From heartbreak to happiness A FAMILY'S FORTUNE

Susan Vinella

The Plain Dealer

Five young sisters from Lorain, separated for years in the foster-care system, just wanted to be together in a safe home with parents who loved them.

Ann Roberts, 43, and her husband, Tom, 47, frustrated from trying for six years to adopt a group of siblings, just wanted lots of kids to raise in their log home in rural Carroll County?

What were the odds of them becoming a family? Probably about the same as winning the Ohio Super Lotto Plus jackpot.

This is the story about how they did both.

Early in the evening of Oct. 24, 2000, hamburger meat sizzled in the frying pan as Ann Roberts anxiously chopped lettuce in the kitchen of her Carroll County home. Three of the five sisters whom Ann and her husband, Tom, hoped to adopt were on their way from Lorain County to live with the Robertses in foster care. Two older sisters, Ashley and Brittney, were expected to arrive in a few months.

The three younger sisters had told Ann they wanted taco salad for dinner.

She obliged happily.

If the Robertses adopted all five girls, their family would grow to 10, including Ann's natural daughter, an adopted daughter and a foster son.

As Ann continued to cook, two cars drove up their long gravel driveway, and Ann and Tom ran out to greet them.

Kayla and Stephanie climbed out, wearing matching purple-and-white checked dresses. A social worker lifted Lindsey from her car seat.

The kids' belongings were packed in the second car.

At 9 years old, Kayla stood almost 5 feet tall with straight brown hair that rested just below her shoulders. Six-year-old Stephanie was several inches shorter, reed-thin, with long, straight blond hair. Nine-month-old Lindsey resembled Stephanie - with wavier hair, big blue eyes and soft, pinchable cheeks.

Ann and the two social workers unloaded the girls' belongings. Ann cringed when she saw the black garbage bags stuffed with clothes.

Inside the log home, the girls and Ann plopped the bags and boxes and small suitcases in Kayla and Stephanie's bedroom. Ann peered inside the boxes. Underwear and socks and T-shirts were mixed with plastic Barbie shoes and crayons and puzzle pieces. It looked as if a dresser drawer had been turned upside down and dumped inside.

Much of it looked like junk to Ann. But the girls were excited to show it all to her, so she was careful not to discard anything without asking them.

After dinner, Ann took the girls outside to explore their new surroundings. They walked along the driveway searching for caterpillars and bugs.

As night fell, Lindsey went to sleep first, in a crib in Tom and Ann's room. Ann helped the older girls comb their hair and pick out their pajamas. She read them Dr. Seuss' "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish."

By bedtime, Kayla and Stephanie were calling her "Mom." Ann had heard this from foster children before; but at this stage, she had learned, "Mom" was a word, not a relationship.

She flicked off the lights and said goodnight.

10-year-old 'mom'

In 1997, years before Ann entered the girls' lives, 10-year-old Ashley played the role of "mom" to her younger sisters - 8-year-old Brittney, 6-year-old Kayla and 3-year-old Stephanie, and to her 2-year-old brother, Ryan.

She fed them, changed diapers and tried to keep them safe.

They lived on Florida Avenue in Lorain with their mother, Sherri Yost, and Brett Scott, the father of four of them.

When food was scarce in the house, Ashley knocked on the neighbor's door to ask for leftovers. When no one cooked, Ashley made macaroni and cheese, toast, cereal or fried bologna.

The kids attended school sporadically. Brittney missed so many days in kindergarten she had to repeat it.

A relative troubled by these conditions finally called police.

On New Year's Day 1998, two Lorain officers arrived at the home and found a scene so horrid that one of them walked outside and threw up.

The house was littered with garbage, rotting food and cat feces. Bugs crawled everywhere; the toilet was overflowing with soiled toilet tissue and human waste. The lights didn't work.

Yost, Scott and one of the children slept amid the garbage on the living room floor.

Lorain County Children's Services took custody of the children. Yost and Scott were convicted of child endangerment and sentenced to a year each in prison.

In the foster system, no one wanted five siblings, so the kids were split up.

Kayla and Stephanie went to one foster home.

The two older girls, Ashley and Brittney, and their brother, Ryan, went to another in Sheffield Lake. On March 26, 1998, their foster parents went shopping and left the children at home with the couple's two teenage daughters.

When the parents returned, the mother went upstairs to check on Ryan. He was lifeless. An ambulance took him to St. Joseph Hospital and Health Center in Lorain. He was flown by helicopter to Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, where he was placed on a respirator. Doctors told family members that Ryan was brain dead and would never recover.

On March 27, Yost and Scott, who had not yet begun serving their prison terms, along with Ryan's four sisters, gathered at the hospital to say goodbye. He was removed from the respirator and died in his mother's arms.

The Cuyahoga County coroner said Ryan died of massive head injuries, and the death was ruled a homicide. No one has been charged.

Ashley and Brittney were removed from the home and placed with another foster family.

Every night after that, they prayed together:

"Now I lay me down to sleep.

Pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I die before I wake,

Pray the Lord my soul to take."

After a year, their new foster parents began talking about adopting the girls but wanted them to take the family name. Ashley was willing; Brittney refused. She had been through so much change, she didn't want to give up her identity, too.

Brittney talked about leaving. Ashley didn't want her to go.

In January 2000, the girls' mother, released from prison in early 1999 after serving only three months of her sentence, gave birth to another sister, Lindsey, by another father. She was placed in foster care six months later.

Wanting a family

As a child growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Canton in the 1960s and '70s, Ann Wallace loved big families. She reveled in the happy chaos that existed in the home of her friend Suzanne Wackerly and her six brothers and sisters.

Ann's house was the opposite. She was close to her mother but said her father was distant and domineering. She said she didn't get along with her older brother and was never close to her sister, who was 10 years younger.

After graduating in 1977 from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in nearby Louisville, Ann moved into a dorm at the University of Akron and met a part-time student who played keyboard in a pop band. A year later, they dropped out and got married.

In 1982, at age 23, Ann gave birth to a daughter, Colleen.

Ann found working and caring for a baby overwhelming and difficult. Her husband did little to help, she said. Yet six months after Colleen's birth, Ann was pregnant again. She wanted more children, but not this soon. Not while she still had to spend so much time away to work at her father's sign business to help support the family.

Sometimes, she silently wished the baby inside her away.

On Nov. 6, 1983, her son, Drew, was born.

Three days later, Ann sat in her nightgown at Aultman Hospital in Canton, her son cradled in her arms sucking formula from a bottle. She gazed into his brown eyes. They looked empty, distant. Like there was no one inside.

"There's something wrong with my baby," she told a nurse.

A few hours later, Ann stood in the neonatal intensive-care unit staring down at her son. Tubes snaked from his tiny arms. A respirator kept his little chest rising and falling.

Doctors explained that because of the similar genetic makeup of Ann and her husband, their son was born with a defect that prevented his body from properly breaking down food. Thus, the formula he drank turned to poison. Drew might live up to a few years, the doctors said, but he would be brain dead.

As night turned into morning, the couple decided to remove Drew from the respirator. The hospital opposed the decision, but Ann's lawyer negotiated the baby's release to Children's Hospital Medical Center of Akron, where doctors agreed he could be taken off the respirator.

Nurses led the family to a private room. A nurse took Drew's handprints and footprints. Ann snipped a lock of his hair and held him. Her husband snapped a photo. Drew died in her arms.

Because the chances of having another baby born with the defect were high, Ann had her fallopian tubes tied to prevent future pregnancies.

In 1985, after deciding to become foster parents, the couple took in a 3-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy.

But after Ann's husband lost his job as an insurance salesman, their frustrations mounted. One day, Ann came home from work exhausted. She said she remembers this scene:

Her husband was on the couch watching television. The house was a mess with a dirty diaper plopped in the middle of the kitchen floor and dishes piled high. Dinner was nowhere in sight.

She walked outside to the garage, grabbed a pair of garden shears and cut the cable wires.

When she came back inside, her husband said, "Something happened to the TV."

"I cut the wires," Ann said. "When are you leaving?"

"Is tomorrow OK?" he asked.

The foster-care agency wanted Ann to keep the kids, but she didn't know how she could care for them alone. They left shortly after her husband did.

Starting over

Ann didn't date much after the divorce in 1986, but about a year later friends coaxed her to a singles dance, where she bumped into Tom Roberts, who worked for the Hoover Co. in North Canton. She liked his beard and Western-style flannel shirt. She asked him to dance.

Afterward, they sat together at a small table. Tom was quiet and shy and a little awkward. At 35, he had never been married and had no kids. Ann liked that: a clean slate.

They began dating, and three years later, they married. In 1993, they built their log home on 43 acres in rural Carroll County near Atwood Lake, Tom's favorite swimming hole growing up in Canton.

They wanted to start a family but learned that it would cost thousands of dollars to untie Ann's tubes and that even then, it would be difficult for her to get pregnant. Overseas adoption was expensive. So they decided to try to adopt foster children from nearby Stark County.

In 1994, two young boys and their infant sister were the first to arrive. Tom and Ann wanted to adopt all three.

However, in the summer of 1995, the children began visits to the home of their biological parents. Three days before Christmas, social workers took the kids back home.

Ann and Tom dealt with the loss by replacing them with more foster children. During the next several years, 20 more came through their home.

There was a 2-year-old girl, who never smiled and never cried and who Ann said taught her that love cannot cure all. There was a baby girl who had 11 broken bones when the Robertses picked her up at the hospital. They hoped to keep her, but she was returned to her mother.

Eleven-year-old Dustin was supposed to leave after just a weekend at the Robertses' in 1996. But a weekend turned into a week, a month, then a year. He still lives there as a foster child.

Eighteen-month-old Bridget arrived the same year as Dustin. Tom and Ann adopted her in 1998. Finally, their family was growing.

But several incidents in 1999 led the Robertses to reconsider trying to adopt more children.

As Ann prepared dinner one night, one of four foster sisters at the home got into Ann's makeup and smeared red lipstick all over herself. Ann put the 3-year-old in the tub to scrub it off but scratched the girl under the eye.

The next day, Ann explained to a counselor what happened. The counselor called the social worker. The county investigated and ruled that there was no abuse. However, the girl and her three sisters were removed and never returned.

By then, the relationship between Ann and Stark County Children Services was admittedly strained.

Earlier in 1999, Ann had tried to obtain a loan by improperly using signatures of agency staff members. She needed the money to pay back $25,000 to her mother. Tom did not know about the signatures at the time.

The county didn't file charges and renewed the couple's foster-care license. But agency workers told the Robertses that for a while they would not place any more children with them.

Ann apologized for the signatures. With Stark County's OK, the Robertses switched their foster-care license to Summit County.

However, in the fall of 1999, social workers told Ann that a former foster child had accused her of sexual abuse. She was exonerated, but frustrated and worn down by the events of that year, Tom and Ann decided to take a break from fostering any more kids.

Then, in spring 2000, a friend persuaded them to try a private adoption agency in Akron, A Child's Waiting. The agency's database included the names of the five sisters from Lorain County.

Another try

Tom Roberts got the call on the Friday before Labor Day 2000. The representative from A Child's Waiting told him she had five sisters ages 13, 11, 9, 6 and 9 months who needed a home.

The older two played basketball. The middle two liked cheerleading. The county, which had custody, wanted to place all five sisters together.

Was he interested?

The Robertses worried that it would be difficult to build a relationship with the two older girls, but they finally decided to give adoption another try.

After a few visits, the three younger girls moved in with the Robertses in late October.

The two older girls arrived in spring 2001. Ashley was 13, Brittney 11. Ashley, a self-described tomboy with light-brown hair, was chatty, outgoing and eager to please. Brittney, a slender brunette, was quiet and sometimes stubborn.

Ann stayed home with the girls. Tom worked six and sometimes seven days a week as a machine operator at Hoover, where he has been employed for 28 years. It wasn't unusual for him to work 30 days in a row. With overtime, he could earn about $50,000 a year.

The $500 a month that the Robertses received from the county for each foster child helped, but the budget remained tight. Still, they put their money worries aside and focused on teaching the children how to be loved after years of neglect.

The girls didn't like to be kissed or hugged or touched much, so Ann created the "sloppy kiss," a raspberry pucker that could be planted quickly on the cheek. Each night before bed, she gave them a choice: "sloppy kiss," regular kiss or hug. Sloppy kisses quickly became their favorite.

Other progress took longer.

Lindsey avoided eye contact in her first months there. Ann spent hours rocking her and looking into her eyes.

Ann rocked Stephanie, too. Stephanie was not convinced she was at the house to stay.

For several months, she became ill every time Ann drove her somewhere, fearful of not coming back.

Ashley and Brittney found it more difficult to warm up to Tom than to Ann. Ann was talkative, open, engaging. Tom was quiet but sometimes yelled at the girls when he grew impatient.

Sports helped them build a bond. Tom played basketball in the driveway with them.

They watched professional basketball games on TV together.

He picked them up from track, volleyball and basketball practices and attended many of their games.

Their relationship continued to grow, and by the spring of this year, an adoption date was set for late April.

At work on Tuesday, April 9, co-worker Dennis Smith approached Tom at the Hoover plant and said some employees were pooling their money to purchase lottery tickets. Did he want to kick in?

Tom reached into his wallet and pulled out a $5 bill.

There was no winner after that Wednesday's drawing, so on Thursday, Smith invited Tom to join the pool again, with the jackpot at a record $75 million.

Tom reached into his wallet one more time. What the heck, he thought.

Tomorrow: A new family finds many kinds of rewards.

This story is based on hours of interviews with family and others as well as public documents from Stark County Children's Services, Lorain police, the Cuyahoga County coroner and Summit County Children's Services.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

svinella@plaind.com, 216-999-5010