Adopted boy missing: for nearly 10 years.

One reason we think adoption sucks is this: Another horror story hits the news. Read about it here.

Consider this, a boy of eleven--an adopted boy named Adam Herrman--goes missing in 1999 after a "spanking" with a belt (isn't that usually called a whipping?) and his adopters do not report him missing. For nearly ten years. All the while Valerie and Doug Herman collect $700-a-month state adoption assistance because, they say, if they reported him missing the state might take away two of their other adopted children, Adam's siblings. They had already lost one child the state removed, so far don't know why. They don't want to talk about it.

According to Valerie's sister and the couples' two biological children, who are older than Adam, their parents punched and kicked Adam over the years, beat him with a belt buckle and kept him chained to the bathtub faucet. Valerie Herman denies the allegations but admits that he was sometimes locked in the bathroom at night after they found knives under his pillow when he was about eight. Read more about the adopter mother's denial of abuse in The Wichita Eagle.

Okay, all those pro-adoption people who are indeed loving parents will say this is an aberration. Point taken. But if the child had been born to the Herrmans, unless they are deranged, they would have sought help and different treatment for a child that is possibly schizophrenic. If a natural child away, they would have gone to the police immediately, not simply told relatives that he had gone back to state custody, a neat excuse.

A brother of Adopter Valerie Herman doesn't believe her excuses. Read a report from KWCH .
He thinks the child is "gone."

The boy's biological father, Irvin Groerninger, says that after a divorce when the boy was 18 months, the three children were removed from the mother's home after allegations of abuse. A trucker from Indiana, he then tried to get custody but welfare officials terminated his parental rights. Why does it always seem that the state is often so eager to terminate parental rights? The man is a trucker and some official probably sniffed his nose at that. Reminds me that in the Jessica/Anna case, the biological father was a trucker and that was always mentioned.

While we can't say that keeping the natural parents involved, or keeping the birth records not sealed, would ever prevented this kind of incident, the miscreants who uphold laws that keep records sealed might consider that being adopted is not the same as being born into a family. Whatever arrangements Groerninger would have made, they were almost certainly going to be better than locking the kid in the bathroom and/or chaining him to the faucet. And if he had gone missing, it's likely that someone would have noticed.

Can we blame family members for not being more vigilant about what happened to their "nephew"? Perhaps. A simple excuse--he went back--is plausible enough.

But in a family not "created" by adoption, there is no neat excuse to cover up when a child goes missing. Family members know the kid can't be sent back.

This can now be added to the list of adoptions gone wrong--where nobody did anything until it was too late. The Herrmans deserve more than simply having the other children removed. They should be jailed for at least ten years. That's assuming they did not murder him. So far no bones have turned up. --lorraine

PS: For another tragic story, read Jane's comment that follows.