A FATHER'S FIGHT

Doug Bressie is gaunt with a cowboy mustache and a baseball cap that sits squarely over a weathered face that wears a grin.

He pokes a thumb into a pocket of his worn jeans decorated with a silver chain looped to the leather billfold in his back pocket.

Smoking a cigarette, Bressie, 57, looks part range rider and part church steeple painter.

It is likely at some point in his life, he has done both.

Today, he is smiling, because he can tell his story, he says, blowing a puff of smoke that billows and is immediately lost in the gust of a North Idaho spring.

“I was never mad at God,” he says. “I figured it was a challenge. I thought I was being tested, like maybe there was something big I had to do.”

But the test, if there was one, was not only his, it involved his three children — including his daughter, Dusty, a fragile diabetic, who is now 21 and a nursing student. And his sons Oscar and Derringer, who both attend St. Maries High School.

In 2008, the children were taken from Bressie by a state agency charged with protecting children.

It wasn’t until six months ago, after a decade of fighting Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare and its child protective services, that Bressie’s battle against the agency ended.

In December, Judge John Stegner, a Second District judge ruling in First District Court, found in Bressie’s favor, indicating the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Child Protective Services had turned its back on its compact with Idaho citizens by illegally removing Bressie’s children from his care and placing them in foster homes, preventing the dad from visiting the children — a traumatic situation that resulted in suicide attempts by two siblings — and splitting up a once-stable family.

Most of a $350,000 settlement helped pay the burden of attorney fees and expert witness costs that had accrued in 10 years of fighting the state.

Representatives of Idaho Health and Welfare who were directly involved with the Bressie family and the court case declined to comment for this article.

A spokesperson for the agency said, in an email, that the department denies any liability.

However, formerly sealed court records show that for more than four years, between 2008 and 2013, the agency prohibited the Bressie family from reuniting while caseworkers hid exculpatory evidence from judges, repeatedly bullied Bressie, subjected him to irrelevant tests and evaluations, and cycled his children through foster homes in the Panhandle.

One of the kids, Oscar, who was 8 when he was removed from his dad’s care, attempted suicide by hanging himself from a bunk bed railing.

“My dad was all I had,” Oscar said recently. “I just wanted to go home.”

Dusty, who was 11 when she was placed in foster care, experienced several life-threatening diabetic episodes while placed with foster parents who weren’t educated in taking care of diabetics.

A psychiatrist who reviewed Dusty’s case considered at least one of her life-threatening incidents self-induced.

Child protective services illegally kept the family apart, attorneys for the family said, without due process, or any evidence the actions were warranted, for a period that far exceeded timeframes set by state law.

State caseworkers kept evidence from judges and pushed to break up the family without ever showing the court why dissolution was warranted, according to court records.

Caseworkers charged Bressie with being an unfit father. They testified before 11 Kootenai County judges over an eight-year period that Bressie was transient, sexually abusive and jobless, although he ran his own plumbing business, had two homes, and had never been charged with sexual misconduct.

He failed to comply, caseworkers testified, with the many plans the agency set as roadblocks to the reunification of a family that was knit tightly as boiled wool since Bressie’s wife abandoned them years earlier.

“I did everything they wanted me to do,” Bressie said. “It was maddening.”

Most of the judges didn’t question the state, instead rubber-stamping demands that the family remain apart and Bressie be subject to evaluations, counseling and strictures set up by child protective services, court records show.

“I was so busy talking to counselors, peeing in a cup, and doing whatever they asked, and nothing was changing,” Bressie said. “I never got to see my kids.”

As other families under the child protective services authority had regular visits, including during holidays such as Christmas, Bressie was barred from spending time with his children without supervision, while the agency attempted to coerce him into admitting wrongdoing, he said.

“I wasn’t allowed to take my kids anywhere, the whole time,” he said.

Once in two years, the agency allowed him to visit his children in a park, he said.

“I didn’t ever break any laws,” he said.

Normally, caseworker-ordered plans are meant to empower a single parent, but in Bressie’s case, the agency swamped him with what one of the judges much later deemed were unnecessary, unreachable and moving targets.

Bressie was left exhausted, without remedy, and flapping in the wind.

“I don’t know how he could have held down a job, frankly, doing all the things they had him doing,” said April Linscott, a Hayden attorney hired by Bressie to file a lawsuit against Idaho Health and Welfare.

Linscott and Coeur d’Alene attorney James Hannon worked for Bressie, in the final hours, to assure he and his children were reunited and that the state compensated the Emida man for the decade of hell it had put him through.

Bressie’s case against Idaho Health and Welfare was adjudicated last December, 10 years after the family’s ordeal began at a Spokane hospital where Dusty was transported from Benewah Community Hospital for a viral infection and a diabetic reaction.

But targeting, Bressie said, began earlier, after an incident at school when caseworker Stacy White accused Bressie of spanking Oscar, who was then a 7-year-old. She made the boy pull down his pants as she photographed his buttock without dad’s consent. The case fizzled because her photographs were lost, but not before Bressie confronted White and her agency.

“Oscar came home and was very embarrassed that this had happened to him at school,” Bressie wrote in an affidavit. “I was upset my children were spoken to without my knowledge. I was angrier when I found out photographs were taken of my son’s naked body by a stranger … This was highly inappropriate.”

Bressie, a former Harley-Davidson riding youth pastor, is convinced this incident put a target on his back, he said.

He can’t prove it, he said, and when he speculates on what caused the decade-long ordeal, he shakes his head, and his usual smile and prolific language hit a wall.

“It’s like they just wanted to play hardball with me,” he said.

Editor’s note: This is the first story in a three-part series about Doug Bressie’s struggle to regain custody of his children and hold the state accountable.