Plan to Rescue Central American Children Mired in Red Tape, Discord

Gary Bennett considers himself a lifesaver, trying to rescue babies from poverty and disease in Central America.

Carol Bogart, who paid Bennett more than $5,000 for a little girl he never delivered, sees him as a false hero.

“I’m angry,” said Bogart, 40, of Denver. “I’m angry about what she went through, and her mother. Who knows what that woman thinks or believes?”

After almost two years, Bennett has not completed a single adoption, and the state has shut down his agency because he allegedly violated adoption rules.

Bennett concedes that he bit off “more than I could chew” and says he counted too much on friends who liked the idea but couldn’t help carry it out. His good intentions, he says, were thwarted by red tape, lack of money and naivete.

“The only reason that I started this was the children . . . not for me, but for these people, so their babies won’t die.”

Bennett first took an interest in the Miskito Indians in 1984 after he left his $83,000-a-year air-conditioning repair business in suburban Ft. Worth and “sought a thrill” training Nicaraguan Contras. A friend invited him to see the Miskito Coast, a 225-mile-long strip of jungle along the Honduras and Nicaragua coast with poverty so bad “you’re not human if you can ignore it.”

He said he began taking food and arranging aid shipments to the Miskitos in 1985. He sought help from the federal government and obtained medical visas for four sick, malnourished children.

“There are four children who will have good lives because of him,” said David Sowders. Sowders and his wife, Denise, became foster parents of abandoned twins Bennett brought from a military hospital on the Honduras border in 1985.

“The nurse came to Gary and said ‘Would you please do what you can for these kids?’ and so Gary went, found their father and got permission to bring them out on medical visa,” said Sowders, a Dallas Times Herald editor.

The Sowderses paid for the twins’ medical care and are in the process of adopting them. Bennett helped them look in Nicaragua for the twins’ father to get him to relinquish custody.

Bennett, a 42-year-old divorced father of four, became the foster parent of another of the four children, a Nicaraguan girl named Angie, now 3. He recently received the final custody relinquishment documents from the girl’s father, and said that the adoption is in its final stages.

The fourth child is with another Dallas couple, Bennett said.

Because of his work with the four children, friends urged him to start an adoption agency, and in late 1987 he got a provisional license from the Texas Department of Human Services for the nonprofit Mosquitia Coast Child Find Inc.

The provisional license gave the agency six months to prove itself by completing an adoption in order to get a regular, biennial license. The state twice extended the license but in September refused another because Bennett had failed to place a child with permanent, adoptive parents and apparently had bent regulations, Human Services officials said.

Carol Bogart was one of about 75 people who contacted the agency seeking children, Bennett says now, though at one point he told state officials that “thousands” had called him. Fewer than 10 people were interviewed by social workers connected with the agency, Bennett said.

Bogart, who already had a 4-year-old son, Michael, paid $5,200 in adoption deposits and fees and $2,000 to an agency that was to evaluate her suitability. In return, Bennett promised he would bring her a little girl in November, 1988. Then he said he was certain it would be December.

“The rest of December came and went,” she said. “I was calling them frantically, constantly. . . . They said, ‘No question, you will have this baby for Christmas.’ ” In the months that followed, “They were still stringing me along and sending me the pictures. I was worried about what was happening to her, what kind of shape she was in, and was she being taken care of properly.

“You get so hooked into it that you just can barely stand to give it up. I couldn’t invest myself emotionally in it anymore. And Michael was just having a terrible time. He had been waiting for a baby sister for months.”

Bennett said the adoption fell through when his assistant and girlfriend, Pat Nealy, was jailed for a day in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, because of questions over the nationality of the the little girl, Kyla Sue. A travel document Nealy and Bennett obtained for the girl showed that she was born in Nicaragua. But in an affidavit relinquishing parental rights, the girl’s mother said the child was born in Tegucigalpa.

Bogart accused Bennett of trying to circumvent stricter Honduran adoption laws by passing Kyla Sue off as Nicaraguan.

The Department of Human Services investigated her claim last summer, but could not validate it. But the department said Mosquitia Coast failed to meet several regulations, including providing records and properly training staff.

The state had criticized Bennett earlier for bringing the four children into the United States on medical visas when he intended to have them adopted.

Bennett says his problems are political. “Our State Department says one thing and what they actually do is another. I’m just one man. We haven’t placed any. We’re just banging our heads against the wall.”

Case records show that the most serious state allegations against Mosquitia Coast involved its inability to retain a professional social worker and Bennett and Nealy’s competence to counsel parents giving up their children.

Donna Parrish, the Human Services licensing official assigned to Bennett’s agency, declined to discuss Bennett’s qualifications, but said: “Child-placing is very complicated. It’s very difficult for professionals to become involved in it and go through it in the way that it needs to be done, let alone someone with no background it.”

The final report on the agency indicates two families withdrew applications they had filed with Mosquitia Coast as it went out of business, and several other families were referred to other agencies.

Bogart’s is the only complaint on file with Human Services. Bennett said he will return her money.

Kyla Sue and three other children are at a “safe house” in Tegucigalpa, he said. They are his foster children in the government’s eyes, but can’t leave because adoptive parents must be lined up for each child, he said, adding that he hesitates to look for permanent homes for them because he doesn’t want to appear to be operating an illegal adoption service.

Sowders believes Bennett will be better off taking help to the Miskito than bringing children out. “I saw firsthand how hard it is to get one tiny thing done,” he said. “It took more resources and help than he had available.”