Tragic Story of Hana Williams, Who Died after Abuse from Her Adoptive Parents
News.com.au
HANA Williams was supposed to have a better life in the United States. Instead, the Ethiopian teenager was subjected to horrifying abuse at the hands of her adoptive parents, Larry and Carri. Then, three years after travelling to the US from an African orphanage, Hana was found dead in her own backyard. Carri Williams has since been convicted of "homicide by abuse" and sentenced to 37 years in prison. Her husband Larry will serve 28 years. The pair terrorised a household of nine children, two of whom were adopted, with a strict disciplinary regime that turned deadly on May 11, 2011. On that day, Carri sent Hana outside into rain and single-digit temperatures, telling the girl to do jumping jacks to stay warm, Slate reports. Hana was left outside for hours, where she eventually died of hypothermia, compounded by malnutrition and gastritis. It was a slow death. Hana staggered around the yard, repeatedly falling and hitting her head, before taking off her clothes in a phenomenon called "hypothermic paradoxical undressing". When one of the family's biological daughters said Hana was lying facedown on the ground, Carri went out, covered her with a sheet and told two teenage sons to bring her inside. She eventually called 911. "I think my daughter just killed herself," Carri said. "She's really rebellious." The Williams family lived on an isolated, 5.6-acre property in Sedro-Woolley, a small town deep in the American northwest. Larry and Carri practised a fundamentalist brand of Christianity while homeschooling their children and banning most TV and internet access, Slate reports. The couple's strict parenting style appears to have been taken from the book To Train Up A Child, which has been implicated in the deaths of two other adoptees. While the Williams' biological children were seemingly well "trained", their two adopted kids, Hana and Immanuel, were often singled out for brutal punishment. Hana was forced to use an outdoor port-a-loo her parents hardly ever cleaned. She had to sleep in a dark, cramped bathroom, and when that punishment didn't work she was moved to a closet which was barely a metre long. If Hana didn't like her clothes, Carri made her wear a towel instead. The two adopted children were fed cold leftovers and frozen vegetables, or sandwiches soaked with water. They were excluded from family events and routinely beaten. Hana's adoptive siblings later told investigators they barely saw or heard the girl because she was "always in the closet" and had stopped crying when their parents hit her. When Hana first arrived in the US she weighed 35 kilos. Six months later she had almost reached 50 kilos. But at the time of her death, Hana was so emmaciated and malnourished that she had returned to her original weight. Immanuel suffered the same abuses. When he was removed from the family following Hana's death, the boy told therapist Julia Petersen he felt certain he would be the next one to die in the home. Immanuel apologised compulsively and asked his new foster mother why she didn't hurt him. Larry and Carri had been arrested. They couldn't mistreat Immanuel anymore. But he was still afraid of ending up like Hana.
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