After a Slip, Parents Find Renewed Focus

Rebounding from a Return to Drugs, Couple Fights for 'Little Angel'

In the fourth in a series, staff writer Mary Otto recounts one couple's journey through the Family Recovery Program, an experimental Maryland court attempting to help drug addicts get clean, then get their children back from state custody. The story reflects scenes the reporter witnessed or, when noted, were recalled to her. In the previous segment, Stacy Coleman wanted to forfeit her parental rights; Keith Cromwell was furious.

February-April 2006

On the first Friday of February, Keith Cromwell leaves the courthouse and finds Stacy Coleman waiting for him.

She hasn't been going to court. She has abandoned recovery and gone back to their old life, to the drug habit that cost them their daughter, now 7 months old and living in foster care in the Baltimore suburbs.

Coleman starts to walk with Cromwell, and he desperately feels himself also slipping back. And then, as if in some kind of nightmare, they use drugs again.

Afterward, he recalls telling her: "Stacy, we cannot lose this child. We can't let the state take our child because we are using drugs. We've got to let the drugs go."

He is anguished by his lapse. And it does not go unnoticed in the courtroom the following Friday.

"You tested positive on Feb. 3," Judge Martin P. Welch tells him.

"All my nevers came through," Cromwell says, almost weeping. He says he used drugs to try to reach his girlfriend, to bring her back.

"I tried to help her," Cromwell says. "I didn't get in this by myself. I wasn't planning on having a child. She came into my life. This happened. There is no excuse for what I've done. I took a chance. I cared too much. I went through that to save her."

"You may have to get out of this without Stacy," the judge tells him, sternly. "We are going to look at some more treatment options for you. Are you ready for that?"

"No," Cromwell says. "I made a mistake."