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March 5, 2002         Autism Database Search  www.feat.org/search/news.asp

Boy Genius

Prodigy or pawn? The troubled saga of Justin Chapman

[In depth article By Julie Poppen.] http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/justin/index.shtml

Mother Of ‘Boy Genius’ Lied

The mother of Justin Chapman, 8, has recently

admitted she falsified records used to document

claims about her son’s intellectual gifts

When Justin Chapman and his mother, Elizabeth, moved to Colorado last summer, Justin’s reputation as a child prodigy preceded him, much as lightning precedes thunder.

Drumrolls of media fanfare followed his every brilliant act.

He picked up the violin at age 2; competitive chess at 3. At 4, he enrolled in a prestigious interactive program through Stanford University.

At 6, Justin became the youngest person ever to take a for-credit course at the University of Rochester. Newspaper pictures show his slight figure slumped in an oversized chair, surrounded by classmates a dozen or more years his elder.

On April 4, 2000, three months before Justin turned 7, Linda Silverman, director of the private Gifted Development Center in Denver, tested Justin’s IQ at 298-plus, the highest ever recorded.

A month later, word came that Justin had scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and achieved a verbal score of 650.

The media seized upon Justin’s story, and the commercial world took notice, as well. In one striking advertisement, Justin’s remarkable little head was shown safely cocooned in a Bell bicycle helmet.

But the crescendo surrounding Justin has fallen silent.

From genius to concern

In recent months, the 8-year-old has gone from being a symbol of childhood genius in New York to a source of serious concern for mental health professionals in Colorado.

Justin threatened suicide in November, according to his mother and hospital reports. Afterward, testing at Children’s Hospital found him to be of average intelligence.

A psychological evaluation from the hospital said, “His recent suicidal gesture . . . exemplifies his inability to continue the existence that has been assigned by his mother, the gifted community and most likely by himself.”

Justin has been placed with foster parents by the Health and Human Services department in Broomfield, his mother accused of neglect.

“This child doesn’t seem to have the degree of intellectual capacity he is purported to have,” Michael Grills, Justin’s court-appointed guardian, told a judge Feb. 6. “Either these folks who did the testing at Children’s are flat wrong or the extraordinary gifts this child currently has are a fiction—something that has been contrived.

“The picture that is painted of this child being extraordinarily gifted and talented does not seem to bear out.”

Many of the claims about Justin’s ability and potential could not be independently verified in an extensive investigation by the Rocky Mountain News. Records are nonexistent or cannot be confirmed.

Proponents now say that their relationship with Justin was based entirely on e-mail, that they had no firsthand knowledge of his work. Many acquaintances simply have clammed up.

Still, Justin has his true believers.

“My observations of him are that he’s exactly what he was claimed to be,” said Tracy Neal, director of the Malone Family Foundation.

The foundation was created in 1997 by John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media Corp., and his family to improve access to quality education for extraordinarily talented young people who lack financial resources.

Neal said the newly formed Broomfield County is behaving like “peasants with pitchforks, coming after the weak and powerless.”

Elizabeth Chapman complains that her only child is grossly misunderstood and not receiving the specialized help he needs as a profoundly gifted child with a learning disability, which, she said, is an inability to process the spoken word.

“People just don’t understand these kids,” Chapman said in one of many interviews with the News during the past six months. “People fear what they don’t know or understand. They don’t come with manuals.”

A Life Of Studies And Being Studied

“I don’t want to be me anymore.”

·        Justin Chapman, as quoted in a Denver emergency room report, November 2001

Justin Myles Chapman was born July 17, 1993, the son of Elizabeth Chapman, then 20, and James Maurer, then 24. Chapman was in North Carolina, hopeful of opening a gymnastics studio, when she met Maurer through a friend.

He was working a manufacturing job at IBM. The two dated for a few months but “irreconcilable differences”—Maurer’s words—kept them from taking the relationship further. He now lives at the YMCA in Raleigh, N.C., and works a midnight shift as a security guard.

Chapman, pregnant, returned to New York. Her parents live in the Rochester suburb of Henrietta. Maurer faded from her life.

She said she was determined to raise her son differently than she had been raised—which she described as “totalitarian.” Her parents were strict Catholics, she said, and she attended private Catholic schools.

Chapman’s father, George, works as an electrical engineer and computer programmer for Rochester Gas & Electric. Her mother, Jane, stays home. Chapman said she sought refuge by becoming a competitive gymnast. She said her parents thought she was “obsessed” with the sport.

As a troubled teen, she was counseled by a clinical social worker in Rochester. In a letter to George and Jane Chapman in fall 1987, social worker Delores Sanderson noted that “the issues Elizabeth is dealing with are family issues, not personal pathology, and need to be treated in the context of the dynamics within the family.”

After high school, Chapman studied physical education at the State University of New York at Cortland for a semester, but she did not do well and dropped out.

Chapman said in one interview with the News that she received a master’s degree in elementary and secondary education through Regents College in New York. But the registrar’s office at the college, now called Excelsior College, an online university, said she never was actively enrolled.

When her son was born six weeks early, she was enrolled at Monroe Community College in Rochester. Chapman read all she could about child-rearing. She said she was determined to be a model for Justin.

It wasn’t many months before Elizabeth’s stories about Justin began to baffle those who heard them.

Walking at 7 months.

Reading aloud at 2 years, 4 months.

Chapman often brought the toddler to the Monroe campus, where he pretended to take notes on a magnetic drawing board. One day, his mother said, Justin, at age 2 ½, filled out the bubbles on a 40-question test and turned it in to the instructor. The graded paper received a 76, she said. Instructor Dale Doty said he did not remember the episode.

As a toddler, Justin ate with a fork and hated to be messy.

“He was obsessed with reading. I read him my college textbooks. The only way to keep him quiet and calm him down was to make things really complicated,” she said.

Chapman decided to teach her son at home. She wanted to nurture his talents and follow his lead, letting him eat, sleep and study whenever he wanted; his upbringing would be the opposite of her own.

Psychologist Thomas Arnold gave Justin, then age 3, a Wechsler Intelligence Scale test for preschool-aged children, his mother said. She said Justin’s IQ was tested at 160, placing him in the “exceptionally gifted range.” Arnold could not be located for comment.

Not long after the Wechsler test, Chapman refused a request by the public school system in Penfield, N.Y., to test her son for placement.

At age 4, she enrolled Justin in Stanford’s Educational Program for Gifted Youth’s interactive computer mathematics program. He received a B in honors intermediate algebra, an A in elementary writing and “satisfactory” ratings in accelerated 3-4 math, accelerated 5-6 math and honors pre-algebra, according to a program transcript. The work was performed via the Internet.

At age 5 ½, Justin began taking high school classes via the Internet.

At age 6 in 1999, Justin burst into the media spotlight when he was enrolled in college courses at the University of Rochester.

According to one transcript, he received a B in a four-credit-hour religion course called The Ancient World for a paper on Babylonian creations, myths and Homer’s The Iliad. He audited a physics course.

Justin’s Web site states that he then enrolled full time. University officials declined comment and refused to confirm Justin’s course schedule.

In Justin’s free time, Chapman said, he behaved like a regular child, engaging in pillow fights, playing soccer, swimming or reading Harry Potter books.

Justin is credited with writing a syndicated column through Paradigm News called The Justin Report, in which he opined on topics ranging from family car trips to the merits of the nation’s education system in 1895. One of his columns, about his crusade against age restrictions, was published in the Christian Science Monitor.

Justin’s Web site contains the entire run of columns, which were distributed weekly from July 3, 2000, to May 6, 2001. The tone of the writing is earnest and thoughtful.

Paradigm News declined to talk about Justin or his columns.

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The media descended on Justin, but Chapman said it never was her intention to make her child a celebrity.

She turned down 115 requests for media interviews and accepted 14, according to a record of media interviews kept by the University of Rochester.

In May 2000, when Justin was almost 7, he took the SAT test at Penfield High School, where Chapman said he scored those remarkable numbers. It was his first crack at the college placement test. Officials with the College Board, which administers the SAT, were unable to independently verify the scores.

“The scores are the property of the student,” College Board spokeswoman Janice Gams said.

A copy of Justin’s score report, taken from a transparency he made for a presentation, does not include a test center code number or the name of the testing site.

Mike Sullivan, an assistant principal at Penfield High, said he did not recall ever seeing Justin taking the SAT with juniors and seniors at his school and said he no longer is in possession of SAT records for that date.

Regardless, Julian Stanley, director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at Johns Hopkins University, was intrigued when, through the Gifted Development Center in Denver, he learned of the boy’s high score. He said a copy of the SAT score he received looked legitimate, although it, too, lacked a testing site.

“He’s a very bright kid, assuming these scores are correct,” Stanley said.

In July 2000, Stanley invited Chapman to bring her son to Johns Hopkins for objective testing. The costs would be covered by Stanley’s program. Chapman declined. She said later that she planned to take her son to Stanley’s center the following summer, but Justin had begun to struggle.

In August 2000, one month after he turned 7, Justin graduated from the Cambridge Academy, a distance learning high school based in Ocala, Fla., with a 3.75 grade-point average. According to his course transcript, he had completed the high school course work in 1 ½ years.

Academy Principal John Fox said most of his interactions were with Justin’s mother, but he praised Justin’s work.

“As flexible as our program is, he was challenging us to keep up with him as far as sending in his work,” Fox said. “Usually in ninth grade we require two credits of electives. He submitted proposals for 14 of them and he did them all.”

Fox also lauded Justin’s efforts to end age discrimination in education.

Indeed, Justin and his mother have taken his crusade across the country to conferences for educators and parents of gifted students.

At a typical seminar, he stood on a box and read a presentation while exhibiting transparencies of bell curves and graphs. He quoted Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But it was during these conferences that his inability to answer questions was noted.

Chapman said Justin thinks of too many possible answers and can’t answer simple questions such as, “What’s your favorite color?” Other experts who have treated Justin say his auditory processing problem makes it difficult for him to respond.

Michael Piechowski, a researcher in the field of gifted education and educational psychology, first heard Justin speak at the May 2000 Hollingworth Conference on the Highly Gifted in Newton, Mass. He is convinced that Justin knew his stuff.

“His arguments were presented logically, and from the way he emphasized his points, it was clear that he understood what he was saying,” Piechowski said in a recent letter supporting Chapman’s quest to regain custody of her son.

IQ Off Charts . . . And Under Suspicion

“My favorite subject is physics and anything related to Einstein. Why? He never combed his hair and he never wore socks.”

·        Justin Chapman, quoted by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, November 1999

Silverman, of the Gifted Development Center, has been called as a potential witness in Chapman’s neglect case and no longer talks publicly about her protege and little friend. But she spoke of him extensively last summer.

In fact, she was instrumental in helping Chapman move to Colorado. Silverman was to arrange programs and protocols to help develop Justin’s potential, as well as line up sponsorships to help the family financially.

It was early 2000 when she first saw Justin’s Web site, Knowledge Quest—Chapman says Justin built it by himself in six hours—and she was “blown away.”

Much of Justin’s mesmerizing effect was achieved through e-mail to mentors and prospective peers around the country. Many of these were signed off late at night, when most children his age are asleep. Silverman recalled her early e-mail exchanges with the boy as “incredible.”

“He would e-mail things at a profound level of knowledge that I knew I couldn’t get him to tell me in words,” she said.

Silverman, who earned a doctoral degree in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California, didn’t doubt the authenticity of the messages.

“For anyone else to be able to ghostwrite what Justin does on e-mail, they would have to be a greater genius than Justin and they would have to be the stupidest person on the face of the Earth, because they’d be found out,” Silverman said.

In Silverman’s test of Justin’s intelligence, she used a Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M). That test has brought much controversy to Silverman’s career, in which she has tested the IQ of more than 3,000 people, because it last was revised in 1972.

Jerome Sattler, a nationally known IQ testing expert and author who helped update the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition in 1986, said results from the 1972 test are not valid. People have more knowledge now, meaning that scores compared with norms from 30 years ago are inflated.

“The idea is, one should use the most current version of a standardized test because it better reflects what is known in the population,” said Sattler, professor emeritus at San Diego State University.

But Silverman and her staff argue that the Stanford-Binet Form L-M is the only test that distinguishes those who rank above the 99^th percentile on other intelligence tests. She said there is a formula in the Stanford-Binet manual that describes how to calculate a score when the ceiling of the test is reached.

Despite her loyalty to the Form L-M test and the professional duels that has caused, Silverman is a member of an advisory committee to the team of editors and psychologists revising the fifth edition of the Stanford-Binet, which is expected to be released in 2003.

The Stanford-Binet tests skills in vocabulary, verbal abstract reasoning, mathematical induction, spatial perception, auditory short-term memory, visual memory, visual-motor performance, arithmetic reasoning, social cognition and verbal fluency.

Justin slept only two hours the night before the first day of his testing, according to Silverman’s report. She said she allowed him to take the test in his mother’s lap because she could not always understand his responses.

Silverman noted that there were several times she had to ask Chapman what her son was saying.

Special testing arrangements aren’t common, although they’re not unheard of. But Sattler said he would not accept as valid any answers translated by a parent.

Regardless, Justin’s score blew off the charts. At 298-plus, according to Silverman, it was almost three times the average IQ of 100.

“Justin’s extraordinary strengths in all of these areas surpassed the limits of this instrument,” Silverman wrote. “He performed beyond the level of an individual 19 years, 5 months.”

Sattler said there is no valid way to achieve a score of 298.

“That number doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in any normed group. You cannot find a number in any standardized manual that’s much higher than 160.”

The voices of critics failed to dampen Silverman’s awe.

“It was the most incredible experience testing this kid,” Silverman said. “I’ve never had anything like this happen to me in my entire life.”

Other experts have weighed in to support Silverman. “If his score was really that high, there is almost no testing modification you could make that would make that big of a difference,” said Jonathan Plucker, a testing expert and associate professor of educational psychology at Indiana University. “With a score that high, the kid is bright. There is not a lot to be argued about there.”

Warning Signs

“(Justin) also disclosed that the world is going to end in five years and that he has known this since World War III started on September 11, 2001.”

·        Justin Chapman’s admission report at Children’s Hospital, November 2001

As Justin continued to roll up intellectual feats and acclaim, there were unmistakable signs that all was not well.

Four months after administering the IQ test to Justin, Silverman received an e-mail message in Denver from Charlene Kociuba, Chapman’s neighbor in a subsidized housing complex in Penfield, a suburb of Rochester.

Kociuba warned Silverman that Justin “is only loved for the monetary gain, prestige and power he can bring to his mother.

“He cannot play unless he works, he cannot laugh unless she approves, he must be first to get the ‘highest IQ’, swim the fastest, is the first to enroll in college, be the youngest to graduate HS, be the first syndicated columnist and test the highest in all your hundreds of tests she brags about.”

Kociuba said Chapman prepared Justin for days for the IQ test with Silverman. She accused Chapman of pulling information off the Internet, “perhaps the very tests you use.”

A quick search on eBay offered a 1960 test book with all the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M) answers for $5.

When contacted by telephone, Kociuba described herself as a photographer and rehabilitation counselor, and as a former Chapman friend. “The biggest fear I have is that unless he’s gifted, she will not accept him. He’s deathly afraid of losing her love.”

At one point, according to New York state records, Child Protective Services visited the Chapman home in Penfield. On Oct. 17, 2000, the agency issued a statement saying allegations of “suspected child abuse or maltreatment” were “unfounded.” It’s unclear who filed the complaint that led to the investigation.

During that investigation, Silverman defended Chapman in a letter to the New York agency. “(Justin) is clearly a happy, loved, well-adjusted little boy,” she wrote. “He begs to take 12 college courses at once since they all sound so interesting to him. Justin is pushing Elizabeth; she is definitely not pushing him.”

Chapman, in an interview with the News, dismissed Kociuba as a jealous mother. She said Kociuba was particularly upset that her 16-year-old son, a gifted student also taking courses at the University of Rochester, failed a class in which Justin received a B.

Chapman and her son moved to Colorado in August, in part to be closer to the Center for Inner Change in Cherry Creek, where Justin was receiving treatment for his auditory processing problem.

Chapman said her son couldn’t understand words spoken into his right ear.

With Silverman’s assistance, Chapman sought help from Ron Minson, the director of the center.

Minson’s alternative therapy is based on The Tomatis Method, a 50-year-old sound therapy program that uses hearing exercises to help patients better process the sequence of sounds and tones. Minson says that the technique, while not mainstream, can help children overcome learning disabilities without medication.

Justin visited Minson’s office to have his right ear stimulated. During an August visit, Justin listened to music on the headphones in a room with other children. He was playing with plastic dinosaurs. In a smaller room, he underwent light and sound therapy as he reclined on a soft chair with lights flashing inside special eyeglasses.

Not long after the treatment started—about a year after the phenomenal IQ test—Justin began to regress, Chapman said. She said he began acting like a 2-year-old.

Before that, Chapman said, Justin was a dedicated vegan who thrived on a few hours sleep every night.

Suddenly, the 7-year-old was eating meat and giving up his late-night e-mail exchanges. He was sleeping late. His photographic memory disappeared. He started sucking on his finger. Instead of science kits and Legos, Justin played with toddler toys, his mother said.

In early June, when the family still was commuting to Denver from New York, Justin began keeping a journal to track the effects of the Tomatis program, which he himself had discovered on the Internet, according to his mother. Two weeks after Justin started the listening program, he wrote, in pages offered for viewing by his mother:

“I am now Joe. I am nothing like the Justin I read about. Hard to believe I wrote those things so I must be someone new—so gave new name to myself.” Two days later, he wrote: “I cannot find Justin? Have you seen him? Please help me this does not feel right. I cannot think at all. Acting stupid. I need to do better. So what—I can hear—too noisy cannot see words.”

In the fall, Chapman enrolled Justin in the Brideun School for Exceptional Children in Broomfield. The private school, which opened last year, caters to gifted children with learning disabilities.

As the school year progressed, Justin began throwing temper tantrums, kicking a hole in a school wall and becoming increasingly convinced the world was going to end five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to his mother.

In October, Justin told a social worker at Brideun that he “didn’t want to live anymore.” At the time, his abilities ranged from second- to 12^th-grade levels, according to a letter from school director Marlo Payne Rice.

Despite Justin’s apparently deteriorating mental state, Chapman took him to the National Association for Gifted Children’s national conference Nov. 7-11 in Cincinnati. Justin gave a presentation.

“He put together a presentation two weeks before,” Chapman said. “We were hemming and hawing about doing it at all.”

In the end, Chapman decided it would be a safe environment for her son because Silverman and other friends would be there.

Piechowski, professor emeritus of education and psychology at Northland College in Ashland, Wis., recalled that Justin seemed “lively and full of fun.”

“He was happy to be with people who accepted him and understood him. He was happy to see again his gifted friends, his true peers.”

A Little Boy’s ‘Cry For Help’

“Justin can no longer meet the expectations that have now become his identity.”

·        Children’s Hospital

On Nov. 18, Chapman took Justin to see the movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Just after it started, Justin began screaming in pain because of a headache. Chapman took her son to St. Anthony Hospital North. She said doctors gave Justin liquid Motrin and sent him home.

Later that day, Chapman found her bottle of Motrin, empty, on the floor of Justin’s room. She said she had hid the Motrin in a cupboard above the stove. She took her son back to the emergency room. Tests came back negative for any overdose, she said.

In speaking of the episode, Chapman said she interpreted Justin’s actions as a “cry for help” rather than a suicide attempt. She expressed regret at taking Justin to St. Anthony’s a second time.

The hospital placed the child on a 72-hour mental health hold. And Chapman was reprimanded for trying to leave the emergency room with her son.

“Justin wanted to go home,” Chapman said. “I tried to take him out of the hospital. I tried to sign him out and leave.”

Justin was transferred to the Devereux Cleo Wallace inpatient hospital in Westminster on Nov. 19 and placed on a 72-hour mental health hold for suicidal ideation, or fantasizing about killing himself.

Founded in 1943, Devereux Cleo Wallace treats psychiatric, emotional and behavioral problems in those ages 5 to 21.

Devereux psychiatrist Cathy Collins wrote in her report that Justin was mentally ill, “a danger to himself” and “gravely disabled.”

Chapman provided the report to the News. Several key findings of the report became elements of Broomfield’s neglect case against Chapman, including this one:

“The mother’s treatment of the child by means of a rigorous speaking and travel schedule in order to display her son’s intelligence has produced an identifiable and substantial impairment of the child’s psychological functioning or development,” Collins wrote.

A staff report from Devereux noted that Justin could not spell “fire” or “get” or define the word “sum,” yet he continued to say he was at an eighth-grade spelling level. The report noted that Justin would become agitated and try to keep a distance between himself and his mother during her visits.

In a letter provided by Chapman to the News, Collins wrote: “It is my impression that he is gravely disabled as evidenced by his violent tantrums, regression to infantile-like behaviors and suicidal ideation.” She suggested that Justin might have bipolar disorder.

In defending herself against the complaint, Chapman said that Justin had given only seven speaking presentations in 19 months, and that he enjoys the engagements.

Justin was transferred Nov. 28 to Children’s Hospital, where he remained until the week before Christmas.

Of the suicide attempt, Justin told the staff at Children’s he had consumed only one Motrin. “He alleges that his cats ate the rest,” the report states.

There, the neurology department found Justin to be “without any apparent neurological deficit.” A child depression index found that Justin was having “excessive tearfulness,” according to a report by attending psychiatrist Harriet Stern. Justin said he felt tearful only since being in the hospital and not before that.

As he was given an intelligence test, Justin became frustrated when he did not know the correct answer, and he would hide under a piece of furniture, Stern reported in a document Chapman gave to the News. Justin’s performance on the Wechsler test indicated he had “an approximately average intelligence level,” Stern wrote.

Chapman responded by defending her son’s results on the Wechsler test. She said Justin could not possibly do well, because he was traumatized. She also said the Wechsler test is inappropriate for gifted children because the ceiling of the test is not high enough.

But the dramatic change in test results raised a red flag for Stanley at Johns Hopkins.

“People like that don’t deteriorate to average on a Wechsler,” Stanley said. “They don’t peter out in that sense at all.”

Chapman’s own mental health also came under scrutiny at Children’s Hospital. In Justin’s discharge report, Stern noted that Chapman had “unsupportable beliefs” that Justin could move objects using his mind and “possibly alter the outcome of the future, including the future of the world associated with World War III.”

Chapman said Justin does believe in telekinesis and is concerned about the fate of the world.

Staff at Children’s found Justin to be “adjustment disordered with mixed anxiety and depression.” But, upon discharge, Justin’s mood was described as “cheerful and he was without apparent psychotic process.”

Doctors at Children’s said that Justin should be reunited with his mother at some point if she is “assessed as mentally fit and appropriately able to care for Justin.”

___________________________________________          Broomfield separates

                                                      mother and child

“There is clear evidence this

>> DO SOMETHING ABOUT AUTISM NOW <<           child did have gifts.

Miss

Chapman has provided every

   Subscribe, Read, then Forward the FEAT          educational opportunity

   Daily Newsletter. To Subscribe go to                 to her child.”

     www.feat.org/FEATnews     No Cost!            -- Chapman attorney Paul Dugas,

in Broomfield District Court

___________________________________________        At the end of Justin’s

stay

at Children’s Hospital, Broomfield’s Health and Human Services department removed Justin from his mother and placed him in foster care. He is living with a family on a farm. He is in third grade in a public school, said Chapman, who is now allowed supervised visits with her son for up to three hours each week, while a child-parent study is being completed.

“I’d rather have him in foster care than going to public school,” Chapman said. “He doesn’t belong there. They had no right to take custody in the first place. It did more harm than good.”

She said Justin has regressed in foster care. “He’s not questioning anything,” she said, adding that he doesn’t trust her because she can’t act like herself. Officials in Broomfield refused to discuss the case, citing confidentiality rules that cover dependency and neglect cases. But in a Feb. 6 neglect hearing they made it clear they think Chapman has manipulated her son, and they question her mental health.

One legal claim that Chapman has made—it’s one her attorney, Paul Dugas, repeated in a December hearing—is that Justin holds a voter registration card in New York and should be treated like an adult. Chapman’s argument is that Broomfield is “holding an adult against his will.” The judge didn’t buy the argument.

Peter Quinn, an election commissioner in Monroe County in New York, recalled the day Justin filled out an application and made a pitch to the commissioners about why he should be allowed to vote. Quinn said the request was denied.

Chapman says she has Justin’s voter registration card but can’t find it.

Chapman’s parents, George and Jane Chapman, came to Colorado from New York for one of the initial hearings. They are requesting custody of their grandson and have expressed doubt about the boy’s giftedness, Elizabeth Chapman said. The couple declined to discuss the case.

“He’s been through a lot and I think it should be kept private,” Jane Chapman said last month.

Byron Howell, deputy city and county attorney in Broomfield, said at the hearing Feb. 6 that the senior Chapmans are worried about their daughter’s mental health. “They strongly feel she needs a psychological exam,” Howell said, adding that “everything with her son has been coached.”

In the dependency and neglect summons, Justin’s father, James Maurer, 33, is accused of abandoning his son. But Maurer says he pays child support, even though he hasn’t seen his son in more than six years.

“She’s alienated Justin from me, so I haven’t really been able to have contact with him,” Maurer said. “Social services told me she was using Justin for her own need for recognition or popularity. She’s just very flagrant and compulsive about things.”

Chapman said she voluntarily underwent one psychological evaluation and that the court has ordered her to be tested further.

She also said she has returned to church and is taking parenting classes. She said she recently began teaching gymnastics part time in Thornton and broke her arm on the job.

A candle with an angel on it sits on a mantel next to a picture of her with Justin during a happier time.

“I can’t protect him and I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

Chapman does have her advocates, including Neal, director of the Malone Family Foundation.

Neal has visited the Chapman home and said, “I never saw anything that would fall under the rubric of abuse or neglect. I’ve seen her discipline him. She gives him the standard timeout. He didn’t show any unusual fear around her. I saw food in her home.

“It’s their first case,” Neal said of Broomfield authorities. “She’s a single mother, a girl with very little money, an easy pushover. . . . I hope people can get past the gifted stuff and see this kind of thing can affect anyone.”

Neal said the foundation hasn’t helped Chapman but that she personally has offered financial and moral support. When asked whether Malone, the cable magnate, has helped Chapman, Neal responded, “No comment.”

On Monday of this week, attorney Dugas said Chapman would admit to the accusations in the dependency and neglect petition in hopes of getting her son back sooner.

The admission, which Dugas said would be filed within a week, would void a jury trial now set for March 18-20.

Chapman said her main goals are to regain custody and get Justin the help he needs, such as returning to the Center for Inner Change and the Brideun School.

“It will take a lot of time with just dealing with this situation,” she said, a lot of nature walks, a lot of letting him be and saying, ‘It’s OK to be who you are. You don’t have to be an average 8-year-old. You don’t have to be a junior in college. You can do what you need to do.’ “

As of Monday, Chapman’s phone was disconnected, and Dugas said she would no longer be talking to the media.

For now, at least, the questions about Justin remain. Is he a genius, or a little boy who has been used as a pawn?

Words from the song Reflection from the movie Mulan that he has used in his writings might begin to approach an answer:

“Look at me, you may think you see, who I really am. But you’ll never know me. Every day is as if I play a part, now I see, if I wear a mask, I can fool the world, but I cannot fool my heart.” Contact Julie Poppen at (303) 892-5176 or poppenj@RockyMountainNews.com.

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Lenny Schafer, Editor@feat.org  •  CALENDAR EVENTS@feat.org Michelle Guppy Catherine Johnson PhD  •  Ron Sleith  •  Kay Stammers  •  Edward Decelie

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ALL INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE.  THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.