Those of you following our site already know that April 20, 2012 has been set for the Founding Fathers March on Washington at Senate Park on the West Lawn of the Capitol. Designed to promote parenting equality and court reform, it was announced in November, 2011, see related details at www.leonkoziol.com. This week we sent final notices to various supporters and groups known to us. We intend to publish their involvement, if any, so that you might learn whether your group or contributions are producing results. Please share this message with others.

Now, in our final countdown, we feature short stories from callers and e-mailers as promised in a recent post. We call them the “Parenting Papers”. They are intended to stimulate attendance at next month’s event because our court victims apparently believe that it’s someone else’s job to protest for them- and of course reform will not occur with this kind of lame attitude. These stories are based on real events. However, names and content have been edited to protect the sources. Our third story of this series, Day 19, is entitled: “Paula Poe-Leece”.

Paula Poe-Leece was a veteran member of a small city police department. She came from a long line of police officers since her great grandfather joined the NYPD more than a century ago. Her job was very fulfilling and there was a sense of family developed with her fellow officers. The work was of course demanding and dangerous at times, but she felt that she was doing something special for her community. Keeping criminals off the street meant that her neighbors could sleep easier, and that was a job description which suited her just fine.

In recent years, however, crime was taking on a new face in this city. Increasingly, calls were coming in from private homes where the villains and victims were not strangers to one another. In fact some of them she knew very well, or at least she thought she did. There was Betty Bizarre who was found chasing her husband after she had stabbed him with a knife. A few blocks over, the Joneses had erupted once again into a physical altercation requiring medical assistance for both. And then there was Billy Biere who bashed his girlfriend’s head in with a baseball bat after leaving divorce court. Such domestic incidences were taking time away from the real criminals but given their severity and number, they could not be ignored.

Then one day it hit home. She had been called to yet another domestic incident where a man had barricaded himself in a garage in a standoff with police. His ex-wife had just gotten his “visitation” reduced and “child support” increased to amounts he could no longer sustain on meager salary. This guy had simply been on the losing end of too many Family Court hearings, and he finally decided to take the law into his own hands. As far as he was concerned, the courts were completely one-sided when it came to children, and the only thing they cared about in his half of the parenting equation was money, as much as could be extorted from him. If he was gonna go to jail for a stupid debt, he was not going quietly.

And so there they all were, several precincts and a state trooper unit, all converging upon the garage. Concededly she was not ready for this because the guy inside turned out to be a fellow officer. He had been stripped of his guns and reduced to a security detail after his ex kept filing incident reports and court petitions in an effort to gain a tactical advantage over the children. She knew Johnny Hapless because they were partners on the west side at one time. He was anything but crazy and he loved his children, but in court he had at least two strikes against him: he was a man and he engaged in violent acts in the line of duty. Time and again these facts were exploited against him. The attorneys he hired were costly, and they all made false promises .In the end, he would have saved a lot of money and gotten the same results if he simply represented himself. Paula had many chats on the subject at Gregg’s Coffee House.

Suddenly a shot rang out and gunfire exploded in all directions. An officer was down right next to her, and it caused others to storm the building until Johnny was taken out. Both cops died en route to the hospital. Paula was still cleaning the blood off her uniform when Captain Clean approached her. “How ya handling this Paula, you gonna be alright?” The subordinate could hold it in no longer as she broke down on the man’s shoulder. “Why are all the good guys going down like this, what’s happening to our families and neighbors?” she cried aloud. Captain Clean responded with friendly logic, as he always did in tough situations. “It’s not the people, it’s these unfair laws and greed which are causing it all. I’m tired of helping lawyers get rich by taking guys to jail for false charges and child support.” And that’s when a thought emerged in Paula’s mind. Why do it next time? Let the judges lock them up. Maybe we need to send our own message of reform.