Detroit mother jailed after standoff to be released

Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News

Detroit— The bond was reduced today for a woman charged with using a gun to hold off police when Child Protective Services workers came to take her daughter in a dispute over the 13-year-old's medication.

36th District Judge Paula Humphries lessened the bond for Maryanne Godboldo, 56, to a $200,000 personal bond from $500,000 cash, meaning no money will be posted and she likely will be released today.

Defense lawyers called the original bond "enormous" and "excessive."

Humphries said today she believes Godboldo isn't a threat to the public despite a police report saying Godboldo fired a shot while officers entered her home Thursday on the front porch of her west-side home.

Godboldo has been in the Wayne County Jail since surrendering Friday morning on the front porch of the home after a 10-hour standoff.

Her daughter, Ariana, was initially turned over to a relative by Detroit police, but was later taken into state custody from a hospital where her physical condition she was being evaluated after the standoff. She has been allowed visits at a state-run facility for juveniles from her father, Mubuarak Hakim, and an aunt, Penny Godboldo, a professor of dance at Marygrove College.

"She's OK," Hakim said Tuesday. "I'm not OK with it, though, and we are working at bringing her home, bringing them both home."

Godboldo's lawyers, who claim the state had no authority to take the girl, have requested an April 6 hearing on her custody in Wayne County Juvenile Court. A preliminary examination of criminal charges against Godboldo will be April 8 in the city's 36th District Court.

The standoff started Thursday afternoon, when protective services workers came to Godboldo's home armed with a warrant to take the girl. The dispute is over a medical and mental health treatment plan that had called for psychotropic drugs the mother felt were doing more harm than good. Godboldo has said her daughter's physical and mental problems are a bad reaction to immunizations the formerly homeschooled teen took so she could be enrolled in a regular middle school.

Godboldo's lawyer, Wanda Evans, has said the medical treatment plan was voluntarily developed between the mother and specialists at the Children's Center, an organization that helps "at-risk children." The court had no prior involvement with the family and granted no authority to social workers to countermand a parent's right to make medical decisions, Evans said.

The incident has attracted widespread interest since the standoff began Thursday afternoon. Ministers and civil rights advocates rushed to the home that was surrounded by police. One of the people who helped police talk Godboldo out of her house was Wayne County Circuit Judge Deborah Thomas, a former polio sufferer and advocate for the disabled. Ariana has had only one foot since birth. Thomas has said her examination of the warrant CPS workers presented to Godboldo revealed that it contained "defects."

A broad spectrum of activists, conservatives, liberals, and anti-immunization, parental and civil rights groups are expected to come from around the nation to attend a 9 a.m. event Saturday at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, 18700 James Couzens Freeway, to support Godboldo.

"We are going to have an extremely interesting collection of Americans who believe in the sanctity of family, conservatives and liberals, coming together for this mother," said one of the event's organizers, Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality. "We have received word that people are coming from the holistic health community and even representatives of the Tea Party in West Michigan."