Nita Dittenber was passed among four families over two years through a practice called “private re-homing.” On the message boards where parents would offer up adopted children that they no longer wanted, the 14-year-old from Haiti was offered up more often than any other child on there. The teenager was “re-homed” with four families in 2 years.
Most people have no idea what is going on in some places on the internet where children are traded, without the benefit of government oversight. The illegal practice is basically desperate people who use online bulletin boards to offer adoptees to strangers. No background checks, no home visits, but of course there is usually a “re-homing fee”, a term I have only ever heard used with animals on Craigslist. Nita was advertised in the same Yahoo group where a 10-year-old boy in Illinois was taken home by a pedophile just hours after he was listed.
Reuters and NBC News exposed these underground and dangerous “adoptions” and found that most of the children were adopted from foreign countries, the children usually range from 6-14, and over a 5 year period an average of one child per week were exchanged. One mother on the forum said about her 12-year-old daughter, “I would have given her away to a serial killer, I was so desperate.” The facts are, she very well may be.
Some situations were that parents adopted children only to find out they had behavioral issues. Not being able to deal with the unexpected, and instead of going through proper channels, they would post them in hopes of someone else taking them. Wrote one “mother”: “I am totally ashamed to say it, but we do truly hate this boy!”
Some ads even seem to be enticing pedophiles. One read: “Born in October of 2000 — this handsome boy ‘Rick’ was placed from India a year ago and is obedient and eager to please.” I cannot even stand to think where that boy may have ended up. Just as scary, some of these kids are tracked down and placed right back in the homes that gave them away to strangers in the first place.
Back to Nita, her fourth and last “re-homing”, Ohio prosecutors say was used to keep Nita and another girl quiet to hide the repeated sexual abuse of children. From early 2011 until July 2012, 17 months, Nita lived in Marysville, Ohio with Jean Paul and Emily Kruse. Jean Paul was an information-technology specialist with the Ohio National Guard. Emily was a stay-at-home mother.
Not long after she lived there, Nita says, the younger Kruse children told her they were being sexually abused by Jean Paul. Nita says she struggled for months over whether to say something about what they were saying, afraid she’d be thrown out of the house and sent to yet another set of strangers if she did. “I didn’t want to get passed around anymore,” said Nita, now 18, in an interview.
Months later Emily Kruse suddenly put her on a plane going back to her original adoptive parents in Idaho – alone and “with only the clothes on her back.” In charges that have been filed against the Kruses, Prosecutors allege that Mrs. Kruse had done that because she heard Nita had told relatives of the Kruses about the abuse accusations. Prosecutors allege that Emily sent Nita away to make sure that Nita “would not be around to answer questions or participate in the resulting investigation.” They say another girl – an alleged victim of the abuse – was also threatened by Emily with re-homing unless she wrote a letter saying her accusations against Jean Paul were “not true.”
Jean Paul Kruse, 41, has entered a not guilty plea to 17 felony criminal counts, including raping two of his daughters and sexually abusing another daughter. Emily Kruse, 36, has pleaded not guilty to felony charges of obstructing justice and intimidating a witness.
In Wisconsin, Todd and Melissa Puchalla had been raising Quita for more than 2 years since they adopted her from Liberia. They “re-homed” her on the internet only to find out later who they had given her to was not as they seemed. Read Quita’s story here. You would be surprised, and amazed, at what Reuters had discovered. It took less than 2 days after posting her online before they found a home for Quita. Nicole and Calvin Eason, an Illinois couple in their 30s,answered the ad and were very eager to take Quita. Emails show, Nicole Eason assured Melissa Puchalla that she could handle the girl who had been diagnosed with health and behavioral problems. “People that are around me think I am awesome with kids,” Eason wrote.
They dropped her off at the Eason’s trailer and spent only a few hours before they walked away…for good. They did not know that both of Nicole Eason’s biological children had been taken away by child welfare services years earlier. A sheriff’s deputy removed the Easons’ second child, a newborn baby boy, and wrote a report that the “parents have severe psychiatric problems as well with violent tendencies.” The couple had been accused, but never arrested of molesting children they were babysitting and the Eason’s faked a document, saying it was written by a social worker, praising their child rearing skills. On Quita’s first night the Eason’s asked her to sleep in their bed with them; Nicole slept naked.
- Quita Puchalla
Melissa Puchalla did attempt to check on Quita. She called the Eason’s and the school she should have been enrolled in but never showed up. The Eason’s had moved from the trailer park and they had no idea what had become of her within days of leaving her there. Little did they know some of the other “re-homings” that Eason, or as she was known Big Momma, had a hand in. One in particular she helped a pedophile get a 10-year-old boy.
After Reuter’s extensive investigation, Yahoo quickly shut down Adopting from Disruption, the message board where a large part of this took place, however a Facebook page that is similar, Way Stations of Love, remains online. Yahoo says: “Since the late 1990s, Americans have adopted about 243,000 children from other countries. If the failure rate of international adoptions is similar to the rate at which domestic adoptions fail – estimates by the federal government range from about 10 percent to 25 percent – then more than 24,000 foreign adoptees are no longer with the parents who brought them to America.”
Also after Reuters report, Nita’s adoptive aunt began watching the boards and she recognized the girl who her in-laws, Tony and Michelle Dittenber, had adopted. “I said, ‘Oh my God! All the puzzle pieces are coming into focus,’” Tammy Dittenber recalls. “…I realized she had been re-homed the way you re-home a pet.” She thought they had sent her to live with relatives.
Re-homing a child is not difficult. There are no state or federal laws that specifically prohibit it, and state laws that restrict the advertising and custody transfers of children are often confusing and don’t always turn into criminal sanctions. An agreement among all 50 states called the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, or ICPC, is meant to make sure that child welfare authorities oversee custody transfers, review possible parents and account for what happens to children sent from one state to another. Many law-enforcement officials, including police who investigated the Kruse case, have never heard of the ICPC.
Ohio state officials say prosecuting the Kruses would be futile. “There are no sanctions or criminal penalties in Ohio for violating the ICPC,” said Benjamin Johnson, a deputy director of the state’s Department of Job and Family Services. Authorities handling the Kruse cases are now calling for state measures to address re-homing, and other states have already taken action in response to the Reuters investigation.
Michelle, now says she regrets her decisions to re-home Nita. She traveled to Nashville for her graduation ceremony. For the first time, Michelle told Nita how she had used the Internet to find new families for her. “I was like, I do understand that you needed help…but there could have been murderers or killers,” Nita says. “You don’t know those people. I could have been dead.“
Michelle told Nita that “she always has the option to come back home” to Idaho. Nita has no plans to do that. Today, she is living outside Nashville with Sandra Booker, a nurse she met through church. With Booker’s help, Nita intends to finish her education and “focus on the future.” Her ambition, she says, is to return to Haiti and work with orphans.
For more on Nita’s story, see here.
Rueters 5 part series tells the stories of all involved. From the network and the dangers to the middlemen, some who think they are helping, to the failures. And finally the survivors. The ones who get passed around from home to home, never knowing where they will end up next or what will happen to them there.
C.W. Williams
C.W. is a mother, a liberal, and an atheist who believes strongly in equality, gun control, and debunking the many lies of the GOP.
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