Judge sent kids of MLB vet from KCK to controversial reunification camp
Family court judges are sending minor children to “reunification camps,” supposedly to help them reconcile with a parent who’s been separated from a child due to long-term custody disputes or allegations of abuse. But as a result, parents are then separated from their children for months more; that’s reconciliation?
A Johnson County District Court judge has done this, too, sending Kansas City-area children to an unlicensed out-of-state camp with a history of questionable methods.
How is alienating children from one parent in favor or another in the best interest of a child? That’s what former Major League Baseball player David Segui, who was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, is wondering.
For years, Segui and his ex-wife got along well as co-parents of two boys, now 13 and 15, court documents show. In recent months, though, they have fought a bitter custody battle for the children. In December, while visiting relatives in the Kansas City area, Segui was accused of alienating the children from their mother, according to court records.
Segui claimed in legal filings that he was protecting the boys from an abusive mother and her boyfriend. This spring, a video surfaced of the mother’s boyfriend allegedly abusing one of the children by spraying vinegar in the boy’s eye. The boyfriend, ex-MLB player Mark Grudzielanek, once played for the Royals and St. Louis Cardinals. He wasn’t charged in connection with the incident but was investigated for child abuse.
Segui played for several teams in his 15-year-career and still has family in the area. He hasn’t had contact with his two sons since January. Both were taken from Arizona to California without Segui’s permission to attend the Family Bridges camp at their mother’s request. That request was granted by Brad Astrowsky, a family court judge in Phoenix.
Family Bridges is a reunification camp described on its website as a four-day workshop to help children reunify with a parent. The goal is to help children and a rejected parent to restore their relationship, the site says.
Segui probably wouldn’t agree. He has spent tens of thousands of dollars for court-ordered exams and evaluations, according to legal documents. His tab is at $70,000 with Family Bridges, despite not having contact with his sons in nearly seven months.
Segui declined to comment due to a gag order issued in the case. But how is alienating a father from his children any different than the alienation he was accused of?
Is Family Bridges legitimate?
Family Bridges is one of the most widely used reunification programs in North America, according to child welfare advocates. But critics say there is no oversight of the program, and little is known about its effectiveness in reuniting alienated children with a non-custodial parent.
In 2018, Johnson County District Court Judge Christina Dunn Gyllenborg ordered two sisters from Overland Park to reunify with their father, whom the children had accused of abuse. The allegations of inappropriate conduct were never substantiated but the nightmare was just beginning for the pair, the older of the two sisters said. She asked that their names not be used to protect her younger sister.
The girls and their father were instructed by the judge to attend Family Bridges. The girls were whisked from a courtroom in Kansas, discreetly driven to an airport in St. Louis and flown to a remote hotel in Montana. Four days later, the children were released from the program and into the care of their father, who had been engaged in a long custody dispute with the girls’ mother, his ex-wife. It would be months before the girls saw their mother again.
The older sister is 19 and just finished her first year studying neuroscience at New York University. She wrote an essay on the ordeal as part of the admissions process to get into NYU.
“For years, I was silent,” she recently wrote. “I was afraid to disrupt the peace and possibly hurt someone I cared for. But then, sitting in the back of the car, the doors child-locked as they shut behind me, stripped of my possessions and people I love, they regarded me as a criminal. They treated me like I was in the wrong. In the wrong for speaking out against my abusive father and the court who supported him and his actions.”
She asks why Gyllenborg would recommend Family Bridges to anyone. The organization has no business license in Kansas or Missouri. Its top administrator has no active psychology license, and families are charged thousands of dollars per day for the four-day camp, according to legal documents and receipts.
Messages seeking comment from Gyllenborg were not returned. She is up for retention in 2022. She’ll answer to voters then.
“Honestly, I thought it was a prank,” the older sister said as she described how she was separated from her mother and sister. “We were in the dark about everything happening to us. They never told us anything. It didn’t seem like kidnapping children could be legal. You can’t kidnap children.”
Kamala Harris involved in administrator’s appeal
Randy Rand, the face of Family Bridges, has operated without a psychology license since 2012. The California Board of Psychology punished him for unprofessional conduct, gross negligence, violating laws that govern the practice and dishonesty, according to online court documents. He appealed, but then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris successfully defended the board’s decision, which was affirmed by the state’s Court of Appeals.
Rand has been without a license since. One simple internet search would have uncovered that important piece of information. How many other families have Gyllenborg, the Johnson County Family Court judge, ordered into the camp?
David Carico, Rand’s California-based appeals attorney, dismissed all of this as “another witch hunt. Another disgruntled parent.”
The 19-year-old from Overland Park doesn’t want her sister or anyone else to be subjected to some of the methods used at Family Bridges, where she says camp therapists tried to convince the girls that their mother had filled their heads with lies about their father. They were told they made up the abuse allegations against him.
“Protecting abusers in family court is not acceptable,” she wrote in her essay. “Family Bridges must be stopped and brought to justice.”
In Johnson County, family court judges should do more research before assigning another family to attend this program.
This story was originally published July 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
