Lawsuit against sheriff’s office ‘not about money,’ say daycare owners

The Bradenton daycare owners who filed a lawsuit against the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office and its Child Protective Services division over how officials investigated child abuse and neglect allegations against them, say it’s not about retribution or money.

“We spoke to our church members and we decided unanimously that we had an obligation to expose this and not allow for this to happen to anyone else,” said Pastor Steve Erickson at the Church Without Limits, which owned and operated the No Limits Learning Academy in the 2200 block of 75th Street West.

The lawsuit alleges a CPS deputy went beyond her authority when she temporarily closed the daycare last summer over a playground incident during which an older child dared a younger special needs child to ask another child to pull down her pants. The incident was immediately stopped by teachers and documented.

No criminal charges were ever filed in the case.

James Patterson, of the Harder Law Group is representing Erickson and his wife JoAnna in the suit. Patterson said by Florida statute, certain governmental agencies like law enforcement are financially protected and by law the suit can only top out at $300,000 in damages.

“But as JoAnna has stated several times, this lawsuit is not about money or retribution, it’s about restoring reputation,” Patterson said. “We honor those agencies who do this important work, but at the same time those agencies must follow their own policies and that didn’t happen in this case.”

Patterson said last summer’s closure was based on one officer’s predetermined opinion and it occurred “without due process and based on no probable cause. Not only were the wrong forms used to do the closure, it was done in such a manner that caused chaos and killed this business, also contrary to state statute. For something like this to happen, especially to the Ericksons who are wonderful people, is completely unfair.”

Patterson said it remains to be seen if reputations can be restored after the damage the initial media reports caused due to CPS’s Lisa Montera’s actions, “but we are going to try. This incident with the children is something that happens at every daycare across the country at some point and this got misreported and mishandled and the sequence of events that followed was overkill.”

The Ericksons estimate the controversy cost them about $300,000 in revenue, as enrolled dived from 117 last August to only seven almost a year later at the daycare, which now has a new name, Salt Life Kids Academy.

Steve Erickson, a former police officer for 11 years, kept telling his family in the beginning that everything would work out and that the system would work as intended.

“But it didn’t,” he said. “Had they just fixed this in the beginning, even with the wrongful closure, and admitted they made a mistake instead of dragging it out this long, we wouldn’t be sitting here today doing this. The problem now is that the community didn’t know what happened and because they took so long the community could only go by what was being reported at first, when nothing happened. So now we want the community to know the truth and that’s the most important thing for us.”

JoAnna Erickson said lives were destroyed.

“It all comes down to that illegal shutdown,” she said. “We were destroyed by one person. Everything we have worked for in our lifetime was destroyed within an hour.”

The sheriff’s office declined to comment Tuesday.