We would have thought that, after being so roundly denounced not just by us but
by many others, that Denise Teri Atkinson would have
left well enough alone as 2002 dawned.
But it only took till June for us to see that she would never see.
On the 10th of that month, in the wake of a bitter debate on yet another Amrex thread on FRUA, some poor innocent going by the name “ton” started not one but two threads with this post:
My husband and I are currently stuck between two agencies Building Blocks and Frank Foundation. When on another website I was told to come to frua and look up building blocks for horror stories. I haven’t seen any of these ... any experiences with building blocks ... good ... bad ... any info would be great.
Was this someone genuinely seeking information, or just a provocateur to start what followed? Or someone manipulated into doing this?
We’ll never know. We all knew what would come next.
The very next poster, a Frank user, mentioned us specifically as having had a horrific experience but said she didn’t know us and that her experience with Frank had been great. A happy BBAS Kazakhstan client followed up.
I popped up. Not saying anything about our experience, I mentioned that things like this were really an incentive for us to get this website done so all we could do was post the URL.
Alysha Towell popped in to say that her experience with THE BLOCKS had been “extremely awful. If you like being lied to, enjoy waiting, spend[ing] lots of money that you will never get back, giv[ing] a donation the orphanage won’t get and possibly never get your child then sign up.”
Perhaps the revelation that there was another dissatisfied client out there willing to use her own name gave the BBAS-ites some pause, for the next spate of posts concerned primarily Frank.
By the end of the week, though, a few happily blissful cheerleaders of Denise’s showed their faces (Or didn’t, actually — they all used pseudonyms).
Denise’s rhetorical fingerprints soon betrayed themselves, and it seemed possible that some sort of coordinated effort was underway:
We used BBAS and now have the most amazing daughter, but we had a lot of hiccups along the way. Some were not the agency’s fault and some of them they could have handled better. I have emailed with several other families all using different agencys and they too had complaints about theirs, so I guess maybe none of them are perfect. Good Luck!
—
Well here’s a word from a VERY satisfied client of BBAS!! After hearing of other tragic stories from clients of other agencies — we know that agency’s are not always to blame for tragic happenings. You are dealing with children here, not material goods.
... Please anyone here reading negative things understand that you are only hearing one perspective. It’s the typical scenario where a happy person goes away happy [duh!] but an unhappy person will rant and rave and seek vengeance in any way. PLEASE judge for yourselves. Conduct interviews, ask questions but don’t be swayed by disgruntled people.
We owe a lot to Building Blocks and I will definitely use them again for our next adoption. I would hate to see you turn away from a very potentially positive experience because an upset former client has tainted you.
This last one suddenly reactivated the thread on June 22 after a whole week in which it had lain dormant.
It was a clear signal that BBAS and its apologists were prepared to sink to the next lowest level ... to do what not even the Russians had deigned to: smear us as responsible for the Cyril’s death.
Within a half hour of that latter post came this next one, from “A Mom,” whose IP address indicated an AOL account:
I read the Case story that they have recently posted on a web site. I did not use BBAS and I do not know the Case family or anyone else associated with the Case family or BBAS.
After reading the story I can honestly say that it sounds to me that BBAS was not at fault regarding what happened to that little boy. Although it does sound to me like they were working with an orphanage that was not properly caring for its children. I sincerely hope that the orphanage has improved the care that the children are getting there. Or if not I hope that BBAS has stopped working with them.
Other than bringing that little boy back to life I don’t see how they could have done anything to make the Cases happy.
What did bother me about the story was this:
Despite an unhealthy medical report and a “yellow flag” from an IA doc. the Cases proceded with the adoption anyway.
They declined or tried to decline a second video that would have shown what if any progress or lack of progress that the child had made since the first video was made.
The kept a obviously critically ill child in a hotel room for FIVE days without getting ANY medical care for him.
I know that this story is very controversial. I hope that Ernie does not delete the post though. The Case family has made it very clear on this board that they would like families to read their story. I believe that they think that those of us that read it will come away thinking what a horrible, awful agency this is. And that this agency was totally at fault for what happened. I think they are underestimating the intelligence of those of us who read this board and have followed their story.
Well, this was quite a gauntlet to throw down.
Perhaps it wasn’t Denise ... too many words are spelled correctly, after all.
Boy, was it good ... the author managed to avoid sounding like a raving lunatic, cleverly cobbling together some legitimate points (although one relied on a misreading of the story, which was hardly posted “recently” ... assuming she’s referring to the version on Mary Mooney’s site) which might have some credibility on their own but, when lumped together like that, seem to us like an effort to counteract a year or so’s worth of factual dissemination on our part.
Especially in light of the final graf, which is pure hit work.
It was followed barely ten minutes later by “Here Here,” posting from an IP we haven’t yet been able to match with a server.
Lest there be any doubt that the spinners now intended to paint us with Cyril’s blood, read carefully:
Hats off to you A Mom — you found the same inadequacies that myself and others have commented on! It’s nice to hear from an objective 3rd party! It’s one thing to be unhappy and perhaps take blame for you own actions too — it’s another story to be on a permanent plight to smear the reputation of an agency for years afterwards.
Daniel saw this not too much later and replied at length (see below), doing his best to address every point specifically and not lose his temper.
He posted as “Those Crazy Cases,” a moniker that Denise had used once to describe us to the Towells.
Much of this is familiar to a reader of this site, but it is reprinted here to make it perfectly clear what any of the anonymous readers and posters to the thread would have to have known had they been doing more than little drivebys.
Well, it must be open season on the Eeeevil Cases over in Medina ...
I can tell a choreographed effort when I see it, but I do feel compelled to respond to these continuing efforts by BBAS to smear us by anonymous proxies.
These objections are suspiciously similar to some raised several months ago in yet another anonymous post (Use your names! We don’t bite! If you’re really serious about these questions, send us an email):
(Most of this, BTW, we will go into in much greater detail on our website, hopefully preventing the boards from being clogged up by discussions like these in the future, so we can all more efficiently share recipes :-) [Dan is referring to a tactic we and others started using on other threads that were getting a little out of hand])
Despite an unhealthy medical report and a “yellow flag” from an IA doc. the Cases proceded with the adoption anyway.
Dr. Adesman advised us that some of the issues with Cyril might require surgery or extended treatment in the US (he said the video greatly redeemed what he saw on Cyril’s medicals, which has a lot to do with this next part).
We could accept that. But at that time we did make one mistake: We trusted Denise Lynn Hubbard when she persuaded us that most of the diagnoses on the medicals were exaggerated in order to expedite the children’s international adoption.
They declined or tried to decline a second video that would have shown what if any progress or lack of progress that the child had made since the first video was made.
So what’s the implication here? I don’t get it. That we were hoping Cyril would die so we could have a very miserable year waiting for our other son and persecute BBAS afterwards?
Really, we’re not that good at planning things in advance. Nor that cold.
In any event, the truth of the matter, as will be made plain our website with supporting evidence, is this: Denise Hubbard emailed us in late September 1999 and asked us to ask for a second video.
We said we didn’t want the Russians to think we were being difficult or possibly reconsidering the adoption.
It also didn’t make sense; why did we have to go to the trouble of writing, printing, signing and getting notarized a formal request? Wouldn’t it have been better to just surprise us with the second video? We would have been very happy.
Why would we have needed a keepsake? We had a lovely first video; we were going to bring him home to live with us in a couple of months anyway. You’d think that if Denise knew Cyril was terminally ill enough to potentially die in a few months, she’d actually say so instead of letting us figure out for ourselves. I mean, that’s what we paid BBAS for, isn’t it?
(Contrast this with BBAS’s behavior during our Bulgarian adoption: after having gotten two videos post-referral and then finding out the truth about how long it was going to take, we asked for another video and got it. But after we complained to the state about Denise’s dissembling and prevarications during Cyril’s adoption, suddenly videos could be gotten for every other BBAS Bulgaria client save us. Hmmmm ...)
There’s more to this story which will be on the website whenever we get it finished (which, since we keep learning more and more, keeps getting delayed. But definitely before the end of the summer ...)
The kept a obviously critically ill child in a hotel room for FIVE days without getting ANY medical care for him.
Hindsight is always 20/20, isn’t it?
Consider that we had a) no prolonged experience with infant children, either of us and b) no inkling (nor did anybody, really, except for maybe some of the orphanage staff, but that’s another story) that this boy was in his last stages of a severe infection.
Now, against that background, consider also that Cyril was laughing, attempting to crawl, eating and obviously alert to his surroundings. Could you blame us for thinking that his worst problem was the diaper rash?
BTW, I described his condition to a hiking partner of mine who also happens to be an ER nurse. He said it sounded like the sort of cachexic states often seen in end-stage AIDS or cancer patients, when if you hadn’t seen the earlier stages of the disease you might not have had any clue that the patient was on the way out. Certainly not if he couldn’t talk about it.
And as for medical care? Remember that we were two days late taking him out of the orphanage because of the fever he was running (the Dunkirk moment of his immune system, in retrospect). BBAS has claimed it provided us with medical contact information while we were in Russia, but its proof is somewhat suspect (again, more detail will be on the website). In any event, we did not receive any such information.
And, I doubt that medical care would have amounted to anything more than taking him back to the orphanage ... in other words, the same place where he got sick and was neglected in the first place.
All this talk really sounds like little more than the suggestion that the government knew 9/11 was going to happen and could have prevented it, as if it was the government’s fault and the terrorists themselves had nothing to do with it.
(But at least our answers to the questions we’ve been asked aren’t classified :-)).
So why do we continue to do this to the point of having a website that might as well be called onepointfourmegabytesandstillgrowing.com, “Here Here” [sic] asks?
Because we’re far from the only people Denise Hubbard has hurt, financially and emotionally. We have the files of at least half a dozen or so other people who would tell other people as strongly as we have to never use Building Blocks for an adoption. Some of those stories we will be telling (some others we have been asked to keep to ourselves for now). At least one of those people, ABTowell, has joined us in posting here. Hopefully others will feel free to in the poster [join that poster, Dan meant].
Sometimes, too, I think I would like to put this aside. But then I close my eyes and see Cyril’s stunned, dying, final gaze. Even as Anguel is laughing and thrusting cars into my hand while I type this.
And that, as Shakespeare puts it, “whets thy blunted purpose” quite effectively, to the point that we go months before having any other such doubts.
Denise Hubbard will be held accountable for her many sins one day. She may think that the absence of any real law may save her. But there’s a hard way to do this, too, and it’s not impossible.
In the end she and BBAS will wish that all we could have done was sue them.
Daniel Case
Reaction was predictably swift.
“A Mom” didn’t challenge any of what Daniel said, she just denied categorically that she had any connection to BBAS or the Hubbards, claiming she was “just an adoptive parent who visits this board.”
But we have our doubts about that. For one thing, there was the rhetoric; for another, there was the “Mom” handles, just like the previous instance six months or so earlier, that pointed to Denise Hubbard or someone close.
Most importantly, there was the timing. We knew at that point that the week before, yet another complaint had been filed with ODJFS about Denise and her lies. Linda Saridakis had certainly made another personal call on BBAS’s sumptuous suburban headquarters, asking for information.
We don’t think it was a friendly visit either, given that Linda had complained in a memo about Denise’s evasions and misrepresentations to her during BBAS’s relicensing barely a few months before.
It wasn’t surprising that Denise once again responded the only way she knew how — lashing out at her perceived tormentors, this time perhaps enlisting the help of her few satisfied clients and maybe even some relatives to cover her butt.
“If you don’t want anyone to challenge or question anything about your story,” “A Mom” scolded, “then you should not encourage people to read it.”
Strange that she would interpret a detailed point-by-point response as some attempt to silence criticism. She still desperately wanted some way of having her say without the risk of us being able to contradict her.
Daniel said in a reply a half-hour later that he had no problem with criticism as we wouldn’t have posted the story in the first place if we did, but that he really felt better about people using their own names when they offered criticism. And that was it for Friday night.
There were at first no further criticisms of how we handled Cyril’s death, Daniel’s lengthy reply having forestalled that (we hope), but this opened up a new line of attack the next morning, again with pseudonymous posters leading the charge.
A “jane q. public” whose IP traced back to the University of Texas (again ... sounds like this is the “Wondering,” of the previous smear thread) snippily asked “why would anyone use their real names when you have behaved the way you have?”
She claimed (erroneously) that we had actually gone to the lengths of calling the Indianapolis DFAS office up, and then just as quickly claimed not to be Teri ... which was sort of interesting as Teri’s name had not yet come up yet, much less the incidents of the previous summer.
“A Mom Again,” with almost exactly the same IP address, followed up saying “Really Jane Q like people are going to post their own names so these two can stalk and harass them?” Then, completely ignoring Dan’s response, she repeated her assertion that we had better be ready for people to challenge the story if we posted it (never mind that debate is a continuing thing).
Daniel was back on it (this was, conveniently, a weekend when I was working a double shift, so he had a lot of opportunities to get back online over the course of the day) a few hours later, patiently repeating his previous points and reminding people that we had never called Teri Atkinson’s workplace.
He also identified the servers used by two of the anon posters, just to let them know they weren’t as well hidden as they thought they might have been (we have our ideas about who one of these people is, but it’s too early to say so publicly with confidence. Yet).
This was followed by a “NotUsingMyNameEither” suggesting that just because multiple posters pointed out the same alleged flaws in the story did not mean it was coordinated.
That was true, but taken also with the fact that none of these posters dared speak their names, and all posted at the same time, a time when Denise Hubbard was facing fresh regulatory heat, we had to wonder.
Finally one poster dared to use her own name.
“AshtonL,” whose server came back to one owned by Fairfax County, Virginia, at first seemed to know more than we did about our own lives.
A Mom echoed quite a few of the same questions I had after reading through the story. Why does it matter that the agency didn’t provide enough medical contacts? [Oh, we don’t know, just this funny thing called contractual obligations] After reading through the account it appears obvious that the child was seriously ill. [Nice that people thousands of miles and two years away can tell this better than we could at the time]. No Western trained doctor? So What! At that point find a doctor, any doctor and have the child assessed. Don’t like what that doctor says, find another [funny, Denise has a similar take on IA docs]. Press the facilitators in Russia to help you and if necessary find the nearest hospital and go. I am sure the Russian health system is not up to par with the US and it is possible that a doctor would have dismissed those symptoms as a cold or a flu but then again maybe he wouldn’t have. Wasn’t it worth finding out?
Daniel braced himself for another attack as he read this. And it seemed that way as she cast doubt on whether our “campaign” had had any effect on Building Blocks (just because, she argued, they still had a website up).
But she also said our story was a cautionary tale about the need for accurate medical info and access to medical care in Russia. And she ended with an empathetic note, which seemed to suggest that despite the spelling errors and clipped sentences it might not have been Denise:
I have to wonder after reading the story why it could not be enough to know that they took in a child who was terminally ill and had spent his life in an orphanage. They gave him the love and comfort of a mother and father if only for a few days. And when he slipped away, he did do so in his parents arms not in a bed, lying alone in an orphanage.
Indeed, we have often said this to ourselves. However, that’s not the whole of the issue, as anyone reading this website should realize.
To be sure, this argument is also one Denise commonly makes ... that if you get your child, nothing else matters.
Then an anon from an AOL account said that a dozen or so upset clients from what she (again, of course, she had absolutely no connection to BBAS or Denise of course) guessed were about 400-500 adoptions over the years had to be a “pretty good” service record.
This was more than even BBAS was claiming at the time (its website graphics claim 200 adoptions) but more to the point, this was another one of Denise’s talking points dressed up in different clothing. Especially when she said “You are never going to have a 100% satisfied customer rating no matter who you are” — an excuse Denise has been using since her experience with us.
All this, however, was but a prelude to the next post ... the Return of Teri Atkinson, Dark Lady of the Sith.
At least this time she didn’t pretend to be someone else. And, in coming out swinging, she began to trip up the version of events she had previously offered.
She led off by denying that she had accused us of stalking her (we hadn’t; we had used the word in responding to one of the other anonymous posters about the dustup the summer before).
Then she said “The only reason my supervisor questioned me about my emails was because you said I was harassing YOU! For the record, we are allowed to send emails outside of our office.”
Funny, that was not what she had implied before. Her January posts strongly suggested she had gotten in some amount of hot water and could have been fired.
Then she dared to say publicly what she had only insinuated privately before:
For the record, we used Building Blocks for the adoption of our beautiful son. We are so very happy with him and unfortunately I don’t feel the Cases are as happy with theirs. Let the flames begin!
If you want to know why we took the time to spend seven web pages on Teri Atkinson, whom we’ve never met and didn’t give any money to, this is a large part of the reason why.
Ernie Jones then stepped in and asked nicely that the thread be stopped.
He was ignored. There were immediately some sarcastic posts from more unidentified individuals, possibly sympathetic to us, concerning potato salad recipes.
Then Daniel stepped in, determined that Teri should not have the last word when it was so hurtful and misleading. By now it was very late at night.
He addressed most of the responses that had come in. In response to “AshtonL” he stated once again that we didn’t hold BBAS directly responsible for Cyril’s death; rather it was the way they handled us in the months immediately following that did so much to sour us on them.
To the Anon who cited numbers of successful adoptions greater than those even BBAS claims, he went over the numbers of complaints, failed adoptions, ODJFS citations and Bulgarian orphanage directors removed from work.
Then it was time to tee off on Teri.
After retelling the story of how the previous July’s flame war had started, he took any gloves he still had on off.
At that point, you could have just said “Please don’t email me at this address” and I would have let it drop. I really did have other things to do that day.
But no, you indicated you wanted a good old-fashioned private flame war. Fine, I used to tangle with Holocaust revisionists back in 1992 before you could even spell Internet, and frankly they’re more honorable sparring partners than you. But I digress ... We went at it through several exchanges, which I admit did start getting a little personal on both sides (but I would never question whether the Atkinsons are as happy with Nicholas as they state publicly here that we are not with Anguel. No, if I’m going to sit there and claim that I have integrity, I’m not going to insult other people’s children, privately or publicly. That’s Teri’s shtick).
I was never obscene, as Teri has tried to claim elsewhere.
I know all this because we still have all the emails, which I’m reviewing for the nth time as I type all this.
What Teri leaves out of this little discussion is that she was also going at it with two other people simultaneously, like some bad-tempered housecat on crystal meth — one of the aforementioned never-again BBAS clients who also adopted from Bulgaria, and another woman, a published magazine writer who has seen a lot of our story and vouches for it. Both of these parties asked us if we’d been having strange email exchanges with Teri, and we compared notes and that’s when we realized that her supervisor ought to know that she had apparently spent the better part of one hour (based on the timestamps on her other emails) engaging in three simultaneously email catfights. In other words, was she really getting any work done? (Perhaps, Teri, I should tell my cousin in the Air Force what at least one person in the agency responsible for processing his paycheck feels is an appropriate way to spend her work time. And perhaps he should tell other people he works with ... You know, Teri, they only volunteer to put their tails on the line keeping us safe from Mr. bin Laden and his minions, among others, and you do your part for them with an extreme display of personal pettiness. I’m so proud to be an American).
Teri responded by basically saying she was going to take her marbles and go home, but not without taking one last dig at us:
For all of you who have had any dealings with the Cases, you know that virtually everything he or his wife say on these posts is a lie. As anyone who has disagreed with the Cases and subsequently received an private email from the Cases can testify, they are the flamers and yes, they are obscene. And yes, we have copies of those emails too, Mr. Case.
The only reason I have posted in the last couple of days is that the Cases continue to slander and tell lies. Everyone needs to reach their own conclusions as to the truthfulness of posts on this and other boards. Take into consideration the sort of comments Mr. Case posted above.
There was little after this. One of our acquaintances, a woman whom we had been supportive of when she had difficulties with her agency (and eventually successfully adopted from Ukraine), told Teri that we were “wonderful people. very supportive, very kind, very helpful. please don’t speak for me.”
Daniel did indeed get the last word, telling Teri she should basically put up her evidence, sue us, or shut up.
Then Ernie finally deleted the thread.
We did, however, receive supportive emails from many net.friends of ours who were just appalled that Teri was trying to hurt us the way she did.
We have not heard from the redoubtable Mrs. Atkinson since then, but neither do we think we’ve heard the last of her, either.
However, we’ve put up our proof of what we have to say about her.
And she’s the one with the explaining to do.