A West Virginia jury heard how the adopted children of Jeanne Whitefeather and Donald Lantz were forced to sleep on the cold concrete floor, sometimes on cardboard, locked inside a barn outside their home, while they were monitored by surveillance cameras.
Detective Ana Pile with the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office, who spent hours reviewing thousands of clips from the footage from the couple’s Sissonville home, testified about the shocking conditions on day three of the child abuse trial.
Whitefeather, 62, and Lantz, 61, who are white, are on trial for charges of forced labor, civil rights violations, human trafficking and gross child neglect of their five adopted children, who are Black.
The couple was arrested in October 2023 after two of their children were found locked in a shed outside their home when a concerned neighbor called 911.
Donald Ray Lantz and Jeanne Kay Whitefeather were arrested in October 2023 after two of their children were found locked in a shed outside their home when a concerned neighbor called 911 (West Virginia Regional Jail/Correctional Facility Authority)
Detective Pile told the jury on Thursday that she received six days worth of footage from inside the barn and also from inside the main house, WCHS-TV reported.
“What I saw on the videos and I think what everyone else will see when they are played,” she said. “You see (the two oldest children) in the barn area and they don’t ever leave the barn area.”
Out of the six days of footage, Detective Pile said the only time she observed one of the children step out of that room was (the teenage girl) when she stepped out for like a minute,” she said.
“Other than that, they never left that room as far as the videos showed.”
She also said that in those days of footage she reviewed, the children never changed clothes.
The detective said there was another camera from an upstairs bedroom in the main house that monitored two younger children, who were 9 and 11 at the time. She testified that she observed the children standing for hours at a time in their confined rooms.
“Also what the videos showed is that the children, in both rooms, slept on the floor,” she added. “The two in the barn area slept on the concrete floor. (The teenage girl) slept on a sleeping bag on the concrete floor and the (teenage boy) slept with nothing underneath him other than a piece of cardboard under his head. He had a fitted sheet that he would cover up with.”
Detective Ana Pile with the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office said she saw footage of inside the house and shed where the kids often slept on the concrete floor or cardboard (WCHS)
On one of the videos shown to the court, Lantz could be heard scolding one of the children for not folding blankets correctly.
“Sounds like you were having trouble with instructions,” he said on the video.
The couple adopted the five siblings while living in Minnesota and moved to a farm in Washington state in 2018 before moving again to West Virginia in 2023, when the children ranged in age from 5 to 16.
According to the criminal complaint, the children had been deprived of adequate food and hygienic care, and the outbuilding had no running water or bathroom facility.
In opening statements on Tuesday, assistant prosecutor Madison Tuck said evidence presented during the trial will show the couple forced the children to work and used them “physically, emotionally and mentally so that they would comply.”
However, Whitefeather’s attorney, Mark Plants, said the case “is about adoptive parents struggling to deal with their children’s past trauma and severe mental illness.”
Lantz and Whitefeather are shown during a break in the Kanawha County Circuit Court on Tuesday (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
On Tuesday, the neighbor, Joyce Bailey, testified that when the family first arrived at the home in Sissonville, West Virginia, in 2023 in a vehicle pulling a trailer for animals, it was raining and the children were told to line up outside.
“You never see them talk to each other,” she said. “They didn’t talk at all among themselves. You didn’t see them out unless they were working. They never played.”
She also told how she witnessed the children working outside by carrying fencing for the animals, propane tanks, full buckets of water and other supplies between the home, a trailer and a barn as Lantz watched.
“He made them carry it all, that heavy fencing,” Bailey said as they showed video she took of the forced labor. “They would just stand there and wait for him to tell them what to do.”
The trial at Kanawha County Circuit Court is expected to last two weeks.