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Thursday, February 26, 1998
A few united to help the accused
By MIKE BARBER WENATCHEE -- They were "non-believers" in the eyes of Child Protective Services and Detective Bob Perez. They were the people who wanted credible evidence before condemning friends and neighbors as pedophiles. There weren't many "non-believers" at first. "People didn't want to get involved because they didn't want to mess up their nice town. Yet, they already had a mess they refused to acknowledge," says Jean Wake, 80, who refinanced her house to pay a top Seattle lawyer to defend a woman she knew through her church. Wake was one of a few people who risked their reputations, their savings, their jobs and even their freedom by speaking up for justice in Wenatchee. Some paid dearly to call attention to mistreatment of people they barely knew:
The 5-foot, 2-inch grandmother jumped into the fray Feb. 2, 1995. A woman who Wake knew from her Baptist church, Donna Rodriguez, had been charged with child rape. Rodriguez's accuser -- her own daughter -- later recanted, saying Perez had pressured her to lie, as CPS supervisor Tim Abbey looked on. "I got involved because I didn't believe some of the other people arrested from our church were guilty. I had been hearing things about corruption," Wake says. "When Perez reached out and arrested Donna, I thought, 'It is corruption.' It made me so mad that they would take someone so good and decent and put them through that." She marched down to see police Chief Ken Badgley and Mayor Earl Tilly. She came away unimpressed by their boilerplate remarks, and wondering who was ultimately responsible for the investigations. "Tilly, he'll just go down in history as the man who bankrupted the city," Wake says. "And Badgley, a great big stern man over 6-feet tall, told me that if I related anything with criminal content to him, he'd have to turn me over to his detectives. I thought, 'Oh no, if it's Perez, I'm a dead duck." Wake used her savings and home equity to bail Rodriguez out of jail. Then she brought in a hired gun: Seattle trial lawyer John Henry Browne. She says the $35,000 fee was money well spent. "When he came over it had an impact," she said. "It changed the tenor of things. The home-grown corn pone guys in the prosecutor's office were intimidated . . . John Henry's arrival brought in a big boy to help stop this malicious child's play they were having over here." Wake soon teamed with her neighbors, Connie and Mario Fry, who had seen parents of three families in their Mormon church go to prison.
Connie Fry, 47, a former flight attendant, and Mario Fry, 50, an accountant, were already widely known in Wenatchee for their work with popular causes. Mario Fry had launched humanitarian efforts to ship medicine to Romania. But those efforts paled in comparison to standing up for people's rights. "The Romania efforts were more politically correct" than helping people tarred as child abusers, Connie Fry says. "But you can be for children and be for justice, too. I'm a mother of seven." Fry got involved simply because she grew curious about what a court trial was like, and she decided to attend one. She chose the courtroom where Connie Cunningham, a housewife and mother of four girls, was on trial for child rape. "I was appalled by what I saw," Fry says. "The checks and balances weren't working." One episode that hit home involved the Mormon religion. Deputy Prosecutor Alicia Nakata was permitted to wave a sacred garment that married Mormons wear under their clothes and ask jurors, "Do you know the practices of the Mormon church?" "I never thought of these cases as having religious bias until I saw religion being used against people," Fry says. Distaste became action when the pattern repeated itself a few months later. Carol and Mark Doggett, acquaintances of the Frys in their ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were convicted of sex abuse. The state placed their four children for adoption even though their convictions were on appeal. "We refinanced our house . . . to have justice done," Fry says. The money went to hire lawyers, pay for polygraph exams and other expenses. The Frys also convinced Robert Rosenthal, a New York attorney with a track record of getting unfounded abuse convictions overturned on appeal, to get involved. Rosenthal has since added Connie Cunningham and both of the Doggetts to his list of victories. Eric Nielsen, a Seattle attorney, worked on the Doggett appeals with Rosenthal. Fry, meanwhile, considers people such as Vasquez, CPS supervisor Juan Garcia and Glassen, along with Roberson, to be heroes. The three social workers lost their jobs after complaining about the investigations. Garcia, 33, said he complained when Perez tried to use him as a threat -- telling parents Garcia would take away their kids unless they confessed. He was appalled that other caseworkers allowed themselves to be used that way. "CPS wasn't supposed to be punitive, we were supposed to be protective," he says. Though fighting an inoperable brain tumor, Vasquez is still punching away at the injustices she saw in the Wenatchee CPS office. "I do this because I still worry about the kids and the families," she says. "People are still there in prison, have been there and will always be there if the truth does not come out." Vasquez, 47, and Glassen, 54, are pressing a lawsuit against the state, hoping to prove they were wrongly fired -- and that CPS was out of control. "They would use the term 'non-believer' a lot in the Wenatchee CPS office," she says. "The pressure was to believe the social worker, not the child. If you didn't believe, then you were categorized as being against the child. It was a matter of making facts fit what you wanted them to." She was fired after questioning Perez's solo interview of a child who made, then recanted, a sex-abuse allegation. "I wrote letters and had hope that someone from outside would come in and sort this all out," she says. "I wrote a letter to Gov. Mike Lowry and Jean Soliz, (then secretary of the Department of Social and Health Services) about the situation, and to legislators, but it always seemed more like they just wanted to know what I knew." Glassen came under suspicion himself when he pointed out that a prime witness was telling him a different story than Perez and CPS investigators had passed along. "I simply reported a child's recantation of allegations, and they arrested me within 24 hours on witness tampering," then charged him with obstructing justice, Glassen says. Moreover, Perez added Glassen's name to increasingly fantastic police reports that described a sex ring of men and women, who dressed in black robes and sunglasses and traded children as sex partners. An internal investigation was launched. One day Glassen was told he was on administrative leave and was escorted from his office by a Wenatchee police officer. The official reason given for relieving him of his duties was that he knew children under his care were being abused, but he had failed to report it to Perez and CPS. Fearing his wife would be accused and their son taken away, Glassen moved his family to Canada. When he applied for a social work job there, the routine Royal Canadian Mounted Police background check showed disturbing allegations he'd never heard before: he was a suspect in 50 child molestation cases in Wenatchee. The Mounties say they got the information by calling the Wenatchee police and a DSHS special investigator. In February, 1995, the Wenatchee judge who dismissed the obstructing justice charge gave police and prosecutors a stern lecture: Charging people for speaking to each other about injustice violates the Constitution and moves the nation "down the path to a police state."
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