A FRIEND IN NEED

I met someone new today. Granted we spoke a few times via email but we spoke for the first time today. The phone call was a couple of hours long. She holds three positions on the footstool of adoption. That makes her particularly interesting to me. She is a complex and very caring woman.

Her name is Jill Ekstrom. I can tell you that she was worth the wait. Yes she is a confidential intermediary by legal terminology. However she is not the confidential intermediary by my standards or for that matter, many adoptees' and mothers' standards. I have spoken with five CIs in my journey. Four of them are people that are good people. She however tops the others. I asked her reunion rate. As I figured, it was high.

Her situation was a set up all the way around. It is not the way that I thought. Her fingerprints were not found in the area that the records are kept. They never found a single record that was supposedly stolen in her possession. Their proof was that she reunited a mother with her supposed son. She didn't have any records of that adoption file.

The police sting had gotten an adoption file. They basically stole an adoptee's first identity. They even got a copy of his current driver's license. Neither the adoptee or the natural mother had a clue what was going on. The so called $850.00 fee goes between court costs and a private investigator that works with her. This investigator is prior law enforcement. They moved jurisdiction from Davis county. Why? Jill had worked with many of the judges in that area.

Here is the set up. Jill had been in reunion with her brother for ten years. He had shall we say fell into a bad path. He raped her nineteen year old daughter. She quized her daughter about the incident. She then questioned and confronted her brother. He admitted that he raped her daughter. She then took it to the Davis County prosecutor. This prosecutor chose not to pursue the rape. He set up this sting operation. Why? Her brother in wanting to avoid being charged caluded with the police on this. He said that she stole the records. So the prosecutor, still peeved at her for pushing the issue, set up the sting. There were originally 21 counts. It was dropped to 5 counts. It was one sting operation for one case. Enquiring minds want to know how one natural mom being found led to five counts.

When she was arrested, she was rear ended by a federal marshal. She re injured her neck. She has health issues which are all well documented. The other bad part is that the public defender didn't want to defend her. She visited with three different ones. She didn't fire them. The county send in a new one every time she had a court date. She was told that the public defender wouldn't call in witnesses and would not take this to a jury. She had three minutes to decide whether or not to plea no contest or hire an attorney.

What really irks me is that this woman's civil rights to a jury trial were violated. The court now wants to have her get a medical evaluation. The prosecutor of Davis County got away with the set up. There would not be another state that would have allowed this to go further. Only in Utah. Only in Utah.

Now her story will be on the internet. Her story will not be silenced. Hopefully the judge will see this post and realize that she was telling the truth.

Just another reason why adoption needs to be changed.