A white West Virginia couple found guilty of abusing their five adopted Black children by locking them in a shed and forcing them to work on their farms as “slaves” has been sentenced to a combined 375 years in state prison.
Donald Lantz, 62, received a maximum sentence of 160 years in prison after being convicted of forced labor, human trafficking, child abuse, and neglect, a judge ruled in Kanawha County Circuit Court on Wednesday.
His wife, Jeanne Kay Whitefeather, 63, was convicted of the same charges, plus violating her children’s civil rights. She received a 215-year prison sentence.
The couple has also been ordered to pay $280,000 in restitution to their victims.
“You brought these children to West Virginia, a place that I know is ‘Almost Heaven,’ and you put them in hell,” Eighth Judicial Circuit Court Judge Maryclaire Akers said during sentencing, per WCHS.
“This court will now put you in yours. And may God have mercy on your souls, because this court will not.”
Lantz and Whitefeather adopted the five Black siblings, ages 5 to 16, in Minnesota before moving to a farm in Washington state in 2018. In May 2023, they relocated to Kanawha County, West Virginia, prosecutors said, per the Times.
They were arrested in October 2023 after a neighbor called Child Protective Services, alleging that two teenagers, 14, and 16, were locked in a shed at the couple’s home in Sissonville, according to court documents obtained by WCHS-TV.
Other neighbors also claimed the kids were “forced to perform farm labor and were not permitted inside the residence,” per the documents.
Deputies responded to the home and alleged two teens — the eldest daughter and her teenage brother — were locked in the shed with a porta potty with no lights or running water.
The siblings told the authorities they were forced to sleep on the concrete without any mattresses or bedding. They both wore dirty clothes and had body odor, according to the indictment.
One of the teens told police they had been locked in the shed and not fed for 12 hours.
Inside the main residence, a 9-year-old girl was found crying. Three hours later, Lantz arrived with an 11-year-old boy. Whitefeather soon followed with a 5-year-old girl.
All five were turned over to Child Protective Services after the couple’s arrests.
In court on Wednesday, the couple’s eldest daughter read a letter she had penned to her adoptive parents.
“I’ll never understand how you can sleep at night. I want you to know that you are a monster,” she told the court.
“I feel like I went through a lot more mentally because I had to watch my siblings go through those things… I felt hopeless in those situations. I felt a lot of anger.”
Last month, the now 18-year-old sued the couple, alleging severe physical and emotional abuse that left her permanently scarred.
She also testified during the trial that she and her siblings were forced to dig with their hands and were regularly berated with racial slurs.
She also said the children were fed mostly peanut butter sandwiches at scheduled times and ordered to stand in their rooms for hours with their hands on their heads.
The couple’s defense attorneys argued they were overwhelmed after taking in the children, who had already endured abuse from their biological parents.
Whitefeather’s attorney, Mark Plants, said during closing arguments that their only crime was bad parenting.
“These are farm people that do farm chores,” Plants said. “It wasn’t about race. It wasn’t about forced labor.”
