On July 17, 2017, at the Carl Robinson Correctional Institution, Inmate Number 230558 was issued a disciplinary report, placed on a 60-day probationary period and moved into a more secure dormitory for trying to carry contraband into a supervised visit.
The visit was with his 2-year-old daughter, Jewelyette.
The contraband in question: a crayon.
Inmate Number 230558, known outside the prison as John Masserio Jr., would later write to the parole board that he had only wanted to “color and make a memory with my daughter.” He didn’t want the indiscretion to hinder his efforts to get his daughter out of foster care when he was released.
“Did I just seal my fate?” he asked the parole board.
Masserio was granted probation and released in 2018. When he left, he donated a set of crayons for other prisoners to use during visits with their children. Then he continued his fight to regain custody of his daughter.
What unfolded over the next few years was a complicated legal and emotional journey for everyone involved — Masserio; John and Diana Norman, the foster family caring for his daughter; and Jewelyette herself.
Masserio spent that time imploring officials at the state Department of Children and Families to help him get his daughter back. Meanwhile, the Normans battled to adopt Jewelyette and for their legal right to have a say about what would happen to the child who lived with them for seven years.
That legal battle would wind its way through appeals and eventually land before the state Supreme Court, which overturned 2023 case law and established that foster families have the right to be legal intervenors in some cases involving foster children.
The case, which irrevocably changed the course of Jewelyette’s childhood, occurred amid a persistent national debate about the best role for foster parents in court hearings. Foster family advocacy groups want more legal rights, while biological families and their advocates say it makes it harder for children to reunify with their families.
The Connecticut Mirror conducted interviews and exchanged messages with Masserio over the course of two years, interviewed the Normans, spoke with dozens of experts and people involved with the case and reviewed thousands of pages of documents related to Masserio’s case.
At the heart of Jewelyette’s story is a fundamental tension of the foster care system itself: some families foster to adopt, or fall in love with a child and decide to adopt, even while biological families fight to get their children back.
During his August 2017 parole hearing, Masserio asked the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles for a chance, saying that he feared if parole was denied, his parental rights would be terminated.
“I am asking you to please give me this chance to be reunited with my daughter and preserve my family,” he said in his opening statement.
After about 20 minutes of questioning, some of which centered on the crayon incident, the board granted Masserio parole. He was released a few months later, but the struggle to get custody of Jewelyette was far from over.
The beginning
Masserio, a tall man with broad shoulders and brown eyes that crinkle at the edges with his smile, described the day his daughter was born as “the best day of my life.” His partner chose the name, but Masserio decided how to spell it.
He wanted it to be special, something just for her, he said in an interview.
“She is precious to me, like a jewel,” he wrote in a folder of notes about the custody case.
Before they had a child, Jewelyette’s mother was using drugs and Masserio was drinking, according to DCF documents. The police were called repeatedly to their home for domestic disturbances.
But when he found out his girlfriend was pregnant, Masserio said he tried to get sober, but had setbacks, as there are with many sobriety journeys. When Jewelyette was born in 2015, she tested positive for exposure to substances and went through withdrawals. She had to stay in the neonatal intensive care unit for weeks while she recovered.
Over the next several months, Masserio struggled with his sobriety. He was pulled over in 2016, and charged with his third-ever DUI. This one landed him in prison, where he served a sentence with a three-year maximum that began in June 2016.
DCF records show that he regularly attended his monthly supervised visits with his daughter, even while incarcerated. In letters, he asked the cousin Jewelyette lived with for more — more updates, more photos, more contact with Jewelyette.
“Jewelyette is so adorable,” he wrote to the family member. “Please put yourself in my shoes for 1 min. She is my only daughter and I will never give up on her.”
As for Masserio, DCF workers noted that his maximum release date was three years away.
“His maximum release date is 5/26/19, therefore he will not be available as a reunification or parenting resource for Jewelyette … in a reasonable time frame,” they wrote in the documents that recommended terminating his rights. “Even if he is released early, he will need a period of time to reestablish housing, employment.”
DCF then pursued a plan to terminate both biological parents’ rights to Jewelyette so she could be adopted by her foster family.
Jewelyette had, at this point, been in foster care for more than 15 of the last 22 months. Federal law mandates that a child must be on a path to permanency within that timeframe — either in the process of adoption or reunification.
Advocates for family preservation say the timeline punishes families who have trouble finding housing, for example, or parents who are incarcerated.
“The ASFA [Adoption and Safe Families Act] timelines, which is what we’re talking about here, are an obscenity as well, in that they do not count what’s called relational permanence. He’s visiting, he’s trying to maintain contact,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
DCF works with the Department of Correction to facilitate visitations between parents and children. Parents also still have the opportunity to participate in administrative hearings and to come to court when necessary, said Ken Mysogland, DCF’s chief administrator of external affairs.
DCF also tries to connect recently incarcerated parents with services, officials said.
“It’s difficult for parents to have access to services, to address the reason why the children came into care. Visitation is limited when parents are incarcerated, and we have to take into consideration the length of time that a parent may be incarcerated,” said Maritza Velez, chief of child welfare at DCF. “We have to think about, what does that mean, and how does that impact a child?”
Masserio appealed decisions and attended hearings. His files show he took courses in anger management, attended group sessions to talk about sobriety, and took a parenting class.
Another home
At the age of 2, as her father entered his second year of incarceration in 2017, Jewelyette was moved to a new foster home after the first adoption plan fell through. DCF told the new foster family the agency was pushing to terminate parental rights.
That family was the Normans.
John Norman was on the fence about having children until he met his now-wife, Diana Norman. Their friends had children, and seeing them become parents convinced Norman. The Normans quickly learned they couldn’t have biological children, however, so they decided to adopt.
In 2014, they got licensed as foster parents, and Norman said DCF put them on the “foster to adopt” track. DCF officials say they always make it clear that foster placements are temporary, but Norman says that was far from true in their case.
“Typically, when a child comes into care, the plan is reunification,” Velez said. That isn’t always possible, she added, but it’s what DCF strives for.
Despite those goals, Connecticut children who come into foster care are less likely, on average, to be reunified with their parents, according to federal data. About 39% of children who exited foster care in Connecticut in fiscal year 2024 were reunified with their parents, compared to 45% nationally. In Connecticut, about 29% of children who left foster care in fiscal year 2024 were adopted, compared to 27% nationally. Others age out of the system.
The Normans adopted their older daughter, Peyton, after fostering her for two years. Jewelyette, then 2, was placed with them on the day of their daughter’s 4th birthday, and in a family of mild-mannered, quiet people, she was loud. They called her “the megaphone.”
“It was funny,” Norman said. “Jewelyette was just loud, which we liked.” She was a happy child, he added.
John Norman agreed to be interviewed for this story, but his wife did not join him because she still finds the topic too distressing to discuss.
DCF workers told them it would be “the easiest case” because her mother’s parental rights had already been terminated and they planned to terminate her biological father’s rights in a matter of months, Norman said.
“So we took her. Ten years later, she’s still …,” Norman said, trailing off. “Things don’t always work out the way they tell you.”
They gave her a bedroom all to herself, which was painted green and decorated with Minnie Mouse ears. They put her in tae kwon do and swimming lessons, took her to specialists for her allergies. When they played family games, their older daughter and Diana Norman would be on one team, and Jewelyette and John Norman on the other. He said she was his “little buddy.”
“My wife and I’d be in another room, and just out of nowhere, Jewelyette would be like, ‘Daddy, I love you,’ same with my wife, and so it kind of breaks my heart the way this went down,” he said, tears in his eyes.
Meanwhile, Masserio worried about his daughter’s psychological well-being because she withdrew and acted out during visits, he said.
Over time, the friction between Masserio and the Normans became obvious. There were frequent irritants and misunderstandings, such as Jewelyette spelling her name differently, which Masserio said was done at the foster family’s behest. Gone was the “Jewel” that he’d given her. She scribbled “Juliet” at the top of her math homework.
Norman said this was an accident. They planned to change the spelling of her name once she was adopted, so her teachers taught her to write it both ways. The shorter spelling — Juliet — was easier and stuck with the child.
During one visit, she told Masserio that Norman was her real dad.
“You’re not my daddy, I can only have one daddy,” he recalled her saying. “My Mommy and Daddy hate you,” she said another time.
“They’re just tearing at my heart,” Masserio said in a 2023 interview. By then, Jewelyette was 8.
Norman said that’s not true, that he thinks Jewelyette didn’t understand the concepts of a biological family or a foster family.
“I think in her head, I’m her dad. He’s the guy in the visits is what she would say,” Norman said.
Masserio, the second youngest in a household of seven siblings and step-siblings, wanted her to be connected to her family as much as possible. He took her on a visit to John D. Masserio Park, named for his father, in Berlin. The family had donated the land to the town to create the park.
For a while, even though he’d found an apartment and ran a construction company, Masserio tried to get on board with the adoption plan. He suggested to the Normans that they enter an open adoption. He wanted to see Jewelyette at least twice a year — sometime around her birthday and Christmas — and asked for school pictures to be mailed to him every year.
They declined, instead offering only school pictures and occasional written updates.
Norman said he and his wife didn’t trust John to stick with that plan and DCF was still on the path toward terminating Masserio’s parental rights, so they didn’t think they needed to make a deal.
“I have moments that it’s between heartbroken and frustrated, and that it went down this way,” Norman said. “I keep thinking back to all the things we should have done. That offer about the open adoption agreement, that sort of thing, I think about things like that. So if we only pursued that more.”
Reunification
In 2020, Masserio and Jewelyette got a new team of DCF social workers. This isn’t uncommon for DCF, where about a third of newly hired workers leave the agency within a year, and another 20% leave in the second year.
The agency is examining ways to improve its retention rate, including hiring a new director of organizational development to look at recruitment.
“Turnover can negatively impact the length of time it takes to achieve a positive outcome on a case,” DCF’s Mysogland said.
Jewelyette’s journey through the foster care system veered when the new team took over. They shifted her permanency plan, aiming to reunify her with Masserio.
For Masserio, it was a relief, an acknowledgement that he’d been right all along — his daughter belonged with him.
For the Normans, it sparked different emotions altogether. They filed motions asking to be party to the court case; Jewelyette had lived with them for seven years, and they thought she should stay with them.
“All Jewelyette ever said was, ‘I want to be adopted. I want to be a Norman,’” Norman said.
There are sundry reasons a case plan might switch from adoption to reunification, but they tend to boil down to the biological parents making some change that convinces DCF they are able to provide a safe and stable home for their child.
“Our decisions are very fluid, and so we could easily be heading down the track of TPR [termination of parental rights], but until that TPR is granted, we provide services to the family, continue to provide visitation, continue to assess the progress that the family is making,” Velez said.
The voice of the child is also a point of consideration. Jewelyette changed her mind frequently, according to court documents, and Masserio said her foster parents tried to influence her decision.
A DCF reunification readiness report noted that Jewelyette reported that her foster mother would scream at her if she said she had a good visit with her father, a claim the Normans deny. The worker said it seemed Jewelyette would report bad visits, even if she seemed to have a good time, to make her foster family happy.
“This clinician understands that if this child is removed from the care of FP [foster parents], the negative influence against her father as reinforced by FP will decrease and even disappear, and this will help the child to stop her pretending behavior that she does not like father. This child will be able to value and enjoy her father completely and her paternal family as well if there is nobody telling her the opposite,” the report says.
“The relationship of this child with her father will be made whole with reunification, helping this child to gain emotional stability.”
Norman said he and his wife avoided saying negative things about Masserio in front of Jewelyette. He said it was frustrating that DCF interpreted Jewelyette telling the Normans that she didn’t want to be with her father as anything other than her true feelings.
“I know there’s times she told us things just to make us happy, or things we wanted to hear. And so we knew that, and we talked to her about it,” Norman said. “I honestly believe Jewelyette’s voice wasn’t heard throughout this whole process.”
Legal filings
Whether and to what degree foster families should be allowed to participate in custody court cases has long been a subject of national debate. Connecticut law requires that foster families be given the opportunity to testify so they can tell the judge what they think is best for the child.
Generally, people involved in the child welfare system exist along an ideological spectrum.
On one end, there are abolitionists who believe the entire system is built on surveillance and separation of families. They think it should be abolished and a new system should be built from the ground up; that new system ought to be established on provision of services and keeping families together.
On the other end, there are advocates who think the state is too quick to favor family unification. Some believe foster parents should have more rights and that adoptions and termination of parental rights should be easier.
Connecticut has advocacy groups working on both ends of the spectrum to make changes to state law and DCF policy.
Research shows it’s best for kids to stay with their biological families whenever possible. The majority of children are taken from their homes during neglect cases, which are tied often to poverty, according to federal data.
A group of Connecticut foster families in 2022 lobbied the state legislature to pass a law offering them more rights. That law didn’t pass, but they kept trying.
“Foster parents are the ones on the front lines each and every day; we see what our children go through, and we understand the system very well,” Crystal Laffan, the group’s organizer, said in written testimony. “Yet we are rarely, if ever, consulted in our children’s cases nor in the policies governing their precious lives.”
Laffan told lawmakers on the Children’s Committee in early 2023 that she’d like foster parents to have the automatic right to intervene after a case has gone on for a year.
The law as written didn’t pass, although earlier this year, the legislature passed a law requiring DCF to develop a “foster parents’ bill of rights.”
Laffan said Indiana has one of the strongest pro-foster parent laws in the country. Initially, she and her group advocated for a version of that law, known as “Judah’s Law,” named for a 4-year-old who was tortured and killed by his biological father. He’d been placed there a few months before he was killed after being in foster care all his life.
The Indiana law sparked several other efforts in states across the country, including Connecticut.
The Normans were granted intervenor status in 2021, but claim their rights were violated. They argued they didn’t get enough opportunity to speak to the judge and were removed from hearings.
DCF filed to place Jewelyette with her father in 2021, but a judge ruled against the agency, and the girl stayed with her foster family.
In July 2023, a state appellate court ruled in a different case that a foster family should not have been allowed to intervene in a custody case involving their elementary-aged foster son, Ryan C. The case law offered an avenue for DCF’s attorney to shut down the Normans’ attempt to be a part of Jewelyette’s case.
Advocates like Wexler liken the idea of a foster family getting attached and trying to adopt a child to kidnapping.
“If I kidnap a child at birth, flee to Mexico, take really good care of him and come back in two years, can I keep him? That’s the equivalent here,” Wexler said. “They didn’t commit an illegal act in taking the child, but in terms of the notion that simply taking the child by force of law in this case, and holding the child somehow entitles you to that child forever is obscene.”
Acting Child Advocate Christina Ghio, who represented the Normans in their appeals when she was in private practice, said foster parent intervention should be rare, but possible. She said foster parents already have the right to be heard in court.
“There are times when the foster parent has information that would be helpful for the judge to have in making decisions that other parties may choose not to bring to the judge,” Ghio said. “A motion to intervene is only going to happen when there’s some really significant concern, and the foster parents don’t see another vehicle for raising those concerns.”
Even Dorene Masserio-Beach, one of Masserio’s older sisters, said it’s not clear what should be done.
“It’s a really, really tough thing, and I feel bad for them [the foster family] because they had this child ripped away from them,” she said.
DCF has in recent years worked to build better relationships between biological and foster families by holding meetings between the two early on and encouraging the foster families to ask questions of the biological family, such as about the child’s bedtime routine or favorite snacks.
The damage to those relationships, if foster families intervene in court cases, is a concern for DCF, Mysogland said.
“What we don’t want is for that to be an adversarial relationship between the foster parents and the birth parents,” Mysogland said. If foster families become party to the case “that certainly may lead to this adversarial relationship, which is counter to the quality parenting work we are trying to build, which we know is so successful for children and families.”
After the Ryan C. case decision was released, Jewelyette and her father moved more quickly toward reunification. They had more frequent and longer visits. He prepared a room for her at his home, painting it pink and hanging curtains with his sister.
For years, he’d been buying Jewelyette clothes and toys, hoping for the day she would live with him again. The room overflowed with stuffed unicorns, plastic horses and books.
“He was so excited,” said Karleen Masserio-Giarratana, Masserio’s older sister. “He was ready to spoil that girl.”
She tried to talk him into taking some of the clothes and toys back because no one child could use that much, she said, but he refused. He was making up for lost time.
In August 2024, Jewelyette moved into her father’s Farmington apartment, and had a handful of supervised visits with the Normans, who were still appealing for custody in court.
Her foster family didn’t have any warning that she would be taken, Norman said. His wife and daughter went on a trip that week, and it was supposed to be a week he spent with Jewelyette. He still recalls walking around the empty house, wishing it was filled with her presence.
Over the following months, Jewelyette’s mental health declined, and she threatened to hurt herself, according to court documents. She wanted to see her foster parents, but Masserio was afraid they’d take her again. Over months of therapy and other services, she adjusted, her father said.
By Christmas, he said, she was settled in at her new home. Meanwhile, the Normans pushed their appeal of the decision to the Supreme Court. Norman said he still thinks they would be a better home for Jewelyette. At their home, she had two parents, a pet dog and a sister. They were stable, and he saw Masserio as a risk.
“We raised her from 2 to 9,” Norman said. “She was part of our family, and I know we’re not biological, but she was our daughter — is our daughter.”
‘Never gave up’
Masserio and Jewelyette lived in a second-floor walkup apartment in a home without an in-unit washer and dryer. When the opportunity arose to move into a first-floor unit that was larger and offered easier access to laundry, Masserio jumped at the chance.
He started moving their belongings downstairs in early January 2025, despite the cold and snow. Then, 9-year-old Jewelyette got sick, spiking a fever and coughing. She had the flu, and Masserio responded with the fear of a first-time parent and stayed by her bedside through the night, listening to her breathe.
She recovered within a few days, and he continued the move. He kept going, moving them into the new apartment, even when he felt tired and weak and his own fever spiked.
On Jan. 10, Jewelyette hid in the bathroom and called her foster parents. Her dad was sick and sleeping all day and she hadn’t eaten, she said. Norman suggested she call 911.
In the call recording obtained by CT Mirror, the 911 operator stayed on the phone with her until the police arrived. Jewelyette whispered at moments and seemed to cry during others. She wanted to go back to the Normans, she said, and she was hungry.
In the call, she referred to both Masserio and Norman as her dad.
Police arrived and noted she needed treatment for mental health issues. Masserio told them she was in intensive therapy.
Days after the incident, Masserio called his middle sister, a nurse, and told her he was having trouble catching his breath. She called an ambulance to take him to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a bad case of the flu.
When he arrived at the hospital, the doctor said he was severely dehydrated, that years of smoking would make it harder for his lungs to heal, and that he was in renal failure. Masserio-Beach knew her brother didn’t have much time left.
“It totally flipped his world upside down once he became a dad,” she said. “He just never wanted her to feel like he gave up on her. Sadly, he didn’t take care of himself when he got the flu.”
Doctors told the family that the outlook was grim. He’d weakened his body with the move and failed to care for himself in his urgency to care for his daughter. Jewelyette visited briefly, although he wasn’t conscious.
She made a card for her father with a drawing in crayon of the two of them —both smiling, with thought bubbles above their heads that say “I love you,” and a broken heart above them. The top of the card says “me with out you is inposible.”
“I am going to be lonle with out you,” she wrote in a child’s scrawl. “I all wees will love you.”
A nurse read it to him and wrote Jewelyette a note after Masserio died on Jan. 21, just five months after he’d gotten his daughter back. The nurse told the girl that when she told Masserio he had a card from Jewelyette, he raised his eyebrows, assuring her that he could hear and comprehend what she was saying.
After her father’s death, Jewelyette moved in with Masserio-Giarratana. The child handwrote thank you notes to everyone who sent cards or flowers for her father’s funeral. His obituary noted that their relationship, and his devotion to it, is the quality he’d be most remembered for.
“He was a father whose love for his daughter was boundless, a quiet strength in every experience they shared, a hidden knight as he pushed against the tides, always fighting for his little girl,” it said. “His heart was a sanctuary for her, always protecting, always guiding and in his care, she knew the truest form of love.”
https://www.ericksonhansen.com/obituaries/john-masserio-jr
Three months after Masserio died, in March, the Connecticut Supreme Court overturned Ryan C. case law and said the foster parents should have been granted intervenor status in Jewelyette’s case.
The ruling opens the opportunity for foster parents across the state to intervene in legal cases, but for the Normans, it did no good. Masserio was dead, the case ended. Jewelyette was on her way to permanency with her father’s family.
“It won’t help us,” Norman said, of the ruling. “I guess it will help other families.”
They still haven’t gotten over their loss. Norman said his wife still can’t talk about what happened, and that his daughter still puts the clothes she outgrows into Jewelyette’s old bedroom, waiting for the girl she considered her sister to come home.
Adoption
As he lay dying in the hospital, Masserio said he wanted his daughter to be with his family.
Masserio-Giarratana and her husband, Sal, filed for legal guardianship so they could adopt Jewelyette. Compared to the reunification process and previous adoption pushes, this moved quickly.
Jewelyette had her official adoption ceremony in June.
The New Britain courtroom was filled with family members and at least a dozen DCF workers who’d interacted with Masserio and Jewelyette over the years. Many carried balloons or flowers for the girl, whose 10th birthday was the day after her adoption.
Jewelyette donned the last dress Masserio ever bought her for the occasion, smoothing the tulle blue and purple skirt as she sat beside her aunt in the courtroom. The tiara he’d bought her when she was younger glittered on her head.
It was a moment of profound happiness tinged with profound grief. After all these years, Jewelyette was welcomed home, but her father wasn’t there. The case was closed, but it wasn’t the ending anyone had initially hoped for.
“This has gone on for far too long, and ultimately, the greatest impact has been on you, Jewelyette. I want to acknowledge that you are handed circumstances you never asked for,” Jewelyette’s attorney Deetta Roncone-Gondek said in a statement at the hearing.
“I will never forget the sound of your father’s voice saying your name,” Roncone-Gondek said. “The look he had on his face when speaking to you, interacting with you, is one that will be etched in my memory forever. Your banter with him, the way you made him laugh, the joy you both shared in my presence; Jewelyette, carry him with you always.”
She and the guardian ad litem recommended that the judge approve the adoption.
At the attorney’s words, Masserio-Giarratana planted a firm kiss on Jewelyette’s left cheek while the girl wiped tears off the right.
Jewelyette carried a photo of her and her father, their heads pressed close together and noses wrinkled in a smile, to the adoption ceremony, and wrote out a statement to read to the judge. With a nudge from her aunt, she stood, eyes on the paper.
“I wanted to say thank you guys for helping me get here and not giving up,” she said, her small voice cracking. “We all know my dad has passed, but I thank him because he says ‘I’ll never give up on my daughter. I love her,’ and I love him very much.”
At the end of the ceremony, the judge invited her to join him at the bench.
It was with the wide smile inherited from her father on her lips and the hint of a giggle in her voice that she banged the judge’s gavel.
“Court is adjourned,” she crowed. She gingerly placed the gavel back on the desk, then rushed down the steps, tumbling into her family’s waiting arms.
Ginny Monk is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2025 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).