Home alone Kelly Dillery still waits for her little girl to come home.

Kelly Dillery was always quick to explain away her daughter's occasional tantrum as the outbursts of a blossoming girl with a single mother saddled to a wheelchair. A clear-minded mother, yes, and as independent as her limp noodle of a body would allow, but still the genetic recipient of Friedreich's Ataxia. She must repeat much of what she says just to be understood and lives her life in slow motion, every light of the cigarette, every turn of the page, every itch an ordeal. It's enough to make anyone loose their grip now and again, especially a child. That was how Dillery reasoned it.

This time last year, the girl we'll call Eve started staring down anyone who told her to do anything, broke a window during an argument with other kids her age, smiled defiantly at the cop who came to investigate. Dillery wheeled her daughter to all of her counseling sessions. And for a while peace settled over their two-bedroom box of a home, nestled in one of the more hardened enclaves of Lorain, maintained with $1,400 a month in government disability. Church on Sunday. Family TV time. Dillery hoped that Eve would learn to accept her mother's limitations.

"I've asked her, "Don't you ever feel like life would be better if I wasn't in a chair?'" Dillery recalls (and repeats upon request) recently from her sparse living room, Snickers the cat on her lap. "And she says that she kinda likes me being in the chair. She said, "Don't take it personal, Mom, but I've got friends in school who never get to see their mom because their mom is always busy, but you, you're always here.'"

But then there was that morning in February. Eve was leaving for school when Dillery asked her to change her diaper. She'd broken her hip in a fall the previous autumn and still needed help with maintenance. Her aide hadn't arrived yet. Eve gave her lip. An argument turned into screaming. Then Eve's hands were tight around her mother's throat. One face coursed red with rage, the other with fear.

Dillery says it felt like about a minute passed, near the end of which she felt her body slipping, before she finally could lock her bulging eyes with Eve's. The girl loosened her grip. After she caught her breath, Dillery told her daughter to expect the cops waiting when she got to school, and they were.

Dillery visited her daughter whenever she could during her next few months at a halfway house. She participated in counseling sessions. In July, home health aide Amanda Stephens says, Eve came home seemingly a new person. Then, at lunchtime on a Wednesday, July 18, Dillery scolded Eve for a shoddy job of cleaning Snickers' litter box. Again, an argument. Again, two hands on Kelly's throat. Stephens lunged between the two of them as Dillery's face again flushed with blood.

Eve was sent to the detention home this time, 70 days. But when that time was up, Judge Debra Boros ruled that temporary custody would go instead to a family that had stepped forward from Dillery's church, the Church on the North Coast, and that Dillery could have only three short, supervised visits each week. Dillery says court workers have told her this is a temporary arrangement.

"At least right now, I wouldn't want to risk one day Kelly not waking up because [Eve] got mad," says Stephens, who believes the court is acting properly to protect both Dillery and Eve's interests.

Of course, it's hard for Dillery to see it that way. She left Boros' courtroom after a recent hearing with the stunned look of the defeated. Asked by a supporter how she was doing, all Dillery could say was, "They took my baby away."

"They just don't know," she says later. What don't they know? "That I'm her mom, that she needs me. [Eve] doesn't take care of me; I take care of her."

Dillery never was one for sitting around, not in one place anyway. Her father died when she was 7, but four siblings and a tireless mother kept the family unit fortified. Ever since she got her motorized cart as a young girl, she's been on the go. Though her ataxia has precluded her from working, random acts of civil disobedience have never been out of the question.

"I've always known it and I always will: I've got a strong sister there," says her brother, Eugene Dillery of Sandusky. "She's an independent and strong girl. She always wants to work her own problems out. It's the way it's always been too. She don't rely on anybody. She'll take help when it's really needed, but she's just not one to ask for it all that much."

When Dillery was 26, while hanging with friends at an area bar, she says she met a Mexican immigrant named Jose Martinez who didn't seem to mind her lifestyle. He'd moved on again by the time she found out she was pregnant with his child. She tried to find him, but soon gave up: "It would be like asking, "You know John Smith?'"

She stayed with her mother at first, who helped her raise the little girl. But there was little question as to who was the mother. Dillery would strap Eve to her lap and head out into the world at a moment's notice.

Sometimes, it was a struggle. In the fall of 1998, during a trip to get Eve some new school clothes, a Sandusky police officer saw her wheel her cart onto a roadway and cited her for being a pedestrian in a roadway and for endangering her child. She explained how raised roots and cracks had made so many of the city's sidewalks impassable, noting also how so many of the city's recent developments and public projects paid scant notice to ADA requirements, established in 1990.

The media latched on. One activist, Mary Butler, asked rhetorically whether Dillery was "our Rosa Parks?"

Coralee Boswell, a wheelchair-bound coordinator for Ohio LEAP, says advocates from across the nation took notice of Dillery's plight. On December 29, 1998, a Walk for Justice was held in Sandusky to protest the charges. Nearly 100 people protested, about half in wheelchairs of their own. A legal defense fund hired an attorney. The city was in for it.

She was found not guilty on the endangering charge, and the conviction for being a pedestrian in a roadway was reversed on appeal. Then, the following May, she was cited for being a pedestrian in a roadway again (this time, Eve was back at home). But this time, the city eventually dismissed the charge on its own after a new wave of protests.

Over the course of these two court battles, the disabled community rallied to her side in such a solid front, and her defense mounted such a stink and requested so many documents pertaining to ADA compliance, that city leaders years later would bring up her name when planning for projects in a cautionary tone.

"She definitely helped Sandusky because of her need to take care of her child," Boswell says. "Now we've got more access, curb cuts where they need to be, more handicapped parking. She got the ball rolling."

Six years ago, Dillery and Eve moved out of Sandusky to an assisted living center in Lorain. She wanted to break free of the constraints of her mother's home. Later, she moved into her own house. That's when she says it all started to unravel.

"I'd feel really sad for any family in that situation, but even more so here because I know how hard she's fought for her kid," says Carrie Lucas, leader of Boulder, Colorado's Center for Rights of Parents with Disabilities, who has a condition similar to Dillery's and, as an attorney specializing in the rights of the disabled advocated, recently on Dillery's behalf. Lucas believes Judge Boros ruled in the case based less on the perceived limitations of Dillery's disability, which in no way affects her cognitive ability, and more on the limitations of her daughter's maturity.

"I know what it's like to live with adolescent girls," she says. "My 17 year old is just now kinda coming out of it. She's a really nice kid. But it's not ever acceptable for anyone to engage in that behavior, whether you're 7 or 70. Her daughter needs to get that lesson."

Dillery believes her daughter has taken it well to heart by now and is ready to come home. But that's not her decision to make anymore, a powerless feeling for any parent who feels she's done nothing but the right thing all along. She wants to fight it still, just like back in Sandusky, but it's life and death now, not curb cuts and access ramps.

Dillery's mother, now 67, is in a nursing home with dementia. And without mom to help, Eugene, his children grown and gone, thinks he's finally convinced his sister to move back to Sandusky to be closer to the help he could offer.

"If she can get closer this way, we can work on there being more help for her here, than us having to go there," Eugene says.

But that all depends on whether Judge Boros gives Eve back to Dillery. Boros wouldn't speak about the particular case, but did add that it's "fortunate when there's family."

"No doubt," Eugene says, "[Eve] was made to grow up fast because she always helped to take care of her mother, but this anger thing, it had to be dealt with. And I think that's being done."

On a recent afternoon, Dillery reads her sociology textbook for one of three community college classes she's taking. She's got a test coming up and says she hasn't been able to put her mind past her daughter to think about studying all that much. Around the corner, the closed door to her daughter's tiny room is a constant reminder of her absence. In the center of the door, a sign provides an innocent message made ominous by recent events. It reads: "TEENAGERS: IF YOU ARE TIRED OF BEING HASSLED BY UNREASONABLE PARENTS ... NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION!"

"My daughter's [probation officer] said in court that they just want [Eve] to have a normal life. Well, what's normal?" Dillery wonders today. "Nobody's got the same normal. Besides, this is [Eve's] normal. They're just making it worse now by treating her like she's some special case."

She pauses, twitches her head to the left at the end of a long reflexive shudder up her spine, and then tears well up and subside in her eyes. And still she muscles out that broken smile of hers, eyes still alive and searching. "I miss her. It's so quiet around here without her."

dharkins@freetimes.com