Former Tacoma hospital director sued over handling of child-abuse cases as state expert
A former director of the child-abuse unit at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma is accused of providing “false, incomplete, and/or unsupportable evidence” as a state expert that led to several children being wrongly removed from their parents.
Dr. Elizabeth Woods was sued Wednesday in federal court, where she was accused of giving flawed medical opinions to authorities regarding whether a child injury was the result of abuse and lacking the expertise necessary to conduct those evaluations.
The suit was filed by a dozen parents individually and on behalf of their young children who they claimed were unjustly ripped away from their custody. It also names as defendants 10 unidentified agents of the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families, who are alleged to have known Woods’ opinions were defective.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
Her testimony often wielded significant influence over whether courts took children from their homes and charged parents with violent crimes, according to the lawsuit.
A spokesperson for the state’s child welfare department declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. Messages left at emails and a phone number believed to be associated with Woods were not immediately returned Thursday.
In a statement, spokesperson Kalyn Kinomoto said the hospital, which is not a defendant in the lawsuit, “remains committed to providing the mental and physical health services our children need to live healthy lives.” The Child Abuse Intervention Department is “an important piece of that overall care,” she added, declining to comment further.
Woods was the subject in 2020 of a joint news investigation by KING 5 News and NBC News, which reported that she had not undergone medical training necessary for her expert role, lied under oath about the prevalence of such training and misstated integral facts in reports on child-abuse cases.
The news organizations also reported in March 2021 that Woods left her position with Mary Bridge’s Child Abuse Intervention Department and had been removed as a state medical expert. Woods reportedly did not return messages seeking comment for either of those stories.
Woods’s medical license was active in Washington as of Thursday, according to the state Department of Health’s provider credential search tool, which showed no enforcement actions on her record.
Most plaintiffs are local
Eight of the parents named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit reside in Pierce County, including Michelle and Deonte Thomas.
The parents brought their daughter into a hospital after she fell off a bed and struck her head while Deonte Thomas was changing her diaper. The parents were ordered to leave the hospital without her. Two days later, Woods advised that the girl should be removed from their custody after performing an examination, according to the lawsuit.
The girl’s primary doctor and two medical experts would confirm that she had a preexisting condition that caused fluid to build up in the brain, according to the lawsuit. Woods failed to note that condition, which would purportedly have explained the girl’s test results, and she did not cite medical articles that showed similar injuries were seen in short falls, the legal filing said.
Miranda and Mitchell Dellinger, also of Pierce County, took their newborn boy into the emergency room after noticing blood in his mouth. Doctors found an abrasion on the boy’s tonsil and a torn frenulum. Miranda Dellinger’s possible explanation was ignored, according to the lawsuit, which did not specify what that explanation had been.
The boy was kept at the hospital, and the parents were told to leave after a 17-hour interrogation by Tacoma police officers and child welfare workers, even though two officers disagreed with Woods’ assessment that the child should be taken away, the lawsuit claimed. A case worker also purportedly questioned Woods’ report.
Other parents named as plaintiffs live in Kitsap and Lewis counties.
All parents have been reunited with their children, attorney Darrell Cochran told The News Tribune. Cochran, who is one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit stemmed from court battles fought by another lawyer on the case who reunited the families.
The complaint accuses Woods of being financially motivated by “a steady stream of State referrals” for evaluating child abuse.
“When you run across a situation like this, where it becomes a cottage industry developed by a health care professional who profits off of encouraging (the state) to take kids out of their biological homes, it undermines everything that we do,” Cochran said.
In the legal filing, lawyers said that Woods ignored evidence that would have proved parents did not commit wrongdoing and that the state concealed evidence and misled courts. Questions about the reliability of Woods’s reporting, qualifications and training began to surface in 2018, the lawsuit claimed, adding that the state’s child welfare agency should have properly vetted her background.
This story was originally published November 4, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
