Children abandoned in Nigeria back in Texas

Children abandoned in Nigeria back in Texas

BY STEVE MCGONIGLE AND TERRI LANGFORD
The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - (KRT) - Warren Beemer was ministering to children at a putrid orphanage in Ibadan, Nigeria, when he heard a girl speaking English with a distinct American accent. Asked where she was from, the girl replied, "Houston."

She then led the youth minister and his companions to a darkened back room where they found six other children, ages 8 to 16, some with sores and suffering from malnourishment and malaria.

The children, three of whom were originally from Dallas, said their adoptive mother had relocated them to Nigeria but then abandoned them almost a year ago.

The children supplied the names of their schools and teachers in Houston, as well as their church pastor. One teenage girl recited her Social Security number. When Beemer began singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," the children chimed in, hands over their hearts.

Beemer, a 34-year-old San Antonio youth minister, said he didn't need any more convincing. He picked up the phone, called his pastor, John Hagee, and said he had found seven Texas kids in danger of being lost for good. They had to bring them home.

Eight days later - last Friday - the seven children flew home to Houston. Their return was arranged by the U.S. State Department after the intervention of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Sen. John Cornyn, both Texas Republicans.

The children are now living in Houston foster homes. A court hearing will be held Aug. 26 in Houston to determine whether their adoptive mother, Mercury Liggins, will regain custody. No charges have been filed against the 47-year-old woman, who could not be reached for comment.

Hagee, who heads Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, said it is a miracle Beemer found the children because they could have been sold into slavery.

"One of the (orphanage) workers told us very quietly that if anyone involved in child trafficking finds out about these children, who have no proof of whom they are, that they would be gone immediately and never seen again," Beemer said in a message to his pastor shortly after encountering the American children.

Hagee said, "We feel this was the hand of God leading him there to liberate those kids."

Child Protective Services, the state agency that approved the adoptions and provided monthly support payments of $3,600 to Liggins until this spring, is investigating the story of their remarkable odyssey.

The agency, a part of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said that Liggins was thoroughly screened before being approved for adoption but that confidentiality restrictions prohibited it from providing further details on the case.

Stuart Roy, DeLay's spokesman, said CPS did not know where Liggins' adopted children were until they were advised by the congressman's office.

All seven children came to CPS because they had been abused or neglected by birth family members, said Geoffrey Wool, an agency spokesman.

"That's the only way that kids come into our foster-care system, is if we have found they have been abused or neglected in their own homes," Wool said.

The children told Beemer that they were placed with Liggins by Spaulding for Children, a Houston nonprofit agency that, according to Vikki Finley, its chief executive, has placed more than 1,200 abused and neglected children for CPS.

However, she cited confidentiality restrictions and would not confirm whether the seven children Liggins adopted were placed by her agency.

She said extensive criminal background checks are done on all prospective adoptive families. The agency has a home study process that includes 30 hours of adoption preparation classes, she said.

"Any family that comes to adopt goes through a significant screening process," Finley said.

CPS said Liggins was receiving more than $500 a month for each of the four Houston children until March, when she notified state officials that a grandmother in Houston was taking care of the children while she was undergoing breast cancer treatment in Shreveport, La.

Payments were stopped because the children were no longer in Liggins' care, Wool said. CPS did not try to verify Liggins' story or find the children because they had been legally adopted and no allegations of abuse had been filed, he said.

It was not clear Tuesday whether payments for the three children from Dallas had stopped, Wool said.

Wool said subsidies are provided to families who adopt minority and disabled children because they are hard to place.

"Children who are in sibling groups and minority children are not adopted as quickly, generally speaking," he added.

Liggins is a twice-divorced former employee of KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton. She has also been listed as an agent for a trucking business and a cleaning service. Court records show that Liggins filed for voluntary bankruptcy in 1998 - about two years after she adopted the four siblings from Houston and three years before she adopted the three siblings from Dallas.

"My take is that she took the children to Nigeria to dump them off with a relative that she would pay a pittance to and would never see them or hear from them again," Hagee said. "And all this while she would be making over $3,500 a month from the state for taking care of these children."

The oldest of Liggins' adopted children told Beemer that she and the other children had been living in Houston until their mother withdrew them last year and took them to Nigeria, the native country of the man she called her husband.

The children told Beemer that their mother left them in the care of the man's brother, who was kind but abandoned them last October.

Hagee said he was told that Liggins made an arrangement to pay the man to care for the children but she never made the payments.

"In other words, they were going to sublet the children," he said.

After the children spent two weeks alone, neighbors alerted Nigerian police, and the children were taken to the orphanage, the Ibadan Women's Center for Abandoned Children and Remanded Youth, Beemer said.

Liggins began working for KBR as a food services employee in Iraq in April. She left the company in July, according to Cathy Gist, a spokeswoman for Halliburton Global Public Relations.

"She was in Iraq and her last date of employment was in July 2004," Gist wrote in an e-mail. "I cannot provide further details."

Beemer's visit was part of Cornerstone Church's outreach program to Nigerian orphans, which began more than three years ago at the urging of a Nigerian-born church member in San Antonio. Beemer was led to the orphanage by a man who had once lived there and had attended a Cornerstone service in Nigeria last year.

"It was truly horrible. The smell of urine was everywhere. I walked through the kitchen and there was mold-covered food sitting open on the dark counters," Beemer said in the Aug. 11 message to his pastor. "I went to their sleeping quarters; the smell of urine was so strong that it took my breath away."

Beemer told The Dallas Morning News that he found about 60 children living in squalor. Some children slept on spring frames with no mattress.

Workers at the center appeared worried when he began speaking to the Texas children and tried to keep him from taking their pictures, he said.

"They said they could lose their jobs if anybody found out," he said.

The children told him they had told their story to other visitors who had promised to help them. But no help ever arrived, they said.

Beemer said his first instinct was to get the children back home. But Hagee said his first reaction was skepticism.

"I said, `How do you know they are Americans?'" the pastor told The News. "Everybody wants to come to America."

He changed his mind after Beemer told him of the details the children had supplied, such as the names of their former pastor and schoolteachers and how they stood in unison and sang the national anthem.

After talking with Beemer, the pastor telephoned the offices of Cornyn and DeLay in Washington. Both responded quickly, spokesmen said.

U.S. consular officials in Nigeria visited the orphanage, and the State Department arranged to move the children to the U.S. Embassy in Lagos. New passports were issued, and officials arranged for a $20,000 loan to pay for the flight back to Houston.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Cornyn, said he was amazed.

"I have worked for the government for eight years, and eight days is lightning fast," he said.

LaQuinta Teague, the 27-year-old birth mother of the three Dallas children, did not know what had happened to them until Tuesday, when she was contacted by reporters. She had nothing but scorn for CPS.

"I'm shocked. If they were going to do that to my kids, they could have brought them back to me," she said.

CPS removed her children six years ago while she was serving two years in prison for assaulting a police officer, she said.

Teague, who was released last week after serving a 90-day sentence on a check forgery charge, acknowledged that she was a single mother on welfare with a felony prison record. But while in prison, she earned her GED, she said, and she hoped to start computer classes.

"I just want my kids back in my life," she said.

(Dallas Morning News correspondent Gretel C. Kovach, WFAA-TV in Dallas and KENS-TV in San Antonio contributed to this report.)