An Arizona couple have finally won the right to sue child services employees a decade after they lost custody of their three children because of some innocent bathtime photos.
A federal court ruled on Tuesday that Lisa and Anthony ‘A.J.’ Demaree did not sexually exploit their three daughters when they took photos of them playing in the bath back in 2008.
The parents have been fighting the lengthy legal battle ever since a Walmart employee who was developing their family photos reported the couple to police.
The subsequent police investigation caused the Demarees to lose custody of their children – then aged 5, 4 and 1 – for an entire month as authorities looked into the allegations of sexual abuse and child pornography.
A federal court in Arizona ruled Tuesday that Lisa and Anthony ‘A.J.’ Demaree did not sexually exploit their three daughters when they took photos of them playing in the bath back in 2008
After a series of crushing defeats, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals ruled that Child Protective Safety workers violated the Demaree family’s rights by taking the children without a court order.
‘The social workers did not have reasonable cause to believe the children were at risk of serious bodily harm or molestation,’ the ruling on Tuesday stated.
‘Therefore, viewing the record most favorably to the Demarees, the defendants acted unconstitutionally in taking the three children away from home without judicial authorization.’
A court had previously dismissed the Demaree’s case in 2014 against the two social workers, ruling that the government employees were protected from any lawsuits.
The decade-long ordeal was sparked after the couple took their three children on a trip to San Diego in 2008.
When they returned home to Peoria, they took their camera memory stick into the local Walmart to have 144 photos printed off.
The parents have been fighting a decade-long legal battle ever since a Walmart employee who was developing their family photos reported the couple to police for a series of nude bath photos and images of the girls in towels
The family were reported over a series of images taken on a family holiday to San Diego in which the girls were wrapped in towels and playing in the bath
Several of those photos included nude images of the girls playing in the bath and of them wrapped in towels.
The Walmart employee printing the photos handed them over to police.
Detectives questioned the parents and took the girls in for medical examinations. They also raided the couple’s home and seized their computers, phones and any undeveloped photos.
A child services worker took the three girls into emergency protective custody and her supervisor signed off on the decision even though they didn’t have a court order.
It was a month before the girls were returned to their parents, after a judge ruled the photographs were in fact harmless and a medical exam revealed no signs of sexual abuse.
The couple were never charged in relation to the investigation.
It was a month before the girls were returned to their parents, after a judge ruled the photographs were in fact harmless and a medical exam revealed no signs of sexual abuse
But even though the family had been reunited, the damage had already been done. The couple were both listed on a central registry of sex offenders and Lisa was suspended from her job at a local school for a year while the investigation was under way.
They also had to spent $75,000 on legal bills.
‘It was a nightmare, it was unbelievable. I was in so much disbelief. I started to hyperventilate,’ Lisa told ABC News at the time.
‘As crazy as it may seem, what you may think are the most beautiful innocent pictures of your children may be seen as something completely different and completely perverted.’
In the couple’s original lawsuit from 2009, they had tried to sue the city of Peoria and the State Attorney General’s office for defamation.
They also tried to sue Walmart for failing to tell them that they had an ‘unsuitable print policy’ and could turn over photos to law enforcement without the customer’s knowledge.
Other parties were dismissed early on in the case, but a detective who was involved settled with the family.