UPDATE 1/23/2023 7:00 –Donald Ray Lantz, the second defendant in the Sissonville couple accused of locking two of their children up in a shed on their property, continued his testimony Thursday afternoon.

More testimony concluded that the oldest boy’s mental health issues kept declining which made it difficult to keep the family safe.

Lantz said that in 2021 up until after the boy’s birthday in 2022 he was receiving counseling at Okanogon Behavioral Healthcare in Washington, however after his birthday, it allowed him to opt out of receiving counseling due to a law in Washington State that allows 13-year-olds some freedom when it comes to medical decisions.

“He had to sign all these kinds of papers that says he’s 13 and then he has a choice of whether he wants to participate in the counseling or not and whether he wants us there,” he said. “He chose not to participate in the counseling anymore, he said he hated it, and he didn’t want to do it anymore.”

In prior testimony, the eldest girl, was shown a photo and later a video was shown of Lantz holding a PVC pipe and yelling at the oldest boy. She testified saying that Lantz had hit the boy with the pipe, however Lantz denies ever hitting him.

“I picked up that pipe, and you saw me hitting the table and that’s what I wanted to get their attention and make noise and everything, I had no intention of hitting him,” Lantz said.

Lantz was also asked about why they decided to move from Washington to West Virginia.

He said that the main reason was so they could finally get some help regarding the oldest boy to help protect the family and the taxes on the house kept going up. And another reason was because the location of the house.

“The place that we were living in there were a lot of wildfires in the area in the last ten years and the insurance companies were starting to pull out,” Lantz said.

He even was asked if they moved to avoid any pending criminal charges that would have stemmed from CPS workers coming to visit the ranch, once after the oldest boy was in the hospital because he ran away and another because of a medicine that the boy was prescribed made him hungrier so his school called CPS because he was eating garbage out of the trash cans at school.

Lantz said that both of those visits were cleared because the workers seen that the kids had beds, food, water, and electricity.

Also, in previous testimony from the children, they say that Whitefeather and Lantz forced them to do hard labor around the ranch in Washington and then around the house in West Virginia, however again Lantz denied ever forcing them to do hard labor around either property. He claimed that Jeanne and himself did most of the work.

He did say that he asked them to help with the animals and do simple yard work.

“All kids, they need to learn responsibility especially taking care of the animals,” Lantz said.

And the three kids that testified earlier in the trial stated that Whitefeather would use pepper spray or bear spray on them as punishment. Michael Plants asked Lantz if he ever saw her spray them and he responded with no, and if he ever did see that he would have packed the kids up and left.

The trial will pick back up Friday morning, with Lantz still on the stand waiting cross-examination from the state. After he’s done the defense will call a doctor to the stand to testify about mental health relating to the oldest boy’s struggles.

 

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The second defendant in an ongoing Kanawha County trial of the Sissonville couple indicted on 20-counts of child neglect, human trafficking, and civil rights violation-related charges says their oldest adoptive son’s deteriorating mental health was becoming more and more of a challenge.

Donald Ray Lantz was the third to take the stand to testify Thursday morning. It’s the seventh day of Lantz and Jeanne Kay Whitefeather’s trial. 

Whitefeather previously took the stand Tuesday and Wednesday denying all child neglect allegations against their five adoptive black children.

Thursday was Lantz’s’ turn.

“Mr. Lantz, let’s start with this question, did you abuse your children?” Lantz’s’ attorney John Balenovich asked.

“No.” Lantz responded.

“Did you ever call your children any racial names?” Balenovich continued.

“No.”

“Did you adopt these children to force them to work on your farm?” Asked Balenovich with Lantz again denying the accusation.

Lantz said he and Whitefeather adopted the five children in 2017 in Minnesota following the birth of the fifth child.

Prior to the children’s’ adoption, Lantz said he and Whitefeather owned a hobby farm in Minnesota where they were the sole workers. He said they moved to Washington state in the spring of 2018 when they had the children.

Lantz said the younger children adjusted to the move to Washington better than the two oldest boy and girl.

He said while still in Minnesota after the children were adopted, they all went to therapy. In Washington, however, only their oldest boy went to therapy due signs of greater mental health issues.

Lantz said they progressively started to grow concerned over the boy’s behavior, who was 11 at the time in 2019, but there was a delay in being able to get him admitted into therapy which continued until 2020.

“There was a problem because of Covid, and so, it was hard to find places, places weren’t open or didn’t have enough space, so we were having trouble with that,” said Lantz.

He said they then did finally get him into counseling, however, his mental health was beginning to deteriorate still more and more.

Lantz said their 11-year-old son would often talk to himself.

“And sometimes giggling and laughing and stuff and we’d say, ‘who are you talking to?’ and he’d say ‘I’m just talking to myself,’ and it was like, well, you know, he’s a young boy there, they do all kinds of things like that so I didn’t think too much of it,” he said.

Lantz said the talking would eventually increase in frequency and hallucinations also began to occur.

He said at first, their son didn’t display any signs of aggression, just some agitation, but Lantz said they did begin to notice that fighting among his younger siblings increased.

Lantz recalled one particular hallucination occurrence with their adoptive son where he said he witnessed their son claim to see his third grade teacher from Minnesota on their driveway in Washington and he claimed she was flying around.

He said he tried to help his son deal with this hallucination the best he could.

“I found out where she was standing and I went over and stood by her, or the hallucination, and I said, ‘I don’t see anything, there’s nothing here,’ and the hallucination flew up behind the building and into the clouds,” said Lantz.

Lantz said having fostered several times before, he and Whitefeather took courses for handling children coming out of traumatic situations, but they began to realize that they were not equipped to handle something this severe.

He said he was primarily the one helping their son with his therapy.

Lantz said these mental episodes continued into 2021 with sometimes being a non-stop all-day occurrence.

“Based on my experience before with him when he would just stand there and watch something in the air that he’s having a hallucination, I’d confront him and sometimes he would deny it and sometimes he would say, ‘don’t you see that,”

Prior to Lantz taking the stand Thursday morning, the court also brought in Whitefeather’s two brothers to testify, Mark and Aaron Hughes. Both were asked similar questions.

Both denied Whitefeather being racist to any degree. In fact, both brothers said they come from an interracial family.

However, both said there was some tension when the children were adopted right from the start as they were concerned Whitefeather was too advanced in age to be raising five children. They also said the children’s behavior was somewhat odd whenever they came to visit.

Aaron Hughes said all of the children would turn to the oldest girl when he asked them questions individually.

“It was a little awkward, a little odd, but one-to-one it wasn’t so bad, it was more them as a group that things kind of got awkward,” Hughes said.

Mark Hughes agreed, the children’s behavior was odd and disconnected.

“They were evasive, they didn’t talk to each other, they didn’t engage with me much, and they spent an enormous amount of time just staring into space,” he said.

Aaron Hughes said he got them a basketball, a soccer ball and a board game for Christmas one year and he realized all of his gifts were failures as they went awry in some way.

“I have a basketball court that’s a covered area and within a couple of minutes they were fighting, one of them wanted to kick the basketball, the other wanted to dribble the basketball, another just wanted to shoot it outside, so then mom had to come and be referee and say ‘you stand over there, you stand over there, you stand over there,” Aaron recalled.

Mark Hughes had gone to visit the family when they eventually moved to their home on 225 Cheyanne Lane in Sissonville where the couple was arrested in October 2023.

He said the shed where the two oldest children were found locked up within appeared to him that no kids were actually living in the shed, just staying there.

He said Whitefeather’s room was the only room that had a mattress in it because they were in the process of moving to Beckley.

During the state’s cross-examination with Mark Hughes, assistant prosecuting attorney Madison Tuck asked him if it was appropriate that the children had to sleep on a concrete floor. That’s one the things prior surveillance camera footage showed the children doing right before they were found by police.

Thursday afternoon’s portion of the trial was expected to have Lantz back on the stand as well as a doctor.