AT HALE HOUSE, BROKEN BONDS AND PAIN FOR A LITTLE GIRL LOST

Amanda was the last of the babies Lorraine E. Hale showed the
would-be adoptive couple as they walked through Hale House in 1993.
The couple said they were told the child's mother was in prison and
had no interest in her. The grandparents did not want her, either.

"She was standing up in the crib, arms out, like, "Take me!' "
Shellie Bransford recalled of Amanda, an 8- month-old who instantly
captivated her and her husband, David Seavey. Weeks later, approved
by Hale House as potential adoptive parents, they took Amanda home.
The next five months brought the joy of her first Christmas, first
birthday and first steps. And then Lorraine Hale, president of Hale
House, suddenly demanded a meeting, seized the baby, and sent her far
away.

The painful consequences are still playing out today - for the
couple, the mother and a lost little girl.

In retrospect, everything about the brokering had been odd. Hale
House, the nationally heralded refuge in Harlem for what it called
unwanted babies, had required no formal paperwork. And despite the
couple's requests, they had not communicated with the imprisoned
birth mother.

It turned out she had known nothing of her child's placement, and in
fact had been begging for information in unanswered letters to Hale
House. And far from being indifferent, an ailing grandfather in
California had once threatened to sue Hale House over Amanda's care.

With her rushed journey, Amanda began a spiral from place to place,
and from family into foster care. At one point, at age 6, she was
placed by an Arkansas court with people who put her to work in their
traveling cleaning business. She is 8 now, newly adopted by the last
of many sets of foster parents. But throughout, Amanda's picture
stayed on Hale House's Web site, helping it collect millions in
donations.

Amanda is only one of the hundreds of babies who passed through Hale
House, and her case may not be typical. But her story, pieced
together from interviews, Arkansas foster care records and documents
provided by her birth mother, illustrates that at Hale House, where
raising money was a priority and government oversight an
afterthought, the interests of children could get lost.

Questions about those children have sharpened as Hale House has been
buffeted by weeks of revelations that charity money was misspent,
birth parents misled, government officials duped. A criminal
investigation is under way. State investigators are reviewing the
dozen Hale House adoptions they know of. A new Hale House board has
said it will force Lorraine Hale to resign.

In response to questions about Amanda's case, Dr. Hale and her
husband, Jesse L. DeVore, who has served as the agency's public
relations director, would only issue a statement through a lawyer. "I
have devoted my life to the service of children and acted in their
best interests as God has given me the light to see, following my
mother's example. My husband has assisted me. We have treated the
children in the care of Hale House with love, respect, and
single-minded dedication."

Hale House in recent years has become mainly the recourse of
imprisoned mothers eager to keep their children, although it
continued to call the babies castoffs. It stated its first mission
was reuniting families, but it also maintained an obscure - and
unmonitored - corporate authority to handle adoptions.

In practice, said Luther Jones, who has a master's degree in social
work and who worked as a consultant there from 1990 to 1995, Hale
House ignored the basic requirements of the casework needed either to
reunite children with their mothers or to place them for adoption.

Little effort, he said, was made to identify fathers or reach out to
mothers, or even to collect birth certificates. Mr. Jones also said
that Dr. Hale often spoke of the parents with contempt. Yet he never
knew Hale House to complete a termination of parental rights, and it
lacked a lawyer qualified to handle one in court.

"These children were warehoused in Hale House," he said. "These
children were nothing but property."

In the case of Amanda, what became an unforgettable bond for one
couple started almost accidentally.

Ms. Bransford and Mr. Seavey, administrators at Riverside Church in
Manhattan, had not even considered the famous baby shelter when they
first sought to adopt. But Dr. Hale's husband showed up at the church
in the fall of 1993, saying that he had heard they were looking.

Only later would it make them uneasy that at the time Mr. DeVore owed
the church $5,000 in rent for his production of a financially
ill-fated musical about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and that it
was Ms. Bransford's job to try to collect the debt. "He invited us to
come talk to Lorraine about a Hale House adoption," Ms. Bransford
recalled. "He said, `We can set you up.' "

They had been to Hale House once before, after they had organized the
Riverside Church funeral of Dr. Hale's mother, who in the 1980's
became a national icon as "Mother Hale" when Ronald Reagan praised
her for taking in babies born addicted to drugs or alcohol. But this
time, said Ms. Bransford, who has since left her church job, the
visit began a sequence of events that became "so confusing, so
fraught with strangeness," and ultimately so shattering, that she had
tried to set down the facts as they happened in letters to Dr. Hale
and notes to herself.

The couple knew the birth mother would have to relinquish rights
before a formal adoption process could begin, but they said Dr. Hale
had assured them that the mother, who had given up her first child
years before, would in time do the same with Amanda. Dr. Hale's
advice, Mr. Seavey summarized, was "Be patient, go through the
process, bond."

But the first scare came only a week after they had been approved and
allowed to take Amanda home to a small West Side apartment and a
large house in Stroudsburg, Pa. They had set up a nursery, bought a
car seat, and introduced Amanda to colleagues at church.

Then Dr. Hale suddenly commanded Amanda's return, relenting on
condition that the baby spend three days a week in day care at Hale
House - to keep contact, she said.

Mr. Jones, the social worker who had approved the couple, cited
another possible explanation: Amanda's fair coloring, a rarity in the
Hale House nursery, was important in motivating wealthy white people
to make donations, he said. Amanda's mother, who is white, had said
that Amanda's father was black.

There were other troubling observations that Ms. Bransford and Mr.
Seavey recorded, and that former Hale House employees support. The
Hale House doctor, for unexplained reasons, was not authorized to
write prescriptions. Hale House had failed to seek Medicaid coverage
for its wards, and at the clinic where they were taken, the bills
were so overdue that once, when Amanda fell ill, she was denied
treatment.

Yet Dr. Hale's executive suite in the adjacent brownstone was being
renovated with brass chandeliers and hand-carved doors. None of it
mattered, the couple added, so long as they had Amanda. When Mr.
Seavey came to Hale House to get her from day care, he recalled,
weeping, she would recognize his voice, shake the safety gate at the
top of the stairs and call to be released into his arms.

"This child was bonded to them," recalled Mr. Jones.

The rupture was total and without warning. Standing in the executive
office doorway on March 21, 1994, Dr. Hale said that they could no
longer have Amanda, Ms. Bransford recalled. Pleas for contact with
Amanda's family were ignored, she said, and the door was shut in her
face.

When the couple managed through clergy to get a letter to Amanda's
mother, Desiree Brimberry, her own nightmare began. She realized for
the first time that Amanda had been away from Hale House, she
recalled in interviews last week, and became terrified that, without
her knowledge or consent, "these people are trying to take her away
forever."

She had served 11 months on a drug offense at Albion Correctional
Facility, a New York State prison four hundred miles away, and was
due to be paroled. She had counted on Hale House to keep Amanda out
of the foster care system, she said, and later to help her make a
home for her daughter. "I love my daughter Amanda," she wrote in an
April 1994 letter full of misspellings and emotion. She called her
baby, "the most inportant person in my life."

"I did not know Amanda was going to anybody house," she added. "I
write Hale House once a month, and they don't write back."

She made a panicked call to her father and stepmother, Paul and Wanda
Brimberry, in Fontana, Calif. In fact, Wanda Brimberry said in a
telephone interview from Hillsboro, Ohio, where she lives now, she
and her husband had already agreed to take the baby until Desiree
could care for her, and had been calling Hale House for updates.

But Paul Brimberry was a psychologist laid low by drink, divorce and
heart disease, Wanda said. She was working two jobs to try to make
ends meet. As they had told Dr. Hale the previous summer, they lacked
the money to travel to New York.

At one point, she recalled, a Hale House staff member told them that
volunteers from the church had been allowed to take the baby home for
a weekend, and were refusing to bring Amanda back. It was the only
hint they ever had of the couple's existence. "My husband was very
upset," Wanda recalled. "He said they'd better get the child back, or
he'd sue. I think Dr. Hale got scared."

Mr. Jones agreed. "Lorraine Hale panicked," he said. "She knew that
David and Shellie couldn't adopt the child, and she felt that
Amanda's mother would give trouble."

The result was that Amanda was living at Hale House again.

Amanda's mother came to see her when she was paroled to a halfway
house in the city in April 1994. But, she remembers, Hale House would
not let her take Amanda out, even to the park. At 28, Desiree had a
long rap sheet, the record of a woman who had begun running away at
10 from the molestation of her alcoholic mother's boyfriend. In and
out of jail for prostitution, strung out on drugs by 19, she had no
job, no schooling, and during three weeks of supervised visits with
her daughter, no help from Hale House, she said.

In May, Dr. Hale sent a Hale House employee to take Amanda to her
grandfather in California. Two hours after seeing them to the plane,
Desiree Brimberry said, "I relapsed. I got loaded to stop the pain of
losing her." By June, arrested near Times Square on another drug
charge, she was headed back to Albion.

As for Amanda, when she first arrived at the Brimberry house in
California, she followed the Hale House employee, Melanie Barnes,
from room to room. "Maybe she was afraid somebody was going to leave
her," Ms. Barnes, now a teacher in Mount Vernon, said last week.
"Everybody had left her before."

In fact, only months after Ms. Barnes's departure, the Brimberrys
split up and had to sell their home. With Amanda, Dr. Brimberry went
from a son in Washington State to a married daughter in Arkansas, and
then for a time lived in a borrowed trailer on a stranger's farm.
Finally, working as a hypnotherapist at a hospital, he found an
apartment for himself and Amanda in Beebe, Ark.

"He idolizes her," Wanda wrote in 1996 to Desiree, who had been
sentenced to 4 1/2 to 9 years on the drug charge. But on July 27,
1997, when Amanda was 4, she woke to find her beloved grandfather
dead at 69. Her Arkansas aunt, Kimberly McMenamin, turned her away.
And Amanda passed to the Arkansas Department of Human Services. "I
washed my hands of it," Mrs. McMenamin acknowledged. "I have some
animosity against my sister, and I guess it came out against Amanda."

As the authorities decided what to do with the little girl, Hale
House's performance came back to haunt her. The state said the
custody agreement sent with Amanda to California was legally invalid,
leaving Wanda no claim to the child. And the court ruled that at 62,
Wanda was too old to be a foster parent.

Instead, to the distress of Paul Brimberry's co-workers, the court
eventually put Amanda into the custody of Melody Moon, who was her
sometime baby sitter when Amanda was a toddler living in a trailer.
From 1999 to last June, Amanda traveled with the Moon family cleaning
business, "home-schooled" between their jobs tending foreclosed
properties around the state, often missing her mother's weekly calls.
"We weren't child slave masters," Mrs. Moon said. "Amanda would pick
up things out of the yard or in the house so we could vacuum. And she
got paid just like the others." She added, "I received no pay for
her, no Medicaid, no nothing."

Desiree, whether in prison, paroled or on the run, kept making
tearful calls to her court-appointed lawyer in Arkansas about her
daughter's treatment, the lawyer, James Petty, said. Finally, in
White County Chancery Court, he demanded that the child be taken from
the Moons, and Judge Robert Edwards agreed last year. But, impatient
with Desiree when a new relapse put her back in jail, the judge also
terminated her parental rights, and in March granted an adoption
petition by Amanda's most recent set of foster parents, who are
chicken farmers.

Desiree, who had visited her daughter for a month in 1999, is now
paroled, working and in drug treatment, but no longer allowed to
speak to Amanda. "It's hard for me to know she's going from doorstep
to doorstep," she said. "I went through that as a child - you always
feel abandoned." Then, just like the couple who wanted to adopt her
baby, she cried over the old snapshots.

But on the Hale House Web site, Dr. Hale and Amanda still smiled.