Florida: Child collector caught with nine abused, imprisoned children and adults adopted from foster care in New York
An eighteen year old girl was abandoned in a St. Petersburg, Florida grocery store on July 4, about two hundred miles from her home. She said she’d been living with Judith Leekin for thirteen years, adopted from New York foster care.
According to an article at CNN.Com, Leekin, 62, falsely claimed that the girl had run away a year earlier. She tried to conceal eight other children and young adults, but police returned to her home and found out they had been hiding, on Leekin’s orders. The victims, ages 15 to 27, are suspected to all be adopted from New York child welfare agencies.
Leekin is unemployed. She lived off the adoption subsidy payments she got for those children - well enough that she owned two homes and several cars. A photo of one of her homes can be seen at the CNN website (see link below).
What we’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg. People have been adopting foster children they don’t love for years. What they want is the money associated with those children.
According to the article people who adopt special needs children can get up to $55 per day. That’s about $1650 per month per special needs child. With nine special needs children she could be receiving up to $14,850 per month, or $178,200 per year. Not bad for sitting home taking care of the kids. Of course these extravagant benefits aren’t available to the poor parents these children were originally taken from.
The CNN article stated,
“The adopted children said they had never seen a doctor or a dentist and had not been allowed to attend school or even leave the house.
‘These people have not received any formal education in the time they’ve been with her,’ Bartal said. ‘At times when they were restricted with handcuffs or zip ties, during the night, they soiled themselves because they weren’t permitted to go to the bathroom.’
“They were fed only noodles, and ‘they would have eventually starved to death,’ Bartal said.”
Leekin is now where she belongs - in big trouble with the law. She was arrested and jailed on 11 charges, including aggravated elder and child abuse.
Source: Police: Kids were adopted for profit, abused by the Associated Press, published on CNN.Com on July 30, 2007.
