[dogncatkids]

Here is a news article which was published by an Idaho News Channel.

7 Texas kids returned from Nigeria
Thanks to minister's intervention


By STEVE McGONIGLE and TERRI LANGFORD / The Dallas Morning News



Warren Beemer was ministering to children at a putrid orphanage in Ibadan, Nigeria, when he heard a girl speaking English with a distinct American accent. Asked where she was from, the girl replied, "Houston."

She then led the youth minister and his companions to a darkened back room where they found six other children, ages 8 to 16, some with sores and suffering from malnourishment and malaria.

LaQuinta Teague, the birth mother of three of the Texas children found in Nigeria, says, "I just want my kids back in my life." The children, three of whom were originally from Dallas, said their adoptive mother had relocated them to Nigeria but then abandoned them almost a year ago.

The children supplied the names of their schools and teachers in Houston, as well as their church pastor. One teenage girl recited her Social Security number. When Mr. Beemer began singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," the children chimed in, hands over their hearts.

Mr. Beemer, a 34-year-old San Antonio youth minister, said he didn't need any more convincing. He picked up the phone, called his pastor, John Hagee, and said he had found seven Texas kids in danger of being lost for good. They had to bring them home.

Eight days later – last Friday – the seven children flew home to Houston. Their return was arranged by the U.S. State Department after the intervention of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Sugar Land and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

The children are now living in Houston foster homes. A court hearing will be held Aug. 26 in Houston to determine whether their adoptive mother, Mercury Liggins, will regain custody. No charges have been filed against the 47-year-old woman, who could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Hagee, who heads Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, said it is a miracle Mr. Beemer found the children.

"One of the [orphanage] workers told us very quietly that if anyone involved in child trafficking finds out about these children, who have no proof of whom they are, that they would be gone immediately and never seen again," Mr. Beemer said in a message to his pastor shortly after encountering the American children.

Mr. Hagee said, "We feel this was the hand of God leading him there to liberate those kids."


CPS investigating

Child Protective Services, the state agency that approved the adoptions and provided monthly support payments of $3,600 to Ms. Liggins until this spring, is investigating the story of their remarkable odyssey.

The agency, a part of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said that Ms. Liggins was thoroughly screened before being approved for adoption but that confidentiality restrictions prohibited it from providing further details on the case.

Stuart Roy, Mr. DeLay's spokesman, said CPS did not know where Ms. Liggins' adopted children were until they were advised by the congressman's office.

All seven children came to CPS because they had been abused or neglected by birth family members, said Geoffrey Wool, an agency spokesman.

"That's the only way that kids come into our foster-care system, is if we have found they have been abused or neglected in their own homes," Mr. Wool said.

The children told Mr. Beemer that they were placed with Ms. Liggins by Spaulding for Children, a Houston nonprofit agency that, according to Vikki Finley, its chief executive, has placed more than 1,200 abused and neglected children for CPS.

However, she cited confidentiality restrictions and would not confirm whether the seven children Ms. Liggins adopted were placed by her agency.

She said extensive criminal background checks are done on all prospective adoptive families. The agency has a home study process that includes 30 hours of adoption preparation classes, she said.

"Any family that comes to adopt goes through a significant screening process," Ms. Finley said.

CPS said Ms. Liggins was receiving more than $500 a month for each of the four Houston children until March, when she notified state officials that a grandmother in Houston was taking care of the children while she was undergoing breast cancer treatment in Shreveport, La.

Payments were stopped because the children were no longer in Ms. Liggins' care, Mr. Wool said. CPS did not attempt to verify Ms. Liggins' story or find the children because they had been legally adopted and no allegations of abuse had been filed, he said.

It was not clear Tuesday whether payments for the three children from Dallas had stopped, Mr. Wool said.

Mr. Wool said subsidies are provided to families who adopt minority and disabled children because they are hard to place.

"Children who are in sibling groups and minority children are not adopted as quickly, generally speaking," he added.

Ms. Liggins is a twice-divorced former employee of KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton. She has also been listed as an agent for a trucking business and a cleaning service. Court records show that Ms. Liggins filed for voluntary bankruptcy in 1998 – about two years after she adopted the four siblings from Houston and three years before she adopted the three siblings from Dallas.

"My take is that she took the children to Nigeria to dump them off with a relative that she would pay a pittance to and would never see them or hear from them again," Mr. Hagee said. "And all this while she would be making over $3,500 a month from the state for taking care of these children."

The oldest of Ms. Liggins' adopted children told Mr. Beemer that she and the other children had been living in Houston until their mother withdrew them last year and took them to Nigeria, the native country of the man she called her husband.

The children told Mr. Beemer that their mother left them in the care of the man's brother, who was kind but abandoned them last October.

Mr. Hagee said he was told that Ms. Liggins made an arrangement to pay the man to care for the children but she never made the payments.

"In other words, they were going to sublet the children," he said.

After the children spent two weeks alone, neighbors alerted Nigerian police, and the children were taken to the Ibadan Women's Center for Abandoned Children and Remanded Youth, Mr. Beemer said.

Ms. Liggins began working for KBR as a food services employee in Iraq in April. She left the company in July, according to Cathy Gist, a spokeswoman for Halliburton Global Public Relations.

"She was in Iraq and her last date of employment was in July 2004," Ms. Gist wrote in an e-mail. "I cannot provide further details."

Mr. Beemer's visit was part of Cornerstone Church's outreach program to Nigerian orphans, which began more than three years ago at the urging of a Nigerian-born church member in San Antonio. Mr. Beemer was led to the orphanage by a man who had once lived there and had attended a Cornerstone service in Nigeria last year.


'Truly horrible'

"It was truly horrible. The smell of urine was everywhere. I walked through the kitchen and there was mold-covered food sitting open on the dark counters," Mr. Beemer said in the Aug. 11 message to his pastor. "I went to their sleeping quarters; the smell of urine was so strong that it took my breath away."

Mr. Beemer told The Dallas Morning News that he found about 60 children living in squalor. Some children slept on spring frames with no mattress.

Workers at the center appeared worried when he began speaking to the Texas children and tried to keep him from taking their pictures, he said.

"They said they could lose their jobs if anybody found out," he said.

The children told him they had told their story to other visitors who had promised to help them. But no help ever arrived, they said.

Mr. Beemer said his first instinct was to get the children back home. But Mr. Hagee said his first reaction was skepticism.

"I said, 'How do you know they are Americans?' " the pastor told The News. "Everybody wants to come to America."

He changed his mind after Mr. Beemer told him of the details the children had supplied, such as the names of their former pastor and schoolteachers and how they stood in unison and sang the national anthem.

After talking with Mr. Beemer, the pastor telephoned the offices of Mr. Cornyn and Mr. DeLay in Washington. Both responded quickly, spokesmen said.

U.S. consular officials in Nigeria visited the orphanage, and the State Department arranged to move the children to the U.S. Embassy in Lagos. New passports were issued, and officials arranged for a $20,000 loan to pay for the flight back to Houston.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. Cornyn, said he was amazed.

"I have worked for the government for eight years, and eight days is lightning fast," he said.

LaQuinta Teague, the 27-year-old birth mother of the three Dallas children, did not know what had happened to them until Tuesday, when she was contacted by reporters. She had nothing but scorn for CPS.

"I'm shocked. If they were going to do that to my kids, they could have brought them back to me," she said.

CPS removed her children six years ago while she was serving two years in prison for assaulting a police officer, she said.

Ms. Teague, who was released last week after serving a 90-day sentence on a check forgery charge, acknowledged that she was a single mother on welfare with a felony prison record. But while in prison, she earned her GED, she said, and she hoped to start computer classes.

"I just want my kids back in my life," she said.

Staff writer Gretel C. Kovach, WFAA-TV in Dallas and KENS-TV in San Antonio contributed to this article.


E-mail smcgonigle@dallasnews.com

and tlangford@dallasnews.com

[michellemartin]

I am amazed that anyone could even do that to children- biologically theirs or not! Yeah it gives a bad impression, but more of a bad impression of that lady's bad charachter than of all adoptive parents. It's just a terrible thing to know anyone would do that.

[BrandyHagz]

Ya, I don’t think it’s a bad impression of adoptive parents…had it been her biological children, we wouldn’t be saying she gave biological parents a bad name…

It’s a very sad, very unfortunate thing…It’s also pretty sad that they are shining a beacon on the fact that these kids are adopted. Would it not be as newsworthy had they been biological? It would certainly remove a lot of the media induced scandal, wouldn’t it?

In the end, biological or adoption, its sad…the woman is sick and obviously needs some serious help.

I hope the kids, who have obviously already been thru some very traumatic events, are able to heal after this horrible treatment at the hands of their mother.

[Colorbind love]

Personally, I hope she is charged and convicted of child abandonment, at the very least. Sadly, the adoption card will likely to be played, and she will probably never see the inside of a jail on such charges. Too many times I've seen adoptive parents be treated lighter than biological parents just because they were lousy parents. How your children came into your life does NOT make a bit of difference in the expectation that you need to be a good and loving parent. This woman was a shining example of something far less than a good and loving parent.

I have to wonder if she intended to start out that way though. She adopted those children a long time ago. And then a year ago she up and abandoned them in Nigeria. Would have been far better to relinquish them for adoption again rather than dump them in another country.

[wanttobeparents]

One reason that the adoption card will be played in this case is that the woman in question was receiving adoption subsidies of $512 for each child even though they were not living with her. The subsidies from the Houston adoptions had stopped when it was discovered that the children were not living with her in March, but the Dallas CPS kept sending the monthly check. The information came from http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2743190

[cathy102]

Just a sad story.. I just pray that the children will be ok and find a good home.. I almost couldn't read the whole thing.. Just made me sick!!!

Cathy

[Katey]

We had a teenager in our home for 7 months on a pre-adoptive placement that disrupted when the child decided not to be adopted by anyone and to pursue emancipation with county support.

As a fost/adopt placement, we did receive a subsidy and while it may look like good money, we lost way more than we got. These children (at least the older ones we are considering) have often been through things that are unspeakable. The sitpend we received did not cover the cost of therapy and support activities to try to help the child acheive some positive sense of self as well as work out how to deal with the past. In our case, the stipend just made possible the services that we would have been hard pressed to get on our own.

The article left me feeling like it was viewed as a way to support yourself at the kids expense. These kids miss a lot of school, get behind, frequently have self esteem / self worth issues, not to mention the fears about abandonment, nightmares about former abuse or neglect and a host of other issues that they need help with in order to progress in life.

Before you start talking about how profitable this is, you need to consider the cost involved for many of these kids.

[BrandyHagz]

Katey,

The stipend can be very profitable, if you are collecting it while your kids are living in an orphanage in Nigeria.

Honest foster and adoptive parents don’t begin to think that this is an employment venture…this story isn’t about an honest foster or adoptive parent.

Clearly, there was some financial motivation here…she stopped paying their tuition, and abandoned them in a foreign country, while still collecting the state funded support.

[Colorbind love]

Yes, she was getting over $3,500 on the children AND she wasn't paying a dime. She left them in Nigeria and never bothered to even pay support to the family that she promised to pay. So, I would say at that point, it was about profit to her. Yet, she cared for them for years prior so I don't think it was always about profiting for her. I just wonder what goes through the mind of a mother who says, hey let me abandon these kids I've had for years in Nigeria and pocket the money that I've always used to care for them.

I would like to think she just got completely overwhelmed by being a mother to them. But, if that were the case, why not seek services or at least sign them back over to the state rather than dumping them in Nigeria?

[wanttobeparents]

$512 a month does not begin to cover the expenses an older child adoption will run into. I agree that therapy and support services alone will run far more in most cases than that small amount would cover. I am not disputing that or casting shadows on people that receive subsidies.

However, in this case, since the children were in another country being cared for without any support from the person collecting the subsidy, I suspect there may have been a profit motive in this case. She could have returned the money, sent it to the children, or notified the state that the children were no longer in her care. She chose not to.

I'm just sick that she did not care for the children placed with her enough to see to their well being. If she was overwhelmed, all she needed to do was make a call to social services. If she unwittingly placed the children in the custody of someone that did not care properly for them, why didn't she contact the children or send money to care for them?

[Katey]

I am not questioning that this woman appears to have been in it for the money. I may just be sensitive because of comments I heard during our placement about how much money I must be getting.

What I tried to communicate, albeit very inadequately, is that a generalization about how profitable / generous the subsidies are cannot be made from the few (hopefully VERY few) people who do not use the subsidy as intented - for the additional services an abused or medically fragile child may need.

Sorry if I offended. It was not my intent.