By Cindy Shultz

Dakota “Levi” Stevens deserved a long life. He had a family that loved him and wanted him. In April 2024, he was suffocated in his foster home. No charges have been filed, and Levi’s family is calling for change in a petition. The state of Indiana failed Levi and his family. The Indiana Department of Child Services claims that prospective foster families go through “intensive training and education,” yet Levi’s death is not an isolated incident.

Throughout our country a crisis is unfolding that demands our immediate attention. It’s a crisis that sees our most vulnerable—our children—subjected to unthinkable horrors. The torture and murder of foster and adopted children is ongoing. These children are more than just victims; they’re human beings who deserve love, care, and protection, not death.

A few current murder cases include those of 4-year-old Bryan Boyer (FL), 11-year-old Arabella McCormack (CA), 6-year-old Isabella Kalua (HI), 3-year-old Sherin Mathews (TX), 14-year-old Grace Packer (PA), and 6-week-old Lucas Birchim (NC). The stories of Asunta Fong Yang and Aundria Bowman—both murdered adoptees—are garnering attention in two different Netflix Series: “The Asunta Case” and “Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter,” respectively.” These stories are horrifying but not unique and stand as irrefutable evidence of an industry failing children and their families. Can you imagine losing custody of your children because a government agency says you are a danger to them only to find out they were victims of torture and murder under watch from that same agency?

According to a 2019 study, children in foster care have a mortality rate 42% higher than that other children. This number is not just a statistic; these are real human beings, real children, real lives, and real suffering. Imagine the fear and confusion a child must feel when the very people who are legally responsible for protecting them become their abusers. These children, already vulnerable due to their adoptive and foster care placements, are further victimized by a system that fails to safeguard their lives.

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By Monica Stoffal

My mother once told me: If you think someone is going to be your friend, tell them the worst thing about you; a true friend must know your worst thing.
In December 1971, I was twelve-years-old and pregnant from the incest I’d experienced since I was five. On April 16, 1972, labor started with its vice-grip of contractions, bringing me to my knees just outside the hospital, where I pulled my mother to the ground as she tried in vain to hold me up. A kind stranger helped us to the hospital door. While the on-call doctor considered whether to give me an epidural, he said, “If this baby even lives, it will be small.” Eight hours later, a seven-pound boy was born—a boy I never saw or held. The adoptive parents and older brother were overjoyed.
I followed my mother’s advice for a while, believing that a true friend had to know my worst story.
I considered Robin to be that true friend and, when she shared her hardship story about growing up with an alcoholic mother, I told her my incest story. I was nineteen at the time, and Robin, who was eight years older, seemed trustworthy. I was naive about how hard my story truly was. Unbeknownst to me, Robin gossiped, telling her long-time friend, Colleen, about my childhood sexual abuse. I happened to be renting a room from Colleen, and when we had a disagreement, she accused me of sleeping with my stepfather. I was stunned. Not only by her calloused, out-of-nowhere comment, but by the shocking realization that Robin told someone else my hard story, something I rarely shared. After that, I kept my story all inside, hidden by my Cheshire Cat grin, my cool, aloof self.
Marriage, two children, college, a teaching job, gave me many years to stuff the story down deep enough that I realized I could live my entire life without ever telling it again.

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Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret.

It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later.

Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful.

Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.”
Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.”

“I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.”

The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father?

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For many of us, DNA test results have delivered news that’s made nothing in our world seem normal. Our families may not be our families. The truths we’ve known may not be truths at all. We’ve been upside-down, turned around, and left looking for some kind of foothold—a way to ground ourselves in this new unreality. Then came a virus and a quarantine that have made everyone’s lives anything but normal. On top of that, an unprecedented political climate along with civil unrest have been both globally and personally destabilizing. If that weren’t enough, bring on the holidays, which for some in the best of times are difficult, stressful, and grief-inducing. But this year, even those who typically find the season joyful may experience sadness, disappointment, and grief.

If you experience anxiety, it’s likely been magnified in (or by) 2020. If you’ve experienced trauma, the fear and isolation caused by the pandemic may be retraumatizing. If you’ve been alone in quarantine or can’t spend the holidays with the people you love, your loneliness may seem overwhelming. Even if you’ve been holding your own, the common sorrow—the empathy and compassion fatigue for all who are struggling—may be depleting you. This state of life as we know it now may be getting on your last nerve.