Three adults were arrested in North Carolina for engaging in a trade-deal, exchanging a child for a Plymouth, police say.
Thomasville police and the local children’s services were alerted in July 2019 by hospital staff from the Wake Forest Baptist Health High Point Medical center. Medical staff spotted bruises on a 2-year-old girl when was brought in for treatment for an allergic reaction, according to InsideEdition.
The child was brought in by a 47-year-old Tina Chavis, who claimed to be her mother. When Chavis couldn’t provide any proof of that assertion, she claimed to have adopted that child. However, she could not prove that either.
The child’s biological mother, 45-year-old Alice Leann Todd, and her husband, 53-year-old Vicencio Romero received a vintage 1993 Plymouth Laser from Chavis.
Thomasville Police have made three arrests, and all three are charged with the unlawful sale, surrender, or purchase of a minor. They are held on a $50,000 bail and are set to appear in court on Oct. 21.
No comments have been made about the motives for the trade. The girl is taken into care by a family member.
Global adoption is big business, fraught with loose regulations and profit incentives that have made it a target for kidnappers, human traffickers, and pedophiles. In 2018, The Epoch Times reported on this subject.
Child Trafficking Through International Adoption Continues Despite Regulations
While the 2014 U.S. law ended the “wild west” state of the international adoption business in the United States, which had been mostly untouched by federal regulation and oversight, the law did little to solve the problem.
In India, children up for adoption have been referred to as “manufactured orphans.” India’s Firstpost news outlet reported that in 2016, a “kidnap-for-adoption” racket was uncovered in Kolkata, where an adoption agency was found guilty of stealing infants from “impoverished unwed mothers, rape survivors, and marginalized families.”
In 2017, police in India arrested the heads of an adoption center that was selling children to foreign couples for between $12,000 and $23,000 per child.
The problem has continued even in the United States. In 2017, the FBI raided the agency European Adoption Consultants in Ohio, where news outlet WKYC reported allegations that the enterprise failed to adequately supervise adoptions for “preventing the sale, abduction, exploitation, or trafficking of children.” European Adoption Consultants was also reported to have failed to prevent the “solicitation of bribes” and to have fraudulently obtained birth parent consent.
Epoch Times reporter Joshua Philipp contributed to this report
