Couple abused adopted children until 8-year-old went into organ failure, Florida cops say
A children’s book author and her husband abused their three adopted children until one went into multi-organ failure and nearly died, Florida authorities said.
The couple pleaded guilty on Jan. 13 to three counts of aggravated child abuse causing great bodily harm and three counts of child neglect with great bodily harm, Seminole County records show.
The 45-year-old wife, accused of being the primary disciplinarian, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, while the 43-year-old husband received a 10-year sentence.
The woman’s attorney declined to comment to McClatchy News, and her husband’s attorney did not immediately respond Jan. 14.
McClatchy News is not identifying the parents to protect the identities of their children.
The couple’s abuse came to light when the dad took their 8-year-old daughter to the hospital with kidney and liver failure, pneumonia and a staph infection, in addition to other wounds, deputies with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office wrote in an arrest report.
The dad told deputies that the girl had fallen a few times recently, according to his wife, and wasn’t eating or going to the bathroom, the report says.
The couple called their parents for advice, then took the girl to a hospital, where professionals said her injuries couldn’t have been caused by off-balance falls and appeared to be the result of delayed treatment, the report says.
She was put on a ventilator and was malnourished, deputies said.
The other two kids, an 11-year-old girl and 9-year-old boy, were also hospitalized once authorities began investigating the adoptive parents, deputies said.
The older girl told deputies her parents said she “couldn’t stop sinning,” made her write over a thousand paragraphs of apologies and kept her locked in her room, isolated from her siblings, for years, according to the report.
The kids were punished almost every night, which would sometimes consist of the parents pouring cold water over the children and forcing them to lie in it, deputies said after interviewing the kids.
When the investigator gave the mom the opportunity to speak, she said “I don’t want to make things worse,” according to the report.
The woman is a former elementary school teacher and the author of a children’s book, “A Real Friend.” Her publisher tried to stop selling the book after the abuse allegations were revealed.
According to her author page on Amazon, she “enjoyed instilling a love for writing in her students and found picture books to be a beautiful medium to accomplish this goal. She continued her teaching journey through homeschooling her own children.”
Prosecutors dropped three other counts of false imprisonment of a child under 13 against the couple.
Seminole County is part of the Orlando metropolitan area.
This story was originally published January 14, 2025 at 1:22 PM.