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Background: The Sissonville, West Virginia, shed where Donald Lantz and Jeanne Whitefeather locked up their adoptive children in 2023 (WCHS). Insets, clockwise from top left: Donald Lantz (West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority); Jeanne Whitefeather (West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority); interior photo of the shed taken by Whitefeather’s brother after arrest (WCHS).
A white West Virginia couple has been convicted of using their adopted Black children as “slaves,” forcing them to work heavy labor and live in a filthy shed with buckets as toilets.
Donald Lantz, 61, and Jeanne Whitefeather, 62, were convicted Wednesday of multiple counts of child neglect and forced labor. Whitefeather was found guilty on all 19 counts. Lantz was convicted on 12 of 16 counts.
“You want to know what racists look like?” Assistant Prosecutor Madison Tuck, with the Kanawha County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, asked the jury, The Associated Press reported. “Look at them,” Tuck added, pointing to the defendants.
“These kids weren’t there to be raised as children but served another purpose entirely,” Kanawha County Assistant Prosecutor Chris Krivonyak said. “The whole point of treating them this way is they become less than human. They become more like machines. That way, they’re more useful.”
In his closing argument, Whitefeather’s attorney, Mark Plants, denied the charges, saying, “these are farm people that do farm chores.”
“It wasn’t about race,” he said. “It wasn’t about forced labor.”
Lantz’s attorney, John Balenovich, blamed the state’s child welfare agency, from which the couple had sought help to deal with the children’s mental health issues, but which “dropped the ball the most in this case,” The Associated Press reported.
As Law&Crime previously reported, the case came to light when police searched the couple’s property in Sissonville, 15 miles north of Charleston, after a report to 911 was made about children being trapped inside the couple’s outdoor shed. When authorities got onto Lantz and Whitefeather’s property, they broke into the shed — measuring 20 feet by 14 feet — in the backyard and found two children inside — a boy, 14, and a girl, 16. Another girl, 9, was found inside the home, alone and crying as she sat near a railing in a loft 15 feet off the ground.
The shed had no running water or lights. There was no bedding or mattress, and the floor was hard concrete. According to police, the 14-year-old boy had open sores on his bare feet. The children told police during initial interviews that they had been locked inside the shed for 12 hours. Police said the children reeked of body odor and appeared unbathed and dirty. They shared a makeshift toilet by crafting one from a toilet seat ripped out of an RV.
Police waited at the property with the children for three hours before Lantz showed up with an 11-year-old boy in tow. Whitefeather arrived an hour after that and reportedly led police to the location of a 6-year-old girl who was visiting them with another couple from their local church.
West Virginia’s Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers said after the couple were indicted that she hadn’t seen a case like this one, saying the children were “targeted because of their race” to be used “as basically slaves.”
Whitefeather claimed in court the shed was a “teenage clubhouse,” local Fox and ABC affiliate WCHS reported. She also said the children “liked it.”
The AP reported that Brenda Bailey, a neighbor, testified she watched the children carry heavy items, including propane tanks and buckets of water at the property. She filmed some of it, and it was shown in court. She said one carried a propane tank and could “could barely walk. He acted like his feet were so sore. He was dragging them.”
“Mr. Lantz was just standing there. He never said anything, not helping him,” Bailey said.
Prosecutors say the couple sought out Black children from a shelter and likely trafficked them from an 80-acre ranch the couple once owned in Tonasket, Washington, to the home in Sissonville, West Virginia, WCHS reported.