A Georgia mother claims that she lost custody of her newborn daughter due to faulty drug tests from a lab with a documented history of inaccurate results. When a drug court and her OB-GYN ran tests on Kristen Clark-Hassell, her results were clean. But the tests from Georgia's Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) came back positive, and so the government took her youngest child.
"They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming after the court hearing," Clark-Hassell told the Savannah-based outlet The Current. "For her to just be ripped like that just cut a hole in our hearts."
In a 2021 whistleblower complaint, a former lab director for Avertest—the company that processed Clark-Hassell's drug tests—claimed that as many as 30 percent of the lab's test results were inaccurate. She further alleged that "meeting deadlines for test results is more important to Avertest than accuracy" and that the company manipulated data and set arbitrary detection cutoffs, increasing false positives. Avertest settled the Justice Department lawsuit relating to these claims in 2024, paying a $1.3 million settlement.
