The Barnett's of Indiana wanted to adopt a child. They were told about a little girl who had been moved from the Ukraine to the U.S. They were able to adopt her in 2010. Now they have been arrested and charged with abandonment after they left her in Lafayette and moved their family to Canada. Their defense is is making international headlines!
They claim they were victims of a scam. An adoption agency in Florida is who put them in contact with a little girl named Natalia. They thought she was 6. But now believe she was a 22 year old mentally disturbed adult who has dwarfism.
The Mom Kristine says she thought something was wrong the first night when she went to give her new daughter a bath. "I noticed that she had full pubic hair. I was so shocked. I had just been told she was a six year old and it was very apparent she wasn't!"
The problems started when Natalia moved in and started threatening family members. "She would make statements and draw pictures saying she wanted to kill family members, roll them up in a blanket and put them in the backyard," Kristine told DailyMailTV. "She was standing over people in the middle of the night. You couldn't go to sleep. We had to hide all the sharp objects."
Then one morning she came back in the kitchen and saw Natalia pouring bleach into her coffee. "I asked her, what are you doing? She said, 'I am trying to poison you,'"
They took their little girl to a psychologist who told them Natalia was an adult dwarf with a severe mental disorder. "She was jumping out of moving cars. She was smearing blood on mirrors. She was doing things you could never imagine a little child doing." They asked how old the doctors believed their little girl was and they said around 22.
They tried to keep her in their family till 2014 but after years of treatment it was apparent to them she wasn't getting any better. The family was also moving to Canada to help one of their sons with his education. So they legally changed Natalia's birth certificate to reflect an age the Doctor's thought was about her real age. They set her up in an apartment in Lafayette and paid the rent for a year and moved away.
At some point the Lafayette Police Dept opened an investigation into this matter. They believe that the parents illegally changed the girls age. They say their evidence proves that they coached Nadine to tell people to just say she looked young for her age.
Now 5 years later they are being charged with felony neglect of a child. Kristine surrendered to authorities on Thursday and was released after posting a $5,500 bond. Michael also surrendered and was released after posting $5,000 bail.
Kristine says "The media is painting me to be a child abuser but there is no child here."
And she means that both in the sense that they believe she was never a child while in their custody nor does anyone know where Natalia is today. Both the media and police say her whereabouts is currently unknown.
As a side note Kristine is the author of "The Spark: a Mother's Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism". She has been praised as an outstanding parent.