When Heather Wallace’s eight-year-old son had a tantrum on the drive home from school, she gave him an ultimatum that’s all too familiar to many frazzled parents: Behave yourself or you’re walking home.
When Aiden refused to calm down — kicking and hitting his four-year-old brother Declan — Heather stopped half a mile from their home in Hewitt, Texas, and told him to get out of the car.
Aiden knew the route well through their safe, suburban neighborhood. He would cross only side roads — at which he knew to look left and right — and had already walked home on his own several times.
Plus, after a long day at school, having ten minutes away from Heather, Declan and his seven-year-old brother Liam usually improved Aiden’s mood.
But, that sunny afternoon in October 2021, his short walk came at a cost: a $9,595 legal-fee cost to be precise.
Because — less than 15 minutes after dropping Aiden off — Heather was arrested, charged with child endangerment and put on a Child Protective Services (CPS) watchlist.
Now, almost four years on, the married mother-of-three is speaking out for the first time about her shocking ordeal.
‘It was a living nightmare,’ Heather, now 40, tells the Daily Mail through tears. ‘I get so emotional when I think of what happened to our family. It turned our lives upside down.’
And it was all because of one car drive.
That fateful afternoon — around 4.40pm on October 19, 2021 — Heather remembers Aiden being ‘out of sorts’ when she picked him up from an after-school karate class three miles from their home.
He had just finished his second day at a new school and — clearly ‘overstimulated’ — he began to misbehave not long after he got into her Toyota Sienna.
‘I said, “Kids who are calm are welcome to stay in the car,”’ Heather recalls. ‘But he obviously didn’t calm down. So, when we reached a certain spot where I felt comfortable, I dropped him off.’
The sleep consultant had no worries about leaving him there given how well Aiden knew the route. ‘I thought that when he arrived home he’d be a lot more relaxed and we’d put the behavior behind us,’ she recalls.
But as Aiden walked back, clutching his leaf-patterned T-shirt which he’d taken off in the heat, he was spotted by a passer-by who dialed 911.
In a recording of the call, the worried neighbor said that Aiden looked about six years old and seemed like ‘the perfect target for somebody to kidnap’.
Those words triggered a devastating chain of events which, Heather claims, were vastly out of proportion — and which almost destroyed the lives of her, her 50-year-old husband Scott and their three children.
Around 5pm, less than 15 minutes after she dropped off Aiden, a cop knocked on the door of Heather’s four-bedroom family home.
The officer claimed that ‘several people’ — though it turned out to be the one caller — had phoned the authorities because they were worried Aiden was in danger.
The police bodycam footage showed Heather leaning against the bricked entrance to her house in bemusement while Aiden was made to wait in the cop car.
‘To have an eight-year-old get out of the car and walk by himself, that’s a big problem,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t know who’s in that white van.’
He asked if Heather thought her actions were appropriate, stressing that he wouldn’t let his own child — a four-month-old baby, it oddly transpired — stray ’20 or 30 feet’.
And he said that he’d seen terrible things happen to kids on his usual beat in downtown Waco — a city of 145,000 people around ten miles away — adding that Heather would ‘feel bad’ if something happened to Aiden, who was two months’ shy of his ninth birthday.
Heather, a former pre-K schoolteacher, was astonished. ‘One of the reasons we’d moved from another suburb was to live in a safe neighborhood where our kids could play outside and ride on their bikes,’ she says now. ‘Downtown Waco is a whole different place.’
She told the cop that she and her husband were ‘intentional’ in what they allowed their children to do and said she trusted Aiden to walk home on his own.
But the officer wasn’t happy with her attitude.
In the footage, he then told her to put her hands behind her back and placed her in cuffs. Declan, who was standing in the doorway with Liam, was heard gasping in shock.
By this point, Scott was driving back from the office where he worked as a mechanical engineer. He got home to find an emotional Heather on the doorstep, while inquisitive neighbors watched from a distance.
CPS officials were then summoned by police to question both Heather and Scott. They asked the three boys if they were OK — they said yes — and entered the house to look for signs of neglect.
During their inspection, Heather was driven to McLennan County Jail on the outskirts of Waco. She was led into a cell with only a toilet, blanket and a metal bench where a fellow prisoner lay asleep on the floor.
‘I had absolutely no idea what was going on back at home,’ she recalls. ‘I thought my husband was going to be furious with me and I didn’t know if our kids were going to be taken away.’
She spent a sleepless night crying on the bench until she was charged with child endangerment around 4am. She was released nine hours later on $3,000 bail.
When she got home, an exhausted Scott told her that he’d agreed to a ‘safety plan’ the CPS had provided the night before.
‘He didn’t know what a “safety plan” meant,’ Heather says, sobbing at the memory. ‘He was confused and in terror that the children might be taken away.’
The ‘plan’, which the couple regret signing, ruled that neither parent could be alone with their sons. Over the following three weeks, the children’s grandparents took turns staying at the house to care for them.
The CPS dropped their investigation within a month, after the family paid a lawyer $3,500 to deal with the government agency.
But that didn’t stop the district attorney from pressing ahead with the case against her.
Two weeks after her arrest, Heather was charged with child endangerment. Prosecutor Tara Avants went so far as to claim that Heather, who had a clean record, had put Aiden in ‘imminent danger of death’ and had acted ‘against the peace and dignity of the state’.
From that point on, Heather says her reputation started to unravel. She felt ‘shamed’ by other parents in her circle and was forced to resign from the sleep consultancy where she worked.
It wasn’t until April 2022 that the prosecution settled on a plea deal with Heather’s attorney. As part of this, she says she was forced to write an essay admitting guilt, including the lines: ‘I did not put eyes on him. This put him in danger.’
She was put on a Pre-Trial Intervention program — for which she paid $400 — which included parenting classes and 65 hours’ community service. If she then satisfied the courts, Heather says, she would not formally enter the justice system and her record would be erased.
‘People often ask why I agreed to the plea when I was innocent,’ Heather says. ‘But our lawyer explained that, whether we won the trial or not, the process would cost us more than $7,000.’
By this point, the couple had already spent $5,000 on a trial attorney and were ‘drowning in debt’.
What’s more, if a jury were to find her guilty of child endangerment, she would have faced up to two years in prison. ‘I couldn’t take that risk for the sake of my husband and my sons,’ Heather says.
She took the parenting classes and completed the community service, cleaning a school for special needs children.
To some extent, her actions paid off. The charges were dismissed in December 2022 and her records expunged after she paid a $695 paperwork fee.
But the saga had already taken a heavy toll on the family which, Heather says, continued long afterwards.
She was put on medication for anxiety and PTSD while Scott severely struggled with his mental health. He checked into a treatment center for six weeks over the summer of 2022, even telling his wife that he ‘didn’t care’ if he woke up in the morning.
‘There was a lot of fear on his part, especially because I was the one having to complete the program and do everything I was supposed to do,’ Heather says.
‘He felt powerless and scared that, if we made just one misstep, the CPS would be back at our door.’
As for the boys, Heather says it was difficult to gauge how traumatized Aiden, Liam and Declan were at the time.
‘It kicked in later,’ she tells me. ‘Things weren’t easy because they picked up their mom and dad’s declining mental health.’
The boys became more introverted, preferring to play video games rather than socializing. They were also terrified to play outside or walk to places nearby. ‘They were constantly looking over their shoulders,’ Heather recalls. ‘I really do fear what harm it did to their childhoods.’
Still, the family has worked hard to repair the damage. Last fall, Scott was transferred from his job in Hewitt to Melissa, north of Dallas.
They moved into their new house — 150 miles from Hewitt — six months ago. ‘We’re so relieved to be out of there,’ Heather says.
The couple took pains to choose a neighborhood where kids play outside and are encouraged to roam.
‘We wanted to live somewhere where the kids felt secure enough to feel free again,’ says Heather, who now moderates a Facebook group established by the non-profit, Let Grow, that promotes childhood independence.
The Waco Police Department confirmed that Heather’s charge was expunged and directed the Daily Mail to the District Attorney’s office. The DA was contacted for comment.
The Texas department handling the CPS case gave no comment, saying ‘all information is confidential by law’.
So where does that leave Heather? After all, given her astonishing ordeal, does she feel like a victim of the authorities or the so-called ‘nanny state’?
‘It’s hard for me to take a stance, especially as a former educator who cares about children so much,’ Heather says carefully. ‘I always thought that CPS and the police getting involved was a good thing.
‘Of course, there are children at risk who desperately need protection, but who knows how many families have been punished without warranty, like me?
‘This was a perfect storm of institutionalized and socialized paranoia. Our family was caught in the center.’
Do you have a powerful story to share about a relationship? Please email Jane Ridley, real-life correspondent at The Daily Mail US, at [email protected]