A Sacramento woman billed families thousands to find them a baby. Many say they were scammed
Jill and Adam Ingwell are no strangers to taking chances.
She’s traveled to roughly 50 countries. He’s been a competitive weightlifter. They’ve bicycled across Idaho and hiked mountains around the world.
By 2019, the couple — both school educators in the foothills southeast of Sacramento — were growing serious about their next big journey: raising a child.
The Ingwells had talked about it occasionally during their decade-plus relationship. Jill, however, learned at a young age that she had a rare condition that could result in a high-risk pregnancy and, possibly, a late-term miscarriage. They had accepted it. The couple filled their days working with children, Jill as an occupational therapist and Adam as a physical education teacher.
But as they entered their early-30s, they warmed to the idea of a tiny travel partner.
They turned to adoption.
Wary of the array of national adoption entities that advertise online, the Ingwells wanted to work with a local adoption group. They would have a more positive experience sticking close to home, they thought. So Jill searched Google for something along the lines of “Northern California adoption.”
Near the top of the results was a pleasant-sounding Sacramento company: Little Angel Adoptions. The website was awash in comforting blue-and-pink hues and chock-full of photos of smiling families. Blurbs from parents who’d adopted via Little Angels dotted the pages. The site highlighted a 15-year record of helping “birth mothers find the perfect family for their little angel.”
“We provide hope to struggling birth mothers and adoptive parents by bringing your worlds together,” the website said. It had newsletters about the adoption journey and informational meetings on the calendar for prospective new parents. “No question is too small.”
What the website didn’t state was that Little Angels changed leadership four years earlier and — after a few successful years — had since racked up a growing list of unpaid debts, unfulfilled promises and dozens of unhappy customers.
Without the benefit of this knowledge, the Ingwells in October 2019 drove to Little Angels’ office on University Avenue in Sacramento. It was in a stone-walled business park full of law offices. It seemed so put-together, so formal, they thought. “Fancy,” as Jill recalled.
Jennifer Shimabukuro, Little Angels’ CEO, met with them in a conference room and explained how the company had developed a positive track record. Little Angels, she said, had a network of social workers who counseled pregnant women across Northern California. The company advertised online, on the radio and on billboards, attempting to grab the attention of pregnant women who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to parent.
There were options, Little Angels stated in brochures geared toward expecting mothers. Notably, there were couples eager to adopt their newborn. Some might even help pay for hospital bills and counseling costs.
Little Angels wasn’t an adoption agency. Instead, it was what’s known in California as a registered adoption facilitator.
The Ingwells would eventually learn it was a slight, albeit significant, difference. A difference that exposes how California’s costly and unregulated adoption facilitation system is ripe for wrongdoing.
That exchange marked the beginning of what the Ingwells would come to believe was a costly and emotionally draining scam. In the end, Little Angels failed to find the couple a child. How much effort the facilitator made to do so was unclear to the Ingwells.
Yet they were out $17,500. And they weren’t the only ones.
A Sacramento Bee investigation has found that nearly two dozen families looking to adopt in recent years paid more than $245,000 to Little Angel Adoptions. Despite assurances from the company that matches were essentially a given in all but the rarest of occasions, it failed to secure an adoption for any of those families.
Hundreds of emails between Little Angels and its former clients as well as arbitration records and more than a dozen interviews with families and adoption experts reveal what families, attorneys and advocates contend is a pattern of deceit. The families in their arbitration claim described a years-long campaign by Little Angels — one that predated the pandemic by years — to induce them to sign contracts based on fraudulent claims.
Shimabukuro’s Little Angel Adoptions for years continued using the letterhead of the law office whose attorney founded the business but who had since turned over the company. Hopeful couples told The Bee that these references provided a false impression they were entering contracts with a reputable law firm.
Shimabukuro, they said, failed to keep families informed about her efforts to connect them with a baby after she cashed their checks.
And, arbitration records show, Shimabukuro filed a counter-claim alleging she was the victim of defamation and civil extortion after families compared notes and wrote negative reviews alleging they were duped. It was that “smear campaign,” Shimabukuro’s attorney wrote, that forced Little Angels’ client roster to drop, income to plummet and, eventually, debts to pile up.
For some, the experience with Little Angel Adoptions cost hundreds of hours of time and tens of thousands of dollars.
For others, years with Little Angels crushed any dream they had of raising a family of their own.
For everyone, it was a draining and emotionally scarring experience, said Peter Hamilton, an attorney who represented 21 families in arbitration against Little Angels.
“This facilitator was able to essentially prey on their vulnerabilities and their deep desires to add to their families through adoption,” Hamilton said in an interview. “Everybody came to their adoption journeys in different ways, but the experience with Little Angels was hauntingly familiar in terms of the poor treatment that they received.
“Essentially, nothing was done.”
For over a month, Shimabukuro failed to agree to repeated interview requests for this story. At one point in mid-November, she appears to have mistakenly replied to a reporter’s text message. In a text intended for someone else, she wrote that she was “in the hospital and frustrated and exhausted” and was “trying to make some decisions.” She did not elaborate.
In a brief phone call last week, Shimabukuro said: “Unfortunately, there are various, obviously, different points of view.” She declined to answer further questions. Shimabukuro said she would have her attorney be in touch. No attorney contacted The Bee prior to press time.
Shimabukuro sent one more text message to a reporter before publication of this story. “Due to confidentiality laws of adoption,” she wrote, “I am prohibited from commenting on any adoption, adoptive family, waiting family and/or adoptee’s story.”
She and her attorney, however, defended Little Angels in arbitration filings. They admitted the business began struggling, though not because of the pandemic or due to any failure on the part of Little Angels, they wrote. Little Angels was struggling because of a series of negative online reviews in 2020 from clients who had signed contracts years earlier but failed to adopt. Those contracts, an attorney wrote to one client in a cease-and-desist letter, clearly stated a match was not a guarantee and fees were non-refundable.
Regardless of the back-and-forth, the families’ experiences illustrate more than just a problem with Little Angels.
Their struggle, The Bee found, also reveals how California lawmakers have enabled private adoption facilitators to take advantage of prospective parents in an adoption system primed for abuse.
Adoption agencies are heavily regulated in the U.S. and especially in California. But state lawmakers two decades ago effectively blessed private businesses such as Little Angels that broker babies under the label of “adoption facilitators.” A lesser-known player in the world of adoption, facilitators work with clients to find children to adopt — often from people of color and those with addiction issues.
These facilitators — there are roughly a dozen in California — must register with the state Department of Social Services, which then posts their contact information in an online registry. Unlike more regulated adoption agencies, facilitators do not need to be specially trained on the intricacies of social hardships, women in crisis or the nuance in adoption law before charging tens of thousands of dollars to prospective parents looking to adopt.
The state fields complaints about facilitators but takes no action on them, records show, other than forwarding those complaints to the facilitator and encouraging them to work it out.
Despite being the clearinghouse for adoption rules, California’s Department of Social Services admits that it is toothless when it comes to overseeing facilitators.
“Listing on this website is not intended to be an endorsement of any facilitator by the California Department of Social Services,” says the top line of the state’s adoption facilitator website. The next line is unambiguous: “The CDSS does not provide oversight over adoption facilitators.”
In effect, no one does.
Having a registry without rigorous enforcement is unique to California. It is a feature that experts in adoption law and history say exploits women, swindles couples and is in desperate need of reform.
“There’s a dollar sign on these women’s bellies,” said Celeste Liversidge, a Southern California adoption lawyer who’s researched regulations across the country. Liversidge co-founded the nonprofit AdoptMatch, a repository for adoption information. She believes private facilitation should be outlawed or at least strongly restricted. “There’s no mission to guide them. No board to guide them. No oversight. No state license to lose.
“When they’re motivated solely by money, bad things happen.”
ADOPTION HISTORY SHOWS NEED FOR SAFEGUARDS
Before facilitators and websites there were baby farms and kid-for-sale newspaper ads.
In 1920, for example, a man from Susanville wrote to The Bee advertising “two orphan boys,” ages 10 and 12, who were living in Sacramento and needed a more permanent family. Under the headline “Who wants to adopt them?” the letter writer said his wife’s illness was making it hard for him to tend to the children.
“I believe,” he wrote, “that if I could get the address of some one (sic) who wants to adopt a small boy they would have a better home than I have been able to provide for them.”
It wasn’t always so benign. Birth control options were lacking and birth rates were soaring more than 100 years ago, so physicians, midwives and other well-connected professionals would arrange adoptions. Some saw it as an entrepreneurial opportunity, a chance to make fast cash by placing newborns into families looking to grow, often with few questions and zero oversight.
Regulation of these private adoptions was essentially nonexistent well into the 1900s, said Ellen Herman, a professor of history at the University of Oregon and author of Kinship by Design, a history of the U.S. adoption industry. Meanwhile, private adoption businesses flourished.
“There’s a very long history to it,” Herman told The Bee, “including the history of great potential abuse.”
Over the years, child welfare professionals endorsed and lobbied for state and federal oversight around what was otherwise the Wild West of adoptions. Lawmakers agreed that the state should regulate child welfare and the placement of children for adoption. There should be what are called home studies, where a social worker evaluates whether prospective parents are set up to raise a child, states decided. Health histories mattered, as did follow-up visits.
The goal, Herman said, was to “sideline” private placements and make more heavily regulated agencies the “gold standard.”
Gradually, that’s what happened.
The most common type of adoption has been placements from the heavily regulated array of state and local public agencies that comprise the child welfare system. These account for about 66,000 adoptions annually, according to the National Council for Adoption. About three out of every five adoptions occur through such an arrangement. Private adoption agencies, which are likewise subjected to strict oversight, also make up a significant portion of adoptions.
Though still far from perfect, regulators have increasingly scrutinized adoption agencies. They’re subjected to intensive state and federal oversight, have arduous requirements for documentation and paperwork, and often operate as nonprofit organizations.
Anyone with concerns about adoption agencies can file complaints and seek accountability.
There’s a system of oversight designed to field complaints and enforce the “major requirements and laws,” said Cheryle Roberts, a licensed clinical social worker and adoption service provider who has worked with California agencies and independent facilitators for more than 25 years.
It’s a night and day difference from facilitators, she said. Facilitators, which play the limited role of matching birth mothers to prospective adoptive parents, can charge gobs of money upfront without providing any evidence about their success rates. Their services can be appealing, however, especially among adoptive parents who have a relationship with a reputable facilitator or receive a recommendation from someone they trust. Some facilitators also say they can find a baby more quickly and for less money than agencies.
It’s difficult to know how many adoptions happen outside of public agencies. The National Council for Adoption estimated that 25,737 children were adopted by someone other than a stepparent in 2019 through private adoptions. In 2020, that same category dropped to 19,658.
How many of those were arranged by private facilitators such as Little Angels is unclear.
Some facilitators are aware of the misdeeds in the industry, problems they say extend far beyond their businesses.
The network of lawyers, agencies and bad actors who charge massive amounts and profit from prospective parents desperate to grow their family is the rotten part, said Cindy Simonson, a facilitator at A Loving Alternative Adoption in Southern California.
“It’s a much bigger problem,” she said.
But when it comes to facilitation, she said she wants to be part of the solution.
Simonson said she changed her entire business model in 2017 when she began noticing a slow-down in the number of birth mothers interested in placing their baby into an adoptive family. Instead of collecting hefty fees upfront like many facilitators, she decided she would only charge families when a placement was made.
Her roster decreased, and finances tightened, she said. But it was worth it because couples who had forked over a fortune didn’t feel as if they’d been scammed. Plus, it further motivated Simonson to see a match all the way through.
“People should never pay an upfront fee to anyone for a baby,” she said.
But for many other facilitators, it remains business as usual, and that means upfront payments.
Roberts, the social worker who is also an adjunct professor of social work at Sacramento State, likewise said facilitation serves an important role. She’s worked with reliable facilitators over the years and helped numerous families grow one child at a time.
The problem is abuses can tarnish the reputation of facilitators working in good faith.
More importantly, Roberts said, victims are left without recourse.
“It’s important,” Roberts said, “when you’re dealing with children and vulnerable adults who are at a scary time in their lives to be able to make sure that they’re also not being taken advantage of.”
CALIFORNIA FAMILIES JOIN LITTLE ANGEL ADOPTIONS
At their meeting with Little Angels that October day in 2019, the Ingwells underwent a crash course on adoptions in California. Sometimes, birth mothers change their mind at the last minute and decide to keep the newborn, they were told. But society was awash in children to adopt — especially to upstanding young couples not concerned about race or gender.
Couples such as the Ingwells.
Jill and Adam came loaded with questions, which Shimabukuro answered with ease. Questions about the costs ($17,500) and the timeline (most placements within 18 months). Little Angels would be sure to keep the Ingwells in the loop (always in writing).
“It all sounded like a very, very, you know, quality deal,” Adam said.
“She was able to give us really thorough answers,” Jill added.
They walked out of that meeting feeling positive, hopeful. This would be their next big adventure, and they’d landed on what seemed to be a reputable adoption business.
“Let’s do it. Let’s go for it,” Adam remembered saying. “She seems like she’s going to do everything she can to try and help us adopt a baby.”
A week after their meeting, on Oct. 16, 2019, the Ingwells emailed Shimabukuro their signed contract and said they’d put a personal check in the mail.
“Thank you so much!” Shimabukuro wrote the following week, after the check arrived.
“Again, welcome to Little Angels!”
Jill and Adam Ingwell had plenty to do after that.
Part of adoption involves having a social worker conduct a “home study,” essentially a series of check-ins to evaluate whether a couple and their home are suitable for a baby. The Ingwells also moved into a dream home in the foothills community of Copperopolis, where the front window from their sun-scorched hillside gave them views of the rolling mountains outside of Yosemite.
Jill emailed Shimabukuro and said their final walk-through with the social worker was scheduled for early February 2020. COVID-19 was brewing, but business was still going strong as the pandemic worsened, Shimabukuro would later assure.
The Ingwells had no cause for concern and every reason for optimism.
While the home study process takes its course, Little Angels’ clients write and design books that tell their story. It’s a sales pitch of sorts, a brochure that adoption groups provide to birth parents who are considering adoption.
In the world of adoptive parents, theirs was about as perfect a story as there is.
Jill and Adam met in college in Minnesota and had a mutual interest in travel and adventure. They backpacked in the desert and snowboarded in the mountains, they wrote in their book.
Their 24 pages were loaded with more than 50 images of them climbing mountains and posing with family. They featured photos of their spacious new home. Their cover image shows the athletic young couple holding their pitch-black cat named Blackberry who had appeared under their doorstep eight years earlier and become an integral part of the family. They called her BB for short.
“From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for taking the time to consider us as potential parents for your baby,” they wrote in their opening letter. “... We feel as though we have so much to share, and to offer, a baby — and we absolutely can’t wait to have a family of our own. We are ready to truly open our hearts, and our home, to love a child unconditionally.”
Eager to move the process forward, they printed 10 books and delivered them to Shimabukuro.
“It looks great! I really like it,” she wrote in an email to the Ingwells.
“We never really heard from her much after that,” Jill said.
Five months after the Ingwells signed their contract and mailed their check, Shimabukuro wrote a letter to Little Angels’ clients addressing their concerns about how the pandemic might affect their adoption prospects.
It was March 20, 2020. Society was grinding to a halt. But Shimabukuro wrote that her connections remained strong with health care workers who help identify birth mothers. Business was still on track, she said. By that point she’d set up a home office and figured out how to video conference.
“We are open and prepared to continue our practice of prompt response to their clients that have expressed an interest in making an adoption plan,” she wrote.
But despite her best efforts to paint a rosy picture, financial troubles were mounting.
In the months that followed, the Ingwells became dispirited. They had a Zoom meeting with Shimabukuro that May — nearly eight months after sending their check.
Shimabukuro boosted their spirits somewhat, saying she’d been working leads on birth mothers who might be a match for them. They ended the call once again feeling hopeful.
But the matches fell through.
It went like that a couple more times, Jill said. Then they noticed a pattern. There would be silence for weeks, sometimes months. Then, when Jill reached out, Little Angels would claim that there were matches that appeared close — often with women in Southern California.
And inevitably, for one reason or another, those matches would all fall through.
“I got suspicious pretty quickly,” Jill said, reflecting on the experience through 2020.
They soon found out other families were becoming suspicious, too.
WHY CALIFORNIA ADOPTION REFORMS FELL SHORT
The term “adoption facilitator” is relatively new, though private adoptions managed through intermediaries are anything but. The practice has prompted a dizzying patchwork of laws that vary widely from state to state.
Many have far-tighter rules than California when it comes to regulating private adoptions.
At least a dozen states have some form of prohibition on adoption facilitators, according to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, a federal repository for adoption resources. Delaware, Kansas and Maine “strictly prohibit” any use of such intermediaries. Similarly, nine other states — Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon and Wisconsin — allow only state-licensed agencies to place children into adoptive homes. West Virginia “prohibits any person from offering or receiving any compensation for locating a child for any purpose that entails a transfer of the legal or physical custody of the child.”
Other states have likewise taken aim at the money that keeps facilitators in business.
Alabama, Colorado, Texas, Utah and Virginia cap the compensation facilitators can receive. Those states made it illegal for intermediaries to receive any payment for the placement of the child. All they are allowed to receive is reimbursement for actual medical or legal services.
“There is a market in children,” said Herman, the history professor. “Even though people don’t like to admit that.”
Adoption facilitation was briefly front and center in the California Legislature two decades ago amid a wave of internet scams and twisted tales of faked pregnancies, lost babies and international intrigue.
Lawmakers in 2006 put guardrails on what until then had been a largely untracked system of private adoption intermediaries. “Current regulations are not strict or extensive enough to safeguard birth parents and prospective adoptive parents from fraud,” lawmakers wrote.
Facilitators, they decided, would be required to post a $25,000 bond with the state and register with the Department of Social Services. They’d be expected to have some adoption job experience and have completed at least two years of college with half of the units focused on social work “or a related field.”
In return, the Department of Social Services would post the list of registered facilitators online. It wasn’t quite a state endorsement, but it gave the impression that at least someone was watching.
Ingraining adoption facilitation into California law was seen as a compromise between the private businesses that matched birth parents with prospective adoptive parents and critics who were wary of scammers taking advantage of vulnerable people.
It was a deal that backfired, said Liversidge, the adoption lawyer whose organization has studied the patchwork of adoption laws across the country. While it theoretically makes it possible to keep tabs on who’s facilitating adoptions, nobody is actually looking.
“No one else has a registry,” Liversidge said. “California is the only state.”
Indeed, some argue the registry could have opened the door for bad actors.
“What the state of California did could conceivably have made things worse by simply posting this list,” Herman said, “making it look like it was a legitimate business when there was no effort to, for example, license facilitators in the way agencies are licensed.”
Officials with the California Department of Social Services say that when complaints arise, the best course of action is to file a lawsuit in court — something easier said than done when many contracts require disputes to be handled in arbitration.
If the state receives a complaint, it is forwarded to the adoption facilitator, said Scott Murray, a department spokesman. The parties are “encouraged to work out a resolution independently.”
There is no public repository for those concerns or discipline. It’s not for lack of trying.
Around the time lawmakers were writing new rules around adoption facilitators, they called on the Department of Social Services to publicly post complaints to its website, much like existing state boards do. That would allow prospective parents looking to adopt to do a background check of their own, much like someone hiring a contractor to fix a roof.
But no place on the website is there a list of any complaints. Instead, the website only contains a document listing all registered facilitators that may or may not have been updated in recent months, assuming there’s a document at the link at all. (When a reporter first tried accessing the registry in 2021, the link was broken; access was restored shortly after the reporter contacted a Department of Social Services spokesman.)
Put another way, plumbers and hair stylists are more thoroughly scrutinized by state regulators than businesses that find families for newborn babies.
State law has clear rules for how facilitators can represent themselves online, from the types of fonts they must use to requirements that they clearly state they are a facilitator as opposed to an agency.
Critics say facilitators often get away with flaunting some of these rules because nobody is policing their websites. Indeed, one facilitator, J & J Adoptions, had failed as of this month to clearly label itself as a facilitator. Khimm Journagan, the founder who previously worked for Little Angels, said in an email to The Bee this was a mistake likely from a marketing mix-up. The site has since been updated and clarified.
Accident or not, Liversidge said, it’s yet another example of how facilitators lack necessary oversight.
“The code is very clear about the disclosure requirements,” Liversidge said. “And for good reason.”
The Department of Social Services defended the way it administers its adoption facilitation program. Department leaders declined to be interviewed for this story. In a written response to emailed questions, Jason Montiel, a department spokesman, said the department had not received complaints that rose to the level of needing to be posted.
Asked if Department of Social Services leadership believed they were doing enough to safeguard prospective new parents Montiel said: “The Department continuously evaluates the quality, efficiency, and integrity of the programs it administers, in accordance with state law.”
He repeatedly cited a link to the California Family Code, which spells out the requirements for being listed on the registry and the steps the state can take to remove a facilitator from it. The law also requires facilitators to disclose how many adoptions they facilitated the year prior to their registry application.
Montiel, however, said the Department of Social Services, “does not maintain records on the number of adoptions that are facilitated by Adoption Facilitators.”
ADOPTION ‘MATCHES’ KEEP FALLING THROUGH
Little Angels faced criticism in the latter half of 2020, though not from the state.
“I rate them 0,” one client wrote in July 2020 on Facebook. “Please do your research and find a reputable agency or facilitator or coordinator NOT Little Angel Adoptions.”
“My heart breaks for the families that I recommended to use this company,” another reviewer wrote on Yelp. ”They have used all of their savings and have been waiting over 3 & 4 years with no luck of getting their baby. I will no longer refer my friends to this company.”
The tone of reviews had taken a turn from those posted in years prior.
Around the same time, Shimabukuro acknowledged in a letter to families that placements had slowed. Birth mothers, she wrote, who had committed to putting their baby up for adoption were suddenly changing their minds more than ever.
“While the timelines for placements have increased and the number of placements have decreased, we ARE still facilitating adoptions,” she wrote in the message above three photos of couples holding babies ostensibly matched through Little Angels.
She also acknowledged that clients had asked for data on placements from recent years.
It was a challenge to provide that, she said, because it required “reconciling our paper records with our digital records.” Shimabukuro said her best guess was that Little Angels “had 58 matches over the last four years,” a rate of about one a month. “This may not be what you expected,” she wrote to the 40-or-so families who’d been on her roster, many of whom said they were told Little Angels made dozens of matches each year.
The letter did not say whether a match represented a completed adoption.
Shimabukuro said she was reevaluating outreach strategies, which included ads on Google, Facebook and TikTok. She was also working on distributing print brochures at hospitals and other community medical centers as well as college and high school campuses.
“I do not take lightly the trust you’ve placed in Little Angels and myself,” she wrote. “I work every day with social workers and other professionals to reach out to potential expectant mothers and make sure they know we are here for them. I commit to you that I will work harder at communicating our efforts and the results of those efforts.”
The Ingwells saw that email. They hoped it would be a turning point.
But future updates were fleeting through fall and into the New Year.
By then, they were in what Jill called “limbo” for more than 12 months. They wanted to hear updates about what their $17,500 contract was yielding. They wanted to start meeting these potential birth mothers as their contract said they would.
They needled Shimabukuro through email.
Jan 5, 2021: “Just wanted to send you a quick email to check-in with you. Any updates? Have you noticed that adoptions have gone up or down this year?”
The update didn’t come for more than two weeks. When it did, Shimabukuro said she had presented the Ingwells’ profile to three women in December. “One decided to parent, one is still thinking about adoption but isn’t due until March and the third has stopped responding to me,” she wrote.
“If there’s more information,” she wrote, “I will let you know.”
Jill quickly responded with a question about what state the potential birth mother lived in. Shimabukuro didn’t respond for 10 days, at which point she said it was California.
The woman was working on “paperwork,” she said.
That was the last update for over a month. Then, on Feb. 27, 2021, Jill wrote again: “Just wondering if there are any updates with the new birth mom you are working with?! I know you had mentioned that she was due in March.”
Ten days later, Shimabukuro thanked her for “checking in.”
“I’ve been working with her more over the last week and she has chosen a family,” she wrote. “I know this isn’t the news you were hoping for, but I will continue to present you to prospective birth mothers.”
There was no evidence, explanation or further discussion. The Ingwells were devastated.
It was the closest to a match they’d come in more than a year of being in a contract with Little Angels. Suddenly, they were back at square one.
Frustrated as they were with Little Angels, they also blamed themselves. So they decided to edit their online listing once more.
Then they noticed something: There were fewer families advertising that they were looking to adopt on the Little Angels website. It was curious, they thought. So they asked Shimabukuro about it.
“As far as families on the website, we have had a few matches, a few are on hold,” Shimabukuro wrote in a March 11 email.
“And some of them voluntarily chose to end their contract.”
Online, they saw the criticism mounting. Other people were voicing frustrations similar to theirs, both publicly and privately. When Jill checked her Facebook messages, she found one from someone saying they’d experienced a similar series of interactions with Little Angels.
Then there was another.
And another.
“I knew that it was a scam,” Jill said. “That kind of cemented what we were already thinking.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL?
Shimabukuro wasn’t always the name and face of Little Angels.
In the late 1990s, James Handy, a Sacramento attorney, had been focused on estate law. Handy and his wife adopted a newborn daughter in 1997, and he taught himself how to manage the legal side of private adoption, he wrote on his website. That jump-started his career in adoption law, which grew into Little Angels. He’s since participated in more than 1,700 cases, and many of his former clients said they had a positive experience with him.
Handy hired Shimabukuro in 2009 as an adoption coordinator, according to her LinkedIn page. Business filings with the state show that, in 2012, he listed her as an agent for his law firm. Three years later, he stepped away from his management role with Little Angels and turned the business over to Shimabukuro. He’d still process the company’s adoptions in California and Texas, where he moved, but Shimabukuro would become Little Angels’ owner and CEO.
Families would soon take notice.
Chris and Heather Lamm hired Little Angels in 2015 to adopt their daughter and again in 2017 to adopt their son. It was a relatively smooth process with a reputable business both times, the Redding couple told The Bee. They were unaware management had changed and that Handy was fading from the picture.
But when they returned to Little Angels in 2021 to try to adopt a third child, things were remarkably different, Heather Lamm said. The contract employee who previously had been the main point of contact was no longer with Little Angels. It showed. Shimabukuro wouldn’t return the couple’s calls after they sent their money, Heather Lamm said. When she did get in touch, Shimabukuro on multiple occasions said she was with a birth mother at the hospital. To the Lamms, there just didn’t seem to be any urgency. They felt stuck.
“It just wasn’t the service we were used to,” she said.
When Heather Lamm learned that some of Little Angels’ partnerships with others in the adoption world had ended — notably a home study group — Shimabukuro tried to spin it as what Heather Lamm described as a “casual little shift in direction.”
In reality, it was not business as usual. Other families, unbeknown to the Lamms, were organizing in what would become an arbitration proceeding against the company.
Within two weeks of signing their papers, the Lamms had had enough. They tried to pull out of the deal. Heather Lamm said she called Shimabukuro and told her she had “major concerns” with how the business was run. Shimabukuro downplayed the couple’s concerns, something that still angers them.
“In reality, it’s more like she burned a lot of bridges and ran Little Angels Adoptions into the ground,” Heather Lamm said. “She managed to shatter a lot of people’s dreams and trust along the way.”
Handy now lives in Texas. He did not return multiple voice messages, emails and text messages seeking comment.
A half-dozen families The Bee spoke to described similar experiences with Shimabukuro — the lack of communication and the suspicions about how proactive she was in finding them a baby. Based on the fact that Shimabukuro was registered with the state, some believed that regulators were checking in on her business practices, only to learn oversight was minimal at best.
The chorus of frustrated families’ complaints soon found a receptive ear, though sympathy would only go so far.
‘BELIEVE ME IT WILL HAPPEN’
Peter Hamilton, a Berkeley-based attorney who works for a firm in Missouri, had a client from an unrelated matter who had tried to adopt through Little Angels. That client heard through the grapevine that another prospective parent had been making a ruckus about Little Angels. The client suggested that the person should talk to Hamilton and see what legal options might exist.
At that point, there were just three families reporting negative experiences with Little Angels.
The number quickly ballooned to 21.
Hamilton’s legal arguments hinged on what he characterized in an arbitration filing as a pattern of deceit and devastation — one in which Shimabukuro fraudulently induced families to sign contracts and falsely advertised Little Angels’ services in violation of state law. Little Angels, according to the filing, breached the contract when it “failed to live up to its contractual obligations of best efforts and timely communication.”
Emails compiled as part of the arbitration proceedings show family after family asking for specifics and spotlighting contradictions about Little Angels’ placement rate. Plan on 12 to 18 months, wrote Khimm Journagan, a clerical contract worker with Little Angels, who later had to explain why more couples were being added to the site but more matches were not.
“Waiting is the hardest part,” Dawn Barry, another of the contract workers, wrote to a family. “There is a baby for every family and a family for every baby it’s just about the timing and that right birth mom to fit your situation.
“Believe me it will happen.”
Then there were the books. Through fall 2019, families sent check-in emails and feared Little Angels would run out of their profile books. Plenty remained, the company said. They’d alert families if and when the supply ran low. At the same time, they said they were shipping them across the country and handing them out continually.
Little Angels failed to explain to families and in arbitration records how many times their profiles had been shared with families — a basic piece of record-keeping that Shimabukuro claimed was actually quite difficult to track.
And, according to the families, there was the misleading email signature, phone greeting and business letterhead that falsely claimed Little Angels was still a law office — years after Handy had separated from his formal position. An archive search of the Little Angels website erroneously still showed an association with Handy’s law office into 2019.
Hamilton said this was important because it suggested that once-favorable impression was to be believed, even though the ownership had radically changed. And there was more.
In contracts dating to 2016, Shimabukuro’s team said they would arrange a meeting between birth parents and those looking to adopt. That never happened in the case of Hamilton’s clients.
“Not once,” Hamilton wrote in the arbitration claim, something also supported by family interviews with the Bee.
Families blamed themselves. They believed there “must be something wrong with them” that was causing the lack of matching, Hamilton said. “Only when they began comparing notes in 2020, did they realize that all 15 of them had the exact same experience with LAA,” arbitration records show. “A complete lack of communication, performance, or results.”
The arbitration claim says Little Angels lied about how successful it was at placing babies, distorted the reality of the search and strung desperate families along for years — sometimes until they were considered too old to adopt at all.
That amounted to nearly two dozen allegations that Shimabukuro defrauded families when she induced them to sign the contract, which the claim argues she later breached.
“When 21 families are telling a very similar story,” Hamilton said, “you’ve just got to believe it.”
Under the contract that the families signed, disputes needed to be resolved through arbitration — a common conflict resolution process that is often faster and less costly than courtroom litigation though happens in secret and might not be as favorable to victims. While that process is separate from a civil lawsuit, it still requires both sides to show up for the official hearing.
Hamilton’s families were ready to negotiate, he said. He told The Bee he had compiled evidence that showed that Shimabukuro failed to keep up relationships with the types of places that would normally see birth mothers wanting to put their newborn up for adoption. He’d explain the systematic ways Little Angels baited families for months, inflated its record of successful adoptions and then crushed the hopes of prospective new parents. He’d planned to show how Shimabukuro lied to families and swindled them for thousands of dollars.
He wouldn’t get his day in court, though.
Shimabukuro failed to pay the fees necessary to continue arbitration hearings that she called for in the contracts families signed, records show. That chance for an out-of-court resolution ended in July. The families now have the option to sue, but that would be another financially and emotionally costly process — one that would dredge up trauma about trying to conceive of a family, and the turmoil that followed.
They’ve yet to file suit; it’s unclear if they ever will.
“In a weird sense,” Hamilton said, “it’s almost as though Little Angels won.”
‘BURYING HER HEAD IN THE SAND’
Many who spoke to The Bee did not want their names used because they still feel shame — something experts say is common and a major reason why lawsuits against facilitators are relatively rare.
A Tennessee couple learned about Little Angels through a church acquaintance who had used the company. Unable to have children of their own, they signed up with the Sacramento facilitator in 2017. Their paperwork gave the impression Little Angels was still a law firm, and they had no reason to be suspicious. The couple said Shimabukuro made them feel “like an annoyance” when they requested updates. As the years passed, they gave up. They felt “helpless.”
A Texas couple had a similar story. A coworker recommended Little Angels, and the business appeared to still be run as a reputable law firm. Soon, though, they ran into similar maddening roadblocks and, like many families, felt scammed. After three years, they said they’ve taken it all as a sign they’re not meant to have children.
Michael Hughes and his wife were under the impression that Little Angels had connections that would help them adopt more quickly than other organizations. They signed their contract in 2017, and years later, they had nothing to show for it. On the night of his 50th birthday, Hughes began reaching out to other families who’d signed a contract with Little Angels. It was this rallying effort that sparked the case against Shimabukuro.
Between the initial contract, the arbitration expenses and the fees to contract an entirely separate adoption process with another group, Hughes said he spent well over $100,000 — an expense for which he launched an online fundraiser. He cherishes his son Nathan. But now 52, Hughes wonders if he’ll live long enough to witness his son’s college graduation and, perhaps one day, meet his grandchildren.
He holds Little Angels responsible.
“It cost us three years,” Hughes said. “I didn’t have three years to give.”
It’s unclear how many of Little Angels’ remaining clients that did not join the arbitration case were connected with a child. Hughes fears others were also exploited.
“I can’t impugn the integrity of any other adoption facilitator,” Hamilton said. “But I will say that, to me, it is remarkable that California allows them to do business with so little regulation.”
“It’s almost as though to me, the state of California provides free advertising for essentially unregulated operators.”
Other people lost money after doing business with Shimabukuro, too.
Michael Wisby is the CEO of Two Trees PPC, a marketing company that Shimabukuro hired in January 2019 to overhaul her website and help Little Angels’ Sacramento-area advertising. When Wisby’s team signed on, there were some pressing things that needed his immediate attention. Chief among them: removing all those mentions that Little Angels was still a law firm — mentions that lingered more than three years after Handy turned over the company.
The site was a mess, Wisby said, but Shimabukuro seemed passionate about helping people become parents. That spark made his team want to find ways to help the families whose profile pages could be spruced up. They made suggestions on how to clean up the site and boost how many people viewed Little Angels’ message. For about a year, things seemed to work well.
Then in 2020, Shimabukuro fell behind on her bills. She appeared more scattered and less able to handle things, Wisby said.
“She was just not equipped to run a business,” he said.
After hours of fraught attempts to work with her, Wisby said he and Shimabukuro agreed to a payment plan. She has since reneged on that, too, he said. She owes Wisby’s team some $15,000, he said, and the company is currently in the process of taking her to collections. Similarly, JPMorgan Chase Bank filed a collections claim against Shimabukuro in Sacramento Superior Court this year for an unpaid $7,441.01 credit card.
Wisby’s team shut down Little Angels’ site this summer. He said he knew only the basics of the claims the nearly two-dozen families were making against Shimabukuro. But from what he saw, their outrage is justified.
“I feel their frustrations, too,” he said. “We did have some success at the start. But where the success started to fall off was with the inaction on her part, burying her head in the sand.”
EMBATTLED ADOPTION FACILITATOR REBRANDS
The two people who worked alongside Shimabukuro for years — Journagan and Barry — have moved on to work as facilitators as part of Journagan’s own facilitator company, J & J Adoptions. They declined to be interviewed for this story. In a brief email, Journagan said she had been a contract worker for Little Angels. She had not been affiliated with the company “for years.”
“I really would like to stay out of everything,” she said.
Amid the allegations of fraud, increasing debt and arbitration deadlines, Little Angels dropped off the state registry earlier this year.
It wasn’t the result of any state enforcement responding to the alleged misconduct, however.
Nor was it so the state could look into the company’s record.
Instead, it was simply because Shimabukuro opted not to renew her listing.
In May, Shimabukuro filed updated business papers with the California Secretary of State. Instead of a fancy office in a business park, the latest iteration of Little Angels would have a new address: a mailbox at a shipping supplies center in a strip mall off of Del Paso Road.
No longer would she call herself an adoption facilitator, records show.
Instead, she’d be an “adoption consultant,” an unlicensed title not recognized by the state in any official capacity.
INGWELL FAMILY WARY, BUT REASON TO HOPE
For the Ingwells, the end of their time with Little Angels came with a whimper, too.
Not all hope was lost, though. They were able to recoup most of their money through a tax benefit for families that attempt to adopt. Plus, someone they’d met through the arbitration case had switched to another adoption group and quickly adopted a baby boy.
Feeling like they’d been scammed once, the Ingwells were skittish.
But they weren’t ready to give up on having a family.
They noticed subtle differences immediately. The new adoption company had a media team to help create online profiles, rather than forcing prospective parents to pitch themselves and design brochures. The whole operation seemed more legitimate from the beginning, Adam said. “A little more real.”
After more than 18 months with no meaningful results from Little Angels, they expected to be waiting for equally as long with this new adoption group. Since they had the summer off from teaching anyway, they’d planned a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Instead, they received a call after a few weeks on the roster with the new company saying they had a potential match.
The islands would have to wait.
They booked a flight to Ohio to meet their new daughter. They named her Sawyer.
The Ingwells know they’re fortunate. For so many others, their adoption journey ended with feelings of having failed.
Still, they try not to look backward. Instead, they look forward to the days of watching Sawyer frolic in the hills and family trips to the Sierra; to group portraits and globetrotting adventures; to Sawyer tormenting Blackberry the cat the way that toddlers do.
They don’t expect to hear from Shimabukuro ever again. But they do want someone empowered to do something about it to listen.
“We’re talking about the exchange of a human life,” Jill Ingwell said. “You’d think that of all things, that would be something that would be more regulated.
“I guess we just assumed it would be.”