The first child they adopted was a 2-year-old from the Marshall Islands who had rotten teeth and a large abscess covering the side of his face.
At the time, the family of Tim and Shelly McDaniel was still passably conventional in the small town of Dietrich, surrounded by high desert dotted with sagebrush and cattle.
But since that first adoption in 2000, the couple has brought into their fold 19 more castaway kids from all over the country.
It is a town in turmoil, thrust into national headlines by a tale of racially charged violence and negligence graphically detailed in a $10 million lawsuit the McDaniels filed last week against the 230-student school district. The suit claims that three players on the high school football team sexually assaulted a mentally disabled teammate – a son of the McDaniels – with a coat hanger, which they kicked deep into his rectum. The three alleged assailants are white; the McDaniels’ son is black.
The McDaniels sought legal help soon after the alleged Oct. 22 assault, which the suit says followed months of escalating race-based bullying that coaches and administrators allegedly ignored.
“I needed to know how to keep him safe,” Shelly McDaniel said of her son, who was a senior. “And we were just shunned.”
The alleged assault and the lawsuit’s contentions have torn apart the once tight-knit community, revealing the challenges of raising an unconventional family in a rural small town and sparking the resentment of people who feel unfairly branded as racists.
“It’s a community on edge,” sai
The tormenters, allegedly led by football star John R.K. Howard, a transplant from Texas with ties to a prominent Dietrich family, forced the victim to recite words to a racist song, called him racist names and, in full view of coaches, physically fought him as part of a “toughening up” program until he fell down unconscious, the lawsuit claims. The players were expelled in November and criminally charged in March.
Howard and an alleged accomplice, 17-year-old Tanner Ward, have been charged as adults with felony sexual assault for forcible penetration with a foreign object. Ward was bound for trial at a preliminary hearing in April; Howard is due in court June 10. A third defendant, 16, will be tried in juvenile court.
“They’re 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boys who are doing what boys do,” said Hubert Shaw, who owns the town’s feed lot and whose daughter-in-law is Howard’s aunt.
Fifteen years ago, the McDaniels started adopting children. The house felt empty to Shelly when her own children were off staying with her ex-husband.
“I told her to start saving up,” laughed Tim. “Adopting kids is expensive.”
Tim, 60, and Shelly, 51, now have 25 children in total. To accommodate the outsize brood, they purchased a fitting building: the town’s former elementary school.
The family didn’t set out to become so teeming. After adopting several children with severe needs, the couple developed a good reputation with adoption agencies, they said, and people began seeking them out.
Shelly says she first learned of the bullying in August through another son, 17-year-old Rasaan, the team’s manager. He told her some of the players would “hump” the backsides of him and his brother and other boys.
Then her son came home in October with his underwear torn by a “wedgie” that he said his teammates had given him in the locker room. Incensed, McDaniel said she marched across the street the next day to confront the principal, Stephanie Shaw. McDaniel said Shaw instructed her to call the coach, Michael Torgerson.
When Shelly asked Rasaan if he had been targeted as well, he told her about the alleged hanger assault on his brother. The couple took their son to the emergency room for treatment, and hospital staff reported the alleged sexual assault to the police.
The town’s mayor, Don Heiken, said sports are everything in Dietrich – to an unhealthy extent.
“I think they oughta fire them all,” he said, referring to the long list of defendants in the civil case. “When this happened, everybody just swept it under the rug. . . . These two boys were the top players on the football team. (The coaches) didn’t want to rock the boat. They were having such a good season.”
But Heiken also said the entire town has been besmirched for the alleged actions of outsiders.
But the McDaniels are looking to move. Now, they said, the town feels hostile.
Amid the bitterness and confusion brought by the lawsuit, McDaniel’s daughter, Rollyson is taken aback by how the town can look like all is in order.
“I was on my front porch drinking my coffee and I thought, ‘This is so amazing how there are kids playing, people mowing lawns,’ ” she said. “Shoot, there was a boy walking a sheep down the street. You know, everything back to normal.”
But she doesn’t believe it’s really over.
“I think the storm’s just begun,” she said.