They said they didn’t have enough money to eat, so I bought breakfast,” Watkins says. “One morning, we were going out for breakfast before work and Iris had a friend with her. Both worked for the Parks Department in Flushing Meadows doing maintenance - weed whacking, lawn mowing, sweeping. Watkins first met Rohlsen in the spring of 2016. The next morning, he returned to the same courthouse in lower Manhattan and filed a petition for paternity. Watkins worked a job administered by the city’s welfare system, and he had few resources to mount the kind of legal campaign necessary to regain custody of his child. To get Kenny back, Watkins would have to prove, first, that he was Kenny’s father and, second, that he could provide a safe and stable home for him. Kenny’s case belonged to a subset of removals that occur even before a petition has been filed in court - a scenario meant to apply only when there is “imminent danger to the child’s life or health.” Each year, the agency files thousands of neglect petitions in New York City’s family courts about one in five results in the removal of a child from the parents. Like child-welfare agencies across the country, ACS has enormous and largely unilateral power to separate children from their parents if caseworkers suspect abuse or neglect. Until he could prove his paternity, he would have no official standing in the case. Because Rohlsen was still married to another man, Watkins was not automatically recognized as Kenny’s father. The ACS petition had been filed solely against Rohlsen, who was listed as the respondent, a term that in family court is the equivalent of a defendant. He rushed downtown, ready to plead with anyone who would listen to get Kenny back.Īt the courthouse, Watkins found himself in a confounding situation. Watkins collapsed on the floor and started screaming and crying - “a perfectly normal thing to do,” his attorney, Yusuf El Ashmawy says, “for someone who has just been told, ‘Your baby is being stolen from you.’ ”Įventually, Watkins calmed down enough to hear social workers direct him to appear at the family-court building in lower Manhattan, where ACS was filing a neglect petition in the case. The removal, as such separations are called, was already in effect. Because of Rohlsen’s fraught record, the agency had deemed Kenny to be in imminent danger and was taking immediate custody of him. Watkins did as he was asked.Ī few minutes later, he learned the true purpose of the meeting. They were ushered into a windowless room, and an ACS worker asked Watkins to hand Kenny to another employee while they talked.
The next morning, Watkins, his mother, and Rohlsen brought Kenny to an ACS office in the Bronx. They said they wanted to talk more about Rohlsen.
The social workers seemed satisfied, but as they left, they asked Watkins to come to their office the following day and to bring Kenny. He remembers saying proudly that Kenny was his first child. He showed them that Kenny was healthy and that he had a crib and diapers and clothes. Watkins invited the social workers inside. She’d had nine previous children, all of whom either were in foster care or had been adopted. He knew, however, that Kenny’s mother, Iris Rohlsen, had a complicated history of abusive relationships. Watkins had no history of violence or mental illness, no criminal record, and was not accused of putting Kenny in danger.
The caseworkers said they were conducting a routine welfare check on Kenny. A few days after they arrived, a pair of caseworkers from the Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s child-welfare agency, knocked on the door. Watkins brought Kenny home from the hospital to his mother’s apartment in the Bronx in March 2017. Blissed out, he couldn’t stop staring at his son - the impossibly tiny toes and fingers, his curly brown hair, his perfect little mouth. In the moments after Kenny was born, Kenneth Watkins remembers feeling happier than he had ever been in his life.
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