Minnesota couple caught up in apparent adoption fraud


A Minnesota couple were excited to become parents of sisters from India -- until they made a shocking discovery that raises questions about the U.S. effort to stop international adoption fraud.

By David Shaffer

Last update: December 21, 2009 - 11:06 AM

In court papers that paved her way to Minnesota, Komal is described as a 12-year-old girl from northern India, eligible for adoption in the United States.

She liked to assemble puzzles and briefly attended fifth grade, but the 112-pound orphan displayed a violent streak that soon left a Mayer, Minn., couple wondering if they were told the truth about the two Indian siblings they spent $30,000 trying to adopt.

Within months of their arrival, and before the adoption became final, Komal confessed: She was 21. Her younger sister, Shallu, admitted she was 15, not 11 as advertised. The sisters said they were told to lie about their ages and backgrounds by orphanage officials and an India-based representative for Crossroads Adoption Services of Edina, which handled the failed placements.

At 21, Komal wouldn't have been a candidate for adoption. In fact, she wouldn't have qualified for an orphan visa to the United States. Under the rules, foreign children must be under 16 for adoption proceedings to begin.

Maria Melichar, who once hoped Komal and Shallu would become part of the family she and her husband, Carl, are raising, said Komal's rights were grossly violated.

"To adopt her against her will, when she has a life, had an identity [and] she was an adult, is unthinkable," Maria Melichar said.

The sisters' lies reverberated halfway around the world, from a quiet farmhouse in Carver County to a noisy orphanage in Chandigarh, India, raising fresh questions about an international adoption treaty and the United States' commitment to investigate alleged corruption in the orphan pipeline. During the past decade, adoption scandals have erupted in at least six countries, including India, sometimes shutting off the flow of children from those nations.

A U.S. immigration judge ordered the sisters sent back to India in July 2008 for visa fraud, after medical tests confirmed the age discrepancies. It appears to be the first time the U.S. government has expelled orphans under such circumstances, experts said.

The Melichars complained about the misrepresentations in 2007, but the organization that probes questionable adoptions for the State Department said it didn't hear about the case until this year. Even then, officials postponed the investigation for months.

The United States implemented the Hague Adoption Convention last year. The State Department handed the job of policing international adoption agencies to the nonprofit Council on Accreditation, which enforces the treaty's ethical standards. The reforms directly affect Crossroads and 13 other agencies in Minnesota, which has the highest rate of international adoptions in the United States.

Critics of the United States' commitment to the treaty say the Melichars' case shows the government is not aggressively investigating adoptions that go wrong. "I can't understand why the U.S. government is moving so slow on these cases," said Arun Dohle, founder of the Belgium-based advocacy group Against Child Trafficking and author of a 2008 law review article on Indian adoption fraud.

Attorney Mark Solheim, who represents Crossroads, said the agency "never instructed any adoptive children to lie about their age." Over the past 33 years, Crossroads has successfully placed 3,500 children, including 500 from India, he said.

'It felt right'

In 2005, the Melichars decided to expand their family. They already had four children, including a girl adopted from India with Crossroads' help in 1993. The family lives on a farm once worked by Carl Melichar's parents next to Lake Berliner near Waconia.

"We were both getting older," said Maria Melichar, a nurse practitioner who is now 46. "If we were going to do it, that was the time."

"It felt right,'' added Carl Melichar, a wildlife painter who recently turned 58.

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