A white couple in West Virginia who adopted five Black children just so they could abuse them, neglect them, confine them to deplorable living conditions, and force them into slave labor will spend decades of their lives behind bars, if not the rest of their lives.
Source: Catherine McQueen / Getty
According to the Associated Press, 62-year-old Jeanne Kay Whitefeather and her husband, 63-year-old Donald Lantz, received sentences of up to 215 years and up to 160, respectively. Whitefeather will be up for parole in 40 years and Lantz in 30, meaning even if they ever do get out of prison, they’ll be more than a century old or close to it. They will each also have to pay $280,000 in reparations — sorry — restitution to the children they victimized for years.
The court charged the couple with more than a dozen criminal offenses each, including forced labor, civil rights violations, human trafficking, and child neglect. On Wednesday, the Kanawha County Circuit Court judge sentenced them without hesitation, emphasizing that they deserved to serve every single year allowed under the law.
“You brought these children to West Virginia, a place that I know as ‘Almost Heaven,’ and you put them in hell. This court will now put you in yours,” Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers told the defendants per AP. “And may God have mercy on your souls. Because this court will not.”
Whitefeather and Lantz were arrested in October 2023 “after a wellness check led to the discovery of two of the couple’s five adopted children living in deplorable conditions locked in a shed on the Sissonville property on Cheyanne Lane,” WV Metro News reported. The couple had adopted five Black children — ages 6, 9, 11, 14 and 16 at the time of their foster parents’ arrest — while living in Minnesota, then they moved to a farm in Washington state in 2018.
From there, the couple brought the enslaved people they pretended were their adopted children to West Virginia in May 2023. And that’s where it was finally discovered that this wasn’t a loving Caucasian couple who took in five Black children in need of a loving home; these were a couple of 21st Century slavers who went shopping for Black kids to neglect and torture until they were old enough to do all the household labor in a house they were never even allowed to live in.
From NewsOne:
Photos of the shed the two oldest children were allegedly locked in, show what looks like a 19th-century outhouse that hasn’t seen any upkeep since slavery was legal. In fact, deputies stated that the shed had no running water and only an RV porta-potty for the children to use. Yet, in her previous statement, Whitefeather lied, describing it as a “teenage clubhouse,” according to the indictment, which also stated that neighbors “reported that the children were forced to perform farm labor and were not permitted inside the residence.”
More from WV Metro News:
The 16-year-old girl told deputies they had been locked in the building for approximately 12 hours and were last given food around 6:00 a.m. that day.
The children also said they were forced to sleep on the concrete floor of the shed without any mattress or padding.
Court documents stated that the 14-year-old boy had “open sores on his bare feet,” and that the children were dirty and smelled of body odor.
In addition, deputies said they found a 9-year-old girl inside the main home, and three hours from when law enforcement first arrived, Lantz came home with an 11-year-old boy.
Whitefeather came home about an hour after that and led deputies to a 6-year-old girl who had been with acquaintances from the couple’s church.
During sentencing, letters written by four of the children detailing the horrors they lived through and the lasting trauma they caused were read in court by the prosecutor’s office’s victim advocate. Some of the letters were read while the children who wrote them stood by the speaker.
The oldest girl, now 18, was the only one to address the court directly.
“I’ll never understand how you can sleep at night. I want you to know that you are a monster,” she said to Whitefeather.
Last month, the 18-year-old filed a lawsuit “alleging severe physical and emotional abuse and neglect that has scarred her permanently,” according to AP. None of the children have been publicly identified by name.
The judge, who admonished the couple for continuing to fail to take responsibility for what they’ve done, noted that, in a presentencing report, the couple blamed their real estate agent “for not finding a place isolated enough.” (Whew — the caucasity!)
“But I guess you should have explained to your realtor that you needed an isolated place away from people so that you could continue to abuse your children,” Judge Akers said.
Yeah — these two never need to see another day of freedom. They’re racist child abusers who don’t seem to care that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed 160 years ago. Let them rot!
