UNION (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch [St. Louis MO]
November 17, 2025
By Jacob Barker
[See also the entire report.]
A Franklin County-based Christian charity that for more than 50 years operated children’s homes in Mexico abruptly shut down last week after a report documented decades of sexual abuse allegations, beginning with the orphanage’s founders and continuing to the present.
Niños de México commissioned the independent investigation into its handling of sexual abuse in response to media scrutiny and mounting pressure from donor churches.
The 256-page report chronicles accusations against 20 employees of the organization, including its Franklin County founders, and says its most recent executive director, Steve Ross, who split his time between Florissant and Mexico, failed to report abuse allegations. According to one witness, Ross even instructed a staff member to destroy documents related to some of the accusations.
“The investigation found that leadership, including multiple Executive Directors, consistently failed to protect children, actively concealed abuse, retaliated against whistleblowers, and in some cases, were accused of personally abusing children,” the report concludes.
Ross, who is not accused of any sexual misconduct himself, did not respond to a request for comment. Board President Bob Wideman, of Union, declined to comment.
Niños de México, founded in Union in 1967 and aligned with the independent Christian Churches of the Restoration Movement, ran eight group homes and two dormitories for young adults in the Mexico City area that served about 100 residents annually. Churches across the Midwest donated and sent parishioners on mission trips there. It had a budget as high as $1.8 million as of 2021.
But pressure from its network of church donors had been building in recent years following a whistleblower campaign from a former volunteer and formal criminal charges Mexican authorities brought against a Niños de México house parent, Javier Colosia. Colosia was convicted in 2023 of raping two teenage girls and sentenced to over 11 years in prison.
Donations dropped. Niños began running deficits.
In November 2023, the Post-Dispatch published an extensive report about the charity, including recent allegations from a former employee and a former intern that at least six employees abused children or young adults at its network of orphanages. Two months later, the charity agreed to hire a Virginia organization, GRACE, or Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, to conduct a comprehensive investigation.
The report was released Wednesday.
Douglas Lay, a Florissant pastor and former supporter of Niños who is also an advocate against clergy abuse, called the report “the worst I’ve ever read.”
“I was overwhelmingly shocked and disgusted and had no clue that it was that extensive and over that many decades,” Lay said Friday. “There are thousands and thousands of people throughout the Midwest who have donated to this ministry, and if they read the report, they’re going to be shocked.”
Revelatory accusations
Niños shut down after the report’s release. It scrubbed its website except for “an important announcement” on its home page that acknowledged the GRACE investigation.
”It is with heavy hearts that the board of Niños de México has decided to end our ongoing ministry effective immediately,” the statement said.
Niños was already in trouble. After Colosia was charged, critics used social media to publicize allegations against the organization. A Mexican documentary on abuse allegations at Niños was released in March. In July, Mexican authorities raided the charity’s homes and removed and relocated the children.
The nonprofit’s leadership told the Washington Missourian at the time that it was “deeply saddened and surprised.”
Some of the most revelatory accusations in the new report are against the organization’s founders, Wanda and Merlyn Beeman.
GRACE investigators interviewed several witnesses and victims who described Wanda Beeman as having inappropriate sexual relations with at least five minors staying at the homes. Merlyn Beeman was alleged to have had a relationship with at least one boy in the home.
Another witness told investigators that when Mexican authorities began looking into reports of sexual misconduct during the 1970s, Merlyn Beeman talked to the boys and asked what they would say to authorities about “rumors” of he and his wife’s sexual relationships with boys at the home.
The Beemans left Niños for the U.S. around 1978, reportedly under pressure from their donors and under investigation from Mexican authorities. A 1978 letter the new executive director sent to the organization’s supporters and obtained by the GRACE investigators did not mention the Beemans by name but called their resignation a “very tragic situation.”
”I feel all that needs to be said concerning it is that they left for personal reasons that involved personal moral integrity,” the letter said. “I don’t think any more needs to be said about this except to seek your prayers for them and those involved with them, that their lives can be straightened out and that they can find peace with their Lord.”
Wanda Beeman is dead. Merlyn Beeman declined to be interviewed by the GRACE team. Reached by phone Friday and asked about the allegations, he said he hadn’t been involved in Niños in many years and had “no response to something like that. That sounds crazy.”
An attack, a delayed investigation
The report also details numerous allegations against longtime Niños de México medical director Dr. Noe Flores, who was himself in one of its first groups of children in the late 1960s.
The report documents Flores’s sexual abuse of at least five victims over the years before he was “forced” into retirement around 2016. Ross, the executive director, told investigators he had no prior knowledge of the abuse allegations against Flores, but one of the victims reported telling Ross about it years before Flores left. Ross also acknowledged hearing about “odd behavior” from Flores, including “kissing” children’s faces, but that he took no immediate action.
In 2021, law enforcement began investigating Colosia, the former house parent convicted of rape, based on information some of the girls had shared with government counselors during state-mandated child welfare checks. Ross himself is accused by one employee of asking a staffer to destroy documents related to the criminal investigation.
Two other top officials in the organization, David Hernández and Verónica de la Riva, were accused of trying to coach victims of Colosia about what to tell authorities. A government psychologist told investigators Hernández would come to the prosecutor’s office and tell the girls not to say anything.
Finally, Mexican authorities temporarily barred Hernández and de la Riva from entering one of the dormitories so as not to have contact with the victims while the investigation was ongoing.
Then, a couple of weeks later, on Oct. 12, 2021, government officials were attacked by armed men as they arrived to transport the victims to the prosecutor’s office for interviews. The government psychologist was raped, and a lawyer working on the case was beaten.
The psychologist said the attackers asked about documents they had and tried to access their email via their phones. She heard one of them make a call and say: “I’ve done what you asked me to do.”
The attack delayed the investigation into Colosia by six months while the psychologist recovered.
Other allegations in the report say Hernández, who also had an accounting background, directed some of the nonprofit’s finances to a church he pastored.
Eric Miller, a former intern at Niños who became a whistleblower and critic, said he never wanted the organization to shut down, hoping to force reform instead.
But after the GRACE report documented “60 years of abuse and covering it up,” he said Niños’ closure was “for the best.”
“I believed in the mission, and I thought it was true,” Miller told the Post-Dispatch on Friday. “But the more I learned, the more I got to know the kids, the more I learned Spanish, the more I learned it was all a lie.”