September 22, 2004

• ABUSE

  Greyfox told me about this story he’d seen in the paper, after
  mentioning it and then hesitating because it was so horrible and he
  knows how I empathize and how easily I’m sickened by other people’s
  pain.  But I asked him to go ahead and tell me, and then I
  searched out the details online.

  Five
  Mat-Su children suffered abuse, neglect and violent, often bizarre
  punishments at the hands of their adoptive parents, according to a
  trooper affidavit filed this week in Palmer District Court.

  Sherry Kelley, 35, and her husband, Patrick Kelley, 43, are in jail
  facing multiple charges of assault and kidnapping, the latter based on
  confining one of the boys against his will. Each parent is being held
  on $100,000 bail.

  The Kelleys aimed the abuse and discipline techniques at their two sons
  in particular, according to the charging documents.

  At times one boy was sealed naked in a coffinlike box, according to the
  affidavit. The other boy suffered burns in February that became
  infected; maggots hatched from the wounds this summer.

  Both told troopers of being struck with a shovel and other tools. The
  boys’ sisters backed up their stories.

  The Kelleys were state-licensed foster parents when the children were
  placed with them starting in 1998 by what’s now called the Office of
  Children’s Services, Alaska State Troopers determined.

  The lead trooper investigator said he’s never seen a case like this in
  his 13 years of law enforcement.

  “It just kept snowballing,” said investigator Leonard Wallner.

  The couple subsequently adopted the children through the state,
  according to Wallner’s affidavit. There are three girls, now 6, 14 and
  15, and two boys, 10 and 13. The oldest three are biological siblings.

  At the time troopers intervened in July, the couple was receiving
  $3,400 a month in adoption subsidies from the state to care for the
  children, troopers deduced from check stubs found in the family’s
  trailer home during a search.

  None of the children had been to school in years, the affidavit said.
  The kids said Sherry Kelley didn’t cook and they mainly fended for
  themselves, making rice and beans. Patrick Kelley worked in Anchorage
  as a landscaper.

  The youngsters told troopers they did extensive manual labor at the
  family compound off Misty Lake Road between Big Lake and Wasilla,
  Wallner said. They worked in the vegetable gardens and greenhouses and
  cleared land for a home. The family lived in a trailer home, with a
  generator for electricity and an outhouse but no refrigerator and no
  place to bathe other than a pond, which was essentially a collection of
  water at the bottom of a hole.

  George Long — Sherry Kelley’s father and the children’s adoptive
  grandfather — asked troopers for help on July 8, the affidavit said.
  Sherry Kelley and her 15-year-old daughter were arguing over whether
  the teen could get a part-time job when what seemed to be a minor
  family disturbance soon exploded into a tale of torment.

  Troopers were told children slept in “junk vans” that the grandfather
  had brought in for them. Long and his wife, Shirley, live next to the
  Kelleys.

  The parents had excluded the kids from the trailer and they had been
  “sleeping outside hither and yonder,” Wallner said.
  Troopers were told the kids were confined to the property and hadn’t
  been to school since 2001. They soon found out about the severe,
  untreated burns suffered by one of the boys.

  It took time to draw the children out.

  It goes on, about how the parents didn’t prepare meals for the kids, or “waste money on food.”

  Anchorage Daily News | Parents accused of brutal abuse

  A later edition relates the adoptive parents’ subsequent appearance in
  court where 45 additional charges were added, bringing the total
  between the two of them to 54, most of them against Sherry Kelley, the
  “mother”.

  The new charges include misdemeanor
  assault, criminal nonsupport of children and reckless endangerment.
  Those counts are on top of seven felony assault charges and two
  kidnapping charges levied Tuesday by a grand jury. Sherry Kelley stands
  charged with four more assault counts than Patrick Kelley.
  …

  During Friday’s brief court appearance packed with news reporters and
  blood relatives of the kids, neither Kelley looked at the other or
  showed emotion. Sherry Kelley, her long hair in braids tied with pink
  ribbons, at one point stole a glance at birth relatives of the three
  oldest children.

  Defense lawyers waived a formal reading of the charges but entered initial pleas of not guilty.
  …

  A few adoptive relatives also came to
  the hearing, as well as an attorney representing two of Sherry Kelley’s
  sisters. One of the sisters, Sandra Forman, now has custody of the five
  children.

  Forman won court orders earlier this month against Patrick Kelley and
  both George and Shirley Long requiring that the three stay away from
  Forman’s home and church.

  Both adoptive grandparents participated in the abuse of the Kelleys’
  adopted children, Forman wrote in petitions seeking the protective
  orders.

  The grandmother, Forman wrote, scared the children when she came to
  Forman’s home on Sept. 7 and peered through tinted windows trying to
  see them. On another occasion as the investigation was under way,
  Shirley Long approached one child and asked her to “say stuff that
  would make them look good,” Forman wrote.

  Forman also wrote in the petition against Shirley Long, who is also her
  mother, that she and her sisters were mistreated when they were kids
  and implies some of it may have been sexual.

  “She failed to protect me and my sisters from many years of child abuse
  & told us it was our fault. She told my sisters they wore the wrong
  clothes when George touched them. She participated in our abuse &
  the abuse of the Kelley children,” Forman wrote.

  George and Shirley Long have not been charged with any crime in the
  case. Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak said after the hearing
  that his office is still evaluating the evidence as to whether the
  Longs abused the children.
  That full story is here.

  I have long had issues with the institution of adoption, having given
  up two of my own children because I was told that other people could
  give them a better life than I could, and then having learned later
  that both of my girls were abused.  In separate families, both of
  them were made to feel like outsiders, were verbally and emotionally
  abused and exploited as free domestic help.  Both of them told me
  of being unwilling baby sitters for the natural children of their
  adoptive parents, who were given preferential treatment.  In both
  cases, my girls were adopted into those families because the “parents”
  thought they could not have children of their own, and then –surprise,
  surprise– they had some. 

  My feeling is that people who adopt, as the Kelleys apparently did, for
  money, or who do so to satisfy their urge for progeny, are setting
  themselves and the children up for trouble.  That urge for
  offspring is a physical thing, not spiritual.  It’s part of the
  same brain chemistry as the mating urge, and don’t we all know how much
  trouble that urge can
  cause?   It also seems hardwired in the human brain to prefer
  one’s own DNA.  Parents oogle over tiny babies, discussing which
  one’s smile, which one’s nose, the kid has.  That’s important,
  something that should not be ignored when considering adoption. 

  Few people are sufficiently spiritually evolved to love someone else’s
  children as they would their own.  Too many of those same people
  who will indulge their “need” for children by taking in other people’s
  kids will also vent their own frustrations and anger on whatever small
  defenseless being is handy, usually a pet or a child.  Most of the
  ones who want to adopt are not even sufficiently evolved to admit to
  themselves the true nature of their percieved need for a child. 
  They sugar-coat that biological drive, just as they do their sexual
  desires by calling them “love” or “romance”.  If you cannot see
  the true nature of your sexual drive, or if you occasionally indulge an
  urge to kick the dog, please don’t adopt a child.  Grow up first.
  

  • 3:30 pm
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