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Author david guterson6/21/2023 ![]() Hana's death is among the most upsetting cases in a small roster - although not small enough - of stories of extreme abuse suffered by adoptees at the hands of the families who took them in. When her adoptive mother finally called 911, she suggested to the operator that Hana had killed herself as a final act of rebellion. When she died, late on a cold and rainy spring night, she had been kept outside for hours until hypothermia caused her to fall down repeatedly, ultimately leaving her face down in the mud. She was fed frozen food, compelled to use an outdoor toilet, repeatedly shorn of her braids, and regularly beaten with a variety of implements. She had been adopted from Ethiopia three years earlier, into an isolated, fundamentalist Christian family, and for much of that time endured almost incomprehensible abuse: Hana was shunned by her adoptive parents and their seven biological children and was made to sleep variously in a barn, a locked shower room and ultimately a locked closet too small to lie down in. In May 2011, a 13-year-old girl named Hana Williams was killed by her adoptive parents in a rural town in Washington state's tulip country, an hour or so north of Seattle. ![]()
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