‘Could Barely Walk’: Neighbor Testifies White Adopted Father Stood By As Black Child with Foul Body Odor and Blisters On His Feet Struggled to Complete Manual Labor on West Virginia Property
A deputy who discovered two teens living in squalor, locked in a barn, described their conditions in heartbreaking detail this week as testimony commenced at the trial of the West Virginia couple charged with using their adopted children as slaves.
“As you walked in you could smell not only body odor but an abundance of different types of smells, it’s kind of hard to explain, but they weren’t pleasant,” Kanawha County Sheriff’s Deputy Hannah Burdette testified Wednesday. “And then, like I said, it was physically hot in the room as soon as you opened the door, I was probably standing five feet back from the door and when the door opened you could physically feel the heat escaping the room outside.”
Inside the windowless barn, locked so tight that the deputies couldn’t gain entrance with a sledgehammer, police found an air conditioning unit that didn’t function. There were a couple of chairs, a table, a camper toilet, plastic bag with some bread in it and an empty bottle of juice.
A 16-year-old girl and 14-year-old boy who lived there were noticeably dirty, Burdette said. The 14 year-old wasn’t wearing any shoes and had cuts and blisters on his feet; both reeked of body odor.
They are the two oldest children of Jeanne Kay Whitefeather, 62, and Donald Ray Lantz, 61, who told deputies they were forced to stay in the barn, which had no running water, whenever they weren’t working on the family property.
The parents, who are white, are charged with forced labor, civil rights violations, human trafficking and gross child neglect. The five adopted children, all siblings ranging in age from 5 to 16, are Black.
They were arrested in October 2023 in their Sissonville home, near Charleston. Whitefeather, testified a detective, didn’t understand why the police were there. She later told a welfare worker that the kids “liked it” in the barn.
Conditions weren’t much better inside the couple’s home. A 9-year-old girl was found alone crying in a loft without any guard rails. Lantz soon returned with the fourth child and were later led to the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, according to the criminal complaint.
Detective Ana Pile told to the jury on Wednesday that they received seven days worth of footage from both inside the barn and inside the main house. For that period, Pile noted that the two older teens in the barns never changed clothes and the teen girl only left a few minutes before returning.
“Also what the videos showed is that the children, in both rooms, slept on the floor,” Pile added. “The two in the barn area slept on the concrete floor. (The teenage girl) slept on a sleeping bag on the concrete floor and the (teenage boy) slept with nothing underneath him other than a piece of cardboard under his head. He had a fitted sheet that he would cover up with.”
Neighbor Joyce Bailey fought back tears Tuesday as she recalled the first time she observed the family on the night they moved into their new home.
She remembered the children being told to line up outside despite rainy conditions.
“You never see them talk to each other,” she said. “They didn’t talk at all among themselves. You didn’t see them out unless they were working. They never played.”
But they worked hard. Bailey choked up as she testified about how some of the children struggled to carry fencing for the animals, propane tanks, full buckets of water and other supplies between the home, a trailer and the barn. They were watched closely at all times by Lantz, Bailey told jurors.
“He made them carry it all, that heavy fencing,” she said as prosecutors showed video Bailey shot of the forced labor. “They would just stand there and wait for him to tell them what to do.”
Bailey said she also witnessed the oldest boy carrying a propane tank. The boy “could barely walk. He acted like his feet were so sore. He was dragging them,” Bailey said. “Mr. Lantz was just standing there. He never said anything, not helping him.”
The couple was planning to move in September after purchasing a bigger home in Beckley, West Virginia. A month later, Bailey said, she saw Lantz lock the two oldest children in the barn and leave the property.
They were still in the process of moving when police were called.
Whitefeather’s attorney Mark Plants said his client and her husband were “struggling to deal with their children’s past trauma and severe mental illness.”
Plants said the children suffered “physical, sexual and emotional” abuse at the hands of their biological mother, who, he said, used alcohol and drugs while she was pregnant.
“This is a normal family,” Plants said. “They have Christmases. All of them. They have Christmas presents. They have family vacations. They sit around dinner tables and eat.”
The barn, he said, was like “teenage clubhouse” and said there was a key inside. But prosecutors said the children never knew about a key.
Plants said the lockers were added after the oldest boy attempted to run away from home. The 14-year-old currently is receiving full-time care in a psychiatric facility. All of the children are now under the care of the state’s Child Protective Services office.
The couple adopted the five siblings while living in Minnesota and moved to a farm in Washington state in 2018 before relocated to West Virginia in 2023.
In her opening statement, prosecutor Madison Tuck said the children were used “physically, emotionally and mentally so that they would comply.” She said text messages between Lantz and Whitefeather mentioned making the children stand for long periods of time and locking the two older children, both teenagers, in the outbuilding.