In 1998, Americans Adopted 29 Children From A Town In Sierra Leone. Their Birth Families Say They Were Stolen

When Judith Mosley and her husband adopted 4-year-old Sulaiman Suma from Sierra Leone in 1998, in the midst of that country's brutal civil war, she was sure that they were saving his life. "His orphanage was set fire to; he was one of 12 kids in a family; he had PTSD; he saw people's limbs cut off—it was tough getting him through our first few years," Mosley told me. The child, whom they renamed Samuel Mosley, was a "tiny tot" with a distended belly, hair red from malnutrition, and "eyes like radars, that scanned everywhere, all of the time," she wrote to friends at the time. "The first three nights home, he refused to take off his clothes or shoes, and slept in them, with all his toy cars." For weeks he ate nothing but meat and eggs, up to 14 a day. He could easily consume two whole chickens, bones and all. Once, when Judi tried to take the bones away, he bit her.

More