Adopted kids left in Africa returned to America

I'm glad that they've been taken safe, thanks to humanitarians, but this sort of abuse never should have happened. What will happen if médecins sans frontières and their counterparts are driven from Africa for similar reasons as Afghanistan.

Is anyone investigating adoption policies in Texas?

Birth mother wants children found in Nigeria back
Dallas woman says she can do a better job now
By THOMAS KOROSEC
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Dallas Bureau

DALLAS - LaQuinta Teague, birth mother of three of the children found in Nigeria, said Wednesday she wants them back.


"They know they were taken from me," said Teague, 27, who lost her three children six years ago when she went to prison for assaulting a peace officer. "It wasn't like I wanted them to go. I know they want to be back home."

Teague, who did not know where her children were until reporters began calling her, said she was able to provide her children the basics, even as a single mother on welfare.

"They were in a day care down the street. They were clothed and fed, and we have this house," she said. "I was getting welfare, and a little help from my grandfather and his church. I was doing the best I could."

Teague, who lives with her 89-year-old grandfather in a small frame house on a tough street in South Dallas, said poverty and "things working against me" led state welfare officials to take her children away.

In 1997, she was arrested for failing to pay two tickets, both for not carrying auto insurance.

She scuffled with the officer, leading to a felony arrest for assaulting a peace officer and four years' probation. When she fell behind on her fees and stopped reporting to her probation officer, she was sentenced to two years in prison.

State child-welfare officials picked up her children, obtained legal custody and in 2001 put them up for adoption with the Houston woman who eventually left them in Ibadan, Nigeria.

"I thought I was going to have a hearing, but there never was one," said Teague. "They told me they were with a nice Christian woman who had other children."

Teague said a caseworker sent her pictures of the children several years ago and told her they were in Houston. "She wouldn't tell me more, so that's all I could do," she said.

Her daughter is now 12; her sons are 11 and 8.

Teague said she would like to see the adoptive mother prosecuted for endangering the children's lives.

A friend of Teague's said she was taking her to see a lawyer to discuss her legal rights and steps she might take to re-establish custody.

"I'm a lot more grown up now, and they're older kids. They're not babies anymore," Teague said. "The boy could be in football. My daughter could be a cheerleader. It isn't like I have to be there rocking them 24-7. It wouldn't be hard at all."

She said she would expect help from the state "after all they've put my children through."

Left in Nigeria last fall, they and four other children were living in an orphanage, several suffering from malaria, sores and malnourishment, when an American missionary found them two weeks ago.

Teague said she can do better. But she does not have a steady job, and she recently got out of jail for misdemeanor assault and check forgery.

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Before kids went to Nigeria, abuse was reported but never confirmed
By MELANIE MARKLEY and DALE LEZON
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
Harris County Child Protective Services investigated four complaints against a mother accused of abandoning her seven adopted children in Nigeria, but officials said they found no evidence of abuse in the family's Houston home.


At least one complaint was made by a staff worker at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston, who said the children were underfed, unhappy and scared.

"The kids were always just telling us they were hungry," said Mona Bates, a unit director at the club the children attended.

CPS confirmed Wednesday it investigated four abuse complaints dating to 1997. The latest complaint was received in September, one month before the mother took the children to Nigeria, where they were discovered last month in a squalid orphanage by a visiting missionary.

Authorities have not released the identity of the mother, who faces a custody hearing Aug. 26.

The woman adopted four siblings in Houston in 1996. Five years later, she adopted three siblings in Dallas.

Last October, she took the children to Nigeria, where a relative of her fiancé's lives, and they were enrolled in school. The woman returned to Houston about 30 days later. From April to July, she was in Iraq, where she worked as a food-service contract employee to provide support services to U.S. troops.

The children apparently left school when money for their tuition stopped, authorities believe. Neighbors tipped Nigerian child-welfare workers to their living in squalor. Then they were placed in an orphanage July 28 in Ibadan.

Since their return to Houston last Friday, the children have leveled new accusations against their adoptive mother, claiming she hit them with switches and a cane and often threatened to take them to Africa if they ever told authorities about the abuse, said Estella Olguin, CPS spokeswoman.


Mother's charges growing
CPS has referred the new abuse complaints to the Houston Police Department for a criminal investigation. HPD Sgt. Rose Terry confirmed that police are investigating.

The woman also faces a state fraud investigation, stemming from the payments she received to help care for the children.

CPS had been paying the woman $512 a month for each of the seven children because, as minority siblings wishing to stay together, they were considered hard to place for adoption.

CPS in Houston cut off monthly payments in March after receiving a tip that the children no longer were living with the woman. The mother told the agency the kids were staying with her mother in Houston while she underwent cancer treatment in Shreveport, La. Olguin said the woman was unable to prove she was giving the money to her mother in Houston to care for them.

The Dallas office of CPS continued sending her money for the siblings adopted there.


Hunger among abuse claims
Some of the new abuse accusations from the children are similar to the complaints CPS had previously investigated.

Olguin said the complaint from September involved concerns the children were hungry and dirty and had little food in the house. But when caseworkers went to the house, they found the pantry, refrigerator and freezer stocked with food and the children denying they were neglected, she said.

An earlier complaint in July 2000 alleged the children were without food and were crowded into a single bedroom with no fan or air conditioning. Olguin said that CPS workers found the four girls sleeping in one room and the three boys sleeping in another. The rooms had fans, and the home was well-stocked with food, she said.

Two other complaints, one in March 1997 and one in February 1998, involved allegations of physical abuse, Olguin said. She said the children told the caseworker they had not been physically abused by their mother.

"It was a woman fooling a lot of people, doing a good job of it, and kids terrified to tell anyone," Olguin said Wednesday.

Bates said she wasn't fooled. She said the mother sent the children to her club nearly every day for eight-hour stays with only a single peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for each.

"We fed them," Bates said. "We gave them clothes, shoes, food. We took them out for birthdays."


Overseas calls
Bates said that a few months before they were taken to Africa, they called the club, pleading with her to help them stay in Houston. While in Africa, she said, the children called "every time we looked up."

She said they pleaded with her and her staff: "Please can you help us? We don't have any clothes. Could you send us money? We don't have any food. We're hungry."

The club's staff last spoke with the children about two months ago, Bates said.

Warren Beemer, a youth pastor with the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, interviewed the children as he passed through the orphanage Aug. 4 during a relief mission to the area. He alerted his church to their predicament.


Happy returns
The church contacted U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, who helped ensure that the children were returned to Houston. They landed at Bush Intercontinental Airport on Aug. 13. The children are living in two foster homes.

Joseph Bennett, a Navy Junior ROTC instructor at Sterling High School where the eldest girl was a freshman in the 2002-2003 academic year, remembered her as an eager, friendly and helpful student interested in anything nautical.

Despite her enthusiasm, she could not stay after class for extracurricular activities, he said, because she had to go home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters.

"I feel better that she's back," Bennett said. "I hope that soon she's been restored to good health."

Chronicle reporter Tara Dooley contributed to this story.

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I complete agree

Mom of 7 says she tried to visit kids in Nigeria
But visa problem barred her entry, she tells judge
By DALE LEZON
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

The mother of seven children found hungry and sick in a Nigerian orphanage told a judge she was desperate to visit them but couldn't get a visa to enter the country.


Mercury Liggins, 47, lost temporary custody of her adopted children after they were found in the orphanage.

In court documents reviewed by the Chronicle, she told Master Judge Sherry Van Pelt that she had taken them to Nigeria in October 2003 and enrolled them in a boarding school "to help them get on track; but it didn't work out kinda."

She said she sent her fiance's brother, a Nigerian resident, money for the school tuition and other fees.

Her attorney, Michael Delaney, has said the man began pocketing the money and the children were kicked out of school. Delaney said Liggins later married her fiance.

"I didn't just abandon my children in Nigeria," she told Van Pelt.

Liggins said she traveled to Nigeria to check on the children in June, but was turned away from the border because she didn't have a visa. She then was denied a visa at the Nigerian embassy in Holland because she was not a Dutch resident.

Estella Olguin, spokeswoman for Child Protective Services, said Liggins has documents indicating she was refused entry to Nigeria on July 28, the day the children were placed in the orphanage.

Liggins was working at the time in Iraq for Halliburton as a civilian contractor. She returned to the United States and received a visa from the Nigerian embassy in Atlanta.

"I finally got the visa, and by that time the kids were in trouble," she said.

Liggins said she sent about $14,000 for her children's care In Nigeria. She has receipts for the money, she said.

The children stopped attending school July 22. They were left alone in the home of the man expected to help care for them.

Neighbors concerned about the children tipped Nigerian child welfare officials, who placed them in the orphanage on July 28. Some were hospitalized later with malaria and typhoid.

A youth pastor with Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, found them Aug. 4 while passing out clothes and food at the orphanage. He alerted his church leaders, who contacted two Texas congressmen, who helped ensure that the children were returned to the United States.

They arrived in Houston Aug. 13 and were placed in foster homes.

"I talked to (the children) at least two or three times a week, talked to the children on the phone," Liggins stated in court documents. "They never expressed that they wanted to come home. ... They even said they were enjoying school. Everything was going fine."

A custody hearing in the case is scheduled for Thursday.

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Report: Abandoned children abused earlier
Associated Press
DALLAS -- Three of the seven American children abandoned at a Nigerian orphanage had suffered years of abuse, including broken bones and beatings with extension cords, before they were adopted by the woman who left them in Africa, a newspaper reported today.

The oldest child told investigators that her mother and grandmother often beat her and her two brothers with a black belt and an extension cord nicknamed the "persuader."


The children's mother denied harming them.

"I gave them nothing more than a little whip on the behind to keep them straight," LaQuinta Teague said. "I am a good mother."

Child Protective Services has declined to reveal details of the children's treatment or how it handled allegations of abuse before it approved their adoption in 1996.

A judge in Fort Bend County sealed the court file containing information about the 1996 adoption of four other Houston-area children adopted by Mercury Liggins. However, a juvenile court in Dallas, where the other three children lived before Liggins adopted them in 2001, allowed The Dallas Morning News to review files.

The oldest Dallas girl told CPS caseworkers that her mother and grandmother often beat them.

"She whops (sic) us on our bottom, hips and on our hands," the girl, then 6, told CPS caseworker Kallie Capps.

The children, now ages 8 to 12, were so terrorized that one of the boys told school officials he could not go home after soiling his underwear because he feared he'd be beaten.

"The next day, he came to the school with an abrasion on his lip, stating his mother hit him on the mouth with a belt," Capps wrote.

The same boy suffered two broken legs as an infant. Teague told caseworkers he suffered the injuries while lying in his crib, according to court records. The other boy suffered a burn on his hand from an iron, which Teague and his father said was accidental, and was scalded after his father put him under hot bath water.

CPS caseworkers investigated abuse allegations at least six times. The children were removed from Teague's custody while she was serving a prison term for assaulting a police officer.

Liggins, the adoptive mother of all seven children, also has been accused of abusing them. CPS officials received five complaints of abuse and neglect from 1996 to 2003. A spokeswoman said the children always denied they were being abused.

Liggins eventually left all seven children with a relative in Nigeria. Since they were returned from Africa this month, the children have told of beatings with canes and switches.

The Morning News said Liggins received state child-subsidy payments conservatively estimated at nearly $250,000, yet her children often complained to neighbors of being hungry. A relative said Liggins treated her biological children well but was miserly toward the adopted children.

Liggins declined to comment. Her lawyer said she will seek to regain custody of the children. CPS has refused to release documents used to rate her fitness as an adoptive parent.

The children have been placed in two foster homes pending a custody hearing Thursday in Houston.



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Edgar, reading stories like this makes me sick. There are so many abused children that it is a wonder any of them survive and manage to live decently. To me, they are true heroes.

I have to wonder how this will end. When attorneys are involved, justice isn't always the outcome. Hopefull, the children will be considered old enough to have some say in where they will live.

I wish them the best--God knows they've been through more than most people experience in a lifetime.

My gut feeling is, the adoptive mother will not get them. Where they will end up, I wouldn't guess.

I'm trying to comprehend how this woman managed to adopt SEVEN children. And what sort of follow up occurred on the part of the authorities. This is just unbelievable.

Mother gives up custody of 7 adopted kids
She could have visitation rights, if therapist agrees
By DALE LEZON and RHEA DAVIS
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

The mother of seven adopted Houston children found sick and malnourished in a Nigerian orphanage earlier this month agreed to give up temporary custody of her children but won possible visitation rights in a last-minute deal at a court hearing Thursday.


Mercury Denise Liggins, 47, did not appear at the hearing before Associate Judge Sherry Van Pelt to contest efforts by the state to take her children, ages 8 to 16. The children have accused her of physical abuse.

Her attorney, Michael Delaney, said she will fight to regain custody but thought it best to have them remain in Child Protective Services custody for now to shield them from further trauma.

Delaney said Liggins was medicated for severe mental and emotional exhaustion and could not assist him.

Liggins faces another hearing Sept. 2 to determine if she will pay child support for the children while they are in the care of the Department of Family and Protective Services. In one year, the court will decide whether Liggins can regain custody of the children.

Delaney said his client did not abandon or abuse the children. She tried to care for them as best as she could, he said. CPS officials say they investigated four previous complaints of abuse against Liggins dating to 1997, but none was substantiated.

"She loves her children," Delaney said.

Liggins has not seen the children since they returned to Houston but may have a chance to visit them for one hour twice a month if their therapist believes it won't traumatize them. The visits could begin as early as next month, Delaney said.

Terry Elizondo, the attorney appointed to represent the children's interests, said Liggins can visit them if their therapist agrees.

"Some of the children are very angry with their mother because they have vivid memories of being beaten often," Elizondo said. "They think their mother doesn't care about them. They think their mother doesn't make any effort to pay attention to them. They think she doesn't make any effort to provide them with the basics: food, clothes, respect, attention and love. These kids really are mad at their mom."

Delaney said the oldest child has turned her siblings against their mother. "She is angry with her mother," he said. "She is angry at the whole situation. She has a lot of influence with the younger kids. She may be getting them into her corner."


'It didn't work out'
Liggins adopted four siblings in 1996 in Fort Bend County. She adopted three other siblings in 2001 in Dallas. In October 2003, she took them to Nigeria and enrolled them in school, she said, "to help them get on track; but it didn't work out."

They stopped attending the school July 22 because of nonpayment of fees. Nigerian authorities found them sick with malaria and typhoid at the home of a relative, who Liggins said was supposed to forward her payments to the school. They were placed in an orphanage July 28.

A San Antonio youth pastor found them Aug. 4 and alerted his church leaders. They called U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who contacted U.S. authorities and helped bring the children to Houston on Aug. 13.


Children claim abuse
The children have accused Liggins of physically abusing them before they went to Africa. Neighbors said the children often appeared underfed and lacked motherly love.

Elizondo said the children speak about their mother's miserly spending. She said they told her Liggins would buy two packs of cookies from a Dollar Store and give them one to take to a Boys & Girls Club as a snack.

Club staff have said Liggins regularly dropped off the children in the morning for at least an eight-hour stay. She rarely sent them with more to eat than a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich each, they said.

The birth parents of the children adopted in Fort Bend County, Janice Williams and Gregory Bonner, attended the hearing and said they hope to be reunited and even regain custody of their children. Their parental rights were terminated in 1994.

"It's as if we don't even exist," Williams said, crying.

She and Bonner said they would like to visit the children.

Elizondo said she hadn't told the couple's children that their biological parents had been found. Elizondo said she would consult with the therapist and CPS officials about a visit.


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Latest crack in faulty system
Nigeria case furthers scrutiny of child services
By POLLY ROSS HUGHES and MELANIE MARKLEY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Mercury Liggins passed the adoption test again and again, sailing through one home study after another, each concluding she was a fit mother to care for hard-to-place children.


Yet Liggins' seven state-subsidized adopted children found abandoned at a Nigerian orphanage tell a different story, news that couldn't come at a worse time for Texas' Child Protective Services agency.

The Department of Family and Protective Services' broken foster care system was already the subject of a highly critical probe by Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn this year.

Now, Liggins' case and the adoption system itself will be scrutinized as part of a top-to-bottom investigation of the agency by the Health and Human Services Commission's Office of Inspector General, said commission spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman.

Investigators should keep in mind that adoptions rarely fail as dramatically as they apparently did in the Liggins case, said one judge who's overseen countless child abuse cases and signed off on thousands of adoptions.

"Anytime there's a disastrous case in child welfare or anywhere else, we need to look at it. If it's an individual in the system that's failed, there's nothing wrong with the system," said Bexar County District Judge John Specia, who frequently testifies in legislative hearings on Child Protective Services.

Yet Specia noted that Liggins, who over the years adopted nine children, underwent more than one screening known as the "social" or "home" study.

It is this study, above all others, that judges most rely upon when deciding if an adoptive family is suitable, experts say.

"The social study is designed to tease out any problems with respect to the adoptive parents," Specia said. "If the social study misses things, that's the primary place where things can go wrong. I'm only as good as the information I get."


Pressed for time
Former Travis County District Judge F. Scott McCown, whose petition in 1998 resulted in the hiring of more CPS caseworkers, said the state continues to underfund its child welfare system, ranking 48th in the nation.

Home studies can go wrong, he said, if workers have too many to conduct under tight time constraints. And courts sometimes are under pressure to keep dockets moving, he said.

"They don't always uncover everything," said McCown, now the executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin think tank. "Our judges have way too many cases, but they don't have but minutes to spend on cases they should be spending hours on."


Passed in the past
Liggins passed muster for two private adoptions in Fort Worth before she was screened and approved for four CPS children in Fort Bend County in 1996 and three in Dallas County in 2001. The last two screenings were conducted by Spaulding for Children, a private nonprofit agency in Houston that contracts with the state for foster care and adoptive services. The first two children adopted are living with an ex-husband and were not taken to Nigeria.

Vikki Finley, the interim president and chief executive officer of Spaulding for Children, would not talk specifically about the Liggins case. But she said the agency's process for screening families and conducting home studies is extensive.

According to the Department of Family and Protective Services, inspectors have never found shortcomings with Spaulding's home studies.


Mostly successful
Finley said her 27-year-old agency facilitates about 100 adoptions a year, "and 98 percent of these adoptions are hugely successful." Spaulding is one of seven private Texas agencies that contracts with the Harris County CPS to recruit families for adoptions.

Last year, 2,444 CPS children were adopted in Texas, and nearly 75 percent of them went to families recruited by the agency itself.

The Liggins adoptions are not the only ones that have come back to haunt CPS and the private agencies that helped recruit and screen the families.

In March 2000, an 8-year-old Tarkington boy was beaten to death with a baseball bat by his adoptive mother. The woman, Edith Beebe, was sentenced to 75 years in prison after she was found guilty of killing her son and seriously injuring three of the other five children she had adopted.

Amid all the scrutiny of CPS, some private adoption agencies are rallying around a call for dramatic changes in the system, saying the agency should get out of the adoption business and focus on regulation. Richard Laballo, a lawyer at Advocacy Inc., said he hopes the inspector general will study "collector families," who adopt large numbers of hard-to-place children and get paid a subsidy for each.

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Mom who left kids in Africa must pay support
Associated Press

The adoptive mother of seven children found malnourished at a Nigerian orphanage was ordered today to pay $1,480 monthly in child support while the children remain in the state's care.


"It's a lot of money for someone who is disabled and jobless at this point," said Michael Delaney, the attorney for Mercury Liggins, 47.

An attorney appointed to represent the children, Terry Lea Elizondo, had asked the payments be the same as the amounts the state had been providing Liggins.

"This mother accepted $3,500 a month from the government to care for these children and I wonder why she shouldn't be required to pay that same amount back for the state to take care of the children," Elizondo said.

State District Judge Sherry Van Pelt ordered the support be paid twice a month in $740 increments.

Liggins' children, ranging in age from 8 to 17, were discovered a month ago at a squalid orphanage by an American missionary. The children, some of them suffering from typhoid and malaria, told the missionary they were from Houston and wanted to go home. The church's pastor told two U.S. congressmen and arrangements were made to return them to Texas.

Liggins testified Thursday she had been making up to $6,000 monthly doing contract work in Iraq as a food services worker for Houston-based Hallilburton subsidiary KBR. She went to work there in April but left three months later. In previous jobs, she'd never made more than $9 per hour, she said.

At an emergency hearing two weeks ago, Liggins told a judge she wired more than $14,000 for her children's care during the final eight months they were in the West African country, where she said they were supposed to be staying with her brother-in-law and attending boarding school while she worked in Iraq.

Delaney said then that instead of paying for the children's school, the relative pocketed the money.

The children were kicked out of the school and on July 28 ended up in at the orphanage.

Four of the children are biological siblings adopted by Liggins in 1996. The three others share another birth mother and were adopted in Dallas in 2001. The family has been investigated four times for abuse or neglect in reports dating to 1997.

Since their return, the children have alleged years of severe emotional and physical abuse, according to Child Protective Services.

Liggins received $3,584 monthly -- $512 per child -- from the state for the children's care.

Before adopting the seven, Liggins had adopted two other children with a man she was married to from 1979 to 1990. She also has two children of her own, who along with the first two adopted children, lived with Liggins' ex-husband after their divorce, according to CPS.

The children's ordeal has prompted an investigation into Texas' adoption system by the state Health and Human Services Commission.

Media exposure might make those kids feel terribly important--an hour of fame after months of privation.

Personally, I don't think appearing on national television would solve any of my problems or dissolve any of my traumas but Therapy By Media seems to work for some people.

Do you remember the very attractive little Morman 14 year old girl who was kidnapped by the demented handyman? Her parents put her on the talk show circuit as part of her healing.

I recall the girl, but didn't know it was a part of her therapy to make the rounds like that. I can see that it could be helpful to some, if not all. What disturbs me the most is the sheer volume of these type happenings.

Her parents insisted that they were not exploiting their daughter and her unhappy experience; that talk shows were part of her "therapy" to help her return to "normal".

I don't recall that any therapist felt talk show help was theraputic.

I suppose you could consider a talk show appearance as validation that these children were "Good" and what happened to them was "Bad" and "Not Their Fault" but there are more private ways to accomplish this sort of orientation.