exposing the dark side of adoption
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Police dissect depressed metro woman's murder-suicide plot

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After finding 37 year old Shanda Yenglin on the floor of her garage Monday morning dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, Waterford police have been working to piece together the last, desperate hours of her life. Though there is a brief suicide note reciting that the breast cancer survivor was too depressed to carry on, there is no explanation why she plotted to take her four adopted children with her.

Certainly, Yenglin's life was challenging enough without her clinical depression. She had adopted four children, two girls now 13 and 14, and two boys, 10 and 11. Last May she had lost custody of all four, and her home in the 6400 block of Barker in Waterford was empty again. Yenglin fought back to the point that, beginning earlier this year, she was allowed to have unsupervised visits with them.

Last Saturday marked the third such visit. According to police, Yenglin was to return the children that same night. Instead, she left phone messages for the foster mother caring for the girls, and the state facility where the boys were staying, saying that she was unable to return the children that night due to inclement weather. The weather was in fact not that bad, but by this time Yenglin had plans of the worst kind for everyone in the house, and on Sunday evening she began putting them into action.

Police say that Sunday evening, Yenglin served milk shakes to the children. The confections had been spiked with narcotic pain pills and anti-anxiety medication (such as valium or xanax), to make then drowsy. Investigators found that the thermostat had been lowered to 53 degrees. As the home cooled, Yenglin probably told the kids the heater had gone out.

Before long she told the kids that to stay warm, they would have to sleep in the van and use its heater, hoping the kids would be too stoned to think very deeply about that. In fact, the milkshake had made the 14 year old girl so sick she refused to leave her room. The other three children entered the van, which Yenglin then turned on, leaving the garage door closed.

The following morning, the 13 year old girl became cold and left the van to get a blanket when she discovered her adoptive mother unresponsive on the floor of the garage. She and her sister called 911.

Yenglin was already dead. The children were hospitalized, but the last two were released yesterday.

Waterford Police Chief Dan McCaw said the focus must now be on providing a healthy and stable environment for the kids.

2011 Mar 2