Posted on 09/10/2013 3:43:07 AM PDT by markomalley
A U.S. adoptive mother accused of starving her 13-year-old Ethiopian-born daughter and locking her outside in the cold, where she died from exposure, was found guilty of homicide on Monday in Washington state.
Hana Williams, adopted from Ethiopia in 2008, died of hypothermia in May 2011 after she was found unconscious outside shortly after midnight in temperatures hovering around 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius), authorities said.
The girl's mother, Carri Williams, was convicted of homicide by abuse and of manslaughter linked to the girl's death, while the father, Larry Williams, was convicted of first-degree manslaughter, a representative of the Skagit County Prosecutor's Office said.
"It was a very sad, sad story," Skagit County Prosecuting Attorney Rich Weyrich told Reuters. "It was something that shouldn't have happened. Fortunately, we were able to prove the charges, so we were able to hold them accountable."
The case is among several in recent years that have drawn attention to the vulnerability of children from overseas adopted by U.S. families, among them the death in January of 3-year-old Russian adoptee Max Shatto.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Sickening.
Yep ... all that from the courtroom photo.
Thanks markomalley.
Carri Williams back in jail for violating no-contact order
Woman tries to contact son she allegedly abused
http://www.goskagit.com/news/article_57e69e54-8b24-11e1-ab30-0019bb2963f4.html
Child’s Death Sheds Light on Biblical Disciplinary Teachings
http://abcnews.go.com/US/childs-death-sheds-light-biblical-disciplinary-teachings/story?id=14897901
You likely nailed it in your post #4.
inhumane.
I feel for her attorney, as well. What a horrible thing to have to do.
Full disclosure: we have two adopted daughters, both from China, and we have come to know a considerable number of other adoptive families.
That said, of course, adoptive families have their share of bad situations. So do families with natural born children. So do foster parents: I know several foster parents who are wonderful people, but the U.S. foster care system as a whole is rife with abuse. And over 40% of American children are illegitimate, which is the font of many problems. People are people, and will mess up.
Adoptions, whether domestic or foreign, sometimes involve children coming out of very destructive situations, and adoptive parents aren't always able to remediate. But that aside, adoptions involve extra energy, work, and expense, and therefore commitment; they are 100% intentional and voluntary on the parents' part; and there is usually at least some screening (and with a reputable agency, a serious screening) of would-be adopting parents.
For all these reasons, I would expect that the incidence of serious parental misconduct to be lower than average in adoptive families. So I wonder what is driving the recent spate of stories. It's starting to look like an orchestrated effort.
The parents kept the family isolated from non-relatives, home-schooled the children and followed strict religious principles described in the Christian parenting book "To Train Up a Child," investigators said.
She's a fundamentalist nutcase.
You’re right. Not a lib. I read article but forgot that.
When this sort of thing happens, it's reasonable to ask, "How are these stories expected to benefit the Democrat Party?"
The answer isn't clear, right now, but perhaps it's intended to push universal home visitation, such as was just enacted in Scotland. This requires millions more government employees, all unionized and militant on behalf of their employer.
Someone posted a story yesterday afternoon about the “Trade of adoptive children” when the parents cannot cope with the stresses of what actually occurs when an adoptive child is placed in a home with their new parents...it seems like a fad to go over seas and adopt a child when there are plenty here in the US to adopt - likewise - there are educational classes through child services that will explain the conditions these children likely come from and the behaviors that will be exhibited — it takes years to overcome these difficulties — some of these children are torn from their parents and sold illegally by crime organizations or the govt itself...the problem, it seems, is just now surfacing and these children are going from a bad situation to a nitemare situation!
These stories are also meant to discredit adoption and encourage people to think of abortion as being the only solution.
Good point. Some women expecting babies they don't want may recall that they saw something about some of these cases on TV, and rationalize that, if adopted children all end up murdered, they might as well abort.
Most adoptions are domestic but there are some good reasons why some of us go abroad. In our case, it was age.
When we were first looking into adoption, we were told that the waiting period for a healthy infant was five to seven years with no guarantee at the end of that period, and that if you were over 35 you were too old, so forget about it. Interracial adoptions, especially of black kids, were strongly discouraged because racialist advocacy groups were insisting that kids of color should be raised in their own cultures, whatever that is supposed to mean. The foster care and family court systems are heavily invested in the theory of eventual reunification with the birth mother, so the process is rigged to keep kids in limbo while mom tries to get herself back together. And even if you think you have a final adoption, there is no guarantee that mom isn’t going to show up again in ten years, and get a judge to agree that she should be able to reassert her rights. It’s a mess. At some point an international adoption can start to look cleaner and simpler.
The fact is, in the U.S. today most of the kids who would formerly have been adopted are aborted, and many of the survivors are siphoned off into private adoptions. So some of us end up getting on airplanes.
I adopted two kids out of the foster care system here in Indiana...both from different areas and DCS worked with us..two different case workers...I was 38 yrs old — we did the foster to adopt...and yes, there are circumstances where the goal is re-unification - but the mother coming back and getting a court to flip the adoption is not going to happen in this day and age - even though some TV shows or isolated events did pop up...We started with China and got out after the cost to stay end went way up...and I’m very glad we did switch...so I have a bi-racial daughter and a son that has CP - but they are both safe and cared for - that’s what’s important at the moment...I’m sure there are incidents of biological parents selling there kids just as well - but the news picks and chooses which stories to run...you know - to cause a fairly tale dilemma!
I’m glad it worked out for you. We did it the other way around. We started domestic and ended up going to China after encountering roadblocks here. That was 18/19 years ago when we began to make initial inquiries. Things have changed. Among other things,China has dramatically reduced numbers. Wealth effect.
The answer isn't clear, right now, but perhaps it's intended to push universal home visitation, such as was just enacted in Scotland. This requires millions more government employees, all unionized and militant on behalf of their employer.
I get what you are saying and do not necessarily disagree that this may be how it is/will be spun or the end result, but in this particular case, some follow up home visitations post adoption or perhaps a more thorough pre-adoption vetting, might have saved this girl’s life.
In any case, a child died due to abuse and abusive and IMO sadistic punishments. It doesn’t matter to me whether that child was adopted or biological, whether the parents where “Christians” (and I don’t think they are from all the Christians I know), whether they got the ideas from “To Train Up A Child” (which BTW isn’t the first time a death of a child has resulted from parents wackadoos following the Pearls “parenting advice”) or whether the parents were of any other religion or of no religion.
There might also have been someone else, a family member or neighbor who might have witnessed or reported the abuse but as I understand, they kept all their children, their seven biological children and their two adopted children, completely isolated from non-immediate family members.
I know some families who home school, some for religious reasons, some for other reasons, and are careful about who and what they expose their children to, but they don’t keep them locked up in the house 24-7 and completely hidden away from the outside world, they don’t lock them in closets, don’t withhold food to the point of malnutrition, shave their heads and beat them with quarter-inch PVC plumbing pipes, punish them by putting them outside for hours a time in cold weather or hose them off outside, nor do they encourage their biological children to met out “corporal punishment” out on their adoptive siblings. And that’s not in any way normal.
I get what you are saying, but what is the alternative? Are you saying a story about such abuses should be swept under the carpet, kept hushed and not reported on?
I think the alternative is for adoptive parents, home schooling parents¸ Christian parents, etc. to acknowledge that there are very few “bad” folks among them and to call these evil people out for what they are, but also take back the narrative by pointing out that they are aberrations and in no way reflect the vast majority. But let’s not ignore what happened here. It was horrific and inexcusable and ignoring abuse will not make it go away. Don’t do what most of us conservatives too often do and just “harsh the narrative”; learn to take the narrative back from the MSM.
I certainly agree that these things shouldn’t be swept under the rug. I just meant that sometimes the negative adoption stories get a lot of coverage, while the fact that most adoptions are great is ignored.
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