When Jackie Rubio walked into the courtroom, she believed that guardianship over her grandson, the child of her murdered son, was to be officially handed over to her.
The district attorney had walked her through a moment by moment replay of the murder of her son, which had been captured on video and audio via her son’s car dashcam. The district attorney’s office as well as law enforcement officers who had been present at the murder scene had assured her that in this hearing she would formally receive guardianship.
But when Jackie Rubio entered that courtroom alone, she rapidly became aware of the alternate reality that faced her—a reality that was counter to the protection of her grandson. The first thing she saw was a large screen showing a live video of the woman who had murdered her son, smiling and waving at her supporters. These supporters of the criminal included four defense attorneys who had been retained via a criminal court grant for her defense, two evaluators from the Cascades Family Resolution Center, additional friends and family, and the criminal’s mother, who was also seeking custody of the 7-year-old child.
Jackie Rubio thought that guardianship would be awarded to her. But to her horror she found that it was in fact awarded to the family of the woman who murdered her son, as the murderess retained all parenting privileges and custody determinations to be made.
The backstory
Jackie Rubio was the mother of Devyne Briggs, who at age 28 had a good life to look forward to.
At the beginning of the Christmas season 2022, Devyne had anticipated gaining full custody of his 7-year-old son, as he was about to present evidence to the court regarding the unfitness of the child’s mother, from whom Devyne was divorced. Engaged to a young woman, he was secure in his work life and relationships with his nuclear and extended families. He was respected as a good citizen and a contributor to the welfare of the community.
Devyne looked forward to soon being able to welcome his son into the environment in which he was loved and surrounded by friends and family.
On December 16, 2022, Devyne drove to the home of his ex-wife and her family to pick up his son for visitation. He parked at the front steps.
Devyne had set his car dashcam to record every movement, because of a pattern of vicious false allegations that had been lodged against him. These false allegations had been solidly disproven by hard evidence presented in court.
When he opened the door of his car to get out, Paige Vannorsdall, Devyne’s ex-wife and mother of his son, shot Devyne directly in the chest.
The district attorney’s office described this first shot as a kill shot, as it went through the main artery to his heart. Devyne should have died instantly, but instead he pulled himself up and moved forward, hands outstretched to stop the bullets, as he fell through the front doorway into the living room of the house.
Paige Vannorsdall continued to shoot Devyne at close range, for a total of nine bullets in his body.
Paige’s grandmother, Linda Jones, was present in the living room. She can be heard on the car dashcam screaming for Paige to stop shooting. The remaining sounds of the gunshots were also heard on the dashcam.
Police arrived at the scene within minutes.
To be clear, the murderess was not facing domestic violence, abuse, or any form of mitigating circumstances that would have even begun to allow her actions to be described as protecting herself or her son. In fact, the opposite is true: clear and convincing evidence exists, medically and legally demonstrating that the mother was in fact the abuser of this child and the murder victim was seeking to protect his child from an abusive and dangerous situation.
At the time of the murder, the child was in the house waiting for his father to pick him up for visitation. Policemen carried him out of the house with a jacket over his head so he wouldn’t see his father’s body, but the circumstances around the death made it impossible for the child not to be aware that his mother had murdered his father. However, the family of Paige Vannorsdall and others insist that the child did not know that his mother murdered his father and is not even aware that his father is dead.
Devyne’s body was not removed from the scene for a number of days because of the crime scene investigation that had to take place. Once his body was removed, no crime scene decontamination team came to deal with the bloody, gory crime scene. Those who cleaned up the physical scene of the crime consisted of Paige’s family and friends.
How the case went awry
In Oregon, where this crime took place, there is no law clearly stating that a parent who has murdered the other parent loses parental rights.
The loophole by which the family of the murderess was able to gain control over guardianship litigation involved the fact that the department of Child Protective Services was not contacted at the time of the murder.
At the time of the murder DHS should have been contacted and taken custody of the child as a ward of the state. But this did not happen. When they were finally contacted, they deferred taking control of the case and allowed the mother of the child, the murderess of the child’s father, to be in control of the decisions related to guardianship.
Because DHS refused to take custody and make the child a ward of the state, the maternal authority reigned. DHS supported the mother in assuming her parental rights and supported her in all decision making. That decision making awarded Paige’s mother, Melissa Jones, full custody and control of the child. Her mother was then empowered to make all decisions, medical, legal, and psychiatric, for the child.
This decision included that the child would have no contact whatsoever with his paternal grandmother, Jackie Rubio, the mother of the murdered man.
In the custody of the maternal grandmother the child was brought back into the house in which his father had been murdered. He was removed from school and sports, and to the best of our knowledge has remained entirely isolated from friends and family other than those of the maternal grandmother.
The child’s situation, which was tragic and traumatic, has now been made exponentially worse, as he is in the exclusive custody and isolation of the family of the murderess. There is no objective evidence or statement as to his state of mind.
How Family Resolution of the Cascades made things worse
Complicit in the defamation and reinventing history are the evaluators, Jan Falk and Tim Brannan of Family Resolution of the Cascades. Falk and Brannan worked closely and directly with the legal defense team retained by government grants to defend the murderess Paige Vannorsdall.
To provide context, Jackie Rubio was told that if she hoped to attain guardianship of the child, she would need to live close to the child’s school in the Madras, Oregon, area rather than in her home in eastern Oregon, so that his life in the community and his education would be maintained.
She did move from her stunning and impeccable 5-bedroom home on a 20-acre farm and in the midst of an extremely difficult housing market she found a rental house near the child’s school, a 2-bedroom house on 100 acres of land.
Initially she rented a mobile home because it was impossible to find property. The mobile home was inspected and approved by the child’s attorney, David Haskett.
The evaluators from Family Resolution of the Cascades made false accusations about Jackie Rubio’s living conditions. The driveway was not a dirt road 3 miles long. The tires on the roof were not there to hold down the roof (but to protect against lightning strikes).
The team of evaluators questioned her ownership of the 5-bedroom house in eastern Oregon, yet she had the deed and all ownership documentation available for review.
But the baseless accusations and easily proven lies in this hearsay document provided by these evaluators was accepted by the court because DHS refused to take responsibility for the child and assume custody of him.
The incomprehensibly incompetent, defamatory, corrupt, and unprofessional evaluation performed by Falk and Brannan will be attached with a line by line critique of the content.
The process by which this campaign against the paternal grandmother and her family was conducted is also detailed in the affidavits of associates of the victim Devyne, the collateral contacts that were interviewed. The way the interviews were conducted indicates not only bias but outright hostility and malevolence toward the family and associates of the family, who do not deserve the hostile vindictive rhetoric to which members of the Rubio and Briggs families were subject.
The interviews began with, “Did you know that Jackie Rubio is an alcoholic drug addict with a criminal history?”
Needless to say, this question is not structured to elicit open ended objective responses. Witnesses to the behavior of these two evaluators have provided affidavits stating that they felt they were duped into thinking that they were providing objective testimony supporting Jackie Rubio and her family in obtaining guardianship, but they realized that these evaluators were creating an atmosphere of harm to Jackie Rubio and seeking to eliminate any possibility of her ability to get guardianship.
In addition, the description of the interaction in the interview between the minor child and the team of Falk and Brannan was beyond ludicrous. These statements are also commented upon in the line by line critique to follow.
Where things stand now
The long form death certificate describing every injury and every aspect of the desecration of Devyne’s body is included in this report. It is being sent to the family court judge and to all oversight bodies that have authority over the licenses of the so-called expert evaluators who collaborated with the attorneys for Paige Vannorsdall, the murderess, and the defense attorneys who maneuvered the guardianship transfer away from Jackie Rubio and to Paige Vannorsdall’s mother.
At this point the maternal grandmother, the mother of the murderess, who currently has guardianship of the 7 year old child, has moved to Montana with the child. The paternal grandmother, Jackie Rubio, could potentially lose any possibility of accessing the child at all.
It is incomprehensible and counterintuitive to wrap one’s head around the fact that a parent who is a documented abuser of a child can murder the person who is the documented protector of that child and then the abuser who has committed premeditated first degree brutal murder can maintain extensive control over the life of the child and successfully exclude family members who are seeking to protect the child from all access to the child.
In today’s family courts across the USA child abusers and murderers are gaining full custody of children. Protective Parents are losing all contact with their children. To further the pure hell and insanity faced by children and parents in these situations, parents and children are ordered into reunification “therapy.” This so called therapy is ordered so that Protective parents and children are trained / coerced brainwashed into believing that abuse is not abuse, the parent / child bond, however horrendous the parent, the child must be forced into a relationship with that parent. Other correlates of the treatment involve there was no abuse, the child is lying, misreading the event or “it really was not that bad.” The amount of money spent on these unconscionable, illegal services, rubber stamped by licensing boards across the country, pumping out unethical providers to the courts are creating a population of dysfunctional and or criminal adults, thus undermining the democratic institutions that rely upon educated, functional citizens.
