Unfair Park from p4 As Stafford worked alongside Baucum and Monroe followed developments in the case, their belief in the elaborate story started to fade. “I basically sat in trial and lis- tened. I did not want to,” Stafford said. “My support was already gone for her.” The custody hearings covered a lot of ground, including the 2019 claims. But the hearings detailed how other, more grounded reports of abuse were also made by a baby- sitter, the director of Buckner Children and Family Services, doctors, one of Brianna’s neighbors and others. One of the earliest was in 2017. It also explains that Baucum has been tied to threatening, anonymous text messages as early as 2011. This was all summed up in a 67-page rul- ing from the Second Appellate Court that af- firmed a lower court’s decision terminating Baucum’s parental rights to her daughter. Baucum would often attribute bruising to her daughter’s allergies, clumsiness or other people’s actions, according to the appellate court’s ruling. For example, when a babysit- ter told Baucum about bruises she found on Journi in 2017, the mother suggested what- ever caused them happened at another bab- ysitter’s house. In 2018, a resident at Buckner Family Ser- vices, where Baucum and Journi were stay- ing, reported Baucum was “potty shaming” her daughter. The following year, another resident told CPS they saw bruises on Journi. When Baucum found out who made the re- port, she confronted the resident at their apartment and wouldn’t leave, according to the ruling. The resident ended up leaving Buckner’s campus because they felt unsafe. On June 7, 2019, Cynthia Rentie, the di- rector of Buckner Children and Family Ser- vices, showed up at Baucum’s place, where police had arrived not long before. Accord- ing to the ruling, Baucum said she called the police “due to being tired of people saying that she was going to hurt the moms or the kids.” The ruling added, “Mother was hys- terical and was highly upset.” Five days later, Rentie received a call around 2:24 a.m. saying CPS came to the campus because they’d received a report that Journi “had to be airlifted and that her blood was on the porch,” the documents say. CPS told Rentie that Journi was fine and they believed Baucum was being harassed. From there, Rentie said in court, “all the different spoof calls [started] happening.” Rentie, residents at the campus, the CPS caseworker and the supervisor all started getting anonymous threatening texts. “They could never figure out who was behind them, but the CPS worker thought that it might be Mother,” court documents state. The ruling also details an incident in 2011, when Baucum claimed to police that she was receiving threatening text messages. A friend of hers had Baucum’s phone when the threat- ening text messages started coming in. “Mother explained that in the summer of 2011, while her friend had Mother’s phone, she received harassing text messages,” the ruling said. “The police concluded that Mother was sending the texts.” Baucum even signed a police report at 66 the time saying she was responsible for the 2011 threatening text messages. When Mike Brooks asked, “Who made the threatening texts to your cell phone when Merriam [the friend] on July 9th had it in her possession?” in the 2011 police report, Baucum answered, “Ev- erything I did.” Baucum claimed in court that this question wasn’t on the report when she signed it. She also claims she never read the report before signing it and just took the blame to end the ordeal. During the case involving Journi’s cus- tody, a psychologist examined Baucum and said they couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. In August 2019, Baucum would lose cus- tody after her daughter made an outcry of abuse during a CPS interview. Baucum wasn’t present for the interview. Journi told CPS her mother “whopped me because I peed on the couch.” When asked how she got her injuries, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” The idea that Baucum was being wrongly accused of abusing her child and was being harassed by law enforcement and CPS had all seemed believable to Monroe and Staf- ford. After all, there are plenty of credible stories and statistics on people’s experience of abuse in various foster care systems. But then came the claims about being sex-trafficked and giving birth to multiple children. Eventually, a supposed CPS whis- tleblower would enter the mix along with alleged FBI documents purporting that Bau- cum was sex trafficked while she was com- ing up in the foster care system. Stafford believed these claims at first. “That’s why I took her on, because we believed she was a sex-trafficking victim,” she said. After a while, though, it just didn’t add up. “Everything was just fake,” Stafford said. More and more often, seemingly fabri- cated documents would crop up appearing to corroborate Baucum’s story. Then, people would come out of the woodwork, claiming to be whistleblowers who could prove Bau- cum’s claims. One of those alleged whistleblowers con- tacted the Observer claiming to be a staffer with CPS. They had what appeared to be an employee email set up by the agency. They also sent along a supposed staff ID. The email and phone number this supposed whistleblower provided have since been dis- Stacey Monroe questioned Baucum’s narrative and stopped supporting her case. connected. Stafford believed the whistle- blower at first, but she now says she thinks it was likely Baucum or someone helping her posing as a CPS employee. “It’s really hurtful because we really were believing her and she took away from a lot of victims, real victims,” Stafford said. “She used a lot of our resources that could have went to victims themselves.” But believing it at the time, Stafford was determined to track down proof for Baucum and help provide for the children she claimed she had when she was just a child herself. Ac- cording to Stafford, Baucum claimed the whole time that she knew where the children were and that they needed to be protected from her foster parents. Stafford said: “We never could confirm any kids because everytime I would ask I would say, ‘Well, Brianna, let’s put them in respite care. We’ve got somebody that will take the kids in respite care,’ she would say, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it.’” Now, Stafford thinks she was played. “She got us for about $50,000,” Stafford said. “That was in legal fees and hotel [stays].” They were helping pay for a place for Baucum to stay because they thought she was in danger. As for Monroe, she began questioning Baucum’s narrative when she started getting messages herself. “It wasn’t until I started getting threatening text messages saying ‘Don’t help Brianna.’” She said it just seemed off. “First, how would someone get my number? I limit the people I share my number with, so either someone I know gave it out or someone I know is using it and pretending to be someone else,” Monroe said. “My gut was just telling me ‘This is Brianna texting you these threatening text messages. This is her. This is her.’” She said she started getting the text mes- sages when she began distancing herself from Baucum’s case. The messages got more aggres- sive, violent and urgent “to the point where I was concerned. Should I call the police? Should I file a police report?” Monroe said. Eventually, she felt if she ignored the messages they would stop. As Monroe continued distancing herself from the case, she heard others were doing the same. Then, Stafford reached out to Monroe, saying she had doubts about Bau- cum’s story and asked that she take down some of the social media content they had made for her case. “I wanted to, in a way, remain neutral in the thing because I wasn’t really sure of the validity of her claims. So, I left a video up and stuff of when we were advocating for her,” Monroe said. Others interested in the case would also get phone calls from what appeared to be the Arlington Police Department and CPS. Eventually, people began receiving mes- sages and calls from someone claiming to be Stafford, who now says she believed Bau- cum “spoofed” her numbers and was threat- ening people. Stafford also got a message from some- one claiming that this reporter was investi- gating her family, which was untrue. “I was getting these messages about ‘Jacob is talk- ing to your family.’ … I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Stafford said. Before she broke ties with Baucum, Staf- ford would drive her around. There were times Baucum would be on the phone in the back seat while Stafford was getting threat- ening texts regarding her case. Stafford be- gan to believe Baucum was sending her threatening text messages while in the back seat of her car. Baucum denies it all and maintains her innocence. In a recent phone call, she told the Observer she felt she was being treated unfairly by the court during her hearing and by her detractors now. “Instead of the case being about allega- tions of abuse or anything, it went directly on my past,” Baucum said. “That I’m a for- mer foster youth, that I’m delusional, a liar, made things up, that I was not a victim of any type of abuse.” Baucum added, “They made up their nar- rative and that’s what they ran with in the 67-page memorandum.” In response to the claim that she made up details about her time in foster care, Baucum said: “You would need to ask yourself why all of a sudden these people are saying these things, especially when I’m not the one that came forward with this information. I never talked about my past when it came to my daughter. I never discussed my trauma be- cause my trauma had nothing to do with my parenting to my daughter.” She says Stafford introduced her past and allegations of being sex-trafficked and forced to give multiple births as a child into her custody hearing. “Whatever I went through as a child should have never been brought into this case and it was brought into this case by Tonya Stafford who investigated, who worked with Homeland Security, who also provided infor- mation to Rhonda Hunter who did her own investigation with Derek Washington,” Bau- cum said. Hunter is one of Baucum’s former attorneys. Washington is an investigator who was working for Baucum’s defense. “So, this is not information that I divulged to anyone. It wasn’t anyone’s business what I went through as a child in foster care.” Stafford claims she was led to the infor- mation about Baucum’s alleged abuse >> p8 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 AUGUST 25–31, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
