Father, daughter bond after being reunited
Published: October 30, 2005
A year ago Joe Culpepper boarded a plane in Colorado with his 5-year-old daughter, Meagan, and flew home to Galveston County.
At the time, Meagan had not seen her home state in almost four years.
Colorado social services took custody of the girl when she was 20 months old after a trip to visit her biological mother, Mystina Turner, ended with both parents behind bars — Culpepper for yelling in the hallways of the nursing home where Turner worked and Turner for slashing Culpepper’s tires and falsely accusing him of stealing $600 from her.
“The reason I took Meagan to Colorado was because I wanted her to know who her real mom was,” said Culpepper. “I felt bad and I wanted her mom to be a mom, but I have learned that if someone doesn’t want to be a parent you can’t make them. You can’t change other people.”
As Culpepper’s case went through the court system, he was allowed limited time with his daughter.
In 2001, Meagan was placed with foster parents, and Culpepper was not allowed to see her for almost two and a half years.
“At one point I was living in my truck in Colorado,” he said. “It was really hard, but all I was concentrating on was getting my daughter back. I didn’t care about anything else.”
Last year the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled the social services agency had erred in taking custody of Meagan. On Oct. 30, 2004 — one year ago today — Culpepper was finally allowed to bring his daughter home.
By then, Meagan had lived with her foster parents for about three years and referred to them as “mommy and daddy.”
“The first couple of weeks were pretty rough because it was different for both of us,” said Culpepper. “It was a major change. I left home with a (toddler) and came back with a 5-year-old. She didn’t understand why she had to go from one place to another. We sat her down and explained it to her, and about two weeks later it was like it never happened.”
Today, Culpepper is raising Meagan with his girlfriend of five years, Rachel Vaughn. Meagan calls Vaughn “mommy” and has had no contact with Turner.
Culpepper describes his daughter as a happy, active, normal 6-year-old. She is a star player on her softball team, the Little Texans, a straight-A, first-grade student and if given a choice she would eat pizza for dinner every night, said Culpepper.
“Meagan is a very outgoing, talkative kid,” he said. “She is definitely a daddy’s girl. She looks like me, talks like me and acts like me. She always has to be doing something until the minute she goes to sleep and when she wants something, she wants it and that’s it.”
When asked what she enjoys doing, Meagan candidly recites a list of activities, including fishing with her dad, swimming and recess at school.
Her favorite color is pink. Her favorite subject at school is math, and “Casper” is her favorite movie, she said.
For Halloween, Meagan said she is going to dress up as a fairy-mermaid and go trick-or-treating.
She has had very little contact with her former foster parents.
“When we first got back we were taking her every week to a psychiatrist, and they said it would be better if she didn’t talk to them and we just let it go away,” said Culpepper. “We sent a couple of letters, and they still send her stuff. At first we wouldn’t let her actually read the letters they sent. I would just read them to her, because at the bottom of them it would say “love mommy and daddy,” and that’s not her mommy and daddy. Now, I guess they have accepted it because they sign (their names), and we let her see those.”
Culpepper said he plans to sue the state of Colorado.
“They need to pay for the mistakes they made,” he said. “I also want people to know what happened because it was not right. What was done was clearly not harmless. I missed some of the best years of Meagan’s life, and those are years I can never get back.”
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