Family turns tragedy into benefit for others

As of Tuesday, December 14, relatives in Michigan will be given special consideration when children are placed into foster care by the Department of Human Services. It was on that day that Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm signed House Bill 4118 into law. HB4118 is also known as the “Amer Act,” after Ahmed and Rehab Amer, who helped draft the legislation and pushed for the bill to be passed into law.

(L-R) Ahmed Amer, Rehab Amer, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, 49th District State Rep. Lee Gonzalez, and Hussein Amer pose after signing the Amer Act into law in Lansing.

“I feel it is a victory that took us over two decades,” said Rehab Amer. “It took a lot for this to become a law.” Although the Department of Human Services says it is a policy to place children who are removed from their home with relatives if possible, doing so is now a law.

“We are just blessed to have this, preventing others from going through what we went through,” she said. “Other families will be better protected.”

The Amers lost two children to foster care in 1985 when Rehab was charged with negligence in the death of her two-year-old son Samier, who died from injuries sustained from a fall in the bathtub. Rehab had stepped a few steps away to answer the phone. She was charged with negligence and the reason listed on Samier’s death certificate was homicide. Ahmed and Rehab worked hard to prove her innocence. But even after an acquittal by a jury a year later in 1986 and a court order to have their children returned to them, what was then called the Family Independence Agency refused to return the children. In fact, a third child was taken shortly after birth directly from the hospital, four months after her acquittal.

Amer said her brother petitioned to be a foster parent, but was denied although he had fostered other children. Instead the children, Mohamed Ali, 3, Suehier,1, and Zinabe, four months, were sent to live with a Christian family in Clarkston, Michigan, given non-Muslim names and raised as Christians with a bias against Islam and Muslims. It was well known that the Amer’s Muslim faith was why the social workers would not return their children.

“My children were torn apart from their heritage and who they are,” Rehab Amer said. “They didn’t accept who they are or where they came from.” The Amers contacted their children 14 years later in 2001, only to learn that both Suehier and Zinabe believed Rehab was responsible for Samier’s death. Only Mohamed  Ali, 28, who is now named Adam, believed she was innocent. “The first time he walked into my house was August 13, 2001, exactly 15 years after the day I was acquitted. I saw it as a sign.”

The Amers continued trying to prove her innocence to their other two children. Their persistence was nothing short of amazing. They both performed constant community service at their mosque and demonstrated remarkable faith. Finally, in 2003, they were forced to exhume the body of Samier, at which time a Swedish physician who specialized in brittle bone disease, shared the news at a news conference in Detroit that Samier had suffered from the rare brittle bone disease which caused the injuries resulting in his death. Rehab had indeed taken her baby son repeatedly to the hospital claiming that he cried often and touching him caused him pain. The doctors missed the brittle bone disease on the xrays.

“We took our new evidence to the court, that our beloved son Samier’s death was caused by an accidental fall,” she said. The death certificate was then changed to show the cause of death as accidental.

Still the Amers only have a relationship with Mohamed Ali, who even has Rehab listed as his mother on the social-networking website, Facebook. “He came on the 24th of November this year, with his son, and spent two days with us for Thanksgiving.”  Suhier and Zinabe do not speak with her.

“As parents we were put on an emotional roller coaster. Our kids are victims and there is no way I would let this happen to another family or child and let them go through what we went (through),” said Rehab. “It’s not just about Muslims. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Christian or Jew. This law has no color, no prejudice. It doesn’t matter who you are. A child has a right to know who he is.”

The Amers initially worked with state Rep. Gino Polidori to develop the legislation in 2006.  The legislative process was completed December 10th when Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop and Majority Floor Leader Alan Cropsey scheduled the bill for a vote on the last day of the legislative year.

The Amers could easily have retreated into bitterness. Instead they took a tragedy they will never outlive or forget and turned it into a positive act to protect the rest of Michigan’s children.