Family sues Dayton Children’s and Children’s Services after twins removed from custody

DAYTON — A couple told News Center 7 investigators medically kidnapped their newborn babies and they are warning other parents it could happen to them too.

The children’s mother wants someone held accountable for accusing her and her husband of child abuse and calls the accusations, “not true.”

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News Center 7′s Brandon Lewis spoke with the mother Friday and said this all started in 2021. That’s when she took her newborn twins to Dayton Children’s Hospital to get examined and said it has been a battle since.

Arianna Brooks, mother of twins, said she and her husband were away from their twin newborns, Aniyah and A’mir, for 341 days.

“We’re healing,” she said. “That’s the best way I can put it.”

The twins were born in March 2021 and a couple of months later, the babies stayed overnight their grandmother. Brooks picked up them up the next day.

“My daughter was sweating profusely,” Brooks told Lewis. “She had a long sleeve onesie on. So, I took it off of her and she had a lump on her right arm. When I went to go touch it, she screamed.”

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Brooks tells Lewis the news at Dayton Children’s did not get better as doctors found several fractures in both babies.

“CPS was already called, the police were already called,” she said. “The child abuse pediatrician was already there at the hospital waiting for us when we had gotten there. At that point, they just told us that there was no other possible way that it was anything else besides child abuse.”

Brooks said to Lewis on Friday investigators interrogated her and her husband, D’Ronate Brooks, for hours.

They told investigators they did not abuse their children, but Brooks said that did not matter.

“My kids were moved three times in foster care, so they had no consistency in their first year of life,” she told Lewis on Friday. “One of the placements that they were in, they were starved.”

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Lewis reports it played out in the courts and in May 2022, the judge granted custody of Aniyah and A’mir to Adrianna and D’Rontae.

Brooks said the judge believed the children were abused but not by their parents.

She tells Lewis this accusation does not make sense since the babies were either were with them or their doctors the first few months after birth.

That was one of the reasons the Brooks filed a lawsuit against Dayton Children’s Hospital and Montgomery County Children Services.

Brooks say the investigation could have been more thorough, including getting a second opinion.

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Lewis asked her what she hopes to accomplish.

“To bring awareness that this is an issue, this can happen, that this does happen and to also break down the stigma that CPS only gets involved when you’ve done something wrong as a parent, that’s not always the case,” she said.

The Brooks lawsuit said during one court hearing, a doctor testified the twins’ fractures might been from Elhers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). The Mayo Clinic said it can affect connective tissues.

Brooks told Lewis she and her husband found out they had this syndrome months after their kids wound up in foster care. But that still did not help their case.

News Center 7 reached out to Dayton Children’s and Children’s Services for comment.

Dayton Children’s said it could not respond on pending litigation. Children’s Services did not comment.

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