Notes of Despair

"That bulletin board is a statement of what we're actually dealing with in this city: The incarceration of parents. Poverty. Drugs. Drug abuse. HIV-AIDS. Poor educational achievement. It's crime. It's teen pregnancy. It's a statement of all the social pathologies and dysfunctions. And how do you make sure that some kid, when they become an adult, doesn't become: to the unknown father of?"

Miracle. Praise. Prince. Diamond. The names of the children tacked to the board suggest at least a moment when someone -- either the mothers or a hospital nurse left holding a just-abandoned baby -- christened these newborns with promise: Their lives would be better. Their lives would be celebrated. Their lives would be different.

Seeking Parents

Yet here they are, children facing neglect hearings and guardianship proceedings and, in the happier circumstances, the prospect of adoption. These children are, for the most part, either entering or leaving foster care, and their mothers and fathers might be on the verge of having all parental rights terminated.

And the mothers and fathers have a constitutional right not only to take part in the care, custody and control of their child, but also to know when and where they can come to court and say: None of what those social workers, or hospital officials, or other family members of mine are saying is true.

But the parents can't always be found. The ones who show up on the board have disappeared entirely from their children's lives.

Each mother is named in full, outed by the public records created when she gave birth: A mother's identity, it seems, cannot vanish as easily as the mothers themselves.

Many of the fathers are named in full, too. Yet the fathers' stories are trickier. With each posting announcing only a father's first name, or his nickname, or, simply, UNKNOWN FATHER -- in those cases where the mom didn't know the name of her child's father or would not tell -- comes a sharp reminder that not everything in Washington glitters like the Capitol's marble steps or a Penn Quarter martini bar at happy hour.

"You'd be surprised how many times people don't know the people they're sleeping with's last name," says Michael O'Keefe, president of the Family Court Trial Lawyers Association.

You'd be surprised, too, how many times mothers don't know the father's name at all. "If we don't have a name," says Derrick Russell, supervisor of the city's Diligent Search Unit, "then it's impossible to find this unknown dad."

The mother might know only the father's nickname -- "Mike," Russell says, or "C.Lo." But that meager shard can mean everything to Russell: With that, plus a physical description and favorite hangout, Russell and his team can often track him down.

And when they do, he says, "the majority of the fathers we do locate were unaware that they had a child. . . . Some are just surprised. Some deny it. Some say, 'There's no way that's my child.' " Still, he says, "we've had some situations where the father was just unaware that he had a child, and he wanted to be a part of this child's life."

He can't say how many men who make a noble speech about fatherhood when they're served with court papers actually appear in court -- the diligent search unit isn't there when the gavel brings these cases to order -- but he has faith that among these fathers are men who fight to keep their child from becoming another of the 2,300 children residing in the District's foster care system.

Not Found

The men Russell's team of 11 searchers doesn't find or can't find -- and "they can find people on scraps of information," O'Keefe says -- are the ones who wind up on the board, up where the escalators end, in that windowless fourth-floor corner of Superior Court:

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a newborn girl whose mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, believes she is "a Secret Service agent who came to Washington, DC, from California to protect George Bush and Nancy Reagan." She also believes that the father of her very-much-alive baby "didn't matter as the baby was dead."

UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a baby girl born seven weeks prematurely and already addicted to cocaine. Your baby's mother is homeless, and while at the hospital, she would leave, several times a day, "allegedly to use drugs." When your child was 2 days old, her mother left and didn't come back.

UNKNOWN FATHER, the postings cry to no one, you are hereby notified.