No Proof, No Service… No Problem

Disturbing pattern of fraud and kid-snatching in Linn County, Oregon

Now that I’ve dug into the family matter that triggered perjury charges against attorney Kyla Mazhary-Clark, I’m struggling with why she wasn’t also charged with kidnapping/custodial interference, and why there are still two young children under her “care.”

Yes, I know about due process, and no, I’m not suggesting that people charged with crimes should have their kids taken away… but these are not her children, and they were snatched by her through a web of lies she crafted in the very court where she’ll soon appear as a defendant.

Notice I’m not saying “allegedly,” because she already admitted the truth in a deposition, yet still managed to dupe or outmaneuver four separate Linn County or pro tem judges, in a case she filed while still a law student at Willamette.

And given the case’s striking similarly to another appalling kid-snatching matter in that same court, it’s fair to identify it as a pattern, and wonder aloud: What is going on in Linn, and just what the fuck are they teaching over there at Willamette University College of Law?

In February 2019, in her second year of school, Kyla Mazhary-Clark gave lawyerin’ a dry run in the boldest way possible: She filed a petition for “psychological parent” custody of Jamie Clark’s young children.

Kyla Mazhary-Clark and Jamie Clark are not related. For clarity, I will refer to them as Kyla and Jamie/mother/mom.

In her papers, Kyla made three specific claims that would mostly fulfill the requirements for such custody, while also expediting the matter: that the kids had been living continuously with her for the past six months, that she was their “sole” caregiver, and that she was their aunt.

Kyla also alluded to “acquiring guardianship of the minor children in November 2018,” but provided no concrete details or proof of such a guardianship. For good measure, Kyla also criticized Jamie, calling her an “unpredictable, unreliable and unstable” mother who “exercised only sporadic parenting time.” The details on this were also paper thin.

In a status quo motion, she boasted of the stability she was providing for the children: That she was teaching the older girl “her number and shapes” [sic] and that she was even teaching the younger child sign language.

When it came time to serve the petition, Kyla said Jamie couldn’t be located despite hiring a PI. She thereby got permission to serve Jamie by posting a notice in the courthouse.

You know, the warm and inviting courthouse halls, where everyone strolls daily to make sure their kids aren’t about to be taken away from them.

So, of course the mother never saw the notice, and of course she then lost the case by default.

In her final declaration to the court, in a motion for entry of judgment without a hearing(!), Kyla casually slid some entirely new and quite serious allegations into the docket, again, without any evidence:

Read that again… a few times, if necessary. Especially the part about how the mom should be forced to undergo a psych eval, based entirely on Kyla’s good word (which we now know to be bad) and based entirely on evidence that was not given to the court, or reviewed at any hearing, and which apparently does not exist.

And since Kyla drafted her own judgment for her default win against a woman who was served by posting in the Linn courthouse basement, all of Kyla’s lies became Jamie’s reality to deal with.

Judge Rachel Kittson-MaQatish signed the papers just a few business days after Kyla filed them… again, without any hearing.

The case is incredibly confusing and requires reading a lot of paper to finally understand the timeline of what happened. I’ll do my best to lay this out efficiently and clearly as possible.

At the time she filed her petition, the kids did not live with Kyla, and they would not live with her for several months after Kyla won custody of them. But armed with her August 2019 court order, Kyla laid in wait for the kids to come into her orbit again.

That happened in early 2020, when Jamie agreed to allow Kyla to care for the children for several weeks while dealing with personal problems. When Jamie tried to pick her kids up after the visit, Kyla refused to even respond, and then called the police on the mom.

Kyla flashed her Linn County court order at the police, and that was the first Jamie heard anything about a court case.

The mom left empty-handed that day.

Once Jamie learned of Kyla’s secret court case — which must have been eye-opening — she quickly filed a motion to “vacate” the default judgment that had awarded her kids to Kyla. That is, she filed a motion to dispose of the secret, fraudulently-obtained judgment like the garbage it was.

But the “mistake” Jamie made was going to court without a lawyer, and expecting the judges there to be fair, and to take her word on a par with the opponent, who was by then a licensed attorney appearing regularly in that same courthouse, and who had been “awarded” custody of the kids a few years earlier, because Jamie was a “bad mom” etc. etc. etc.

You get the idea. It was not going to be easy, and judges do not like to admit that they’ve been defrauded, especially not by a fellow officer of the court.

The first motion to vacate mom filed (in June 2021) was denied less than 24 hours after it was filed, without any hearing. It was denied by Linn Judge Brendan Kane, without any findings of fact, or any comments whatsoever. He just checked a little box and that was the end of that.

The second motion to vacate mom filed (in October 2021) was denied two weeks later, the same day Kyla filed her objection to it. Judge Thomas McHill did slightly better than Judge Kane in that he at least reinstated the case and vacated the order of default, but left undisturbed the judgment granting custody to Kyla. Once again, there was no hearing and Judge McHill issued no findings, he just checked two little boxes.

Jamie then retained an attorney who deposed Kyla in April 2022, and then filed a third motion to vacate based on the fraud and misrepresentation that was admitted in that deposition.

Most importantly, he pointed out that the judgment was void because Linn County did not even have jurisdiction: Champaign County, Illinois did.

That tiny detail alone should have been fatal for Kyla’s case, and for Linn County’s involvement.

Jamie’s lawyer also elaborated on that “guardianship” that Kyla mentioned in her original petition. In reality, it was a temporary power of attorney created so that Kyla could travel with Jamie’s kids in November 2018. The lawyer did an excellent job of laying out the deliberately muddy and false details with which Kyla had poisoned the court, and gave a clear timeline of events showing how Kyla ended up being wrongly awarded someone else’s kids. All of this was argued at a two-hour hearing before Polk Judge Rafael Caso, who was brought in to Linn to hear the third motion to vacate.

Inexplicably, Judge Caso denied it, and even declined to modify the garbage judgment so that Jamie Clark could take back custody of her own children.

In his findings, Judge Caso ruled that Jamie’s two previous motions to vacate — that she had filed without the assistance of a lawyer! — had already been heard and denied, despite the fact that no hearings had been held. He also relied upon the mistaken belief that a motion to vacate cannot be filed more than a year after a judgment was made — an error of law that Judge Caso has made before, to disastrous effect.

In reality, there is legal precedent that there is no statute of limitations on tossing out fraudulently obtained judgments, because they simply cannot be allowed to stand, no matter how ancient:

“Tampering with the administration of justice… involves far more than an injury to a single litigant. It is a wrong against the institutions set up to protect and safeguard the public… institutions in which fraud cannot complacently be tolerated consistently with the good order of society.”

That Supreme Court decision was made twelve years after the fraud occurred in the underlying patent law case.

In a case involving children — who are far more precious than a goddamn patent — a motion to vacate due to fraud should be able to be heard for infinity years. And more importantly, that motion to vacate should be fairly adjudicated.

Judge Caso also denied a second modification Jamie’s attorney filed in January 2023, but Caso did grant her a little parenting time in accordance with Linn County’s “Long Distance” parenting plan. Gee, thanks.

Crazily, for all the “trouble” she’d been put through by the mom trying to get her kids back, Kyla submitted a statement of attorney fees for $22,708.95. Jamie’s attorney objected to the bloated bill. The matter has been sitting there undecided since July 2023.

And then the three criminal perjury charges hit Kyla last month: She is not the kids’ aunt; she was not their sole caregiver; and the kids did not live with her for the days before the filing of her petition.

We know that the perjury charges are founded due to Kyla’s own admissions during deposition. We also know that those specific falsehoods were the same falsehoods that expedited Kyla’s default win. A fourth motion to vacate was filed by mom, days after Kyla’s arrest, and it remains pending.

But again, why is Kyla not also charged with kidnapping or custodial interference? I mean, this is someone who cannot even be honest about something as basic as teaching a child sign language, and she still has custody of Jamie’s kids.

The prejudice Kyla Mazhary-Clark wrought in Linn County Circuit Court is just astounding.

It’s impossible to ignore the similarities between this mess and Linn’s other child custody catastrophe: The case of baby Kye Christopher Janssen, who was snatched from his mother Blainey Elkins through fraud and crimes and a whole lot of prejudicial garbage filed by then-licensed attorney Megan Perry (aka Moeller). There was no need to post notice of the case in the court’s basement, because Perry simply filed a forged waiver of service allegedly signed by Elkins. There was never a hearing in this case, either.

Like Kyla, Megan Perry is also a Willamette Law alum who gave lawyering a dodgy test run while still a student there.¹ She is also a white woman, which is a similarity that should not be discounted in extra-white, women-led Oregon.

But Perry blew out her O-ring after just four years of practice, buckling under the weight of 25 bar complaints — all of which alleged fraud committed in family law cases, and many of which also alleged criminal conduct that is now established as true.

Further, after graduating from Willamette, Kyla set up shop with some of the people who crawled out of the smoking crater of Perry’s former practice, including attorney Dan Miller and paralegal Julie Lindgren, who notarized Kyla’s signature on her garbage petition. Kyla is also a member of the Linn Defenders, a small consortium of public defense attorneys that includes Perry’s husband, Erik Moeller — who was mentioned numerous times in Perry’s federal sentencing memorandum.

And both cases involve Judge Brendan Kane denying or simply refusing to hear a motion to vacate a judgment due to fraud.

But perhaps most importantly, the judgments in both cases are void, voidable, or void ab initio for jurisdictional and statutory defects.

Yet Linn continues to cling to clearly unsupportable decisions because judges there apparently cannot admit wrongdoing, even if it was done by a peer.

I mean, it’s a lot to ignore — but for victims of lawyer-committed fraud, it’s even more to swallow.

They’re forced to accept the unacceptable: that Linn judges refuse to acknowledge, tackle, or remediate fraud that occurred in their own damn courthouse. And because of that, victims are left to struggle two, six, or even nine years later, just to have contact with their own children.

It’s been five years since her implosion, and I have not heard of a single Perry victim who ever recovered from the extrinsic fraud that she deliberately strewn in their family matter. Elkins and her son Kye’s case may be the most horrific example of that fraud spree, but they are definitely not alone.

¹ While in her third year at Willamette, Megan Perry filed a petition to change her kid’s name, and fraudulently avoided serving her child’s father a copy in the same way that Kyla did: by posting notice in a courthouse basement.

And while we’re at it, she may be considerably older, but Lori Deveny is also a Willamette Law alum, and she’s been described by prosecutors as “the single worst thing to ever happen to Oregon’s legal profession.” Go Bearcats!!