A Kanawha County judge has approved a $4.4 million settlement for five Black siblings who were forced into slave-like labor by their white adoptive parents, marking the maximum payout West Virginia can award for the state’s child welfare failures.
Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers greenlit the historic settlement last week for the children, who ranged from ages 6 to 16 when Jeanne Kay Whitefeather and Donald Lantz kept them in horrific conditions on their Sissonville property. The couple, who were collectively sentenced to 375 years in prison, made the siblings work as farmhands because of their race.
The children filed suit against West Virginia’s Department of Human Services earlier this year, accusing Child Protective Services of failing to protect them despite multiple warning signs. The agency could not produce documentation showing CPS made contact with the children, even though its own system contained notations about the slave-like conditions they endured.
“There were a ton of calls that came in from neighbors, and I think only one visit out there. There should have been many more,” said Dante diTrapano, the attorney who represented the children.
During Whitefeather and Lantz’s trial, evidence showed that CPS left a card at the family’s front door. DiTrapano said the agency later conducted an interview with the children, but they were within earshot of their adoptive parents, compromising any chance of honest disclosure.
At least one Department of Human Services employee involved in the case was fired, according to state officials. The settlement will be split among the five siblings, some of whom now suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder stemming from the abuse.
The settlement “means that these kids will have an opportunity to be children,” diTrapano said.
“They were robbed of their innocence and robbed of their youth by the monsters that were their former parents.”
The case erupted into public view when a neighbor reported that two teenagers were being kept in a shed. Police discovered the eldest siblings, a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, locked inside with only a small RV porta-potty, no lights, and no running water. One teen told officers they had been locked in the barn for 12 hours since their last meal. Both wore filthy clothes and smelled terrible, and they said the couple forced them to sleep on the concrete floor without mattresses.
After Whitefeather and Lantz’s arrest, the children were placed with new families. Two of their new adoptive mothers appeared in court and spoke about the kids’ new lives, including a trip to the beach.
DiTrapano said he plans to bring charges against Washington state’s Human Services Department as well, since that agency approved Whitefeather and Lantz moving with the children from Washington — where prior reports of child abuse already existed — to West Virginia.
DiTrapano claims that West Virginia’s entire child welfare system “is broken.”
“There’s all kinds of things that need to be changed,” he told West Virginia Watch. “The quality of the employees that they’re having to go out here and look after the welfare of these children, some of the manner in which they do these interviews and document things, they have to take these calls seriously.”
Lars Dalseide, spokesperson for Gov. Patrick Morrisey, said the governor has taken steps to strengthen DPS since taking office.