Posted on 08/20/2004 10:13:53 AM PDT by Ironfocus
Ibadan - Allegedly abandoned by their American mother as she took up military contract work in Iraq, seven American children left behind for months in Africa begged for change for food and shuttled from a stranger's care to a state-run orphanage, recalled Nigerians who crossed their paths.
Ranging in age from seven to 16, the Texas children arrived late last month at their last stop in Africa, the government orphanage in this Nigerian market city of millions bustling with traders and crippled and leprous beggars.
By then, a step away from rescue, the American children were skinny, mosquito-bitten and suffering from malnutrition, malaria, and typhoid.
The children are now back in the States
"Three of them were sick - they could not walk," said Alex, a 23-year-old orphan at the Ibadan orphanage. "They looked tired - they'd been sick for long, without food."
The seven children's extraordinary 10-month ordeal ended only with the chance visit of an American missionary to the orphanage.
Swarmed by the American children, missionary Warren Beemer - a Texan himself - quizzed the brothers and sisters on the roster of the Houston Rockets basketball team to test that they were who they said.
Ultimately, Beemer launched into the American national anthem.
Placing their hands on their hearts, the American children joined in - singing out the Star-Spangled Banner on the grass-and-dirt yard of the Nigerian orphanage.
On Friday, the American children were back in the United States, in the care of foster parents in Houston.
Their adoptive mother, identified by authorities in America as 47-year-old Mercury Liggins, was under investigation in Texas regarding payments she had received to help care for the three boys and four girls.
Authorities believe Liggins took the seven children in October to Nigeria, where a relative of her fiance lived.
Stopped paying for children's schooling
Liggins returned to Houston within weeks, leaving the children behind. She later went to work as a food-service worker in United States military mess halls in Iraq, authorities said. Officials said she quit in July.
An official at Nigeria's Ministry of Women?s Affairs, Community Development and Social Welfare said on Thursday that the Nigerian government had known about the abandoned children before their discovery by the American missionary.
Local Nigerian authorities had not notified the US Embassy because the case was a sensitive matter diplomatically, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Nigerian government workers and others who knew the children said Liggins had left the children in the care of a businessman, identified as Obiora Nwankwo, whose two-story house is a well-cared-for building in an affluent neighbourhood of Ibadan.
He enrolled the children in boarding school, but started missing payments and by July, all seven siblings had stopped attending, and dropped out of sight.
Stories like this really tug my heartstrings, the mother should be arrested and sent to work in the Nigerian orphanage.
Home Alone IV?
Wow, it's a good thing these kiddies remember their NBA teams. I'd have been screwed "You don't know the entire team roster? to the lions with you!"
She's not a mother, she's a fraud artist and child abuser who adopted these kids as meal tickets on the govt. gravy train.
Adoptive mother: Nigerian relative trusted to provide care
HOUSTON — The lawyer for the adoptive mother of seven children found malnourished and sick in a Nigerian orphanage is defending the woman's actions, blaming a brother-in-law for abandoning them while she was in Iraq.
Mercury Liggins faces a custody hearing on Aug. 26. Harris County Child Protective Services officials have referred to police new abuse complaints from the children, who claim that she struck them with switches and a cane and had repeatedly threatened to take them to Africa if they ever told law officers about earlier abuse reports.
Liggins, 47, also faces a state investigation stemming from payments she received to help care for the three boys and four girls, who range from 8 to 16 years old. They are in Houston foster homes.
Also, the FBI is investigating the case to see whether and any federal laws were broken.
Attorney Michael Delaney said Thursday that Liggins has checked in to a hospital for nervous exhaustion. The shock of hearing that the children had been in the orphanage and the sudden realization that her brother-in-law had duped her have drained her, he said.
"She trusted the wrong person," Delaney told the Houston Chronicle in Friday's editions. "She feels badly for her kids."
The youths told a Texas pastor who discovered them in the orphanage that they had been abandoned in the country by Liggins in October. They proved their American citizenship to the missionary by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and he notified U.S. authorities who returned them to Texas last week, nine days after they were found in Ibadan, Nigeria.
"Before the public judges this lady they need to hear the entire story, both sides, not just the sensationalistic allegations," Delaney said.
Child welfare officials investigated four previous complaints of abuse going back to 1997, but no mistreatment was ever proven, a spokeswoman said earlier this week. CPS officials halted $512-per-child monthly stipends in March after learning that the children from Houston were not living with the mother.
"She certainly never intended to abandon the kids," said Delaney. "She thought he was caring well for the kids."
Liggins adopted four of the children, all siblings, in Houston in 1996. Five years later, she adopted three siblings in Dallas.
Delaney said Liggins had decided a boarding school would be the best place for the children while she trained and worked in Iraq as a contract food-service employee supporting U.S. troops. The woman investigated boarding schools in states near Texas and schools in Mexico, but decided on the Nigerian school because her husband is Nigerian and he had gone to a boarding school there as a child.
Liggins and her brother-in-law toured at least two of the schools and decided on the one that best suited the children and their means and enrolled them. After she returned to Houston, she talked on the phone with the children often before she left for Iraq, Delaney said.
"She was caring for her children as a working mother, financially supporting them in the best possible care that she could while she was overseas," he said.
Information from: Houston Chronicle
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August 20, 2004 - 8:07 a.m. EDT
Retrieved from wacotrib.com
Copyright 2004, The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP Online news report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Hey! That's the guy who sent me an email about $400 gozillion he would share with me if I would just give him my bank account number and unlimited access to it. I'm gonna be rich, I tell ya'. RICH!
Note to self: if ever faced with the consequences of some really bad behavior on my part, check self into a hospital of some sort.
Touche'
Off the subject, but isn't 23 a little old to be at an orphanage?
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