Held in a makeshift-basement dungeon, whipped, chained, enslaved—this may sound like something that couldn’t happen in America, let alone in a small, picturesque New England town.
But that was the nightmarish childhood endured by a woman, now 19, brought here from China when she was just a baby, according to a lawsuit recently filed in New Hampshire.
After years of attempts to break free by peeling back drywall or breaking a window, only to be returned to her home by local police, Olivia Atkocaitis, who fled through cold winter woods in just sandals, finally won her freedom in September of 2018 from her home in New Boston, New Hampshire.
She did so by digging her way through a wall using a bottle cap, according to the lawsuit filed this past week in Merrimack County Superior Court.
The shocking case includes several years’ worth of police reports dating as far back as 2007 of a “nightmarish subjugation,” as her attorney Michael Lewis calls it, that appears to have started in 2004—less than a year after she was adopted at just 14 months of age.
The New Boston police along with the NH Division Children of Youth and Family Services (DCYF) and Wide Horizons For Children, the adoption agency that handled Olivia’s adoption, are named in the suit.
The DCYF nor Wild Horizons did not respond to inquiries by The Epoch Times. Wide Horizons is the same agency that arranged the controversial adoption of actress Angelina Jolie’s daughter from Ethiopia.
In a statement released to The Epoch Times, the New Boston Police Department denies any wrongdoing in Olivia’s case and instead emphasized that it was the department’s investigation that eventually led to the arrest and convictions of Olivia’s adoptive parents, Thomas and Denise Atkocaitis.
“It was the New Boston Police Department who conducted the investigation which led to the removal of the plaintiff,” said New Boston Police Chief James Brace in an email to The Epoch Times.
Lewis reacted with disgust at Brace’s suggestion the police rescued Olivia. “She freed herself,” Lewis told The Epoch Times. As he wrote in the lawsuit, “this should shock the conscience of anyone who claims to have one.”
Denise and Thomas Atkocaitis, both named in the suit, did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times. Now divorced, one lives in Maine and the other in Georgia.
Years of Missed Opportunities
While the lawsuit chronicles in heartbreaking detail the times police would track down Olivia, one day even using police dogs and reprimanding the then-13-year-old for escaping before returning her to the Atkocaitises, the department’s own records spotlights what appears to be many red flags ignored by police, DCYF workers, and other names in the lawsuit.A 2007 police report described Denise Atkocaitis as committing acts of violence in the household, including arson, and was exhibiting “general, violent, and out-of-control behavior.”
By 2009, police had already had responded to several disturbing reports in the home including an allegation of elder abuse by the NH Bureau of Elderly and Adult Services. At the time, Denise was licensed by the NH Department of Health and Human Services to foster elderly patients in her home.
Then in 2011, when Olivia was just eight, the New Boston police received a report that one of the Atkocaitis’s three biological children told a school counselor that he and his siblings were subject to cruel and degrading punishments, and were brutally beaten by both their parents, but that their adoptive sister Olivia was suffering even worse abuse.
In a Feb. 1, 2011, interview with police and a DCYF worker present, the high schooler described in detail of how Olivia had often been beaten with a cross whip, pushed down the stairs, and handcuffed to a metal pole in the basement where she would sometimes be held for several weeks at a time in a padlocked, dungeon-like room.
She was given only a bucket to go to the bathroom in, said the teenaged boy, and that he and another brother would often wear military gear, including gas masks, when they were sent in to empty it and clean Olivia’s room.
After interviewing the Atkocaitis’s son, police went to the house and observed the dungeon room he described and made a report of it to the DCYF.
In their reports, police described the room as a small “8x8 room” with no lighting and darkened windows covered with chicken wire. They also noted an alarm on the door.
But no action was taken against Thomas and Denise Atkocaitis.
A trail of internal memos show that a chance to help Olivia was lost to minor technicalities. According to a Feb. 6, 2011 police memo entitled “supplemental narrative, an officer wrote that the Child Advocacy Center (CAC) used by the DCYF to interview children was refusing to interview Olivia because it was against their policy for the accused parent to drive them to the appointment.
“They stated it was against policy to have the perpetrators bring the victim to the interview,” the officer wrote. According to the memo, the officer suggested to the DCYF “to attempt” to find someone else to bring Olivia in for the interview including her older brother. DCYF responded by saying they would “relay the matter” to Denise and Thomas Aktocaitis’s attorney. However, there is no more mention of the issue in following memos.
More than a month later in a March 27, 2011 memo, the same officer wrote that then-Police Chief Christopher Krajenka ordered Olivia’s case suspended until “we hear anything further from DCYF.”
Four years later, in 2015, came a new round of police reports involving Olivia, but not of stories rescuing the girl—instead, of returning her back to the Atkocaitis’s home.
Following one of those returns, an officer wrote in his June 19, 2015, incident report that he told escaped Olivia “what she did was wrong” and that she “understood the ramifications.”
Two years later in 2017, New Boston police arrested Denise Atkocaitis for assaulting a child in the home—but it was not Olivia, but instead one of her biological children. According to the report, Denise became “violently angry” against the child for posting on social media that she was a bad parent. Police also cited that there were guns in the house and reported the incident to the DCYF.
The agency ruled the case “unfounded.”
In 2018, as police reports show, Olivia made more escapes.
Police did start asking questions. But to allay their concerns, Thomas and Denise told them that Olivia had been diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) and in a separate encounter, told them she had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (OOD)—both behavioral problems often attributed to adopted children. It turned out that neither was true.
The New Boston PD issued “BOLOS”—Be On the Look Out—bulletins and described Olivia, now 13, as a runaway juvenile. In what would finally become her permanent escape, the police brought out its K9 unit to track her.
They even retrieved a piece of clothing from “her basement” room to help the dog pick up her scent. In the Sept. 9, 2018, report on the incident, one police officer described how another police officer “after being down in the room for some time ... found it difficult to breathe and asked to go back upstairs.”
Red Flags and Disturbing Allegations
Even before her adoption was approved by the DCYF and Wide Horizons, there were red flags about Olivia’s soon-to-be parents who had allegedly forced her to drink hot sauce and eat her own vomit as punishment.According to the NH lawsuit, in 2003, before Atkocaitis’s adoption, Wide Horizons visited the home of Thomas and Denise Atkocaitis and interviewed their own children, who said their father beat them with a belt, according to the complaint.
Wide Horizon reported to the DCYF, but neither agency investigated the allegation and less than a year later, the Atkocaitises were allowed to adopt Olivia.
Olivia was born in China’s Hunan Province during the country’s “one-child policy.” The policy, says Lewis, created a side market for U.S. adoption agencies and thus an answer to a high demand for babies by American couples.
He believes that DCYF and Wide Horizons were willfully blinded by the couple’s large, imposing home.
He also blames sexism, racial, and other discriminations, pointing out in the lawsuit that the Atkocaitis children, now full-grown adults, said their parents frequently made racial slurs about Olivia, often calling her a “pug-nosed Chink.”
And while the Atkocaitis’s other three children were allowed to attend school, Olivia was not.
She went to school for one day, and then disappeared without any question from the school, says Lewis. Goffstown School District SAU19 Superintendent Brian Balke, also named in the suit, told The Epoch Times he couldn’t comment on the pending suit.
Records show that the first time DCYF or police were contacted by the school appears to be only after one of the Atkocaitis’s children sought out help from a school counselor.
Lewis also pointed out that when the Atkocaitis’s son ran away from home alleging abuse, police didn’t track him down and return him back to his parents like they did Olivia, but instead, delivered him to another home, at the boy’s request.
He also believes that sexist problems that have plagued the New Boston police are still in practice, referencing a lawsuit filed against the department for its alleged coverup of actions by a member of the force who rated females he arrested on a “rapability scale.”
Then, there is the long and highly publicized history of the DCYF not following up on abuse allegations, including the now nationally-famous case of Harmony Montgomery, the 5-year-old New Hampshire girl whose disappearance went unnoticed for years.
Olivia’s case, he said, is just the latest in what he called an “enormous dysfunction in New Hampshire when it comes to protecting children.”
For some reason, he added, both New Hampshire’s administration and elected officials have made child abuse a low priority, while financial crimes have been investigated—the New Hampshire Legislature voted last year to award $10 million in compensation to victims of a Ponzi scheme run by the company Financial Resources Mortgage.
The award was based on allegations that multiple state agencies had failed to investigate complaints against the company.
“We gave money to victims of FRM, so what’s the justification for doing that and not protecting children, and providing relief for children the state failed through its illegal processes?” Lewis asked.
Lewis calls upon New Hampshire lawmakers to pass a civil rights bill to set up a compensation fund for child abuse victims like Olivia who have been failed by the state.
While Olivia is attending college now, she has been handed a lifetime of avoidable trauma to contend with, Lewis said.
Among the seemingly endless horrifying details given by the same authorities, who did not think to immediately remove Olivia from her home after the first round of allegations of abuse, was a police report describing an article of clothing so filthy and saturated with feces and urine that it had to be peeled from the back of the door where Olivia was kept.
In addition to monetary damages, the law also seeks a court order that the police and other government agencies violated Olivia’s civil rights and rights to be protected from child abuse under New Hampshire law.
