The Homeschoolers

Larry and Carri Williams were raising a large homeschooled family near Sedro-Woolley, Washington, when they adopted two children from Ethiopia in 2008: a girl named Hana and a younger boy, Immanuel, who was deaf. The couple followed a strict religious approach to discipline drawn from the book “To Train Up a Child,” and the adopted children bore the worst of it.

Over the next three years Hana was hit with a plastic tube, locked in a closet, denied meals, made to sleep in the barn, and washed off outside with a garden hose. On the afternoon of May 11, 2011, she was sent into the cold, wet backyard as punishment. She was found face down and unconscious, and she died shortly after midnight on May 12 at Skagit Valley Hospital. A pathologist ruled the cause hypothermia, with malnutrition and an infection contributing.

After a seven-week trial in September 2013, a jury convicted Carri of homicide by abuse and first-degree assault of a child for Immanuel’s treatment. Larry was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and first-degree assault of a child. Carri received about 37 years and Larry 27 years and nine months. Their convictions were upheld on appeal in 2015, and later petitions from both were denied in 2019.