A West Virginia couple who adopted five children were sentenced to decades in prison on Wednesday after they were convicted of abusing some of them by locking them in a shed and forcing them to perform heavy labor, prosecutors said.
The couple, Jeanne Whitefeather, 63, and Donald Lantz, 62, of Sissonville, W.Va., were found guilty by a jury in January of human trafficking of a minor child, use of a minor in forced labor, gross child neglect and child abuse by a parent causing bodily injury.
Ms. Whitefeather was also convicted of a civil rights violation. Prosecutors said she had used racially derogatory language to describe the children, who are Black. She and Mr. Lantz are white, prosecutors said.
Ms. Whitefeather was sentenced to up to 215 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 49 years, prosecutors said. Mr. Lantz was sentenced to up to 160 years and will be eligible for parole in 36 years.
Judge Maryclaire Akers of the Eighth Judicial Circuit Court in Kanawha County, W.Va., said that the couple moved to West Virginia in 2023, hoping to find a place isolated enough where they could abuse their children. What they found instead was a “state of people who will not tolerate the abuse of children of any race,” Judge Akers said.
“You brought these children to West Virginia, a place that I know is ‘almost heaven,’ and you put them in hell,” she told the couple, according to video of the sentencing posted online by WCHS, a local television station. “This court will now put you in yours. And may God have mercy on your souls, because this court will not.”
The defense had argued that the couple were overwhelmed with trying to get help for the children’s mental health issues, as well as abuse and trauma from the children’s biological home, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Lantz’s lawyer, John J. Balenovich, said in an interview on Wednesday that his client “maintains his innocence as to the charges” and is considering an appeal.
Ms. Whitefeather’s lawyer, Mark Plants, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. He said during closing arguments that the couple were guilty only of making poor parenting decisions, The A.P. reported.
“These are farm people that do farm chores,” Mr. Plants said. “It wasn’t about race. It wasn’t about forced labor.”
The couple adopted the children, who are now 18, 16, 13, 10 and 9, in Minnesota in 2018, prosecutors said. The family then lived in Washington State before moving to Kanawha County in May 2023, prosecutors said.
In October 2023, Kanawha County sheriff’s deputies responded to the family’s home after neighbors reported that the children were being abused. The neighbors said that some of the children had been “locked in a barn for days at a time” and were “forced to perform farm labor,” according to court records.
Deputies found two children, a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, locked in an outbuilding with a small portable toilet and no running water. The 16-year-old told deputies that they had not been given food since 6 a.m., about 12 hours earlier, and had been locked in the building since then.
Prosecutors said that the children had been forced to sleep on the concrete floor — the 16-year-old with a thin sleeping bag and the 14-year-old with a fitted sheet and a piece of cardboard for a pillow. The couple gave the children only peanut-butter sandwiches and a jug of water, prosecutors said.
When the deputies found them, they were wearing dirty clothes, and the 14-year-old had sores on his bare feet, according to court records. Prosecutors said that the children had been forced to perform outdoor labor, such as carrying buckets up and down a hill and pulling grass by hand.
Home-security camera footage showed that some of the couple’s other children had been forced to stand in a bedroom for hours with their hands on their heads to prevent them from sleeping, prosecutors said.
A Kanawha County grand jury indicted the couple in May 2024 on charges related to abuse of the four oldest children.
Three of the children, who are now 18, 13, and 10, testified about the abuse during the trial, prosecutors said. At sentencing, the 18-year-old told Ms. Whitefeather: “I’ll never understand how you can sleep at night. I want you to know that you are a monster,” The A.P. reported.
Prosecutors praised the children for showing extraordinary resilience.
“They are so wonderful, so smart, so funny,” Madison Tuck, a Kanawha County prosecutor, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “They are going to do amazing things in this world, and I’m so grateful to be a part of getting them some semblance of justice.”