NHRA stats | Pomona finals results

tool name

tool name

Sean Paddock's short life shows system's flaws

Sean Paddock was born in turmoil, early and tiny, to a broken family.

Social workers fretted over how to protect the boy. They finally recruited new parents to raise him.

Sean, 4, died at the hands of his adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock. She beat him and bound him in a dark, drafty attic in her Johnston County farmhouse. This month, a jury sent Paddock to prison for the rest of her life.

A family opens its arms and fills a girl's need

Two-year-old Jasani Norris runs through her adoptive family's living room with the manic energy of a healthy, well-loved child, squealing and giggling with each step. She greets Mom and Dad with bright eyes and a wide grin, anticipating the approving smiles and loving pats she receives in return for her enthusiastic appearance at their knees.

"Gum!" she proclaims. "I want some gum."

Her plea for gum is sort of impish, as though she knows there is such a treat, but might not receive it anyway. The adults seem mildly baffled about her plea for gum since none seems to be handy.

Despair fueled custody saga

A difficult pregnancy left Allison Quets wondering whether she could care for the children she had so desperately wanted. A former boyfriend suggested a solution: Let his relatives adopt her twins.

Quets agreed to an open adoption with the Apex couple but soon regretted giving up the children she had at the age of 48 after in-vitro fertilization. Last month, she tried to circumvent the courts by fleeing with the twins to Canada.

Her drastic attempt to regain custody left Quets, 49, of Orlando, Fla., facing an international parental kidnapping charge and stunned those who have known her for years.

Boy's death spurs lawsuit

It has been two years since 4-year-old Sean Paddock suffocated to death in the home of people the state had entrusted to raise him, and the boy's grandfather wants to know why.

Ron Ford Sr., administrator of Sean's estate, this week filed a wrongful death lawsuit and a N.C. Industrial Commission claim to try to force an answer and apology from the adoptive parents, as well as the state Department of Health and Human Services, Wake County Human Services and the Children's Home Society of North Carolina, a private adoption agency.

"One person blames another, who blames another, and there's been no answers," Ford said. "I never want another grandfather to go through what I've gone through."

Dead boy's mother accused before

SMITHFIELD -- Seven months before Lynn Marie Paddock adopted the 4-year-old boy she's charged with killing, Johnston County social workers went to her remote farmhouse to investigate allegations of child abuse, officials said Monday.

And weeks before she adopted Sean Ford from a Wake County foster home, his uncle told Wake Child Protective Services that the boy returned from a visit to Paddock's farmhouse with welts on his backside and legs, the uncle, Robert Ford Jr., said.

The adoption of Sean and his older brother and sister went through anyway.