Judge Wayne A. Humphrey granted the motion to recuse on April 6, 2021. He was the third judge assigned to File No. 154703.

Gordon-Oliver had been first. She issued the initial court orders, appointed supervisors, established the custody framework — then recused herself when the cronyism complaints surfaced. Morales-Horowitz had been second. She entered a default on a manufactured absence — denied Steve’s remote appearance request at five o’clock the evening before, then defaulted him when he could not fly from California to New York overnight — and built permanent orders on that default. Humphrey was third. DiFabio, Steve’s attorney, moved for recusal on grounds of persistent hostility.

Humphrey granted it. But the order he signed on his way out was not a quiet exit.

Court Order 2021-04-06 Westchester Family Court

The recusal order grants the motion and punishes the attorney for filing it. Humphrey removed himself not just from Steve's case but from every case DiFabio had before him — destroying a third of his Westchester practice in a single paragraph.

LEGAL-HUMPHREY-RECUSAL — Humphrey Recusal Order, April 6, 2021The recusal order grants the motion and punishes the attorney for filing it.

The order acknowledged that DiFabio perceived “persistent hostility and personal animus” and granted the motion on that basis. Then it spent two paragraphs detailing what the judge thought of the attorney who had asked him to step aside: “disrespectful, discourteous, and borderline unethical.” Appearing in a bathrobe on a virtual conference. Attempting to abandon clients. Conducting himself in a hostile fashion toward chamber staff. The recusal was granted — and the cost was extracted in the written record.

Humphrey did not recuse only from Steve’s case. He recused from every case involving DiFabio. All matters, present and future. The order eliminated roughly a third of DiFabio’s Westchester Family Court practice in a single paragraph.

The pattern held. Anyone who pushed back on the system paid for it. DiFabio had seen something — the manufactured default, the secret orders, the procedural framework that always tilted one direction — and he had named it. The system granted his request and punished him for making it.

Three judges. Three recusals. Only three family court judges sat in Westchester County. The case was transferred to Yonkers.

The Yonkers Family Court occupied the third floor of a municipal building on Warburton Avenue — a branch courthouse, twelve miles south of White Plains, with three courtrooms and a children’s center and the particular atmosphere of a facility that processes custody disputes at volume.

Judge Michelle I. Schauer assumed control of File No. 154703 in May 2021.

The case file that arrived at her chambers contained everything the three prior judges had declined to resolve. Schauer was the fourth. She would be the last.

On her first appearance date, Schauer issued a Temporary Order of Protection against Steve. The boilerplate language threatened seven years of incarceration. Stay away from Tara. No communication. No contact. The order carried the weight of criminal enforcement and the precision of a form completed in minutes.

The language was identical to every temporary order issued by this court. The facts underlying it were not. The person restrained was the person who had been poisoned.

Twelve days later, on June 1, 2021, Schauer convened her first full hearing on the case. The supervised visits that had been ordered for Steve’s mother, Linda Russell, had not occurred. The parties had failed to agree on a schedule. The court had been open for an hour and a half, and the conference had produced nothing.

DiFabio proposed three visits per week — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — starting at two hours, escalating to eight. Steve’s mother would supervise. Steve would have FaceTime access, facilitated by an independent monitor, with an eye toward his own visits beginning in the third week.

Weddle, Tara’s attorney, countered with alternating weekends, three hours Saturday and Sunday. He asked that Tara be present at the beginning of each visit. He asked that Steve not be physically present for any visit. He noted that the Walsh grandparents were unwilling to help facilitate transfers. The reason: they were tired of being sued by Steve.

Then DiFabio said something that stopped the hearing.

Steve’s mother had made the drive. She had driven six and a half hours from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, arrived at the Walsh compound, and been told to leave. The Walshes had spoken to her directly.

Court orders in the trash. Schauer acknowledged the threat and moved on. There would be consequences, she said, if that’s what happened. No further inquiry. No follow-up order. No enforcement mechanism.

The hearing continued for another forty-five minutes. The parties could not agree on a day of the week, the number of hours, the transfer location, or who would be present. Schauer grew impatient. She told the room that if they could not reach agreement, she would impose a schedule herself: one that would inconvenience everyone. She meant it. She issued the order on the record: one visit per week, every Thursday, 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. Grandmother picks up Evie from Tara, keeps her for the day, returns her by end of day. No tape recording. No public dissemination of photographs or video. Steve would not be physically present. Transfers at the Kittle House, within the town of New Castle.

One day a week for a grandmother who had driven thirteen hours round trip to be offered twenty minutes.

Steve mentioned, almost as an aside, that the Battery trial in San Francisco was starting in one week — June 7th or 8th. Two court systems, three thousand miles apart, processing the same set of facts simultaneously. In California, a jury was about to hear evidence of poisoning, battery, and fraud. In New York, the court was negotiating whether a grandmother could spend eight hours with the child whose father had been poisoned.

Schauer’s style was immediately clear. She took control. She overrode both parties. She issued orders quickly and with confidence. What she did not do was examine the substance beneath the procedure. The Walsh family’s stated intention to ignore court orders was acknowledged and set aside. The poisoning evidence sitting in the case file was not mentioned. The case moved forward on the assumption that what mattered was scheduling, not the facts that had brought the parties before her.

Schauer did two things in the months that followed.

She vacated the Horowitz default. The order that had been entered when Steve arrived at a closed door — the default built on a remote appearance denied at five o’clock, the overnight flight that was impossible — was undone. On consent, with Walsh’s attorney agreeing, the procedural defect was acknowledged and removed. The permanent Order of Protection and the custody order that had rested on that default were vacated.

But in vacating the default, Schauer reinstated the interim custody order giving Tara sole legal and physical custody. The procedural error was corrected. The custody arrangement remained identical. Schauer acknowledged the arrangement in her own words: “When in the very beginning of this case I vacated the Order of Custody which was issued on default against Mr. Russell, I probably should have said that the interim Order of Custody giving Ms. Walsh sole legal and physical custody was reinstated.”

The default was removed from the record. The custody order survived the surgery.

The second thing Schauer did was not grant Steve’s order of protection.

The California DVRO existed. Two defaults by Tara in the New York proceedings existed — she had failed to appear twice, and no consequence followed. The poisoning evidence existed. The laboratory reports existed. The evidentiary record supported a protective order.

Instead Schauer issued a second Temporary Order of Protection — this one on behalf of Steve against Tara. Now there were two. One against each party. Symmetrical restrictions. Each side restrained equally.

A Temporary Order of Protection is issued on petition. No hearing. No testimony. No finding of fact. It continues until the court schedules a final hearing to determine whether the evidence supports a permanent order — or, in the absence of that hearing, it continues without end. The mutual arrangement required no determination that either party had harmed the other. It required only petitions and the court’s decision not to schedule the proceeding that would have examined them.

At the August 27, 2021 hearing, when the procedural confusion had consumed more than an hour of argument and counterargument, Schauer’s attorney for the opposing side described the arrangement and the court confirmed it:

“As far as I know, each party has a Temporary Order of Protection against the other.”

“That’s correct.”

Steve told the court: “A permanent Temporary Order of Protection does not give me a chance to face my accuser.”

The court told him he was going down irrelevant paths.

The mutual arrangement treated the two sides as equivalent threats. The person who had been poisoned with lithium, quetiapine, and mycophenolic acid and the person who had administered those substances were restrained from contacting each other on identical terms. The symmetry was the court’s answer to asymmetry. Walsh Sr. had told Tara what settling would cost — Evie, transferred to the grandparents. Only one party in the mutual arrangement could not afford to end the case.

The August 27 hearing was a procedural marathon. Over an hour of appearances, motions, clarifications about which petitions were pending, which orders had been vacated, which dockets were active. Weddle, Tara’s attorney, said at one point: “When we started this conference, I thought I knew what was going on and now procedurally I’m lost.” He had been practicing family law in Westchester for years. The file had defeated even the people who were winning.

The court was not lost. The court knew exactly what it wanted to address and resented being asked to address anything else.

Steve attempted to explain the complex procedural history — the two final orders Horowitz had issued, one secretly given to Walsh ex parte, the Motion to Vacate that was “deliberately written” to address one order while preserving the other. Schauer cut him off.

“I know what I need to know.”

“You’re muddying the record.”

“Scattered gunshot.”

“It’s not organized and it’s not helpful to me as a judge to understand exactly what you’re trying to do.”

“I strongly encourage you to get an attorney.”

Steve had an attorney. DiFabio was present — the same attorney who had stood beside him at the June 1 hearing, who had filed the recusal motion that triggered Humphrey’s retaliatory order. But Humphrey’s blanket recusal had eliminated roughly a third of DiFabio’s Westchester practice. Every case, present and future. The financial damage cascaded through the summer. By August, DiFabio could no longer service Steve’s representation at the level the case required. He transitioned to representing Linda Russell — Steve’s mother — and Steve was left to address the court himself, navigating a file the judge described as the largest she had ever seen, without counsel, because the previous judge had punished his attorney for filing a motion the court had granted.

Schauer’s rhetoric carried a particular quality. She was not interested in whether what Steve was saying was true. She was interested in whether he was saying it correctly — in the right form, at the right time, in the right sequence, with the right deference. When he said something accurate but procedurally inconvenient, it was “muddying the record.” When he tried to address the substance beneath the procedure, he was “going down paths that are irrelevant.”

“Scattered gunshot.” The court’s preferred metaphor. The image belongs to hunting — a shotgun that disperses pellets because it cannot aim. What the metaphor described was a pro se litigant filing motions across multiple docket numbers because the procedural history demanded it: the default had generated separate orders, the vacatur had spawned new proceedings, the mutual TOPs sat on a docket of their own. The scatter was the record’s architecture, not the litigant’s — though the court, which had inherited a file assembled by four judges in three courthouses across three years, read the record’s incoherence as the litigant’s disorganization and prescribed the cure of an attorney it had made impossible for him to retain.

The court measured participation in obedience.

At the same hearing, the Attorney for the Child was relieved.

Jennifer Jackman had been the AFC since the case began in Westchester. She had been present at the June 1 hearing eight weeks earlier, recommending weekend visits as a starting point, speaking in the measured cadences of a professional managing a difficult case. She had been present when the bruises were documented and when Guttridge wrote his letter denying any bruises existed. She had dismissed the pinch marks on Evie with scare quotes and declined to investigate Steve’s poisoning reports. She had received his correspondence about the laboratory evidence. She had watched four judges cycle through the case and done nothing to alter the trajectory.

On August 27, 2021, Jackman filed an Order to Show Cause to be relieved as AFC. No explanation was offered. No final report. No account of what she had observed across three years and four judges. The court granted it on consent.

“You are relieved, Ms. Jackman.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. May I be excused?”

Five sentences. The woman who had been charged with representing a child’s interests through a poisoning case, a custody dispute, an ambush, and the discovery of bruises excused herself without documenting any of it. The silence was itself a form of the Pontius Pilate pattern — not washing her hands of the evidence, but walking out of the room where the evidence sat.

That left the case without an attorney for the child. The court noted that “limited progress” could be made until a new one was appointed.

The case had been reset. The procedural error was undone. But the reset did not return the visits that had been lost. It did not address the poisoning. It did not examine the supervision manipulation or the ambush or the bruises or the disappeared reports. It did not give Steve a hearing on the temporary order that restrained him. It corrected procedure and left everything else exactly where it had been.

The case had been reset. The clock returned to zero. Evie was five now. Every procedural reset consumed months. Every month was time that could not be recovered. The file got thicker. The child got older. And each new judge started from scratch with a case she described as the largest she had ever seen, in a courtroom where the only acceptable form of participation was silence.

Kelly had watched all of it. She had watched Gordon-Oliver recuse. She had watched Horowitz enter a default on a manufactured absence. She had watched Humphrey recuse after attacking DiFabio in the written order. Now she watched Schauer vacate the default, issue mutual orders, and tell Steve his attempts to address the substance of his case were “scattered gunshot.”

Four judges. Not the same rulings, but the same outcome: nothing changed for Evie. The file was reassigned. The mutual orders were issued. And the case continued.