Au Pair nightmare

Now that the trial is over, I wanted to tell the story of Ema-- our last Au Pair. What could she have done that would require a court appearance you ask? Abandon our children while she was watching them...

Disclaimer

We have had a few Au Pairs now and I am pretty sure that what we experienced with Ema was an anomaly. We got another Au Pair shortly after this debacle happened and she is working out well.

Background

Jolie and I decided to use Au Pairs to watch our children shortly after Cole was born. It made fiscal sense and we have an extra room in the house, so living arrangements weren't going to be an issue. The beauty of the Au Pair program (or a live-in nanny) is the flexibility; you don't get charged by the minute if you are late like day care, and there are weekend hours if you need them. We had had 3 Au Pairs up until Ema came to stay with us.

A Month with Ema

Ema was actually in rematch, which means that she already was already in the country but wasn't working well with the original family that brought her here. She told us about some awful abusive behavior on the part of her old host family that was corroborated by the placement agency; her reasons for rematch seemed sound.

However, I knew we were in trouble when I first spoke to Ema in person. Within about two minutes of meeting her at the airport, she was complaining about:

• how her life in California was sooo hard (with the first family)
• how life in Serbia was sooo hard
• how she didn't have enough money
• that she was in debt because she had to buy a laptop computer on which to play her music?!?

In five minutes I learned that Ema thinks the world owes her something and that she didn't really take responsibility for what was going on around her. Not a good start.

In spite of this first impression, she was really comfortable with the children and they really liked her. Since Jolie was still at home in maternity leave, she could show Ema how we do things in our house and help Ema really know what we expected of her. Things seemed to be going pretty well at home but the attitude first shown in the airport soon started to appear.

Ema was 26 years old and a college graduate, yet she was really into the emo/goth scene. She was smart and funny one minute, moody and petulent the next. I couldn't figure out if she were an adult or a high school kid. On a couple of occasions, Ema would go to her favorite hang out Neo, meet some random guy, and then have him drive her home. I told her that this was simply not acceptable, and that we didn't want random guys she met at a bar, knowing where we lived. She told me that she was an adult and could do whatever she wants on her own time... yikes.. definitely high school.

That night

Jolie and I had a wedding to attend on a Saturday. Ema was set to watch the children from 5pm until midnight. We came downstairs to leave, and found Ema with tears in her eyes and looking kind of weepy. Unfortunately, this was nothing really new for us.. she was always over dramatizing something. We asked her if she were alright to watch the children. If not, no big deal, Jolie and I would stay home. After a couple of minutes, she convinced us that she was just having a bad moment (again not too uncommon) and that everything was fine.

We get to the wedding a little bit late but make it in time for the vows. We put our cell phones on silent, so that they wouldn't interrupt the wedding but didn't activate the ringers after the service. We have a great time at the wedding and at about 11:30pm we hail a cab to come home. Jolie pulls out her phone to call Ema, just to let her know that we are leaving the wedding but notices that there is a voicemail message waiting... Maybe I'll attach the message to this entry at some point.. but it went something like this..

We got the cabbie to step on it and got home right around midnight. Thankfully the kids were still sleeping and nothing was really amiss.

The hunt

The next day we had a decision to make-- go after her or let it go. We decided to go after her. Ema was now illegally in the U.S. and had severely limited job possibilities. Since she had a lot of experience watching children, we assumed she would try to get a job as a nanny. After she left our 3 month and 20 month old children alone, we thought she should never be allowed to watch children again.

We call the police and file a report. A couple of officers came over and took our statement and we were assigned to a detective. The first report was pretty meaningless, any details or evidence given to them was seemingly lost. The only thing that made it to the detective was a strange story which was a truth/fiction hybrid. So we had to gather all of the evidence again.. not that big of a deal but a little annoying.

The first task was to locate Ema. It is an interesting task to locate someone who isn't working, isn't a citizen, has no address and no known associates. The key information that we had that could possibly lead back to her were:

• her cell phone number
• her bank account number
• a boyfriend who lived the YMCA (one of the random guys she brought home from Neo)
• the club Neo where she always went where people got her and understood her music
• a couple of cities in which she had friends, Indianapolis and Boston.

So we turned over all of the information that we had on her to the detective. He got the billing address of the cell phone plan (it was under a friend's name) but somehow couldn't get the friend to give up Ema. I think he simply asked the friend if he knew her whereabouts. Frankly, I was expecting more Law and Order from the detective and less Sgt. Joe Friday. All of her friends are underground types that really don't want the police in their lives or poking into their business. If the detective had leaned on the friend who was paying Ema's cell phone bill, I'm sure he would have pointed the detective in the right direction or given her up outright. The bank account number was a bust (expected) because the bank wouldn't disclose her information anyway. The boyfriend at the Y had been dumped by Ema for about a month now, so he was no use. The detective probably could have found Ema at Neo but that would have required some off hours work, so that didn't happen. We were dead in the water.

We came to a realization that Ema didn't appear to be a trained con-artist (maybe she was just really good) so she probably left some kind trail that could connect us to one of her friends in Boston or Indy. So I pulled all of our phone records going back to the time she arrived and scanned for numbers that I didn't know. Turns out she had made a couple of calls to a Boston number.. nice. At this point we had two options, give the number and name to the detective or apply pressure ourselves. We opted for the latter. First, we googled the friend, just to see if there is anything on the web that might give us some leverage.. turns out that there was. We were able to find out where she worked and what she did. Every piece of personal information helped to create the we know where you live, work, and hang out illusion that is necessary for any thinly veiled threats that we were going to make. Jolie calls the friend. It was a nicely done call... starts with a recitation of the facts, then came the emotional pain suffered by any parent (the friend is a parent) who has had this happen to them. Once the emotional connection was established, Jolie moved into what we really wanted-- for the friend to either give us Ema's address or convince Ema to turn herself in. The carrot if you will was the promise to not involve the friend in the whole affair; we wouldn't give her number to the police for her cooperation.

About a week goes by and we hear nothing... We decide our little tactic didn't really work out and call the detective in order to give him the number of Ema's friend. The detective gets on the phone and, before I could relay the information to him, he says that Ema is sitting right in front of him! I guess our tactic worked after all. Ema was arrested and sat in jail until someone could post the $500 bond. We found out later that her attorney posted it a few hours later.

The trial

The date for the trial had been set about a month after her arrest. She was charged with two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a Class A misdemeanor. Strange charge-- I mean she wasn't giving smokes or alcohol to underage minors or anything. The state's attorney's office was handling the prosecution, more specifically an associate state's attorney (ASA). The police department assigned us a liaison from their victim services department in order to help us navigate the legal process. Here's how things work..

The ASAs are assigned a courtroom in which to work for the next day (they are in court until about 4:30 or so each day). Each courtroom has judges assigned to them as well. The ASA then gets a stack of manilla folders that contains the cases that they are going to be seeing the next day. So if you were to call the state's attorney's office three days before a trial, they would have no idea which ASA was going to represent you and probably wouldn't even know about your case yet. Again not like Law and Order; maybe it is if the case is a felony though. The key thing is to call the state's attorney's office the day before the trial in order to get the name of the ASA on the case. If you call between 4:30pm and 5:00pm you may actually get to talk to the ASA about your case (which is what we did).

On the day of the trial, it is very important that you make yourself known in the courtroom. When we got there, court was in session (the judge was on the bench), which meant that we had to wait in the gallery before approaching the ASA (or the bench for that matter). Once the judge got up and left, court was in recess and that was the time we got up to find the ASA assigned to our case. (there were multiple ASAs in the room) You really just have to walk up there and act like you know what you are doing.. no one sought us out. Since the state was really pressing charges against Ema, we didn't really have the last word on how hard the state was going to go after her.. but the ASA really did want to make us happy though. She took us to a room off of the courtroom to discuss our options. Here are the basic two:

• Try to get a conviction. This would be a permanent mark on Ema's record.
• Try to get supervision. This is not a permanent mark and can be expunged from the record after some period of time. She told us it is kind of a pain to get it expunged, though.

The ASA informed us that since it was Ema's first offense, the likelihood of conviction was very low. Even if we went through a trial and she was found guilty by a jury, the judge would most likely give her supervision as a punishment anyway.

Our main objective was to do as much as we could to prevent Ema from working with children again. We asked the ASA how we could achieve this, if supervision were our only option. The answer was DCFS. DCFS had been called by the police, immediately after we reported the incident. They had launched their own investigation and had come to the same conclusion that we had, Ema shouldn't ever be working with children again. DCFS apparently puts their mark on every piece of documentation that exists... In the end, the ASA accepted Ema's guilty plea in exchange for 12 months supervision. The supervision had a couple of extra conditions though:

1. Ema would have to perform 10 eight-hour days of SWAP. The program where convicts have to pay $12/day to clean up trash on the side of the road.
2. Ema would have to get a psychological evaluation and follow whatever recommendations come from the exam.
3. She is never allowed to contact us again.

Lessons learned

Here were the key findings that came out of this whole ordeal:

• Drama queens make lousy childcare providers. Even if you solve the present drama; a true queen will create their own very quickly.
• The police are much softer than you think.
• Trying to get an illegal deported is next to impossible. Even if that person commits a crime, the enforcement agencies have no contact with the immigration departments in this country. As an individual we have even less say in the matter.
• The anguish that parents feel when something happens to their children is very, very strong and visceral.