In May 2011, a 13-year-old girl named Hana Williams was killed by her adoptive parents in a rural town in Washington state's tulip country, an hour or so north of Seattle. She had been adopted from Ethiopia three years earlier, into an isolated, fundamentalist Christian family, and for much of that time endured almost incomprehensible abuse: Hana was shunned by her adoptive parents and their seven biological children and was made to sleep variously in a barn, a locked shower room and ultimately a locked closet too small to lie down in. She was fed frozen food, compelled to use an outdoor toilet, repeatedly shorn of her braids, and regularly beaten with a variety of implements. When she died, late on a cold and rainy spring night, she had been kept outside for hours until hypothermia caused her to fall down repeatedly, ultimately leaving her face down in the mud. When her adoptive mother finally called 911, she suggested to the operator that Hana had killed herself as a final act of rebellion.
Hana's death is among the most upsetting cases in a small roster — although not small enough — of stories of extreme abuse suffered by adoptees at the hands of the families who took them in. Two years after Hana died, I traveled to Mount Vernon, Washington, to cover the beginning of the murder trial of her adoptive parents, Carri and Larry Williams, who were ultimately convicted of assault, manslaughter and, in Carri's case, homicide by abuse. The trial was an often-searing experience, eliciting cries and gasps from the gallery when autopsy photos of Hana's bruised, emaciated body were shown, or when her younger brother, the only other adoptee in the family, used sign language to testify that he didn't understand where his sister had gone. It was also surreal to emerge from the courtroom into the bright sun of an idyllic Pacific Northwest summer. At times during the weeks I attended, I found myself spontaneously weeping at traffic lights around the town.
