A legislator vowed to push for new laws as well as a state audit to prevent unqualified parental evaluators from continuing to put Colorado children in peril amid growing criticism from parents who say the evaluation industry has mired their custody cases in turmoil.

State Rep. Meg Froelich, a Democrat from Greenwood Village, spoke out following the recent disclosure in The Gazette of the latest scandal to hit a parenting evaluator –  this one involving a state investigation into whether Shannon McShane conned state and court officials into believing she was eligible for court appointments.

The Gazette reported on July 27 that state investigators had determined McShane, a former evaluator accused of extreme bias and shoddy work in up to 30 cases, had falsified her Ph.D. and impersonated a state regulator and federal diplomatic officials.

“There’s just still more work to do because we keep hearing about these folks who are just terrible,” Froelich said of evaluators accused of favoring abusive parents to the detriment of protective parents. “They’re bad. They’re bad, and the outcomes are deadly.”

4 recent murders: Colorado’s troubled family court system ignores children in peril

Froelich said she will push for additional legislation to bolster new laws she shepherded through the General Assembly in the last two years that were meant to put new guardrails around the use of parenting evaluators, court-appointed professionals who charge parents tens of thousands of dollars per case for custody recommendations that can sway judges overseeing high-conflict court cases.

The lawmaker’s push for an audit to probe whether Colorado needs to do more to eliminate unqualified parental evaluators coincides with nearly a dozen parents reaching out to The Gazette following the newspaper’s report on McShane. They questioned why state and judicial officials allowed McShane to continue causing havoc in their custody cases even as controversy grew over her disputed custody recommendations.

“I feel sick to my stomach because clearly the Colorado courts do not understand how important this role is to children,” said one Colorado Springs mother, who said she dealt with bias from McShane during her custody dispute. “It baffles me. Children are the most important, precious members of our society. You think they would want to get it right. I feel like they’re trying to sweep it under the rug.”

The mother said McShane abruptly turned against her last year after the mother obtained a permanent protection order against her ex-husband after he broke into a bedroom that he had agreed in court documents he would refrain from entering. A camera the woman had set up to protect herself filmed the husband ripping open her robe in an attempt to expose her nude body as he tried to grope her while their 1-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son were across a nearby hallway, she said in court documents.

The day before that encounter, according to the woman’s filing for a protective order, her ex had come to the house while she was in the kitchen and had shoved his hand down her pants and into her underwear so he could grope her. She said in a court filing that he went on to pull her top down while pushing his entire body weight onto her, trapping her against a counter.

The woman, who asked that her name not be divulged due to the sensitivity of the issues, said McShane found her request for a protection order and her report that her husband had violated the permanent protection order a judge issued in the case to be a manipulative, abusive tactic that reflected poorly on her parenting skills. She said McShane also falsely accused her in conversations with her therapist of dropping a barbell on her own face to harm herself.

The woman blames what she described as a botched custody recommendation from McShane that she said cost her and her ex-husband $9,000 as eventually thwarting her efforts to relocate herself and her children outside Colorado to another state to live near her family.

McShane’s report ended up getting tossed from the case, but the judge told the mother that if she wants to move out of Colorado with the children, she will have to start the process over, perhaps requiring the appointment and cost of a new parental evaluator. The woman said McShane has never repaid the money she received for the evaluation.

McShane surrendered her psychology license in July after state investigators with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies found she had falsified her credentials.

Investigators with the agency said in a report obtained by The Gazette that in addition to discovering McShane’s Ph.D. was fake, documents submitted to the state agency purporting to show she had the requisite hours of training while working at the Colorado Department of Corrections to become licensed to practice psychology in Colorado also were forged.

Records also show an investigator with the diplomatic security service for U.S. foreign embassies found that McShane had impersonated a state regulator and diplomatic security agents in a failed attempt to prevent the discovery of her fraudulent academic records. That investigator in March reported McShane for potential prosecution to the Denver District Attorney’s Office, which confirmed receiving a referral about McShane.

Officials in the State Court Administrator’s Office have declined comment.

Colorado parental evaluator accused of falsifying credentials sent child custody cases into turmoil despite magistrate’s warning (copy)

McShane has denied wrongdoing and said she surrendered her psychology license in Colorado to avoid a protracted dispute with state regulators. She also said an earlier revocation of her Texas real estate license in 2018 occurred because she was never told she faced accusations of fraud there for failing to forward rental payments on properties she was managing to the property owners.

Despite McShane claiming she did not have a chance to defend herself on the issues in Texas, records from regulators in that state show they sent by certified mail to McShane’s address a notification of the fraud complaint pending against her. Records show the receipt of the notification was acknowledged by a signature from a person living at McShane’s address. Regulators in Texas also followed up by sending McShane emails. McShane said she had moved and “none of the notifications reached her.”

McShane defended her court-appointed parenting evaluations in Colorado and said critics should realize the parenting evaluation process “is an adversarial one, and there are winners and losers.” She said she properly evaluated domestic violence issues.

McShane kept her Colorado psychology license for more than eight months despite Magistrate Judge Matt Bradley of the 13th Judicial District in northeast Colorado in November ruling that McShane’s work was so biased and flawed that he barred her from ever working again for the courts in six northeast Colorado counties.

Instead of taking prompt action after the magistrate reported her to the State Court Administrator’s Office, state court administrative officials also allowed McShane to continue making disputed court-appointed child custody recommendations in up to 30 other cases in other Colorado judicial districts.

Court administrators finally barred her from doing such work in all judicial districts in the state in March – four months after her sanction in the 13th Judicial District – after receiving a new complaint alleging that McShane had accused in emails a father she was evaluating of being worse than a murderer she claimed to have counseled who had put his enemies through a woodchipper.

In that case, McShane unsuccessfully pushed to lift parenting supervision requirements a judge had imposed on the mother after the judge found the mother had bitten her 3-year-old son’s hand, dislocated his shoulder and punched her 6-year-old son.

McShane did not surrender her state psychology license until state regulatory investigators determined she had submitted fake transcripts purporting to show she had a Ph.D. from the University of Hertfordshire in England. McShane has vowed in emails to a listserv for parental evaluators in Colorado that she will continue making court-appointed custody recommendations in Texas, where she received a license to practice psychology in March.

A magistrate ruled in another custody case that McShane fixated on whether a father’s nickname of “Sleepy Melo” meant he was a member of a violent gang when he was not. That father temporarily lost custody of his children – then aged 12, 9 and 10 – after McShane warned he posed an imminent threat.

The magistrate, four months after removal of the children, found that McShane had improperly impugned a loving father when McShane successfully urged relocating the children to live with their mother, who had been living in California for four years. The magistrate noted that McShane, in contrast, failed to investigate the mother’s new husband who actually had been a gang member.

McShane was kicked off another court case last year after a mother filed court documents showing McShane had explored suing the mother for defamation after the mother claimed McShane told her she needed to lose weight. Emails show McShane told her lawyer she brought up the weight issue because “witnesses had made disparaging remarks” about the woman’s weight and because she wanted to know whether the woman had made plans for how the child would be cared for if she died.

In another case, McShane was not persuaded by reports that a father had been adjudicated as delinquent as a teen for sexually assaulting a 5-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl and had physically struck the mother of his 2-year-old child seeking to relocate herself and her child from Longmont to South Dakota, court records show. Recordings show that the father of the child in the custody dispute boasted to his ex that McShane had befriended his mother and liked drinking wine with his mother.

“I was a victim of domestic violence,” said the woman, whose custody case was in Weld County. “I had over six hours of footage given to her. She testified in court that I made it all up, and the way he hit me wasn’t abuse because I caused it.”

The judge in that case ruled the mother could move with her child out of state. The mother still hasn’t recovered the $7,000 she paid McShane to make custody recommendations in the case. McShane said the father in the case later recanted his boasts that she had befriended his mother. “I am not, nor was I ‘friends’ with any party’s parent,” she said.

At least one parent accusing McShane of bias in her case is in discussions with Henry Baskerville, a lawyer who filed a lawsuit on behalf of six parents alleging former parenting evaluator Mark Kilmer favored abusive parents in his custody recommendations. That lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of up to 60 parents Kilmer had evaluated.

Baskerville is considering expanding the litigation to include other potential class members who claim they were harmed by biased custody recommendations from McShane and other unqualified parenting evaluators.

The mother who wants to file a class-action against McShane said McShane falsely accused her of regularly sleeping nude with her son and of inappropriately watching him bathe while consistently downplaying reports of alcoholism and drug addictions by the father.

Another Colorado Springs woman said McShane favored her ex-husband, who had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of domestic violence after the woman accused her ex of strangling her. McShane recommended that the woman undergo a forensic psychological test, which would cost her $10,000, to determine whether she was a sound parent.

That woman said McShane “victimized” her and “traumatized” her 5-year-old son. She said her child became so distraught he refused to let her out of his sight.

“He wanted me to sleep on the couch, in the living room, because it’s right outside his bedroom door,” the mother said. “That’s the level of fear he felt. That’s how real it was for him that he was never going to see me again.”

Two years ago, Froelich, the legislator, successfully convinced lawmakers to require new domestic abuse training for evaluators. That legislation also required state court administrators to set up professional standards for court practice of evaluators.

But Froelich said she remains concerned that state court administration officials and officials with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies still haven’t come up with a coordinated and effective approach to investigate complaints from parents, including those who say they lost custody of their children to abusers due to biased evaluators who charged them high fees.

Colorado’s parenting evaluation industry profits as bitter child custody cases thrown into chaos

Officials with the Department of Regulatory Agencies oversee the licensing of professionals, such as psychologists, who work as evaluators while the State Court Administrator’s Office maintains the rosters of individuals eligible for court appointments as parenting evaluators and as child and family investigators.

Dozens of parents who spoke to The Gazette complained that court administration officials and state regulatory officials at DORA haven’t taken complaints involving parenting evaluators seriously. They added that court administrators and state officials can’t seem to decide who should have jurisdiction over ensuring evaluators are qualified to make custody recommendations.

State DORA regulators often defer to the courts on the soundness of court-appointed work, saying fitness for court work isn’t a licensing issue, according to parents. And, they say, court administration officials usually won’t consider a complaint unless a judge has already sanctioned an evaluator.

Even when a judge has sanctioned an evaluator and barred them from doing work in their judicial district, state court administrative officials have allowed evaluators to continue accepting court appointments in other judicial districts throughout the state, as McShane was allowed to do, The Gazette found.

“I need to bring additional legislation to empower DORA and the court administrators, either whether it’s to talk more to each other or to just be empowered on their own,” Froelich said.

Froelich added she already has informally talked to members of the legislative audit committee – composed of four representatives and four senators – about requesting a special audit by the office of the State Auditor Kerri Hunter into how the state and courts handle complaints alleging unfit and biased evaluators. She said she will draft a formal request to the committee for such an audit.

“I definitely think audits are intended to examine systems and to say these systems are not working and to find out what would you recommend for a better way to reconcile these flaws in the way that has been proceeding,” Froelich said.

“We need more empowerment of both the court administrators and DORA to act in the interest of the child,” Froelich said. “We’re trying to codify the interest of the child as the motivating factor in all these evaluations. It really isn’t. It is which parent seems the most distressed or who’s bringing the most litigation forward.”