Parents Behaving Badly

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The sweet little North Carolina boy (Sean) pictured above with his Monster adoptive mother has passed.  They adoptive monster and her spouse say Sean’s death was an accident.  He was bound so tightly in a blanket that he suffocated.

Reports say that Sean told social workers BEFORE the adoption that the couple beat him. Trial testimony from Paddock’s five surviving children spoke of physical and emotional abuse almost on a daily basis and said that the children were kept from the outside world and that they were trained to lie to social workers.

“We were told to tell all social workers there was no spanking,” Jessy Paddock, testified. “The forms of punishment were ‘restriction’ or ‘time out’ – those were the terms we were to use.” She also testified that on more than one occasion Sean’s entire head was wrapped in duct tape to keep him quiet.

The monster is 47 year-old Lynn Paddock … may she rot in hell!

Man Accused Of Sex With Teen He Was Adopting:

44-year-old Raymond Chapman of Coweta County, Georgia got caught allegedly boffing a 17-year-old girl in his SUV. The same 17-year-old girl that him and his wife we’re trying to adopt. Chapman was allegedly having an affair with the girl even before the adoption process.

Not many people adopt older children so being an adoptee myself I always love hearing stories of people who adopt older children. However I would hope that people who are adopting older children are not doing it to have SEX WITH THEM!

Both Chapman and his wife were fired by the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home. I guess that’s where Chapman was also cruising for dates. He’s been charged with child rape.

Thanks to LadyJade for the tip.

This family adopted 5 (yes that’s right FIVE) sisters from Liberia… ages 5 to 15.  It is suspected these girls came from West African Support Network which acts as an adoption agency but in reality takes children from poor families, keeps them locked in horrid conditions and sells them to folks like the Tyler family here (slavery is the name of this game).

Andee Verlon Tyler, 51, and his wife, Penny Tyler, 46, of Fairview face felony child abuse charges. Their son, Ashton Malachi Tyler, 20, is charged with rape by instrumentation. Their daughter, Nathania Dellare Tyler, 21, is charged with misdemeanor assault and battery.

Reports say the girls were tied to chairs and bedposts, not fed, made to sleep outside in the cold and sexually molested by an adoptive brother… one article said The Fairview couple was charged with child abuse. Their son was charged as a youthful offender with one count of rape by instrumentation, and their daughter faces a misdemeanor assault and battery count.

The monster family adopted the girls in 2005 and the articles are full of bizzare bits of information that make me crazy… like the fact that the girls were not removed from the home for a long time after the discovery was made.  It is said the family was put into counseling to see if things could be worked out?!?

Adoptive parents are PARENTS and it is WRONG to adopt kids just to abuse them!

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Are you kidding me?  Jessica Banks’ will be serving two consecutive life sentences for abusing her foster/adopted girls.  She kept them locked in a secret room (damn all these secret rooms cropping up) off of the garage.

The girls were deprived of food and beaten daily.  They were removed from their biological parents due to abuse… then abused by Satan’s spawn and now are back in the foster care system. 

 I wonder what chance these girls have?!? … the 12 year old’s letter to Banks is heart breaking.

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Woman Faces Sex Charges after Finding Son:

Waterford Township woman accused of having sex with teen son she gave up for adoption:

Woman accused of having sex with long-lost son:

Ew. Ick. Puke.

35-year-old Aimee Louise Sword of Waterford Township, Michigan is accused of having sex with the son that she gave up for adoption. She allegedly searched for the boy on the internet that she gave up 10 years ago. No word on his actual age but I’m guessing it’s not 18.

Does she want to have flipper kids or something?

It’s usually a fight between Ohio and Michigan about who is the Florida of the Midwest. Michigan just took a huge lead in that department.

Thanks to Soobs for the tip.

Lawsuit says NY failed to protect disabled kids:

The U.S. federal government has launched a lawsuit against Ne wYork City claiming that failed to prevent a woman who used fake identities to adopt 10 disabled children so she could collect $1.68M in subsidies.

Of course the woman, Judith Leekin, 64, had no real interest in caring for the children as she was sentenced to 20 years in prison and the home was described as the usual ‘house of horrors’.

Leekin lived in Florida but had no problems adopting the kids from NYC and collecting the checks. She’s also been sentenced to 11 years in the federal pen for fraud.

The lawsuit seeks to collect $15M for each child.

Thanks to Angel for the tip.

Foster mother charged with killing boy, abusing girl:

Infant Christopher L. Thomas Jr. and his 2-year-old sister were removed from their parents care. Their mother had mental problems and their father was sent to jail on drug charges. They were both placed with caring foster parents. For some reason when the foster parents who were taking care of Christopher tried to adopt him Christopher and his sister were moved into the care of their aunt Crystal P. Keith. Keith began abusing them almost immediately…

Keith told police, whom she called to her home Monday, that she repeatedly slapped Christopher in the face for not eating, according to the criminal complaint. She said she choked him, hung him upside down and pressed his head on the floor. At some point, the infant’s eyes rolled back into his head and he began to vomit. He stopped breathing. She then stuck the handle of a hairbrush down Christopher’s throat, she said, in order to revive him.

Christopher died the next day.

Christopher’s sister would endure scaldings from Keith. Keith would bandage over the blisters but then the blisters would burst adhering the bandages to her flesh.

Maybe someone with a little more knowledge can enlighten me. Why would the state take Christopher out of the original foster parents home because he was going to be adopted?

Thanks to Nurse Sarah for the tip.

Utah couple won’t give up proof of kids’ identities:

This is exactly what I meant when I talked about Step-Breeders and Foster-Breeders. This form of Breeder makes me the angriest most of all, the Adoptive-Breeder. As an adoptee myself I get livid when I see stories of adoptive-Breeders that are abusing the system.

Take for instance Scott and Karen Banks. They’ve adopted kids then given them up citing ‘failure to bond’ but then refuse to give the children they gave up their personal records like birth certificates and social security numbers.

What would be the point of that unless there was some shady dealings going on. The fact that the Bankses own their own adoption agency doesn’t exactly fill with me hope either.

Thanks to Bonnie for the tip.

Here’s another story that should make all well-meaning people ask the question: “Why would you adopt kids just to treat them like this?” Today’s case involves Tamika Shuntell Williams of Warren, Michigan, who adopted two twin girls, now 8, because Williams herself couldn’t conceive. How did Williams treat her precious gifts? According to quiet, fearful testimony from the girls themselves, the “parental love” included being beaten, tied to a bedroom door, tied down to a bed, bathed in bleach, burned with cigarettes (AND the lighter), struck with a belt, bitten on the head, and threatened with decapitation if they told anybody about these crimes.

The testimony came several weeks after the terrified girls previously tried to testify, but couldn’t.

It’s nearly impossible not to believe a story like this. Unless the defense can make a strong case that someone planted all of these ideas in these girls’ head (and explain away the physical evidence), mom is going to jail for a long spell.

So again, I ask: why? Why bring two children in your home, just so you can torture them? What illness possesses people to recruit kids just so they can be tortured? Was she herself raised like this – subject to constant abuse for merely minor infractions?

The only conclusion I can come to is that some people just get off on this. It thrills them to control and inflict pain on others. Shuntell’s parents may or may not have had this legacy of sadism passed on to her by those who “loved” her. Who knows? With any luck, though, authorities have prevented this from being passed on to the girls she was supposed to protect.

(Hat tip: Jean)

When I wrote for Blogging Baby, I found that there was a whole cadre of folks who are virulently anti-adoption. They believe that the adoption industry is an inherently evil, immoral entity that tears families apart. I hadn’t encountered these folks again, though, until today, when MCA alerted me to the case of Allison Quets. According to anti-adoption organization Adoption: Legalized Lies, the 48-year-old woman was faced with “intense pressure” to surrender her twins immediately after she gave birth. After six weeks of caring for them, Quets signed the papers. The babies, Holly and Tyler, were subsequently adopted by Denise and Kevin Needham of Raleigh, North Carolina. Quets changed her mind the same day she signed papers, and fought the adoption. When a court upheld the adoption as valid and legal, Quets kidnapped the kids and ran off to Canada.

Quets has since been arrested, and the twins returned to the Needhams. For their part, the Needhams won’t discuss the details of the case; their only public statement has been to insist that they want to keep the babies. Both the Needhams and their lawyer are relying on the privacy granted adoption proceedings to remain mum about their side of the story. All that the Needham’s lawyer will say is that the facts “don’t support” the Quets family’s account of how the adoption went down.

My first instinct was to side with the Needhams – largely because the anti-adoption advocates like Tricia Vaughn Smith frighten the holy hell out of me. But after considering the case, I realized that too much shit just doesn’t add up.

First, Quets is not some 18-year-old broke-ass mom who got accidentally knocked up. She’s a single professional woman who became pregnant through in vitro fertilization. She reportedly started considering adoption during the pregnancy. According to the News Observer, Quets suffered from hyperemesis, which caused her to become violently ill and frail. Her birth was reportedly a traumatic experience; according to her sister Gail, Allison had to be hooked up to a PICC line and a feeding tube afterwards. A mere 12 hours after realizing that she had given up her babies, she changed her mind. So on first blush, this is not a mom who came back after three months and tries to take it all back; this is a mom who realized she had committed a fatal error that same day.

But then there’s the question of the waiting period. Ironically, as the Ottawa Sun points out, Canadian adoption law would have enforced a 7-day waiting period on the adoption as well as a 28-day revocation period, giving Quets plenty of time to recover from the trauma of her pregnancy and change her mind. But Florida (where Allison Quets gave birth) has a three-day waiting period. Which raises the question: if Quets objected to the adoption the same day she signed the papers, why was the adoption allowed to proceed? To even further confuse the subject, check out the discussion on MCA’s site, where at least one poster claims that Quets tried to get more than one adoption agency to foot the bill for the birth. (Given that Quets has since spent nearly half a million dollars trying to get her kids back, though, that piece of info sounds a tad far-fetched.)

My verdict on this currently leans toward the birth mom and against the Needhams, who seem intent on keeping their shiny new babies regardless of what their bio-mother wants. But a key fact or two could flip my decision. So let’s open this up for discussion: who’s the real villain here? Is there one?

Sadly, there’s little question as to who the victims are…

(Minor P.S. to the folks at abc7.com: it’s PICC line, not “pick line”. PICC is an acronym for “peripherally inserted central catheter”. Sorry, just had to be a know-it-all…)

Thanks again to mgraber for this update in the case of Michael and Sharen Gravelle, the beautiful people charged with keeping their 11 special-needs foster kids locked in cages. You know, because God hadn’t been cruel enough to these kids already. This morning, Huron County Sheriff Dick Sutherland took the stand and described why the Gravelle house “didn’t look right” when he stepped inside. Sutherland described the stench of urine that hit him upon entry, and the rabbit-wire enclosures that housed the kids.

But that’s not all! Other witnesses have taken to the stand to report on how Sharen Gravelle would refer to the kids as “monkeys”, and order them back to their cages if they tried to go potty before their “scheduled time”. (That explains the piss stench, eh?) Another witness testified that dad Michael referred to himself as “Moses”. That paints as complete of a picture as you need, doesn’t it? Sharen Gravelle was obviously worn down by caring for these kids, but her husband probably pushed her forward so he could remain cocooned within his Messianic delusion. I’m amazed that these two haven’t turned on one another yet – though I suppose I shouldn’t. Couples naturally bond together when “attacked” from the outside, and dysfunctional couples even more so.

Are the Gravelles “evil people”? On one level, they’re just basket cases – in the husband’s case, narcissistic ones – who let their dysfunction spiral out of control. I can understand them getting themselves into this shit. But when they closed their eyes and their minds to the horror they were inflicting upon their kids? When they shut out reality and convinced themselves they were great parents, the facts notwithstanding? That’s when their hearts hardened, and they crossed the line from “stressed-out parent” to “abuser”.

The shittiest, and I mean SHITTIEST, thing that can happen to a child is to be pulled from one abusive home, only to be thrown into another. What can a young kid conclude about life when every family to whom he’s sent treats him like garbage? I can only imagine what went through seven-year-old Ricky Holland’s head in the days leading up to his death at the hands of his adoptive mother, Lisa Holland of Williamston, Michigan, who has been convicted of first degree murder.

Prosecutors contended that Holland struck the boy in the head. It was only one of many ways that the mom reportedly abused the child. One of her more clever devices? Duct taping him to the refrigerator. Both husband Tim Holland and his wife then stood back and watched the boy die – a trauma that Tim Holland recounted later in vivid detail. Then the asshole couple reported the child missing, and sent police on a wild goose chase. It took nine days months for the husband to break down and lead the cops to the body. After that, of course, the harmonious couple turned against one another. Lisa Holland’s defense was that her husband was the murderer; her lawyers used the fact that he had lied repeatedly on behalf of his wife to depict him as someone who couldn’t be trusted. Oh, the irony. The jury didn’t buy it, though, so now Lisa gets a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole. Her husband – who comes across as a giant, quivering pussy who stood back and did nothing while his wife tortured their son – got slapped with the rap for murder in the second degree.

Lisa Holland reportedly broke down into tears as the verdict was read. Bitch. You have no right – zero – to cry over that child’s body. The proper time to weap was when he was still alive, and you still could have reformed your sorry ass and been a good mother to him. With any luck, the inmates in your prison will treat you with the same dignity and respect that you treated poor Ricky.

Rest in peace, Ricky Holland. Justice has been done. I’m so sorry no one could help you before it was too late. Your death is our failure.

For more on this case, check out the Lansing State Journal, which has a huge round-up of its coverage. The stories tell you all you need to know about these failed parents, including Lisa Holland’s desperate bids for attention, her tendency to overmedicate Ricky, and her public denigration of the child she should have showered with love.

Thanks (if that’s the word for it) to Southern Sass for this appalling story of adoptive parents run amock. I’ve run a fair number of stories in this space about adoptive and foster parents who treat their kids as badly or worse than they were treated by their original parents (with poor Marcus Fiesel being perhaps the saddest story of all). You can now add to this Gallery of Monsters John and Connie Oliver, the parents of two kids they adopted from Estonia. At least, they were their parents, until authorities discovered that their 10-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy weighed no more than 45 pounds apiece. According to police, the kids were routinely abused, with loving mom Connie locking them out of the house whenever she wanted to go shopping.

This is one of those cases where I think a punishment in kind is much deserved. Whaddya think, folks? These two look like they could lose about a hundreds pounds or so anyway. Hell, starvation might be doing them a favor.

Justice is blind. And apparently dumb. In an effort to bring closure to a lengthy abuse case and get themselves a 4:00 tee time at the golf course tomorrow, attorneys involved in this abuse casehave come up with a novel solution. Charges against the unidentified mother will be dropped if the mother agrees to give the girl back to the state. I’m no John Roberts – hell, I’m not even a Harriet Miers! – but it seems to me that this would set a really bad precedent. Like, “Hey, if I tell you where I’m holding the guy I kidnapped, can I walk?”

To his credit, the judge in the case seems to be reluctant to allow this deal to go forward until “some questions were answered”. For starters, the judge plans on asking the district attorney who agreed to this ridiculous idea if he’s “fucked in the head”.

Let’s cut to the chase, folks: Tammy and Chrisopher Nickel should be put to death. They tortured their adopted daughter to the point that she weighed 27 pounds…at ten years old. My kid is 18 months old. He weighs 28 pounds. And no, he is not big for his age.

The Nickels caught me on a Monday; normally, I’d crack wise about what a pair these two make, but my workweek has started and I’m pissy and tired and the first thing I read about this morning is that thanks to Oregon’s hippy-dippy legal codes these two fucks are going to get a maximum – A MAXIMUM – of five years in prison. Yeah, yeah, I know what happens to child abusers in jail, but they’d have done more time if they had been busted for cow-tipping. Ok, I’m exaggerating. But you get my point. Five years. THAT’S the joke, only it ain’t funny.