Cop’s book details years fighting this horrific child abuse. Texas can do more to stop it | Opinion

The Texas Legislature has countless things on its plate, but one issue that arises occasionally in the headlines and in popular culture deserves attention in this session after years of foot-dragging.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is the disturbing mental disorder in which caregivers, usually mothers, intentionally harm children in a twisted compulsion to create symptoms requiring medical care to attract attention, sympathy and sometimes money.

Occasional cases from around the country have made national news and inspired TV dramas and documentaries. But three cases with local roots fill the pages of a major book to be released in February, and one in particular inspires a proposed law to help protect Texas children from mothers with this dangerous and potentially murderous affliction.

After service in the police departments in Kennedale and Mansfield, Mike Weber joined the force in Arlington, where his path led to undercover narcotics work and then the crimes against children detail in 2004. It was a challenging but rewarding pursuit, with often arduous investigations and frequently life-or-death stakes. But success meant saving children from harm, and his successes led to his hiring at the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office in 2008.

Political winds led to periods of varying enthusiasm in the DA office’s pursuit of such cases, so Mike was pleased to accept an offer from Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn in 2018 — to devote his remaining years as an investigator to the prosecution of what is now more broadly called medical child abuse.

Mike retired recently after an illustrious career that finds him as one of the nation’s most sought-after experts on this harrowing category of crime, and I could not be prouder. I know a little about his path because Mike was a friend of my wife’s back in his earliest cop days, and he has now been a friend of our family for more than 20 years.

I have been friends with Waybourn for years as well, but I did not know of his vital connection to this issue until I read “The Mother Next Door” by Mike and co-author Andrea Dunlop, coming out Feb. 4. It contains in-depth stories of three mothers, all in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, who ravaged their children with the grotesque obsessions of Munchausen until an overwhelmed and undertrained system tried to bring accountability.

One of the cases features Brittany Phillips, who not only withheld food from her daughter but also fed human waste into her IV line or feeding tube, all to create sickness that would attract the kind of attention and empathy craved by Munchausen moms. She was convicted in 2015, and her daughter Alyssa has flourished into a healthy teenager — adopted by none other than Waybourn and his wife.

Under Waybourn, Tarrant County has stood as a rare jurisdiction paying appropriate attention to medical child abuse offenses. Mike Weber’s years of investigating the confounding mazes of various cases fill the pages of “The Mother Next Door.” It reads like a true-crime novel thanks to the talents of Dunlop, who has her own emotional connection to the issue, stemming from her belief that a family member may be victimizing her children in a similar fashion.

That passion has led her to write on the issue for years. She met Mike at a hospital conference on child maltreatment in California in 2020. Her writing skill and Mike’s case experience are combined in the book and several episodes of Dunlop’s podcast, “No One Should Believe Me.”

Both hope the book increases awareness of the challenges and obstacles that can impede investigation and prosecution of the monsters who foist this cruelty upon the children they are supposed to love and care for. But as Mike wraps up a noble career of shining light on this crime, there is pushback from a community I have otherwise found common ground with.

“Parents’ rights” are a frequent focus these days, and properly so, as parents have sought to maintain control over decisions regarding their kids’ health care, education and other areas. But a determined subset of the movement is mightily annoyed by the prospect of advanced attention to medical child abuse. Identifying their kids as “medically fragile” or “medically complex,” they fear the increased likelihood of false accusations of abuse. Is a mother who is a constant return visitor for a child’s medical treatment a Munchausen-fueled predator or a loving parent covering every base amid a difficult diagnosis?

That’s not a bad question, but Mike has an answer for it, and he presented it at an American Enterprise Institute panel in Washington last month. The topic was the proper parameters for parental rights, and one guest seemed to deride most prosecutions as undue targeting of overburdened parents ripe for false accusations of abuse.

Mike’s solution: follow the facts and the evidence, as he has done every step of his career. Munchausen parents often display a telltale list of pathological behaviors. They are master manipulators, often caught in obvious lies that get swept away because of a hesitancy to question a super-motivated mom with a seemingly sick child. They are famous for “doctor shopping,” carting their suffering kids from place to place to seek new avenues for unneeded treatment while evading detection of their abuse. Their profiles are vastly different from innocent, dedicated parents doing their best in “complex cases” featuring “fragile kids.”

Child-abuse investigations present the most razor-thin margin for error. Cast an overzealous eye, and families can be unduly broken as kids are improperly removed. Show insufficient attention to red flags, and kids can die. As in every other line of police work and prosecutions, we need to be able to trust a system that exists to protect kids and punish those who threaten them, sparing the innocent without glossing over the guilty.

Clarity can be elusive, but today, there is too much fog. Children’s hospitals need more staff with the skills to identify cases that may prompt proper suspicion of medical child abuse. States need better child protective training programs to help navigate the particularly vexing task of discerning what is — and is not — evidence of such crimes. And we’re getting to a point where doctors are hearing criticism from a chorus accusing the profession of overeagerness to identify abuse.

Texas lawmakers have had repeated opportunities to enact a law making it a specific crime to intentionally lie to a medical professional for the purpose of obtaining unnecessary medical treatment. Are the failed attempts a product of insufficient grasp of the seriousness of the issue or fear of reprisal from energized critics? Either way, the latest version of such a law is Texas House Bill 1984, creating a third-degree felony for the kind of malicious nightmare visited upon Brittany Phillips’ daughter and others like her.

That young lady is 17 today. Her name is Alyssa, and the law would be named for her. No more delays. The Legislature should pass it, and the governor should sign it.