In May 2011, it was supposed to be a warm spring in Washington, but it was a very rare freezing rain.
After the freezing rain, the neighbors found that in the yard of Mr. Larry Williams next door, there was a naked black girl lying in the yard.
The girl was covered in dirt and her head was down, with only two pieces of clothing thrown next to her.
The neighbors didn't know what was happening, didn't dare to go near, and at first thought it was a rape, so they dialed 911.
Soon, the police arrived at Mr. Larry's house. Under cross-examination, it was learned that the dead girl, named Hannah, was an orphan from Ethiopia adopted by Mr. Larry and his wife Carly three years ago, along with Hannah's brother Iman.
So why did this flower girl die tragically in the home of her adoptive parents thousands of miles away, and did the Larry couple not know about it?
Hannah and Iman's home country, Ethiopia, is an underdeveloped agricultural country in northeastern Africa, with poor land and poor families, and the sisters and brothers have suffered from reality, hunger and disease at an age when they should still enjoy the love of their parents.
And that all changed in 2008, when middle-class couples from the United States, Larry and Carly, adopted Hannah and her siblings.
After coming to the United States, Hannah's infection with hepatitis B, skin diseases and parasitic diseases was also diagnosed.
Hannah, who thought she had been favored by God and ended her suffering and was full of gratitude, could never imagine that she had left her poor and hungry hometown and would eventually freeze to death on the other side of the ocean.
According to Hannah's adoptive mother, Carly, she and her husband have six biological children in addition to the adopted Hannah siblings, and these six children have been cared for and educated by Carly and Larry since childhood, so they listen to them and are very disciplined, but the two brothers and sisters from poor Ethiopia have broken her heart.
Carly claimed that the two children were poor from an early age lack of education, did not understand rules and manners, and language communication was also difficult, like two "aliens", which greatly annoyed her.
Especially in recent years, with the increase of age, Hannah, who has gradually entered adolescence, has become more and more rebellious, often bumping into herself, and is a down-to-earth "problem girl".
On the night of the crime, Hannah once again played a temper tantrum, had a big fight with herself, and then refused to enter the house like a gamble, deliberately fell in the yard, and then lay on the ground and did not get up, and Carly, who prides herself on educating children, thinks that Hannah is silently fighting herself with her behavior, so she simply ignores her.
Thinking that Hannah would obediently return to the house after night to confess her mistake to herself, he also ignored her, thinking that he was educating her. But who would have thought that Hannah had not returned all night and had been in the courtyard, which led to this human tragedy.
Although Carly's rhetoric was logical and self-explanatory, the experienced police officer smelled a lie in it.
First of all, the police believe that even if Hannah is in adolescence and has a certain rebellious mentality, she will not protest to her adoptive mother with her behavior at the cost of her own life, and secondly, the Carly family is surprisingly consistent with the caliber of the case, which is generally the same as carly's words, including Hannah's brother Iman.
Suspicious police called on a witness who could not speak — the police conducted an autopsy on the deceased, Hannah.
And with the release of Hannah's autopsy report, it also reveals to us what the devil looks like in this world.
Hannah's autopsy report revealed large bruises on her legs, swellings on her head, and abrasions and bruises on other parts of her body.
All this suggests that Hannah, the poor Little Ethiopian girl, was suspected of having been subjected to domestic violence and abuse and beatings before she died.
The fate seems to have killed her far more than that, and the autopsy results show that Hannah is extremely thin, and she weighs only 35 kilograms at a height of 1.5 meters.
The skin clung to her ribs, and the outline of each rib was so clearly visible that she was so emaciated and emaciated that she was obviously suffering from chronic malnutrition.
And her adoptive parents are also high-income people in the United States, and her adoptive father, Larry Williams, who works at Boeing Airlines, can imagine that it will not be because of insufficient income to afford little Hannah's nutrition expenses, and if the family conditions are not good, the two of them do not have to adopt Hannah.
All this evidence points in one direction: Little Hannah was brutally abused by her adoptive parents during her lifetime.
This indirectly led to her direct cause of death: being abandoned in the yard and freezing to death.
The police, who had speculated, also received anonymous reports from members of the community: the Carlys often abused Hannah and Iman. The police, who had the evidence in their hands, immediately made a decision and quickly took control of the Carlys, and in the process, the police also got the truth about the day through the children of the Carly family, and the full picture of the case of a little girl who was thrown out of the house and froze to death.
It turned out that on the afternoon of the crime, Hannah bumped into her adoptive mother Carly because of trivial matters, and Carly, who was angry because of Hannah's "disobedience", drove Hannah directly outside the house, and Hannah was wearing only thin short sleeves and sweatpants.
Hannah stood in the courtyard against the freezing rain, while Carly and her children looked at her through the window like a poor puppy who couldn't find her way home in the rain, but There was no pity in Carly's eyes, just indifference.
It was also in the process that Hannah did the last thing her adoptive mother asked her to do: exercise in the yard to keep the heat out of her body.
It was like this until dark, until the sun disappeared on the horizon, taking away the little heat source that the little girl had last, and the outdoor temperature was approaching 0 degrees Celsius!
That's when Carly notices Hannah doing a weird act that makes her even angrier —Hannah actually takes off her only thin clothes one by one!
In fact, this is the phenomenon of "abnormal undressing" caused by hypothermia before being frozen to death, that is, the paralysis of the thermoregulatory center due to low temperature, resulting in hallucinatory heat.
However, in Carly's view, Hannah is using stripping to express her disdain for her own punishment, declaring war on her authority as a mother, thinking that she is not cold, so she does not care about her.
Anger made her ignore the dangerous situation hannah was suffering, Hannah, missing the last chance to be saved.
It wasn't until dawn the next day that Carly's biological daughter found Hannah lying stiffly face down on the ground, naked and covered in dirt, motionless, with neighbors watching nearby.
She called out to her mother, and Carly panicked and found a blanket to cover Hannah and carried her into the house, then called for emergency.
At this time, Hannah had been sleeping forever in a sweet dream without hunger, without abuse, without cold, and could no longer wake up.
During the police questioning Carly, Carly denied the testimony of the children, and she firmly believed that Hannah's death was not caused by herself, and that she did not abuse Hannah, but had been "better educating" Hannah in her own way.
Carly's husband, Larry, clearly disagreed with her.
In Larry's testimony, it is stated that Carly will often abuse and even beat Hannah's siblings, including but not limited to beatings, confinement, not allowing to eat, throwing out of the house, etc., and Larry also said that hannah was working overtime at the company on the night of her murder, and had no knowledge of all this.
Moreover, he usually neglected his wife's abusive behavior towards Hannah because he was busy with work, and he wanted to escape legal punishment by shirking responsibility.
But the police have long grasped the evidence that Larry has also abused Hannah many times, the police learned from the children that Larry had beaten Hannah with a water pipe, and together with Carly, hannah was locked in a small closet, poured cold water on Hannah, etc., and the autopsy results of Hannah's body were mostly due to him.
In stark contrast, Carly and Larry treat their biological children with kindness and care, and their frequent corporal punishment and abuse of Hannah.
The virtuous couple brought Back Hannah in the name of adoption, but had no sense of parental responsibility, flaunting their false image of kindness through adoption, and at the same time committing inhumane abuse to Hannah, in order to vent their violent and twisted desires.
If hell is empty, there will be demons in the human world, and the couple is the real human demon.
And they, in the end, paid for their cruelty, and were eventually tried by the court, with Carly sentenced to 37 years in prison for first-degree manslaughter and abuse, and Larry 28 years in prison for first-degree manslaughter.
The devil paid the price for his actions, and the law defended its dignity, but after all this dust settled, Hannah's life was forever stuck at the age of 13.
Girls at this age when the buds are waiting to be released should enjoy the happiness of the whole world, and Hannah at this age is withered in a freezing rain before the arrival of summer. She did not wait for the arrival of summer to enter the eternal winter.
What caused such a tragedy when she was adopted to the United States across the ocean and eventually froze to death in a hospital? The answer is that the adoption system is extensive.
Data show that the United States is a large country that adopts foreign children, with 20,600 foreign children adopted in the United States in 2006, of which 732 were from Ethiopia, although the proportion is not high, but the increase from 82 in 1997 and 441 in 2005 is quite staggering.
In 2000, Ethiopia ranked 16th in the ranking of countries that "delivered" children to American families, but in 2011 it grew to fourth place.
Among them, Hollywood star Angelina Jolie and singer Madonna have both adopted Ethiopian children. So why do Americans have such a soft spot for Ethiopian children?
The reason is Ethiopia's preferential adoption policy.
Other countries have strict scrutiny of children adopted by foreigners, with high thresholds, high fees and long waiting times.
Ethiopia's adoption policy allows U.S. adoptive parents to go from filling out a form to returning home for adoption, which may only take a few months and cost much less.
Ethiopia's approach is also related to its national circumstances, where 5 million orphans or single parents of the country's 76 million people have died of hunger, AIDS, malaria or families too poor to afford their children's food and clothing.
Specific national circumstances have led to Ethiopia's overly lenient adoption policy, but the overly simple adoption process and short period of time make it impossible for the relevant agencies to carefully and strictly screen the personal circumstances of adopters, so that devils like Larry and Carly can also adopt children, and Hannah's tragedy will occur.
In the aftermath of Hannah's tragedy, the case sparked a debate in Ethiopia about adoption abroad, with radicals at home even producing extreme remarks that "what foreigners come to our country to do is not adopt children at all, they are killing people", and even led to demonstrations by the opposition, which is directed at the Ethiopian government, which has adopted an adoption system.
Human rights organizations have also pointed out that Ethiopia's domestic adoption process is inadequate, has serious problems and is easily exploited by human traffickers.
In 2016, Denmark also halted the adoption of Ethiopian children on the grounds that the lack of source information on the adoption of children could lead to human trafficking.
In January 2018, the Ethiopian parliament officially announced that plans for foreigners to adopt Ethiopian children were abolished in order to protect children from abuse by new parents.
At this point, there will be no more lonely Ethiopian children like Hannah who have crossed the ocean to a completely unfamiliar country and encountered the tragic abuse of their parents.
And the question of the international community's pervasive concern is what the fate of the thousands of orphans in Ethiopia will be?
The Ethiopian parliament said that orphans in the country would be properly resettled and cared for by the national child welfare agency, rather than adopted by foreigners, and that Ethiopians would still be eligible for adoption.
"These are our children, and we've seen a lot of Ethiopians using their strength to support their lives and education," said the coordinator of the Addis Ababa Children's Welfare Institute in Egypt.
Seven years after Hannah's murder, Ethiopia finally abolished the alien adoption system because her easily overlooked adopted Ethiopian children received international attention, and it was also because of her that the adopted children avoided the potential threat of abuse, and her tragedy would never happen to her compatriots again.
There is an old Chinese saying: "If you are born and not raised, you can return your fingers!" Born and raised, the severed head can be returned! Unborn and nurtured, it is difficult to return in a hundred lifetimes! ”
May the adopted children of the world be properly placed and treated kindly, the weak and helpless can also be considerate and cared for, and more adopted children can usher in the summer they are looking forward to, rather than withering in the cold waves and long nights before the summer comes.
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