Then, with her husband Jake, she adopted.
The couple, from South Carolina, USA, were delighted with the selected agency, Always Hope, and passed thousands to owner Tara Lynn Lee, who temporarily discovered a “mom”: Mariah of Florida.
Enthusiastically, they prepare for their son’s impending arrival, call him Eli, and tell his other two that they would be older brothers.
But, in fact, Lee had created fake moms and raised $1.6 million from mom-to-be.Now Julie tells her story:
My husband Jake hugged me while I was crying.
After 4 miscarriages, I gave birth to our little girl, who was still born dead at 23 weeks.
Jake and I were lucky enough to have three healthy kids.
We enjoyed being parents and were looking for a great family, but I couldn’t cope with the pregnancy.
Despite our losses, the preference for some other child will not fade, so a few months later, in April 2016, we adopted.
Where we live, in South Carolina, in the United States, agencies and experts organize adoptions.
“Hi mom, ” said Tara, you’ve been paired.” I cried with happiness.Tara said Mom calls Mariah.
I discovered a firm called Always Hope.
“Families fused into a singles heartbeat” was the project of owner Tara Lynn Lee.
He had a bachelor’s degree in social painting and took care of biological moms, which was vital to me.
Tara, herself a mother of five, noisy with a wonderful personality and cursed a lot.
But I enjoyed it. And she gave it to me.” I had two stillbirths myself,” he felt sorry for himself.We asked Tara to reach us for a baby.
We paid $1,600 in advance, then another $12,000, so we increased our loan to locate the money.
Fees included recommendations for the mother, her expenses, and Tara’s at birth and after.
We collected a folder full of photos of us and the children, our house and statements about who we were, why we sought to adopt and how we raised the child so Tara could show them to moms.
I stayed in touch with her every week and became friends.
“It’s amazing what I’m doing, ” I said.
It’s hard for a woman, a mother herself, to get so low.
One Saturday, he called while I was watching my youngest son, Jay, at a baseball game.
“Hi mom, ” said Tara, you’ve been paired.” I cried with happiness.Tara said Mom calls Mariah.
She is addicted to drugs and prostitute in Florida, 17 weeks pregnant with a child.
Tara asked for the balance of the fees.” Mariah will be with another couple otherwise,” she said.
Jake and I called our baby Jeremiah Elijah, Eli for short.The due date was October 11, 2017.
I wrote to Mariah Tara to thank her, but they never gave me an answer.I haven’t heard much about Tara either, just occasional messages.
Then, before the scheduled date, Tara called with bad news.Tests showed Eli had a genetic abnormality.
There was a hole in his heart, a cyst in his brain and his little face and limbs had not evolved properly.I wouldn’t survive.
“He says the anomalies are consistent with incest,” Tara revealed.
“Are you one of all this?” I cried, probably devastated by us and Mariah.
“Eli has a disorder and we’re not sure she’s going to live in her mother’s outdoors,” we told our children.
They were partly waiting for him after wasting his sister, but they were sad.A few days later, Tara called.
“Mariah gave birth, ” she choked. Her little boy lived 35 minutes, however, she gave him the intermediate call Elijah to honor his choice.”
Tara hadn’t arrived at the time of delivery, but Mariah’s aunt was there.Having experienced a dead birth myself, I felt Mariah’s pain deeply.
I was in shock. I was devastated, but Tara was an emotional basket case.”Mariah is in bed crying as she holds an urn with Eli’s ashes,” she sobbed.I felt like I was supporting her.
“You have 10, 400 euros down payment,” Tara said, “You don’t have to pay my fees anymore.”
She hadn’t been on delivery, so she didn’t know why we were charging her all the prices anyway.
Immediately afterwards, some of Tara’s other clients, Cortney Edmond, had a failed adoption when the birth mother she was looking for to keep her baby.Tara and Cortney communicated on Facebook Live what had happened.
I sent a message to Cortney, giving him my support. Or we lost a baby and friends.
In December, Jake and I were able to review the adoption, but as of April of the following year, more than 50 biological tara mothers had rejected us.
“What’s the matter with us? I asked Tara.The following month, Cortney had another failed adoption with Tara.
Then I heard another consumer who told me that the birth mother had had a miscarriage and that it took him a lot to get Tara’s cash back.
“Maybe we’ll just get our cash back and get rid of it,” Jake said.When I called Tara, she told me she was saving 4, 000 euros for her professional fees.
Soon after, I got a text message from Tara saying she had a mom.”I don’t have a circle of relatives for her, ” she said, asking if she was interested.
She said all prices and expenses would amount to 10,400 euros, exactly what she had left me in her account.
But that went up to 17,600 euros when he sent me a list of rates.”I have to find out what’s going on, ” I told Cortney.
We wondered if there were biological moms and young children.
She had met Tara and said she was dressed in clothes and shoes from beloved designers.
They had gone to a mall to buy groceries and the women at Louis Vuitton’s store knew her by name.Some families had had young children thanks to Tara.
But now Cortney and I were pretty sure she was practicing some kind of fraud.In July, Tara announced that she ended the firm with paintings with orphans in Africa.I sent him a message asking for Eli’s birth and death certificate.
“I’m sorry your adoption failed, but I don’t know why you think I’ve had this kind of thing before,” he replied.Then, incredibly, he added: “By the way, I hope you don’t think about it.it’s a scam.”
At the end of August, I won a refund check of 6400 euros from Tara.
“It’s like bloody money,” I said to Jake, “I wonder who he let down to pay me.”
Another mother, Sarah Scott, shared her suspicions with me and Cortney.Together, we are about 20 families with failed adoptions.
I sent the FBl hotline. No one answered me.
Then, at a baseball game, I spoke to another mother who took me to a retired FBI agent, put me in touch with a friend who was still an agent and was interested in what I was telling her.
I gave him back the main points of all the mothers he knew who had failed at the adoptions, and then I, Cortney and Sarah sought to locate more.Among us, in spite of everything, we discovered more than a hundred families.
A woman, Amber, asked if her birth mother had ever existed.”It existed in your heart, ” answered Tara.
Many learned that her biological mother had had a miscarriage.In some cases, the birth mother made the decision to keep the baby or simply disappeared.Tara told a couple that the mother and baby had died in a shootout, as the bullet had passed through the mother in the baby.
It’s the kind of thing you saw on the news, yet no one can locate a report, and the police don’t have a record either.
In February 2019, Tara was arrested and re-in custody, and I discovered she was pregnant.
After what had happened, I was very careful, but in September 2019, I had a healthy girl, Charlie.I got excited.
The evidence that Cortney, Sarah and I had accumulated was overwhelming.
Approximately 24 couples had Tara’s babies, a total of 160 people, earning 1.6 million pounds between 2014 and 2018.
Federal Prosecutor Matthew Schneider described the fraud as a “twisted and sick deception of innocent people” who tended to locate Lee through Facebook teams, word of mouth, and counseling agencies.
In the end, Lee shot dead three moms-to-be who got together to get the FBI’s attention.
In addition to Julie Mom Cortney Edmond, 36, from Colorado.
They talked to Michael Kaplan at the New York Post.
She and her husband Curtis, a programming engineer, donated an initial amount of $9,000 to that of their biological mother, “Porsche”.
Lee pressured them for $4,000 over a three-month period.
“She said, “Porsche’s circle of relatives made himself known and ate all his food; now you have to give him more money, ” said Edmond.She wasted a total of about $30,000 and never won a baby.
Housewife Sarah Scott, 39, and her husband spent $11,000 on a failed adoption and $13,000 on one attempt.
“Tara gave the $4,000 from May to September and got $9,000 for her,” Scott said of what she later discovered.
When the pregnant woman (who, in this case, was real) to keep her baby, Lee “threatened to kick her and the baby out of the apartment” – which Scott had funded — “and she did.I was horrified.
Disgusted by all this, the three women came together and launched a personal organization on Facebook to lure others with Always Hope stories.Anecdotes have accumulated, from Georgia to Indiana and California.
One even referred to a fake ultrasound.”I asked Tara how Mom was doing. And she said, “It’s funny, questions.She’s on an ultrasound right now,” said Kate Smith, a 33-year-old woman from Wisconsin.Since it was 9 o’am on a Sunday night, “I think it was a little strange.
But Tara texted: “I saw an image of your baby.It’s a girl. Here it is.” I later discovered that [the sonogram] came here from a filling website.”
She pleaded guilty to fraud and in February 2020 I went to her sentence along with 20 victims.
We’ve all had the victim have an effect on the statements.A woman, Amber, asked if her birth mother had ever existed.”It existed in your heart, ” answered Tara.
At that moment, I knew what I was strongly suspicious of, my biological mother, at most others, also fictional.
The opinion on the imprisoned Tara for ten years.I think he’s a monster and he’s still having trouble understanding his cruelty.She talked about her stillbirths, if any, and Mariah, my fake mother, lost her baby a few minutes after birth.
It’s hard for a woman, a mother, to get so low.Adoption wants to be regulated much more carefully.So now I, Cortney and Sarah, are campaigning for strict national laws.
We need to make sure that no one like Tara can launch a fake baby scam and attack vulnerable mothers again.
In the past we explain how these moving images capture joy in the faces of young people followed after being followed after CARE YEARS.
And this mother followed a baby from a dying stranger says the stranger kept her life.
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