It’s sad to be abandoned by your parents, but it can be a blessing when you are adopted by someone who wants to raise your child. However, there are some people who adopt in the name of adoption and then abuse the adopted children or use them as a money-making tool.
A girl born in China and abandoned by her parents was adopted at the age of 1 year and 2 months (2004) by a couple of parents from the United States. The Atkocaitis, who already had three children, adopted the girl and renamed her Olivia Atkocaitis, and all seemed well. It wasn’t until Olivia was 3 years old that the Atkocaitis began to abuse her, chaining her to a metal bar so she wouldn’t escape.
Olivia, now 19, filed a lawsuit against New Hampshire state agencies and her adoptive parents, citing New Boston police, a Massachusetts nonprofit adoption agency and the local school district in addition to her years of abuse and confinement complaints.
alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday that her parents, Thomas and Dennis, prevented her from attending public school and locked her in a room in the basement. She also points out that they forced her to do intense physical labor, beat her and yelled racial slurs at her, among other abuses, for nearly 14 years.
According to the 70-page lawsuit, Olivia was held in a dungeon, beaten, starved and forced to work for years. Olivia also points out that even though one of Atkocaitis’ biological children had reported her parents’ abuse, the agency chose to ignore her case because she was a minority.
In 2011, the Atkocaitis biological child told a school counselor that eight-year-old Olivia had been whipped, starved and pushed down the stairs, and was also the only child in the family who was not allowed to attend school. The police came to visit and filmed and submitted a report to the Department of Children, Youth and Families about the confinement of Olivia, who was only 8 feet old. It turned out that it wasn’t Olivia who was taken away, but the child who had turned in the parents. Even though the couple admitted outright that they had actually imprisoned Olivia in the basement, she was ignored because she was a local minority.
The lawsuit also mentions that the basement where Olivia was held had no basic facilities, no mattress let alone sheets, no ventilation, no heating, no running water. There was only one window, and the window was fitted with iron bars, and the only way to solve the problem was in a bucket. Olivia would only be let out when she was needed to help with work. Her foster parents would ask her to perform massages, do chores, clean up animal waste and feed the animals, and so on. Once she was not satisfied with her performance, she would be locked out of the house as punishment, no matter how bad the weather conditions were.
In order to prevent her from escaping, she was kept on a leash and threatened with deportation to China by immigration and customs officials if she did not behave. In addition, she was mentally abused, often telling her that her birth mother had thrown her in the trash and that she was unloved. Olivia was often fed irregularly, sometimes with a hard pile of food and sometimes with no food at all. Whenever she was in the dungeon, Olivia had to be handcuffed, and poor Olivia had no contact with the outside world, let alone go to school.
The saddest thing is that Olivia has tried to escape many times and has sought help from the police, but their discrimination against people of Chinese descent has led to a reluctance to help her. Each time, she was sent back to her adoptive parents’ home and continued to be abused.
Although Olivia has been adopted for many years, neither of the Atkokaitis have taken any steps to prove Olivia’s U.S. citizenship or apply for a social security card, so she has been threatened with deportation to China and has no way to get a driver’s license or a job even if she gets out into society…who wants to hire someone without proof of identity?
So how did Olivia escape the Service? Just on September 5, 2018, Olivia dug through the basement’s plaster walls with her bare hands and then ran into the nearby woodlands. After Olivia escaped, the pair of foster parents had called the police, and the New Boston police used a police dog to track her down. The next day, when the public there found her, all they could see were scratches all over her face and mud all over her body.
It was only then that the two couples were finally arrested by the New Boston Police Department and charged with felony child endangerment and restraint. After the two pleaded guilty, Thomas pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child endangerment and was sentenced to a minimum of six months in prison, while Denise pleaded guilty to unlawful confinement but did not serve the sentence. In October 2019, the house was sold and the couple went their separate ways, with one moving to Maine and the other to Georgia.
Many people think that these bridges only happen in TV drama series, but in fact there are indeed some children in real life who are adopted but not treated properly. It’s sad that children are abandoned by their parents, but it’s not right that they should be abused by the people who adopted them.
