bessie
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The fact is, nobody in their right mind would leave a child with someone they met on Facebook. Whether they are a relative or not, how would you know that you weren't sending the child to live in squalor? Additionally, who in their right mind takes custody of a child and then fails to seek state funding due to that child. This is a murder investigation, through and through. The authorities aren't going to charge them until they have enough evidence to get a grand jury indictment, and unfortunately, lying to the authorities is probably not enough to do that. I believe they are truly treating this as a murder investigation and they are taking their time to discover evidence and (ideally) to get a confession of one or both of them.
Some Parents of Adopted Children Turn to Online Networks, Triggering Problems
Adoptive parents swap unwanted kids on the InternetPBS NewsHour AIR DATE: Sept. 11, 2013
So, it's important to realize that when parents go into this sort of online re-homing network -- and we found these are Yahoo! -- these have been Yahoo! groups and Facebook groups where people go to solicit new families for their unwanted adopted children, and oftentimes they transfer these children over to strangers with nothing more than a power of attorney, a simple slip of paper that you can download from the Internet and get notarized that says you're placing this child in the hands of another adult, and they're now in their custody.
Also:REUTERS
Monday, September 9, 2013, 10:14 AM
As part of its investigation, Reuters reviewed thousands of pages of records – many of them confidential – from court cases, police reports and child welfare agencies. Reporters examined ads for children and emails between parents, and also identified eight Internet groups in which members discussed, facilitated or engaged in re-homing. Reporters then analyzed thousands of posts from the group that Yahoo subsequently shut down, Adopting-from-Disruption.
"People get in over their heads," says Tim Stowell, an adoptive parent who created the Facebook group last year. "The main thing is to offer hope for families that have no hope... I also knew there were people looking to adopt kids from those situations, so I wanted to get those people together, kind of like a clearinghouse."
Hundreds of other adoptive parents were seeking new homes for their unwanted children through Internet message boards like those that had featured Quita. Nicole Eason knew how the child exchange worked. She would tap it again after losing Quita, much as she had used it before.
One of the first times, Eason had gone by the screen name Big Momma. The custody transfer took place in a hotel parking lot just off the highway, and the man who went with her to get the 10-year-old boy would later be sentenced to federal prison. His crime: trading child *advertiser censored*.