in a report in her custody case after Elizabeth moved 20 miles from Englewood to Castle Rock. She still struggles to understand why the parental responsibility evaluator used the sexual trauma from her military service to question her fitness as a mother. She remains bewildered how such a fundamental misunderstanding of PTSD — according to an expert she consulted — could end up putting her ability to tuck her children in bed at night in jeopardy.
“Everything about that statement is appalling,” said Elizabeth, whose actual name is not being used in this article at her request. “It's reckless. Why would you say that? That had no place in there.”
A magistrate in Denver’s small claims court ruled in May that the work by Finney — who at that point had been appointed as a parental responsibility evaluator, or PRE, in hundreds of cases, by her own estimation — fell short of the district court order appointing her in Elizabeth’s custody case, and she had breached her contract.
Deficiencies in the report highlighted by Elizabeth are emblematic of problems discovered in other custody evaluation cases reviewed by The Gazette. Elizabeth’s evaluator drew conclusions about parenting based on assumptions made without deeper investigation, showed apparent bias against Elizabeth and took one parent’s statements at face value while questioning the other’s credibility without proof, according to an expert Elizabeth hired.
Colorado’s system of deciding contentious child custody cases is fraught with such problems. An investigation by The Gazette found dozens of cases of incompetent, inaccurate and biased custody evaluations, several of which put children at serious, even life-threatening risk.
The Gazette’s probe of Colorado’s network of parental evaluators reveals a system with little practical oversight or accountability, and the measures that do exist operate largely shielded from public scrutiny. Evaluators’ reports are sealed unless a judge grants their release for a narrowly allowed purpose. If someone submits a complaint against their evaluator’s professional license to the Department of Regulatory Agencies, it’s kept confidential unless DORA decides the complaint is founded — but if the agency dismisses it, officials don’t state why.
“What we’re seeing when there are problematic parental responsibility evaluators, in best-case scenarios, are harmful consequences, and in worst case scenarios, it’s deadly consequences,” said State Rep. Meg Froehlich, a Democrat from Greenwood Village, who successfully pushed new legislation last year requiring, for the first time ever, new training and court standards for parenting evaluators.
Licensed mental health professionals, evaluators have seen their influence in Colorado courts grow exponentially over the years. Their use has grown in part because a directive from the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court 10 years ago limited the role of a separate group of court-appointed personnel — child and family investigators (so-called CFIs) — who also make custody recommendations but at a far lower, capped cost to parents. The directive barred child and family investigators from conducting psychological testing, limiting that role to parental evaluators, who must hold a license to practice psychology, marriage therapy, social work, professional counseling or addiction counseling.
The fees for child and family investigators are capped at $3,250 for a report and testimony, except for extenuating circumstances. That cap means parents wanting a more in-depth review who are able to pay the tens of thousands of dollars parental evaluators can charge may ask a judge to appoint one, as well as seek a court order to split the cost with the other parent. Roughly 50 parental responsibility evaluators are eligible for court appointments in the state, while hundreds of child and family investigators are available.
Evaluators — who work for profit, sometimes charging as much, or more than divorce attorneys — can hold great sway in the outcome of emotionally charged cases in which the stakes are the children’s safety and well-being. Parents, even if indigent, are responsible for the court-ordered costs of evaluator reports. State funds can help defray the costs of the less costly assessments from child and family investigators.
Froelich said the clamor from critics of evaluators in Colorado is so pronounced that she will now push for a new law to require domestic violence training for judges so they know the hazards of relying on evaluators who ignore documented abuse. While passage of such a law would qualify Colorado for federal aid, judges raise constitutional objections over the legislative branch issuing mandates to the judicial branch.
Elizabeth counts herself lucky because she didn’t end up losing any custody of her two children as a result of her evaluation. She’s still tucking them into bed four nights each week. But other parents say they’re still struggling to restore parental rights they lost to abusive former partners due to the troubled parenting evaluation system state and court officials have been slow to fix.
Once a judge adopts an evaluator’s recommendations in custody rulings, parents face steep odds in reversing those orders. Old evaluation reports have ramifications even after state regulators find them so deficient that they’ve barred the evaluators who prepared them from continuing to do evaluations.
Consider the case of Gene Gross, a Denver psychologist. Six parents in 2021 had one of the rare successes in convincing officials with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies that Gross had conducted extreme and biased parenting evaluations that misled judges.
“I am in anguish every day,” wrote one mother, a registered nurse, in her complaint. At that point, she had expended her retirement and savings and gone into debt trying to overturn what she termed a flawed custody ruling that hinged on Gross’ recommendations.
Her breastfeeding infant had been removed from her care. The mother believed the father of her child was such a threat that she had fled Idaho to Colorado with their unborn child after she became pregnant during a brief, six-week relationship. Once in Colorado, she filed a court motion asking a judge to determine custody issues, thinking that would protect her.
Instead, the custody judge found “compelling” and “credible” Gross’ testimony that the mother’s fears about her child’s father were delusional and an indicator the mother would eventually villainize her daughter. It was a prediction Gross made without seeing the mother and child together or talking to the mother’s therapist.
The judge’s ruling gave the father primary custody and forced the mom to move back to Idaho so she could be near her infant daughter. Once there, she renewed her efforts in Idaho’s courts to reverse the custody arrangements while the father filed a motion to change the child’s name.
“I worry about the emotional trauma that my daughter is going through,” the mother wrote in her complaint to Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies. “I feel stripped of a voice. My credibility has been robbed. I am now in an excruciating waiting period for costly legal actions that may or may not fix this awful situation.”
DORA regulators found Gross’ custody evaluation in her case and that of four others, including one where Gross asked a child’s school teacher whether a divorcing wife had complained of her husband’s penis size, were so reckless that Gross posed a threat to the public unless he was stopped.
A teacher wrote a letter to state regulators complaining that Gene Gross, in a parental evaluation, asked inappropriate questions about a mother she knew.
The woman, now in Idaho, still struggles to overcome Gross’ evaluation despite a pending recent criminal misdemeanor charge alleging that the father recently injured their child, now 3. Prosecutors filed the charge against the father in February after doctors reported he grabbed the toddler’s arms so hard that he left the imprint of his grip.
The criminal charge against the father still hasn't convinced the new custody judge in Idaho that Gross got it wrong. A new hearing on the mother’s custody efforts is scheduled to take place after a trial in November on the father’s pending child injury charge.
“I am paralyzed in fear thinking about what will continue to happen to me and my daughter if Dr. Gross continues his negligence in our lives,” the mother wrote to Colorado regulators.
In 2021 after the state licensing board for psychology suspended his practice, Gross permanently relinquished his license to practice psychology in Colorado, which is required to do parental evaluations. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Gazette inquiry finds deep flaws
It was only last year that the legislature required any oversight of parental responsibility evaluators by the State Court Administrator’s Office. But there are still hurdles for parents who want to file a complaint with that office over an evaluation. The State Court Administrator’s Office has just one person to administer the statewide evaluator and child and family investigator program and “does not have adequate staff to investigate complaints,” a spokesperson for that office said. To file a complaint, in most instances, parents must be armed with a finding by a judge that the evaluator failed to adhere to the court’s order of appointment or violated a practice standard.
“It is crazy when you really think about it, that there is not more regulation around the practice of doing these types of evaluations,” said Christine Garcia, a psychotherapist and co-owner of Children’s Wellness Center of Colorado. She pointed out that some other types of specialized work therapists do are regulated, such as oversight by the Sex Offender Management Board of practitioners who provide therapy to sex offenders. The Domestic Violence Offender Management Board also oversees providers offering therapy to domestic violence offenders, she stressed.
“They have to have extra training; they have to have an extra approval or credential to do that, they have to keep up with that credential. It’s more than just what we have to do as general mental health practitioners,” Garcia said.
State and court officials have reacted slowly in addressing the troubled system, even as evaluators have based their work on disputed psychiatric theories, ignored conflicts of interest and accrued allegations of sexual harassment and domestic violence in their personal lives. The Gazette found parental evaluators and child and family investigators continued operating for years before any consequences despite alleged drug use, price gouging and deception in court.
Evaluators and child and family investigators continued getting court appointments even after they ignored criminal convictions against parents, misrepresented in court their credentials and, in one case, released the address of a domestic violence victim to her abuser, The Gazette found. One CFI went so far as to file false court documents that claimed her husband was the father of a newborn as part of her “primal need” to adopt the infant. A judge vacated the adoption after the true father showed up claiming parental rights. The CFI's license to practice law was suspended for three years and then restored in 2017.
“The reason it (the parental evaluator system) continues is that courts feel a compelling need for support,” said Joan Meier, a national expert in domestic violence who has written extensively on custody evaluation systems.
“They really want someone with so-called expertise to come in and tell them what’s good for kids and what’s not good for kids,” she added. “I don’t really think these evaluators are doing that. They’re misleading courts a lot. They’re irresponsible and incompetent in a lot of ways, and they’re biased around the issues of abuse and alienation.”
In one notorious case, a mother said a Centennial counselor and long-time parental evaluator who worked as a court-appointed child’s therapist in a custody case was key in a system-wide failure that led to the death of her son. She said that while working as her son’s individual therapist, the counselor aligned himself with the father who engaged in child abuse and alienation and ultimately killed the 10-year-old in 2019. The counselor 10 years prior had settled in mediation a lawsuit alleging he sexually harassed a female assistant. The counselor's professional liability insurance had been dropped in 2019 due to controversies. He is still practicing as an evaluator.
In another case from a different evaluator, a disputed psychological assessment of a mother justified the removal of her infant to foster care, where the infant was repeatedly raped and almost drowned. The psychologist in that case used “family drawings” she had the mother do to justify her assessment that the mother likely suffered from “histrionic and dependent personality features.” The evaluator found that the drawings “suggest that she may tend to relate to the baby as a fantasy object rather than as a real child and project on to her unresolved feelings and issues.”
The infant was returned to the mother months later and, now a teenager, has struggled throughout her life with post-traumatic stress disorder and has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals as she tries to cope with the damage inflicted on her in the foster home.
'A crisis situation in Colorado'
Those expressing concern include one longtime parental evaluator whose expertise state officials rely on to help provide guidance on mental health ethics.
“I would argue that the status of child and family investigators and parental responsibility evaluators is in a crisis situation in Colorado,” said Andrew Loizeaux, who has done more than 400 parental evaluations in Colorado and 60 work product reviews over the past three decades and provides expert testimony for state regulators and the Attorney General’s Office.
Too many evaluators in the field rely on their initial suppositions and that colors their reports that follow, Loizeaux said. As a result, they can end up ignoring domestic violence and signs of abuse of children. Parents can end up losing parenting time for trying to point out actual dangers because an evaluator assumes they are lying, he said.
Loizeaux said some evaluators in the state simply default to recommending 50/50 custody arrangements and joint decision making for children, citing research that suggests that’s the best outcome for children.
The problem with that approach, according to Loizeaux, is that high-conflict divorces often aren’t typical. Children could be in peril due to an abusive parent.
“In this community,” he said of the evaluators, “there’s a lot of scuttlebutt and a lot of gossip about who is doing a good job and who is not. People have reputations for doing this well or not doing this well. And for being a hired gun or not being a hired gun.”
Faulty evaluations can have serious ramifications, according to one man who said he lived through the experience when his parents were divorcing as he was going into the sixth grade. He said a flawed custody evaluation ended up convincing a judge to rule in favor of a 50/50 custody arrangement that returned him to a father who had been abusive.
Now 25, he recalled that an evaluator disregarded reports that his father held him under water after threatening to drown him and had punched him repeatedly. The evaluator still ended up reporting to the judge that the father remained a fit parent, he said.
“I remember feeling let down by the system, and that it placed me in a situation where I had to be careful because I was placed back into an abusive home,” he said during a recent interview.
He said he resorted to locking himself in his room to escape his father’s explosive temper. He struggled with thoughts of suicide throughout his teen years, spent bouncing back and forth between Lakewood and Evergreen, and has sought therapy to help him cope with depression he attributes to his upbringing. He said that even though his father stopped physically harming him, he still believes the custody arrangement should have favored his mother.
“It felt like I was walking on eggshells,” he said of his time with his father. “I felt like it was going to happen again. Sometimes at the house, there was shouting, and I was like, ‘Okay, am I going to get hit again?’”
He said the damage inflicted continues to cause issues, ranging from insomnia to ongoing nightmares. He’s convinced Colorado needs to improve how custody evaluations are done, so much so that last year he became one of the critics who successfully pushed state legislators to change state law to require parental evaluators in the state to undergo new training in domestic violence and child abuse.
In New York, high-profile deaths of children linked to controversial custody evaluations that returned children to abusive parents prompted scrutiny and creation of a commission on the parental evaluation industry, co-chaired by a former New York Supreme Court justice. A majority of that commission in a final report released this year favored eliminating evaluators in custody disputes, saying their reports “are biased and harmful to children and lack scientific legal value.”
Domestic violence expert Meier, a member of that commission and a George Washington University Law School professor, said not only are evaluators doing more harm than good, they’re doing so at tremendous financial cost to parents.
“It’s become this whole cottage industry that people make entire livings off of,” she said. “They charge incredible amounts, and they bankrupt litigators.”
Divorce lawyers say that parental evaluators can charge as much as $70,000 for their work on one case. Failure to pay also has consequences. Evaluators, some of whom maintain non-disparagement clauses in their contracts with parents, can charge as much as $450 an hour if they go to court for non-payment.
Elizabeth prevails over evaluator
When Elizabeth read her evaluator’s report highlighting her sexual trauma while serving in the military, it made her doubt her whole perception of reality. She started to believe the things the report said about her as a mother. It was difficult not to start thinking she had to give up her children for their own well-being.
“At that point, everything in my brain stopped. I literally didn't know right from wrong; truth from fable,” she said. “And then when I got to the end (I thought) it’s my fault that I will end up losing parental rights.”
The judge in Elizabeth’s case ultimately did not adopt the recommendations in the evaluation from psychologist Finney. Elizabeth isn’t sure why, exactly, since the judge communicated the decision not to modify her custody arrangement only in a minute order.
Elizabeth has since 2018 worked with a veterans’ therapist to process her past sexual trauma. She said that only within the last several months has she been able to start understanding that what she went through wasn’t her fault. Seeing her evaluator’s characterization of her as a mother along with the reference to her trauma caused Elizabeth to regress in the progress she’d made with her therapist, she said.
Finney is not on the state's list of certified PREs as of July this year, according to records from the judicial branch. She did not respond to requests for comment, though in the small claims case she testified that she thought her parental evaluation was well-founded. Despite Finney’s remarks about Elizabeth’s sexual trauma in her evaluation, Finney testified in the small claims case that she didn’t believe Elizabeth’s mental health affected her parenting. She also suggested Elizabeth was projecting made-up medical problems onto her children when she sought advice for her daughter’s recurring stomach problems and expert opinions for her son’s special education needs.
As Elizabeth talks about her case, her service dog flops down by her chair and keeps a watchful eye on her, laying her nose across her lap when she senses her owner’s distress.
When Elizabeth won her small claims case in May against Finney for breach of contract, she prevailed in a little-used tactic in challenging her evaluator’s work. Other parents The Gazette spoke to saw it as a rare instance of carving out accountability for evaluators in a system they say offers few options.
“The real worry is how many reports have been written and continue to be produced by Dr. Finney with her self-created strategy of — quote ‘I just come up with it’ unquote — as she stated under oath in family court,” Elizabeth, who represented herself in her small claims case, said in her closing argument to the magistrate. “How many parents have appeared at trial in an attempt to prove that this report isn’t an accurate depiction of the family’s dynamic? How many magistrates relied on her expert opinion to rule on the future of the children?”
'The light of my world'
Finney also received a PRE appointment in the case of Erin's ongoing custody dispute over her now 13-year-old daughter. Erin shared 50-50 custody of her daughter with her ex-husband until 2020. A few months after Finney filed her report, a judge awarded Erin's ex-husband sole decision-making authority and more custody.
Erin -- who is using her real first name -- had her parenting time reduced to every other weekend with their daughter. The decision about the allocation of responsibilities aligned with Finney's recommendations.
This occurred after a judge in Jefferson county had twice denied requests by Erin's ex-husband, in 2018 and 2019, to modify custody in his favor based on endangerment claims he made. Their custody dispute has dragged on for more than a decade. Late last year, Erin's parenting time was reduced to supervised visitation only.
Erin said Finney’s PRE report depicts her as a manipulative and spiteful mother trying to keep their daughter away from her father unreasonably. But in person, Erin’s demeanor is clear-headed and calm. She said she’s singularly determined by her fierce love for her daughter.
Erin finds peace in Prospect Park, near her home. She lost custody of her now-13-year-old daughter in 2020 during an ongoing fight that has lasted more than a decade. She stands in the morning sun on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)
“You have an evaluation, and it paints a picture of you which you know not to be true,” said Erin. “And it reads exactly as if your ex-partner, who you have spent 11 years with under constant attack, has written the report.”
In a complaint filed to DORA, Erin alleges Finney in her evaluation didn’t review key pieces of evidence she provided, including police records of what she said was domestic abuse by her ex-husband and information from medical professionals. Erin said the report took her ex-husband’s statements at face value without verifying them and made recommendations about decision making and modification of parenting time beyond the scope of her role as an evaluator.
She has also filed a case against Finney for breach of contract in Denver's small claims court.
Erin is troubled by what she said was Finney’s omission of key details of a violent 2011 incident. Erin said her ex-husband strangled her while she held their daughter, then 18 months old, and it left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She shared a record of the incident from the Denver Police Department’s computer-aided dispatch system, which she said captured a neighbor’s report of Erin repeatedly calling for help. The neighbor reported a woman’s voice, believed to be coming from Erin’s home, shouting “Call 911!” Erin said she also screamed “He’s going to (expletive) kill me!”
“I lose consciousness for a minute, and I don't know where my daughter is,” Erin said. “I don't know if I dropped her. I don't know if he has her. I have never been so scared in my life.”
She said Finney’s report repeats her ex-husband’s version of the event without including the dispatch record of the neighbor’s call. The PRE report includes Erin's statements that she suffers from depression, anxiety and PTSD, but Finney opines that Erin's difficulty managing her emotions is a result of permanent personality characteristics rather than PTSD.
“That day (in 2011) changed my entire life,” Erin said, her voice trembling. “PTSD is literally a brain injury.”
Her ex-husband getting full custody of their daughter was Erin’s worst fear, and now it’s happened. So now that she’s survived her worst fear turning into reality, she’s no longer afraid of what else might come.
“She’s the light of my world," Erin said of the daughter she calls her miracle, born after reproductive health complications left her with a small chance of getting and staying pregnant.
"I want her to grow up knowing her mom did everything that she could to fight for her."
'The court is responsible'
For decades, critics have urged Colorado’s judicial branch to do more to ensure the quality of these court appointed evaluators, but the judiciary has been slow to regulate the profession.
In 2002, a blue-ribbon judicial branch commission on families in the Colorado courts urged the judiciary to “develop an assessment process” to ensure those receiving appointments in divorce cases are “meeting established standards.” That commission also urged the judiciary to create a system that “allows for removal of individuals who are not competent” and develop an “appropriate process for identifying individuals who are not performing competently.”
In 2012 Michael Bender, then-chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, rejected a recommendation from a judicial committee urging “creation of additional regulatory oversight” at the state court administrator’s office for child and family investigators, though he agreed to create a statewide roster among other changes. "The costs associated with expanding regulatory oversight are undefined and the current economic climate limits the availability of resources,” Bender wrote in a letter explaining his reasoning.
The judicial committee had recommended a centralized complaint office or "super board" for child and family investigators because judicial district administrators reported "they do not have the requisite skill or expertise" to investigate complaints of mental health professionals serving in that role. In addition, officials at the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA), which licenses mental health professionals, reported at that time that they dismissed roughly 60 CFI complaints annually due to lack of jurisdiction, expecting court officials would handle those complaints.
It wasn’t until this year that the state court administrator’s office adopted any standards or oversight for parental responsibility evaluators. The court administration finally acted because legislators demanded it last year by passing HB 21-1228, sponsored by Froelich, the Democrat from Greenwood Village, and Sen. Jim Smallwood, a Republican from Parker. The law requires the judicial department to establish a complaint process for parental responsibility evaluators. The legislation also required evaluators and child and family investigators to complete six hours of training on domestic violence and six hours of training on child abuse. Every two years thereafter, they must complete an additional four hours of renewed training on domestic violence.
The law also required the state court administrator’s office to create an eligibility roster for parental responsibility evaluators, standards for their court practice and a new complaint process. Still, the system the court administrator’s office adopted this year has hurdles for those wanting to file a complaint. Complaints won’t be investigated without a finding from a judge that the evaluator failed to follow a court order or violated a standard of practice, though there are exceptions to that requirement for pressing cases where an evaluator committed a crime or failed to keep up with the new training.
“The rationale for requiring judicial officers and judicial districts to monitor the work of CFI and PRE is because the court is responsible for managing the case and the trial processes,” said Rob McCallum, a spokesperson for the State Court Administrator’s Office, in a prepared statement. “The court and local officials are in the best position to understand the facts of the case, the credibility of the parties, and best positioned to understand the demographic, economic and geographic realities in their communities.”
However, studies suggest that the state’s new minimal training requirements won’t solve all issues. A guidebook the State Justice Institute developed for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges noted that expertise in the mental health field does not automatically make a parental evaluator competent to assess the presence of domestic violence.
“Even though some jurisdictions are now requiring custody evaluators to take a minimum amount of training in domestic violence, that ‘basic training’ by itself is unlikely to qualify an evaluator as an expert, or even assure basic competence, in such cases,” the guidebook states.
The guidebook recommends that court jurisdictions have designated evaluators with expertise in domestic violence issues available for appointment in custody cases with allegations of violence.
Two studies funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, one in 2011 and one in 2012, found evaluators often discount violence, with one review finding they ignored documented evidence in roughly one out of every five cases where such documentation exists. “Even in the presence of severe violence and controlling behavior, evaluators reported they would most likely recommend unsupervised visits for the father,” the latter study found.
And, in 2019, a study published in the Journal of Child Custody of 27 custody cases that were reversed due to later reports of child abuse found flawed parental evaluation reports that “pathologized” mothers when they reported child abuse played a significant role. “The abuse often became increasingly severe and the children’s mental and physical health frequently deteriorated,” the study found.
Attacking 'the hard-working psychologist'
While the judiciary in Colorado has struggled to put in place oversight for custody evaluators, those working in the field have benefited.
In 2015, Wilbert Miles, a psychologist in Denver, issued a “rebuttal report” at the request of the father to another parental evaluation and made custody recommendations in a divorce case despite making no attempt to interview both parents or the child, according to a complaint filed with state regulators.
State law guiding parental responsibility evaluators requires them to interview and assess “all parties to a dispute” before making any specific custody recommendations, unless one of the parties can’t be reached or refuses to cooperate. In this case, the parents were readily available, but Miles still failed to interview either parent, records show, although he entered the case at the father's behest.
Miles would continue to do custody evaluation work for nearly three more years before he finally admitted in a stipulation with the state Board of Psychology in November of 2018 that he made parenting responsibility recommendations in that 2015 divorce case “without sufficient information to substantiate those recommendations.” He signed an agreement in November 2018 with the licensing board promising that he no longer would issue parenting or custody recommendations in Colorado
Miles still stands by his work in the disputed case. He said his work shouldn’t have caused concern since he was rebutting another evaluator’s report and didn’t think he needed to do a full assessment of the parents. He said he settled with the licensing board “because it sometimes takes a fortune to fight the system.”
In the interim, before he agreed to stop working as an evaluator, Miles made another controversial custody recommendation in a 2017 divorce case when he found “there was no evidence” that five children were “in any physical or emotional danger” from a father whose wife was divorcing him.
The father in that case had choked his wife while she was eight months pregnant to the point she believed he would kill her, according to court records and testimony. The father, who had been convicted of armed robbery, also advocated polygamy as a solution to his addiction to pornography. The father’s children reported to child protective workers that he had left marks on them when he engaged in physical punishment.
After the judge lifted a requirement that the father only be allowed to see his children while under supervision, new allegations of physical child abuse surfaced in 2021, substantiated by a child services caseworker. The judge reversed course and restricted the father to four hours per week parenting time at a licensed supervision facility. In a recent interview, Miles said he did not recall that case and “is totally against” domestic violence.
Another evaluator also kept getting court appointments despite a finding that her work was deficient.
In May 2014, the 14th Judicial District covering Grand, Moffat and Routt counties found Alice Suzanne Horning-Rieder, a licensed professional counselor from Paonia, violated professional standards while working as a court-appointed child and family investigator. The exact details remain withheld from the public, but a complaint log maintained by the state court administrator’s office shows that Horning-Rieder was sanctioned for violating standards related to training, objectivity and professionalism, as well as for the sufficiency and adequacy of her investigations.
A 2014 letter of admonition from the state licensing board for counselors sheds some light. She had neglected to disclose to the court while working as a court-appointed child and family investigator (CFI) the past domestic violence charges and conviction of one of the parties in a custody case, the admonition states. The state court administrator's officer found her work in the case so deficient it removed her from the list of child and family investigators eligible for CFI court appointments for one year.
She convinced the state licensing board to only admonish her and allow her to keep her license required to work as a counselor in Colorado by arguing she had immunity for acting in a court-appointed role, and also had not been providing any clinical services while evaluating the parents.
“I have been de-listed by the Fourteenth Judicial District and cannot conduct future CFI evaluations,” she promised in a letter to the licensing board’s director.
Despite Horning-Rieder’s de-listing, judges continued appointing her to custody evaluations. She’s received such appointments at least 10 other times since the state court administrator’s office barred her from CFI work, according to a resume she submitted in a 2019 custody case. She worked as a parental responsibility evaluator (PRE) in those cases, a role that allowed her to charge parents even more money and carried greater influence than her previous work as a CFI.
Horning-Rieder generated controversy again after a Montrose County judge appointed her in 2019 to make parenting recommendations for a 4-year-old girl whose parents were divorcing. Horning-Rieder never interviewed the husband’s two former wives who confirmed he had a history of domestic violence, testimony shows.
The new wife had pointed to bombs and explosives police found on their property as corroborating her contention the husband had made veiled threats he had the means to kill her. Horning-Rieder admitted from the witness stand that she had left out of her final evaluation report many statements from other witnesses supporting the new wife’s allegations of violence and abuse from her husband. In contrast, Horning-Rieder included in the report witnesses supporting the husband. Horning-Rieder said an accidental “cut and paste” computer problem was the cause of the omission of the wife’s witnesses.
“Sadly, computers can seemingly have their own life at times,” Horning-Rieder testified.
In the end, Montrose County District Court Judge D. Cory Jackson primarily sided with the mother, ruling the father’s allegations, brought up late in the divorce, that a friend of the mother had sexually abused the child were not founded. The judge found the sex abuse allegations relevant only because they showed “the parties have great difficulty in communicating.”
The judge ruled the father had committed domestic violence against the mother and limited the father’s parenting time to every other weekend during the school year, though he later amended the ruling to clarify that if the father moved back to Montrose County from the Durango area he’d grant him additional parenting time.
Horning-Rieder in an interview said she currently has 10 other parenting evaluations underway, but she said officials in the state court administrator’s office recently told her to stop accepting additional court appointments for such work until she can resolve questions about her letter of admonition and the 14th Judicial District restriction barring her from CFI work for one year. The State Court Administrator’s Office confirmed her application for placement on the evaluator roster list is under review.
“Everyone wants to attack the hard-working psychologist,” Horning-Rieder said. “It’s pretty thankless work. You have all this pretty salacious, intense stuff, almost made for primetime TV, and your focus is what’s in the best interest of the child.”
Grieving for a murdered child
In 2009, Lon Kopit, a longtime parental evaluator and licensed counselor in Centennial, had his own court battle that ended with him secretly settling a lawsuit alleging that he, at the age of 59, sexually harassed a 25-year-old female assistant at his parenting evaluation office.
The assistant claimed the counselor repeatedly groped her, forcibly kissed her, suggested they go shopping together at Victoria’s Secret and had set up overnight seminar trips in which he booked a single hotel room for the two of them with one bed. Kopit declined comment, though in court documents, before the mediation settlement, he denied any sexual harassment.
A grieving mother says Kopit was one of many fateful shortfalls in the case of her son Ty Tesoriero, a 10-year-old Douglas County boy killed in 2019 by his father, Anthony Tesoriero, the morning after a contentious custody hearing. The judge had indicated she would likely grant significantly more time to Ty’s mother, Jing Tesoriero, a change from their 50-50 arrangement. Anthony Tesoriero shot Ty in the early hours of Sept. 21 before turning the gun on himself.
Kopit took on a role as Ty’s therapist in August 2017. In his response to a DORA complaint filed against him following Ty’s death, Kopit repeatedly asserted he never saw any signs of threats to Ty’s safety.
Jing Tesoriero plays with her daughters Chloe, 4, and Tylee Holberger, 2, last week at Highland Hollows Park in Aurora.
Jing said she objected to the court appointment of Kopit as Ty’s therapist because he had previously served as Ty’s father’s therapist, and she didn’t think Ty would be fully open with Kopit as a result. By that point her ex-husband had a pattern of threatening professionals involved in the case, making other therapists hesitant to take the appointment.
“With the pressure that Ty was getting from Anthony, I just felt like Ty thought Kopit was Anthony’s friend, or they’re on the same team, and Ty wouldn’t be honest with (Kopit) if there’s any kind of concern,” Jing said.
Jing felt Kopit didn’t take her seriously when she reported concerns to him on more than one occasion that Ty’s father was abusing him. Kopit ignored red flags and signs Ty was suffering while he was with his father, she said.
“Dr. Kopit should have been the one last person Ty could trust,” Jing wrote in a complaint she filed with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies. “Dr. Kopit failed to save my child when he could have.”
The agency resolved the complaint, through the state board of licensing, by admonishing Kopit for “failing to comply with any requirements pertaining to mandatory disclosure of information to clients.”
There is seemingly no type of red flag the custody case for Ty didn’t raise. The Department of Human Services received numerous reports since 2016, including statements by Ty saying his father choked him, statements that Tesoriero threatened to harm him if he didn’t say his mother had mistreated him. Jing filed similar assertions that she said Ty had relayed to her.
DHS frequently found there was not enough information from the reports for the agency to continue investigating, and Jing said she has had trouble understanding that decision.
Jing Tesoriero comforts her daughter this month at Highland Hollows Park in Aurora.
Jing filed for a protection order against Tesoriero in 2015 after they broke up, alleging among other abuse that Tesoriero threatened her with a gun, while Ty was in the house, and said he could become homicidal and suicidal. The night of Ty’s death, his father threatened that anyone who tried to take Ty away from him — including DHS workers or law enforcement — would be killed, according to a fatality report done by DHS.
Jing has struggled to talk about Ty as she adjusts to life without him.
She’s kept a lot of his toys for her two toddler daughters. She told her 4-year-old that Ty is in heaven, but said the little girl has had trouble grasping that means her brother isn’t coming back.
And the seemingly casual question “How many kids do you have?” is no longer simple. A screensaver photo of Ty on Jing's phone has drawn questions from acquaintances who know about her two toddler daughters but not about him. Sometimes Jing says she has three kids, other times two.
“It depends on who I talk to. I don’t want to talk to strangers a lot about that.”
Her family feared Tesoriero planned to kill all of them the night he murdered her son, and Jing believes Ty’s death — and his father's subsequent suicide — may have saved their lives.
“To a point, I feel like Ty saved all of our lives,” she said. “Ty just took it for us.”
*Sources referred to only by their first names are pseudonyms used at their request and due to the sensitivity of the matters involved.