The first week of the trial of two adoptive parents accused of abusing five Black children ended on Friday with one of the children testifying about conditions she and her siblings were living in, including sleeping in a barn and having to use buckets for toilets.
Jeanne Kay Whitefeather, 62, and Donald Ray Lantz, 63, who are both white, are on trial facing more than a dozen felony counts, including forced labor, human trafficking, and gross child neglect.
The adopted daughter, who is now 18, testified on Friday has been discovered in a shed by police, which led to the arrests of Lantz and Whitefeather in October 2023.
The 18-year-old testified that she and her siblings were also routinely subjected to racial abuse and forced them to work on the property under video surveillance.
The couple adopted the children while living in Minnesota. The family moved to a farm in Washington in 2018.
At the trial on Friday, a financial analyst who reviewed bank statements testified that Lantz and Whitefeather had collected $318,000 in child assistance from the state of Minnesota.
According to an indictment, Lantz and Whitefeather specifically targeted the children because of their race to use them for forced labor.
The adopted daughter testified that the children, who ranged from 5 to 16 when the family moved to West Virginia in 2023, would go months with showering and were frequently told they would not amount to anything.
The trial is expected to continue into next week.
More about the trial and abuse allegations.