A big "For Sale" sign in a Chicago yard mutely tells the tragic story of Mr. and Mrs. Ray Chalifoux, who face eviction from their apartment. With no place to turn, the jobless coal truck driver and his wife decide to sell their four children. Mrs. Lucille Chalifoux turns her head from a camera above while her children stare wonderingly. On the top step are Lana, 6, and Rae, 5. Below are Milton, 4, and Sue Ellen, 2.
Here is the story from The Times of Northwest Indiana:
After being sold as children, Sue Ellen Chalifouxis (left) and RaeAnn Mills were finally reunited in 2013 just before Chalifouxis’ death. RaeAnn was 70. Her sister Sue Ellen Chalifoux was 67. The picture above was taken by Jonathan Miano of The Times of North Northwest Indiana.
In the story, it said that during their meeting that RaeAnn Mills bobbed a brush in a bottle of nail polish the color of a Barbie doll box. She took her sister's hand and smoothed a thin layer of "pink forever" over each nail.
It was the first time they bonded over painting nails, a moment sisters usually share as teens. But the women never had the chance. They were 7 and 4 when life pulled them apart, and they say their reunion at Chalifoux's Hessville home last month was only their second interaction since they were children.
A picture that made its way into newspapers in 1948 tells a piece of their story. In the image, four small children sit huddled on steps outside a home in Chicago, behind a sign that reads “4 Children For Sale Inquire Within.” Their mother – pregnant at the time and wearing a floral dress – turns her head and shields her face from the camera. Mills and Chalifoux are two of the girls in the picture.
One weekend in early May, Mills and her son Lance Gray traveled from their home in Washington, Ind., near Vincennes, to visit Chalifoux at the Hessville home she shares with her son, Timothy Charnote. They arrived with dozens of old photos and trinkets, fodder for storytelling.
"It's one of the happiest days of my life,” Mills said.
The reunion was bittersweet, as Mills figured it would be her last time with Chalifoux. Chalifoux is dying from lung disease. She cannot swallow food or talk. She has spent all of June hospitalized and is on a ventilator.
Before she dies, she wants people to know the story behind the photo, Charnote said.
When Charnote was a child and acted up, his mother would warn him to be good or she would sell him, just like her mother sold her. He thought she was being facetious. Then he saw the photo.
It was published in The Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso on Aug. 5, 1948, with the caption, “A big "For Sale" sign in a Chicago yard mutely tells the tragic story of Mr. and Mrs. Ray Chalifoux, who face eviction from their apartment. With no place to turn, the jobless coal truck driver and his wife decide to sell their four children. Mrs. Lucille Chalifoux turns her head from camera above while her children stare wonderingly. On the top step are Lana, 6, and Rae, 5. Below are Milton, 4, and Sue Ellen, 2.”
No one knows how long the sign stood in the yard, whether it was long enough for the camera shutter to close or whether it was years. Some family members claim the mother was paid to stage the photo.
The photo was also published in newspapers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Texas, among others, said Linda Herrick Swisher, public information coordinator for the Hammond Public Library. A story several days later in the Chicago Heights Star stated a Chicago Heights woman offered to open her home to the children and that offers of jobs, homes and financial assistance poured in.
Two years after it appeared, the children went in different directions:
RaeAnn
RaeAnn Mills' birth certificate shows she was born at her mother's residence near 91st Street and South Commercial Avenue in South Chicago. She still has the brown-and-white checkered dress she wore and the torn green corduroy pants Milton Chalifoux wore the day they went to live with John and Ruth Zoeteman on their farm in DeMotte.
It was August 27, 1950, and RaeAnn Mills claims she was sold for $2 so her mother could have bingo money and because the man her mother was dating did not want anything to do with the children. Her brother was crying nearby, so the couple took him, too, Mills said.
She has no documents to prove she was sold and no adoption papers to prove she was adopted. However, school yearbook pictures from DeMotte and later family obituaries support her claim that the couple changed RaeAnn's name to Beverly Zoeteman and Milton's name to Kenneth Zoeteman.
With the help of her son, Mills has been using social media to reconnect with siblings and build new connections with extended kin.
"I want to find family before I die," she said.
During that search, the photo surfaced. "My brother (Milton Chalifoux) in Tucson somehow sent it to my email," she said. "I got on there and said, 'Good God. That's me.'"
She doesn't remember the picture being taken and has no recollection of her birth father. She said the Zoetemans raised her in an abusive, loveless home.
"They used to chain us up all the time," she said. "When I was a little child, we were field workers," she said.
Mills said when she was in her late teens, she was kidnapped, raped and got pregnant. She was sent to Michigan to a home for unwed mothers and brought the baby girl back to DeMotte, but the baby was taken from her and adopted.
"At 17, I left home and I never looked back," Mills said.
She deals with health problems now but focuses on the blessings, such as being thankful for the family she has and connecting with family she never knew. Her son Lance Gray said his mother's life is like a horror story. "No one believes it," he said.
Despite being raised in a home with no love or compassion, she turned out to be loving and compassionate, he said. "They don't make 'em like her no more," he said. "Tough as nails."
Mills said she reunited with her birth mother when she was 21, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. Her mother expressed no remorse or regret. And she expressed no love, Mills said. Mills felt one expression of love from John Zoeteman. It came on his deathbed. He asked her for a hug, the only one she ever got from him. Then he told her, "I really did love you."
David
David McDaniel was in his mother's womb when the photo was taken. Now 63, he is organizing a sibling reunion in the fall in Washington state, where he lives and works as a semitrailer driver.
He was born Sept. 26, 1949, as Bedford Chalifoux. Records he released to The Times show he was legally adopted by Harry and Luella McDaniel, who changed his name to David McDaniel.
"They couldn't have children," he said.
The records show the McDaniels had custody of him since July 16, 1950. When he was taken from his birth mother, he was in bad shape. "I had bed bug bites all over my body," he said. "I guess it was a pretty bad environment."
According to the records, his birth mother was on "public relief" [welfare] for several years and her husband abandoned her and their children. His birth father had seen him only once, his whereabouts were unknown and he "does not return to his home because of a criminal record against him in Cook County, Illinois," the records state.
McDaniel grew up in Wheatfield, a couple miles away from his siblings RaeAnn Mills and Milton Chalifoux. From time to time he would ride over on a bike or horse to visit.
"They'd be tied up in the barn," McDaniel said. "They were badly abused."
He would untie them and leave before he was caught, he said.
McDaniel said he was a rebellious teen, despite living a pretty good life. His adoptive parents taught him good morals and values. It was a strict Christian home, and he ran away at 16-1/2, spent 20 years in the military, and has been driving a semitrailer in Washington ever since.
On leave from the Vietnam War in 1969, he reunited with Mills and did so again in 1982. Their birth mother had remarried.
"She got rid of all us children, married someone else, had four more daughters," he said. "She kept them. She didn't keep us."
[ The Times of Northwest Indiana placed phone calls to the youngest four daughters, seeking comment for this story, but they were not returned.]
McDaniel said he saw his birth mother after he became an adult. "As soon as my mom seen me, she said, 'You look just like your father,'" McDaniel said. "She never apologized. Back then, it was survival. Who are we to judge?"
He doesn't harbor bitterness. He said, "We're all human beings. We all make mistakes. She could've been thinking about the children. Didn't want them to die."
Milton
"There's a lot of things in my childhood I can't remember," Milton Chalifoux said. And much of what he does, he'd rather forget.
He joined his sister Mills living on a DeMotte farm with John and Ruth Zoeteman, who changed his name to Kenneth David Zoeteman. The first day on the farm, he was tied up and beaten by his adoptive father, who told Milton that he expected him to serve as a slave on the farm.
"I said I'd go along with that," Milton recalled. "I didn't know what a slave was. I was only a kid."
After that first encounter, Ruth Zoeteman cleaned Milton's wounds and told him, "I love you, and from now on, you're going to be my little boy," he recalled.
But his adoptive father continued the abuse, Milton said. He was beaten, kicked, left alone for days tied up in a barn and fed only some milk and peanut butter. Milton used a corn knife to fight off the rats in the barn.
"I asked why?" Milton said. "He said he had to keep me in line. 'If you're afraid, you'll listen to me.'"
Abuse continued, and Milton went to live with an aunt and uncle, helping with their egg delivery business. Meanwhile, he attended DeMotte High School.
A case worker later placed him in the care of a friend's family. It was then he learned the Zoetemans were considered foster parents, he said.
"I thought I had been adopted," Milton said. "I don't know how they got away with it."
Police were called to another altercation, and Milton threw an officer into a tree. He ended up in front of a judge, who called him a menace to society and told him he could enter a mental hospital or a reformatory. After hearing horror stories about the reformatory, he chose the mental hospital.
He said he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and having fits of rage. In June 1967, he was released.
Milton Chalifoux eventually moved to Chicago and got married. A doctor told him the polluted air was bad for his heart and he needed fresh air.
"My in-laws gave us $500, and we moved to Arizona," he said.
Now 69, Milton Chalifoux still lives in Tucson and no longer is married. He met his birth mother only once as an adult, staying with her for a month in 1970. She threw him out when he got into a fight with her second husband, and the police arrested the husband.
"My birth mother, she never did love me," he said. "She didn't apologize for selling me. She hated me so much that she didn't care."
Lana and Sue Ellen
The siblings don't know much about their sister Lana's upbringing, but they are connecting via social media to her family. They want to learn more about her life.
"I never even got to know my sister Lana because she died in 1998 of cancer," Mills said.
Timothy Charnote said his mother had adoption records, but they were lost in a fire.
Sue Ellen Chalifoux believes she was legitimately adopted by a couple with the last name Johnson.
She was raised not far from her original home, growing up in Chicago's East Side neighborhood, attending St. Francis de Sales High School, Charnote said.
Too sick to talk, Chalifoux scribbled answers on paper during an interview with The Times of Northwest Indiana in May. She was grateful to be reunited with Mills.
"It's fabulous. I love her," she wrote. Moments later, Chalifoux shared her opinion of her birth mother.
"She needs to be in hell burning," she wrote.
So, have you ever seen a picture and wondered what's the story behind it? Well, the picture above was taken in Chicago in 1948. And as hard as it is to believe, the mother of the children in that photograph, Lucille Chalifoux, decided to sell her four children.
Some reports say that it was both parents, Ray and Lucille Chalifoux, who wanted to sell the children. Some say they decided to do so because they fell behind with their rent payments. Yes, you read it correctly. some reports say they decided to sell their four children because they fell behind in rent payments. Yes, that's what some say their justification was for doing such a thing.
While that sounds pretty horrible all by itself, even without the excuse of saying it was "because they fell behind with their rent payments," that wasn't the case.
Actually, Ray Chalifoux, the father, was an out-of-work truck driver in Chicago. After being unable to find work, like the coward that he was, he eventually abandoned his family.
Lucille Chalifoux, the mother, was only 24 at the time. She was alone and without income to support their children. Soon after Ray deserted them, she met and dated a man who wanted nothing to do with her kids. Yes, another "real man" who didn't know the first thing about being a man.
As for the photograph, before being picked up by national newspapers, the picture first appeared in The Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana on August 5th, 1948. The photographer later said the children looked confused when the picture was taken. Of course, their pregnant mother hid her face in shame, as rightfully she should have.
Some reports say that it was both parents, Ray and Lucille Chalifoux, who wanted to sell the children. Some say they decided to do so because they fell behind with their rent payments. Yes, you read it correctly. some reports say they decided to sell their four children because they fell behind in rent payments. Yes, that's what some say their justification was for doing such a thing.
While that sounds pretty horrible all by itself, even without the excuse of saying it was "because they fell behind with their rent payments," that wasn't the case.
Actually, Ray Chalifoux, the father, was an out-of-work truck driver in Chicago. After being unable to find work, like the coward that he was, he eventually abandoned his family.
Lucille Chalifoux, the mother, was only 24 at the time. She was alone and without income to support their children. Soon after Ray deserted them, she met and dated a man who wanted nothing to do with her kids. Yes, another "real man" who didn't know the first thing about being a man.
As for the photograph, before being picked up by national newspapers, the picture first appeared in The Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana on August 5th, 1948. The photographer later said the children looked confused when the picture was taken. Of course, their pregnant mother hid her face in shame, as rightfully she should have.
The children in the picture are identified as follows: Lana (top left) who was likely adopted and died of cancer in 1998. Her sister RaeAnn (top right) was sold for $2 along with her brother Milton (bottom left) to an abusive family. Sue Ellen (bottom right) was adopted. Inside their pregnant mother, Lucille Chalifoux, was their brother David. He would be put up for adoption as well. And just in case you're wondering if she had other children, Lucille Chalifoux would have four more daughters.
Her son David would later tell The Times of Northwest Indiana, "She kept them. She didn't keep us."
Supposedly family members accused Lucille of being paid to stage the photograph. But unfortunately, they and the world would find out that she was dead serious about selling her children. And within two years, all of the children pictured, as well as the unborn child she was carrying at the time, were all "sold" off to different homes.
I wondered about this picture, then I found an article in the New York Post from July 14th, 2013, entitled Finding peace in a life sold for $2. That article originated from a story that ran in The Times of Northwest Indiana.
Here is the story from The Times of Northwest Indiana:
After being sold as children, Sue Ellen Chalifouxis (left) and RaeAnn Mills were finally reunited in 2013 just before Chalifouxis’ death. RaeAnn was 70. Her sister Sue Ellen Chalifoux was 67. The picture above was taken by Jonathan Miano of The Times of North Northwest Indiana.
In the story, it said that during their meeting that RaeAnn Mills bobbed a brush in a bottle of nail polish the color of a Barbie doll box. She took her sister's hand and smoothed a thin layer of "pink forever" over each nail.
It was the first time they bonded over painting nails, a moment sisters usually share as teens. But the women never had the chance. They were 7 and 4 when life pulled them apart, and they say their reunion at Chalifoux's Hessville home last month was only their second interaction since they were children.
A picture that made its way into newspapers in 1948 tells a piece of their story. In the image, four small children sit huddled on steps outside a home in Chicago, behind a sign that reads “4 Children For Sale Inquire Within.” Their mother – pregnant at the time and wearing a floral dress – turns her head and shields her face from the camera. Mills and Chalifoux are two of the girls in the picture.
One weekend in early May, Mills and her son Lance Gray traveled from their home in Washington, Ind., near Vincennes, to visit Chalifoux at the Hessville home she shares with her son, Timothy Charnote. They arrived with dozens of old photos and trinkets, fodder for storytelling.
"It's one of the happiest days of my life,” Mills said.
The reunion was bittersweet, as Mills figured it would be her last time with Chalifoux. Chalifoux is dying from lung disease. She cannot swallow food or talk. She has spent all of June hospitalized and is on a ventilator.
Before she dies, she wants people to know the story behind the photo, Charnote said.
When Charnote was a child and acted up, his mother would warn him to be good or she would sell him, just like her mother sold her. He thought she was being facetious. Then he saw the photo.
It was published in The Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso on Aug. 5, 1948, with the caption, “A big "For Sale" sign in a Chicago yard mutely tells the tragic story of Mr. and Mrs. Ray Chalifoux, who face eviction from their apartment. With no place to turn, the jobless coal truck driver and his wife decide to sell their four children. Mrs. Lucille Chalifoux turns her head from camera above while her children stare wonderingly. On the top step are Lana, 6, and Rae, 5. Below are Milton, 4, and Sue Ellen, 2.”
No one knows how long the sign stood in the yard, whether it was long enough for the camera shutter to close or whether it was years. Some family members claim the mother was paid to stage the photo.
The photo was also published in newspapers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Texas, among others, said Linda Herrick Swisher, public information coordinator for the Hammond Public Library. A story several days later in the Chicago Heights Star stated a Chicago Heights woman offered to open her home to the children and that offers of jobs, homes and financial assistance poured in.
Two years after it appeared, the children went in different directions:
RaeAnn Mills' birth certificate shows she was born at her mother's residence near 91st Street and South Commercial Avenue in South Chicago. She still has the brown-and-white checkered dress she wore and the torn green corduroy pants Milton Chalifoux wore the day they went to live with John and Ruth Zoeteman on their farm in DeMotte.
It was August 27, 1950, and RaeAnn Mills claims she was sold for $2 so her mother could have bingo money and because the man her mother was dating did not want anything to do with the children. Her brother was crying nearby, so the couple took him, too, Mills said.
She has no documents to prove she was sold and no adoption papers to prove she was adopted. However, school yearbook pictures from DeMotte and later family obituaries support her claim that the couple changed RaeAnn's name to Beverly Zoeteman and Milton's name to Kenneth Zoeteman.
With the help of her son, Mills has been using social media to reconnect with siblings and build new connections with extended kin.
"I want to find family before I die," she said.
During that search, the photo surfaced. "My brother (Milton Chalifoux) in Tucson somehow sent it to my email," she said. "I got on there and said, 'Good God. That's me.'"
She doesn't remember the picture being taken and has no recollection of her birth father. She said the Zoetemans raised her in an abusive, loveless home.
"They used to chain us up all the time," she said. "When I was a little child, we were field workers," she said.
Mills said when she was in her late teens, she was kidnapped, raped and got pregnant. She was sent to Michigan to a home for unwed mothers and brought the baby girl back to DeMotte, but the baby was taken from her and adopted.
"At 17, I left home and I never looked back," Mills said.
She deals with health problems now but focuses on the blessings, such as being thankful for the family she has and connecting with family she never knew. Her son Lance Gray said his mother's life is like a horror story. "No one believes it," he said.
Despite being raised in a home with no love or compassion, she turned out to be loving and compassionate, he said. "They don't make 'em like her no more," he said. "Tough as nails."
Mills said she reunited with her birth mother when she was 21, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. Her mother expressed no remorse or regret. And she expressed no love, Mills said. Mills felt one expression of love from John Zoeteman. It came on his deathbed. He asked her for a hug, the only one she ever got from him. Then he told her, "I really did love you."
David
David McDaniel was in his mother's womb when the photo was taken. Now 63, he is organizing a sibling reunion in the fall in Washington state, where he lives and works as a semitrailer driver.
He was born Sept. 26, 1949, as Bedford Chalifoux. Records he released to The Times show he was legally adopted by Harry and Luella McDaniel, who changed his name to David McDaniel.
"They couldn't have children," he said.
The records show the McDaniels had custody of him since July 16, 1950. When he was taken from his birth mother, he was in bad shape. "I had bed bug bites all over my body," he said. "I guess it was a pretty bad environment."
According to the records, his birth mother was on "public relief" [welfare] for several years and her husband abandoned her and their children. His birth father had seen him only once, his whereabouts were unknown and he "does not return to his home because of a criminal record against him in Cook County, Illinois," the records state.
McDaniel grew up in Wheatfield, a couple miles away from his siblings RaeAnn Mills and Milton Chalifoux. From time to time he would ride over on a bike or horse to visit.
"They'd be tied up in the barn," McDaniel said. "They were badly abused."
He would untie them and leave before he was caught, he said.
McDaniel said he was a rebellious teen, despite living a pretty good life. His adoptive parents taught him good morals and values. It was a strict Christian home, and he ran away at 16-1/2, spent 20 years in the military, and has been driving a semitrailer in Washington ever since.
On leave from the Vietnam War in 1969, he reunited with Mills and did so again in 1982. Their birth mother had remarried.
"She got rid of all us children, married someone else, had four more daughters," he said. "She kept them. She didn't keep us."
[ The Times of Northwest Indiana placed phone calls to the youngest four daughters, seeking comment for this story, but they were not returned.]
McDaniel said he saw his birth mother after he became an adult. "As soon as my mom seen me, she said, 'You look just like your father,'" McDaniel said. "She never apologized. Back then, it was survival. Who are we to judge?"
He doesn't harbor bitterness. He said, "We're all human beings. We all make mistakes. She could've been thinking about the children. Didn't want them to die."
Milton
"There's a lot of things in my childhood I can't remember," Milton Chalifoux said. And much of what he does, he'd rather forget.
He joined his sister Mills living on a DeMotte farm with John and Ruth Zoeteman, who changed his name to Kenneth David Zoeteman. The first day on the farm, he was tied up and beaten by his adoptive father, who told Milton that he expected him to serve as a slave on the farm.
"I said I'd go along with that," Milton recalled. "I didn't know what a slave was. I was only a kid."
After that first encounter, Ruth Zoeteman cleaned Milton's wounds and told him, "I love you, and from now on, you're going to be my little boy," he recalled.
But his adoptive father continued the abuse, Milton said. He was beaten, kicked, left alone for days tied up in a barn and fed only some milk and peanut butter. Milton used a corn knife to fight off the rats in the barn.
"I asked why?" Milton said. "He said he had to keep me in line. 'If you're afraid, you'll listen to me.'"
Abuse continued, and Milton went to live with an aunt and uncle, helping with their egg delivery business. Meanwhile, he attended DeMotte High School.
A case worker later placed him in the care of a friend's family. It was then he learned the Zoetemans were considered foster parents, he said.
"I thought I had been adopted," Milton said. "I don't know how they got away with it."
Police were called to another altercation, and Milton threw an officer into a tree. He ended up in front of a judge, who called him a menace to society and told him he could enter a mental hospital or a reformatory. After hearing horror stories about the reformatory, he chose the mental hospital.
He said he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and having fits of rage. In June 1967, he was released.
Milton Chalifoux eventually moved to Chicago and got married. A doctor told him the polluted air was bad for his heart and he needed fresh air.
"My in-laws gave us $500, and we moved to Arizona," he said.
Now 69, Milton Chalifoux still lives in Tucson and no longer is married. He met his birth mother only once as an adult, staying with her for a month in 1970. She threw him out when he got into a fight with her second husband, and the police arrested the husband.
"My birth mother, she never did love me," he said. "She didn't apologize for selling me. She hated me so much that she didn't care."
Lana and Sue Ellen
The siblings don't know much about their sister Lana's upbringing, but they are connecting via social media to her family. They want to learn more about her life.
"I never even got to know my sister Lana because she died in 1998 of cancer," Mills said.
Timothy Charnote said his mother had adoption records, but they were lost in a fire.
Sue Ellen Chalifoux believes she was legitimately adopted by a couple with the last name Johnson.
She was raised not far from her original home, growing up in Chicago's East Side neighborhood, attending St. Francis de Sales High School, Charnote said.
Too sick to talk, Chalifoux scribbled answers on paper during an interview with The Times of Northwest Indiana in May. She was grateful to be reunited with Mills.
"It's fabulous. I love her," she wrote. Moments later, Chalifoux shared her opinion of her birth mother.
"She needs to be in hell burning," she wrote.
-- end of the article.
So yes, while David said "We’re all human beings. We all make mistakes. She could’ve been thinking about the children. Didn’t want them to die", Sue Ellen said that she hopes her mother was "in hell burning."
I understand why she feels that way, just as I can understand David trying to be as understanding and forgiving as he was.
My interest in history has actually led me to many many stories where I just shake my head amazed at what took place. This one is too unbelievable to think real, yet it is.
During the hardest of times, we have all made hard decisions that we hope will lead to the best outcome. But selling your children for money to pay the rent or to go play bingo? No, that's just not right by anyone's definition of right and wrong.
I understand why she feels that way, just as I can understand David trying to be as understanding and forgiving as he was.
My interest in history has actually led me to many many stories where I just shake my head amazed at what took place. This one is too unbelievable to think real, yet it is.
During the hardest of times, we have all made hard decisions that we hope will lead to the best outcome. But selling your children for money to pay the rent or to go play bingo? No, that's just not right by anyone's definition of right and wrong.
Friends, it was not something out of the ordinary for people during the Great Depression to farm out their children to friends and relatives who were better off. Times were tough and many made sacrifices so that their children would be cared for. But while that is true, we should all understand that the economic recession in the late 1940s after World War II was not as bad as the Great Depression.
This act did not need to take place. That is even plainer when considering that their mother was collecting welfare for many years. Of course, as with the welfare system today, the money one gets from welfare is not being paid out to fulfill a parent's need for cigarettes or liquor or drugs or bingo. Welfare payments are supposed to help take care of one's children. This just demonstrates that what's taking place today with welfare abuse is really nothing new.
And as for the mere idea of selling one's children for any reason, that is as deplorable an action as one with low moral character can demonstrate. It's no wonder that the mother of those children hid her face. She should have. After all, that is almost the lowest thing that one can do as a parent.
For me, the only thing lower than someone selling their children is when a parent intentionally prostitutes their children or turns them into thugs and thieves to support that parent's drug habit. And this, this happens in America's inner cities today with regularity. A shameful situation that it is.
And yes, that's just the way I see it.
This act did not need to take place. That is even plainer when considering that their mother was collecting welfare for many years. Of course, as with the welfare system today, the money one gets from welfare is not being paid out to fulfill a parent's need for cigarettes or liquor or drugs or bingo. Welfare payments are supposed to help take care of one's children. This just demonstrates that what's taking place today with welfare abuse is really nothing new.
And as for the mere idea of selling one's children for any reason, that is as deplorable an action as one with low moral character can demonstrate. It's no wonder that the mother of those children hid her face. She should have. After all, that is almost the lowest thing that one can do as a parent.
For me, the only thing lower than someone selling their children is when a parent intentionally prostitutes their children or turns them into thugs and thieves to support that parent's drug habit. And this, this happens in America's inner cities today with regularity. A shameful situation that it is.
And yes, that's just the way I see it.
Tom Correa
This birth mother was a sociopath and a narcissist. She used those kids to collect money then disposed of them. This story should make people look up narcissist and educate themselves that these manipulative hard hearted self absorbed people do not change. Had the children known this as adults they would not have sought out contact with that monster consumed with demonic tendencies for understanding. The four daughters she had after those 5 kids are deluded and clueless as to their mothers motives and they offer only excuses and no truth as to the true selfish motives their mother had. It would benefit them ti look up daughters of narcissist mothers on youtube and look in that mirror! Lana who went to stay with a grandmother had to go back to her mom to babysit her new kids when she was 13! Lana was just an object with a role to fulfill for her mom and she endured with no empathy or unconditional love from her birth mom. Lucille is burning in hell now and rightfully so!
ReplyDeleteMy heart breaks for these now senior citizens! I hope they are able to find their sisters, and heal from the toxicity handed to them by cruel narcissistic families! I would love to learn more about the four sister’s if they were ever found.
ReplyDeleteWho would intentionally sell their children? Unless this is adoption, it CAN'T be legal. And if anyone is thinking is trying this, shame on you. I don't care what kind of habits you may have you don't disown your children for no reason.
ReplyDelete