A white couple from rural West Virginia is back behind bars after a judge revoked the initial bond and raised it to $500,000 apiece — more than double the amount they faced last year when police arrested the pair on charges of locking their adopted Black children in a barn and forcing them to work as “slaves.”
Donald Ray Lantz, 63, and Jeanne Kay Whitefeather, 62, both of Sissonville, were ordered to reappear in Kahanwha County Court on June 11, more than eight months after each posted a $200,000 bond following their arrests in October.
At the time, police conducting a wellness check at the Cheyanne Lane home were shocked to discover two of the couple’s five adopted children living in deplorable conditions, padlocked inside a ramshackle storage shed on the back of the property, which had no working lights or running water.
Normally I’d say that these people should be forced to endure the same shit they doled out. But there’s really no way to dole out childhood trauma after the fact.
Fuck these “people”. Nobody who is ok forcing another person to live and toil in these circumstances can be considered a person in my view. They are animals, humans at best.
I’d bet good money against a bent paperclip that they had childhood trauma already. That doesn’t excuse what they’ve done, in fact that makes it worse. It’s likely the thought was “this is what happened to me to make me the person I am today” or similar.
That being said, once you do this to a child you’re no longer a person in my eyes either. They aren’t human. They aren’t animals. They are nothing. The whole reason I’m not in charge of anything is because I think we should throw them in an oubliette and let them survive by drinking from puddles and eating rats. That’s not justice, that’s revenge. I just don’t have anything else in my heart for these people.