Heather E. Savage caseUPDATED
From Rochester, Indiana, Haiti Creche founder and adoptive parent Heather E. Savage,33, was arrested on a Child Neglect complaint by the Rochester Police Department.
Officers went to her home after a young boy in her care was picked up downtown. A store clerk said that he tried to steal a snack and went running out of The Dugout tavern.
He was found outside of Pablano’s restaurant.
Within minutes of the store clerk calling police, Heather Savage called the police stating that the boy ran away.
The boy was found with no coat or shoes and wet socks. He hid behind an officer and told them that he didn’t know the older girl who came to get him and that he didn’t want to go back to the Savage’s house.
Police toured the home. Everything was ok.
The boy said he was locked in a room in the Savage’s house. Two of the other nine children verified that he was locked in a bedroom because he had been taking food from the kitchen.
Police say that 3 of the 10 children were not “fully adopted.”
Savage posted a $7500 bond within a hour of her arrest. The prosecutor has yet to review the case.
Do you have something to report?[Former Clients of Voice of the Orphan and Giving Hope Rescue Mission 3/26/14 by Concerned Families]
[Rochester News by Christina M. Seiler]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: A look at the Indiana court records reveals that Heather had a pretrial conference on June 9,2014 and and another one scheduled on July 30,2014. She has a trial scheduled for October 21-23,2014.
Update 2: A look at the Indiana court records reveals that Heather on 7/21/15 had “Court being duly advised in the premises now grants said Motion and Orders that the above entitled cause is herby dismissed without prejudice.”
Let’s not forget the EXPERIENCED adoptive parents who worried about corruption in Ethiopia during their first adoption and decided to adopt from supposedly LESS corrupt Haiti (weird, I know)… but were so slack after their firsthand encounter with fraud, they chose to work with UNLICENSED Heather Elyse and Voice of the Orphan:
http://at-the-watershed-blog.blogspot.com
APs, horrified by fraud, could not be bothered to check if their new adoption agency was LICENSED in Haiti. They completed the adoption of little Haitian AJ but it took a year or so to get the visa for the little boy to leave Haiti for the US to join adopted sister Ariam (from Ethiopia).
in the meantime, the APs paid friends in Haiti to care for AJ. What lessons does that teach AJ? That parents are interchangeable, tehy’ll show up for a week here and week there but pay others to mind you?
What did it teach Ariam? That families don’t necessarily live together. That buying kids from poor countries is acceptable. That it’s perfectly okay to buy a kid because you really, really want one. That it’s normal for your adopted parents to pay strangers to care for your siblings who don’t live with your for years???
(The family says they did the best they could… their best SUCKED, big time. They knew they might encounter fraud/corruption and just didn’t care!).
It would be nice if you tried talking to the adoptive parents you speak of in this article. Heather Elyse’s creche WAS licensed in Haiti at the time this family signed with her and at the time that they signed with this “agency” Haiti didn’t work with a select set of agencies. Independent adoptions were a norm. This isn’t the only family that ended up being scammed and drug around by her. There are at least 30 others and more along the lines of 40 plus. This family went back and RE ADOPTED their son, you know, to make sure HE WAS ACTUALLY ADOPTABLE. Any time a family chooses to adopt from another country, or 9 times out of 10, the family doesn’t move to the other country. They continue doing what they can while they wait for the time to bring their child home. Does that mean every family SUCKS because they can’t move to the other country to wait 1-2 or more years for their child to come home? CHECK YOUR STORIES BEFORE YOU GO BASHING PEOPLE.
Wow, that is not my take away at all from that adoptive parents’ blog. As far as I know they led the charge to remove their son from the creche, call attention to the fraud being perpetrated by Heather Elyse, and encourage families to do the same and reunite their adopted children with first families. If not for them Giving Hope Rescue Mission and its related agency would still be operational. Their son lived with his godparents in Haiti while they completed his investigation and adoption. They paid for his food and care which just seems normal to me. And it sounds like they very much cared about fraud and corruption. The agency put in writing to them that it was a licensed adoption agency. Quite honestly I don’t know of anyone who would question that. Obviously they were dealing with Heather Elyse who seems to have no regard for normal human morals, ethics or the law.
From the writer of Watershed – Shame on you Reform Talk for promoting that people stalk our family blog by posting that comment. It was your website that led me to Heather Elyse in the first place and had us convinced that she had her finger on the pulse of ETHICAL adoption from Haiti. You carry a responsibility for that for publishing her words as if she were an authority. You may not have endorsed her but by simply publishing her article on adoption fraud and scams, you gave an implicit endorsement suggesting that SHE was different. We chose to adopt from Haiti because it was ratifying the Hague (unlike Ethiopia) and because we thought we had found someone who truly understood our deep concerns about adoption and exactly what we expected from an adoption (family preservation as a first priority, children determined adoptable by a central authority not by the agency itself, a focus on children with special needs, etc etc.) We asked to be matched with a child with a life threatening illness. Heather matched us with that child, lied about her agency’s licensing status, lied about our child’s special needs, and then completely halted our adoption when we saw through her sham. In the process saving other families and children from her trap. Publishing a comment here that vilifies US is reprehensible. Here is our post about YOUR role in promoting Heather Elyse: http://at-the-watershed-blog.blogspot.com/2014/02/talking-red-flags.html
I just HAD to publish this comment.LOL.It was MY website that led you to her? LOL.That was 4/30/12!!! Didn’t you bother to read 6/24/11 – Haiti ending privatization or 3/10/11 how it just signed the Hague Convention? Let me clarify that for you. Haiti adoptions have ALWAYS been dicey but in the middle of signing Hague, Jesus, it is REALLY, REALLY DICEY! I would NEVER have even attempted to adopt from Haiti….EVER! EVER!EVER! I am just shaking my head in disbelief that you would not feel the same way. Shame on you for even choosing to post here! LOL!And for assuming that I endorsed her! ” as if she were an authority. You may not have endorsed her but by simply publishing her article on adoption fraud and scams, you gave an implicit endorsement suggesting that SHE was different.”
What is your beef with this family? Are you truly as ignorant as you portray yourself? This is not the only family that signed to adopt from Haiti at this time. Also nobody can see into the future nor can we know when something could go terribly wrong as it has with ALL ADOPTIONS THROUGH HEATHER ELYSE. Perhaps you should focus your energy on bringing to light the people who have LIED AND SCAMMED OTHERS on all fronts rather than BASHING an adoptive family who have done nothing but fight for justice for their son, and all other adoptive families in the situation they were once in. You say you are an adoptive family. I assume that your adoption went smoothly. That’s a huge blessings. Things can wrong at the drop of a dime, since we as adoptive parents only have control of a very small part of the adoption journey. You of all people should know and realize this.
I don’t have any “beef” with this family. She accused me of supplying her with the name of Heather. Don’t try and defend her actions. “nobody can see into the future nor can we know when something could go terribly wrong” LOL! Well, many of us CAN because we investigate what is going on with adoptions.
You can’t argue with the FACT that 40 or more families were all scammed and completely taken by her actions. It’s a little bigger than doing an investigation. and you are wrong about something completely. nobody can foresee when problems will occur. Last time I checked none of us are prophets.
A – Let me get this straight:
– You were disturbed enough by the corruption you encountered adopting your daughter from Ethiopia that you chose to adopt from a different country for your second kid.
– You were somehow unaware that Haiti was a desperately poor country with governance problems dating back 200 years, that it was hit by a massive earthquake that killed 200,000+ people and flattened the capital city (including government buildings where paperwork for adoptions was located) just a year or two prior to your decision to adopt
– Despite being an experienced adoptive parent, you CHOSE to take Heather Elyse at her word and not do your basic due diligence to ensure you were working with people/groups *licensed* to process adoptions in Haiti. Despite high-profile news and even arrests of “Christians” who tried to smuggle Haitian kids out of Haiti in the wake of the 2010 quake:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-is-laura-silsby/
– Despite being an educated woman with internet access, capable of PROPERLY doing due diligence, you figured Heather’s article popping up on this blog (which clearly states it is run by APs, not professional journalists who fact-check) counted as proper due diligence.
– You were unaware that implementing the Hague treaty could take years nor that it wasn’t quite curbing corruption/trafficking as well as intended.
Wow, thank you Naame for addressing the fact that Heather’s lies and deception were so deep that even experienced adoptive parents found it hard to find the truth which means it was that much easier for her to dupe, deceive and take advantage of the rest of us no so experienced adoptive parents.
I’m glad you seem so interested in the above AP situation and case but you really need to know a lot more about Haiti adoptions and the actual situation beyond reading their blog to have a clue about what you are talking about. Without the above mentioned parents action most of us (and there are dozens) would have probably lost our adoptions completely or spent another year believing her lies and be starting over now instead of having started over last year. I just wanted to clarify some things for you as someone who WORKED FOR Heather Elyse before I started fact checking (dumb on my part, I didn’t fact check until things didn’t add up…. I just believed everything she said). I’ve also worked in Haiti since I was 18, so about 15 years and I can’t find a SINGLE organization in Haiti that will support or back her because of her known behavior so it’s not just AP that have seen the truth.
If you knew anything about Haiti adoptions you would know that at the time we all began this journey Haiti was not really licensing orphanages or creches. There were a few but adoptions have always been intermixed with independent lawyers working with orphanages and creches AND if you’ve done any work with adoptions in Haiti you would know that getting information from the government is nearly impossible so AP have to take the word of their facilitators/directors often.
You also do NOT have your facts straight on the fact that the AP had to wait a year for a Visa after a COMPLETED adoption. It was approved on the Haiti side but was not even complete. The documents were withheld and a passport was never issued which means it was never even submitted to the US for their approval and THEN Visa for long after their situation started.
And your argument about teaching Ariam to pay strangers to care for siblings is a little out of line. What is the difference between adoptive parents PAYING agencies/orphanages to care for their children vs paying a FAMILY to care for them? You seem to have a real issue with this family that suffered and took a risk in order to help everyone associated with Heather Elyse.
There’s very little difference between paying an orphanage to care for a child vs paying some family to care for a child — that’s sort of my POINT. Even after little AJ was adopted by the Watershed family, he was still being cared for by people PAID to care for him. Not an adoptive family! More paid caregivers!! It must have been terribly confusing for both AJ and Ariam. Especially Ariam, who knows the difference between APs and paid carers!
Ariam was told she had an adopted brother, was aware that NOT HER ADOPTIVE PARENTS were caring for AJ in another country, that amom and adad occasionally went to visit AJ in Haiti for the year or two to sort the whole mess out. How, exactly, isn’t this sending mixed messages to an adopted girl who is still figuring out what a family is? What a forever family is??
Clearly, due diligence — BASIC due diligence, given that you were working for someone who did adoptions in a desperately poor country known for weak governance (that’s being generous), massive corruption and rather a lot of child trafficking in the wake of a devastating earthquake.
I stand corrected, I see that you reposted Heather’s words a few weeks after we first met Heather. She posted this same article weeks earlier on a private facebook group for families interested in adopting from Haiti. Reading it and knowing that you posted it did confirm for us that she was legitimately interested in completing ethical adoptions in Haiti however. You have to hold some level of responsibility here for being in the top results that popped up when families googled Heather Elyse. We all saw her as some kind of adoption reformer. Listen – here is the bottom line – we have all made mistakes. You are a group of adoptive parents. I have always applauded your goals here. You can’t get behind families that put their lives on hold and their adoptions at risk to stop something that was harming children and first families? You’ve never made a huge mistake? I guess I don’t get that. Posting a comment with my personal blog and my children’s names listed here strikes me as incredibly….wrong. The outcome of that for us is people potentially stalking our kids online.
Blogs come with an awesome feature called PASSWORD PROTECT.
You also have the option of not blogging publicly using your kids’ real names. You’re the one that chose to put all that personal info out there for all to see.
which wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t take a tiny piece of their story and try to make into something different than it truly is.
But how else will this pop up when Ariam chooses to google herself? Or AJ himself??
So both kids can see EXACTLY the sort of people their adoptive parents are. Baby buyers.
Who kind of sort of care about adoption ethics, but not enough to ALTER THEIR BEHAVIOR on the basis of fraudulent activity.
The fact that the APs paid strangers/godparents to care for AJ for more than a year must be so scary to Ariam — for all she knows, her APs will send her off to live with strangers paid to care for her too!
Then again, APs have a nasty little habit of “re-homing” adopted kids who fail to live up to their irrational, unreasonably high standards!
??? Seriously.
They went back and went through the entire adoption process through another agency to make sure the adoption was legal and that A was in fact adoptable. How is that NOT what a person should do! And how is it scary that they paid somebody to care for him while he was in Haiti? Every single adoptive parent that does not move to the country they are adopting from pays a fee to whomever is caring for the child. What’s so scary about that?
you are arguing with Heather….and she is the one who got people in her church to adopt kids and rehome them to her….
It all boils down to not assuming you know what you would do in a situation until you’ve been there. Reform talk-you have obviously never been where this family is OR taken the time to talk to them or the countless other families affected by GHRM. Perhaps you don’t know it all. Take that into consideration.
what is better? an adoptive parent writing about their bad experience and warning others or an adoptive parent being chased off the internet by people who are angry they adopted in the first place? Doesn’t a blog like watershed help others by illuminating the problems inherent to international adoption? So few adoption blogs do that. I am asking an honest question. Would it be better for this family’s voice to just go away? Better to leave blogging to those who turn blind eye to corruption and finish their adoptions in silence?
I’m not understanding the animosity that Name is taking against A. I thought this was a group of parent’s that want to protect the interest of adopted children. Why then are you posting A’s and A’s full name on this site and attaching a family blog here as well? To me this is a very harmful and most certainly does not protect the interest of A’s daughter A. I feel like whomever is writing has something personal against A.
To add you should take responsibility for posting Heather’s Elyse’s post on unethical adoptions in Haiti. You are attacking A for trusting Heather and believing that she was reforming Haitian adoptions. It looks like we were all duped in regards to Heather Elyse and Giving Hope Rescue Mission.
Our family was personally hurt by Heather and the daughter we sought to adopt is currently with her birth mom and thriving. Heather had lied and by all appearances was running a Christian agency that was above the rest in ethics. If you trusted her words enough to post them then it looks as if you were taken as well.
Please take a moment to think about the hardship that A has endured, the risks she has taken, the due diligence, and the effort she put into making sure A’s adoption was an ethical one.
I ask that you remove the link to her personal blog and the names of her children. You are not even using your own name yet you post her children’s. Be above reproach yourself and take the kids names and the blog out of this comment thread.
Sincerely,
A very concerned parent
I’m thinking after reading all these comments that Name maybe H herself or someone just like her…Rachelle, A, Shasta, Kimberly you need not explain or defend…you all know better. Obviously Name is trying to get you all angry and feeling guilty for no reason. She obviously has a personal problem with A (and/or her on personal quilt). Let it go guys!!! Keep your head up and press towards the goal. You know what you have to do and you don’t need people who really are totally clueless and out to do harm and not good!
exactly
To Watershed Blogger (aka Ariam and AJ’s adoptive mommy,
You ABSOLUTELY should and COULD have known better than to adopt from 1) Heather Elyse and 2) Haiti.
This was EXTRA important, seeing as you had already adopted once (Miss Ariam from Ethiopia) and run into some issues with fraud/corruption and didn’t want to make the same mistake again…. well, you wouldn’t want to if you gave a damn about ethics.
You did not due diligence on Heather Elyse.
The fact that lots of other adoptive parents (some experienced, some NOT) made the same STUPID PREVENTABLE (Heather’s not licensed? Isn’t really allowed to facilitate adoptions?Hasn’t done what she said shewould/) yhou did does not make this whole situation any better!
The fact that LOTS of you COULD have known better, but did NOT bother simply means you just WANTED TO BUY A KID MORE THAN YOU CARED ABOUT ACQUIRING ONE ETHICALLY.
You don’t give a damn about adoption ethics. You wouldn’t have adopted EITHER AJ or Ariam if you did! You’d’ve struck Ethiopia AND Haiti off your list… because governance is so weak in both places that you can’t ever KNOW if your kids REALLY needed new, foreign parents.
Both AJ and Ariam will surely google themselves when they get odler. And YOU will need to explain your incredibly selfish actions to THEM!
You’re a babybuyer… and your kids will know it in just a fwe years!!