After 12 days of harrowing testimony, jurors on Wednesday found a West Virginia couple guilty of child neglect and human trafficking, among other charges.
Jeanne Whitefeather, 63, and Donald Lantz, 65, face up to 215 years and 160 years in prison, respectively, and fines totaling $2.4 million each. They’ll be sentenced March 19 after being found guilty on 31 of 35 criminal counts against them.
The white couple had adopted five Black children, all siblings. Testimony revealed the kids lived in squalor and degradation and endured years of physical abuse and racist taunts.
Whitefeather and Lantz were arrested in October 2023 in their home near Charleston, West Virginia, after a neighbor told police she saw Lantz lock the couple’s two oldest children into the barn they were forced to live in.
Deputies had to use a sledgehammer to break into the facility, where they found a 16-year-old girl and 14-year-old boy reeking of body odor with sores on their feet. They slept on a concrete floor with no bedding and shared a bucket as a toilet. Inside the main residence, a 9-year-old girl was found alone crying in a loft with no guardrail, according to prosecutors.
Kanawha County Prosecuting Attorney Debra Rusnak said she was overwhelmed with emotion when they heard the jury’s verdict.
“These cases mean a lot to us — we take a lot of this personally,” she said at a news conference afterward. “This is our community, and these are the children of our community. If we’re not going to fight for them, then who will?”
Whitefeather and Lantz adopted the five siblings while living in Minnesota. They took the children with them to Washington state in 2018 before settling in West Virginia in May 2023, when the children ranged in age from 5 to 16.
A financial intelligence analyst who reviewed the couple’s bank statements testified they pocketed $318,000 in child assistance from the state of Minnesota alone.
When she was arrested, Whitefeather seemed surprised, a detective testified. She later told a welfare worker that the kids “liked it” in the barn, which her attorney had likened to a “teenage hangout.”
Three of the couple’s children testified in the case. The eldest sibling, now 18, told jurors the children were made to stand in their rooms for hours “to prevent us from falling asleep.” They also were ordered to keep their hands on their heads, and if they didn’t, Whitefeather would douse them with pepper spray, the teen testified.
As prosecutors presented photos inside the home, the 18-year-old recalled an incident where Lantz hit one of her brothers on the head with a PVC pipe.
The oldest sibling said the children were cursed at “all the time,” especially by Whitefeather, who was found guilty on four counts of civil rights violations.
The children lived on a diet of peanut butter sandwiches, some of which were left over from a previous meal. They were not allowed to eat except during those scheduled feedings and drank only water after their meals, the 18-year-old testified.
She had only a sleeping bag on the floor in the barn in which to sleept, while her teenage brother was given just a piece of cardboard to use a pillow. The oldest child said she went about two months without showering or brushing her teeth.
She was also denied menstrual products.
They worked every day, carrying supplies, gardening, digging holes for trees, clearing land, gathering water from a creek and looking after the animals on their farm. The teenager said sometimes, the children were forced to use their hands to dig. None of the children received any schooling.
After neighbors noticed them performing hard labor outdoors, the 18-year-old testified they spent most of their time inside.
“By then, Jeanne wasn’t saying anything to me,” the teen said. “We were always locked up.”
She ran away once while the family lived in Washington but returned after two days.
She said she wouldn’t have left again if the door wasn’t locked because she knew her siblings would be severely punished in her stead.
A video surveillance system was installed after the oldest boy tried to run away “because Jeanne said she didn’t trust us,” the daughter testified. “She told us to stop being stupid.”
The daughter testified that when the family lived in Washington, the children were made to sleep in tents on a hill because Whitefeather told them, “We were dirty and that we stunk.”
“I felt like I wasn’t ever going to get out of that situation,” she said.
Whitefeather, the oldest child, testified that she gave preferential treatment to her youngest sibling, who was 5.
“She would tell us all the time, she wanted to go with (the youngest girl) without the rest of them, and how they are wasting time on us because we would never amount to anything,” the teenager said.
In his closing argument, Whitefeather’s attorney, Mark Plants, said that the couple was only guilty of making poor parenting decisions. The defense maintained the couple was simply overwhelmed with trying to get help for the children’s mental health issues, abuse and trauma from their biological home.
The children are now living separately, with the oldest boy undergoing psychological treatment.
