Off The Bridge - The

Off The Bridge - The St. Paul woman who threw her twin toddlers off the Wabasha Bridge on July 4 - here's a news flash - had issues.

The ex-husband of a woman charged this week with throwing her twin sons into the Mississippi River told a judge nearly four years ago that the mother was unstable and had threatened the life of another of her children.

Nathaniel Ellis, the father of Gaines' oldest son, now 7, asked the judge to award him full custody of the boy after the couple's divorce in 1999 because Gaines "has once attempted to take her own life and on a few occasions she said … that the next time would take hers and my son," according to Ramsey County family court records.

District Court Referee Charles H. Williams Jr. threw out the custody request in 2000 because neither Gaines nor Ellis claimed the boy and his baby sister in their divorce papers. Ellis, who was convicted of criminal property damage stemming from a fight with Gaines that year, later had a daughter, now 2, with his ex-wife, relatives said.

This is one of those Hellerian situations:

• Leaving aside the exceedingly minimal legal standing that unmarried fathers have in court, Minnesota law has very steep requirements for changing custody for kids; the "Health and Safety" of the children has to be provably, documentably in danger. This is not a bad thing in and of itself - it prevents kids' living arrangements from being as easily manipulated by parental whims and specious charges as it might be (and has been in the past).
• On the other hand, as hindsight shows us, the woman was deeply disturbed. Advocates for the mentally ill make simultaneous, contractictory demands; that society recognize and act on problems like Ms. Gains' - but without resorting to involuntary commitments or excessive scrutiny into their personal lives, especially things like custody of their children.

We'll be following this case as it develops.

Posted by Mitch at July 9, 2003 02:33 PM