There was a knock at the door, and Lori found two policemen there, along with her ex-husband David and his live-in girlfriend. When 6-year-old Brian realized they were there for him, he ran and hid in the basement. But they found him and dragged him, crying, out of the house.

For two weeks, the mother and child were kept apart, and Lori wasn't even given an opportunity to appear before the judge who had ordered Brian's seizure. Then, when the judge finally listened to her, he realized, in effect, that he was wrong, and he returned the child to her. No apology, of course.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that this sort of thing can happen in America — in Chicago. But attorneys say it's not all that uncommon.

David and Lori (not their real names) had separated when Brian was 18 months old, so Brian had been living alone with his mother for five years. She obtained an uncontested divorce, and there had been no legal proceedings since. She was liberal about visitation, allowing Brian to stay overnight with his father once a week although the divorce decree provided only for a daytime visit. But early in 1986 she stopped the overnights. She was upset that David had, in her opinion, failed to care for Brian properly when he was ill during a visit, and Brian was resisting going to his father's house, saying that scary videos he saw there gave him nightmares.

For his part, David was disturbed about the way Brian was being raised. Lori had taken him out of school and was teaching him at home, and she had rented space in their house to some people who were members of an Eastern religion. The tensions between the couple were mounting. On February 23, 1986, during an argument over a visitation, David broke Lori's storm door. She called the police and they sent him home.

David could have gone to court and sought a change in custody in the normal way. Under state law, he would be entitled to a full hearing on such a request —a hearing at which the judge would hear both sides. But instead, David and his lawyer showed up in court on March 5 with an emergency petition. The matter was assigned to a judge who had never been involved in the case, and David's lawyer convinced the judge that the child was "in danger'' and obtained an order to remove him, with no notice whatsoever to Lori. The first she knew of it was when the policemen appeared at the door.

A so-called ex parte hearing like this is allowed when there is a true emergency — when a child is really in danger, and when there's reason to believe that the other parent will spirit him away. In this case, all David needed was a gullible judge.

The story that David, the lawyer and a private detective told would have alarmed anyone: Eight "strangers" involved in a religious sect were living in the house. They had led Lori into the basement, where she "emitted screams." There was garbage and animal feces all over the house. Brian was not attending school. He was being fed nothing but rice and peanut butter. He was wearing tattered, ragged clothing. He was never bathed. He had animal or insect bites all over his body. He was not taken to a doctor when he was sick. One of the strangers showed him how to hurt people by letting his fingernails grow long and by swinging a rope. Lori's face was swollen with open sores. And the kicker: Lori was giving people nude massages in Brian's presence.

The judge swallowed it. "I have no reason to doubt you,'' he told the lawyer, according to a transcript of the hearing. That's the problem with ex parte hearings. There's no opportunity to hear the other side of the story. In this case, the other side was that most of the charges were simply false. There was no garbage or feces; Brian's diet was fine; his clothing was fine except for one pair of ragged bluejeans he was fond of; he was clean; he was taken to a doctor; the bites were some flea bites; his nails were cut regularly; the rope trick was nothing but a child's game; and there was nothing wrong with Lori's face.

The rest of the charges related to Lori's lifestyle, which was somewhat nontraditional. It was true that, to make ends meet after being laid off of her social-worker job, she took in four boarders from September to January, and that they were members of an Eastern religion. A fifth person stayed at the house in October. It was true that on one occasion, Lori screamed during a therapy session conducted by one of the boarders. It was true that Lori, a certified Montessori teacher, had taken Brian out of his Montessori school temporarily and was teaching him at home in preparation for enrolling him in public school. And it was true that Lori is a professional masseuse and occasionally gave therapeutic massages to friends, though never in Brian's presence. They were the kind of issues that a parent might raise in arguing that he could provide a better long-term environment for his child — not the kind that warranted sending policemen to seize him.

The law provides that ex parte orders expire after 10 days. A hearing was scheduled on the 9th day, then put off because the judge was attending a funeral. Lori finally got her day in court on March 19. The judge banned the "strangers" from the house, though they had already been gone for a month and a half. (Later, in what amounted to an admission that there was nothing wrong with them, he allowed Lori to hire one of them as a babysitter.) He also ordered that Brian go back to school, and he increased David's visiting rights. But he said, "I don't think that I am real concerned as to any immediate danger to the child."

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services subsequently determined that David's charges that Brian was being abused and neglected were totally "unfounded."

More than a year has passed now, and David has made no further attempt to obtain custody. But Lori remains very bitter about the whole experience. She can't understand why the system allowed a judge to take away her child, then fail to listen to her story for two weeks. She thinks action ought to be taken against David, the lawyer and the private detective for their exaggerations and "outright lies." But she doesn't have the money to pay a lawyer, and anyway, lawyers have advised her not to rock the boat because the custody issue could be brought up again.

Meanwhile, the law remains the same. There is nothing in the Illinois statutes preventing a judge from doing what this judge did. And the police are at the ready to snatch future Brians out of their basements.