Leaving 9 kids under safe haven law was the best he could do, Staton says

Gary Staton has no regrets. Most of the time.

As soon as he left nine of his 10 children at Creighton University Medical Center in September, a huge weight lifted from his shoulders.

The heaviness had been building for a year and a half, since the day his wife died and left him the single parent of kids then ages 1 month, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16.

They needed forms filled out for school. They needed a place to live. They needed a father. Day after day after day.

But Staton was overwhelmed and out of money. And even with the help of his oldest daughter, he said the stress of it all made him lose the will to be a parent.

Until now, Gary Staton has mostly kept his silence.

But Staton, 36, and daughter Amoria Micek, 19, gave extended interviews to The World-Herald recently after Staton decided to legally relinquish custody of most of the children.

At the time Staton left his kids, Nebraska’s safe haven law had no age limit. After 27 parents and guardians used the law to drop off kids, the Legislature limited it to newborns.

Staton’s family wasn’t like some of the other safe haven families, which had trouble getting help for adolescents with behavioral problems or mental illnesses.

State workers who spoke to the kids soon after they were dropped off found them to be polite and well-mannered. Although a few were a little behind in school, most of the others were excelling. Their teachers reported they were well-liked by their classmates and were motivated to work hard.

Staton agrees he didn’t try to first get help from relatives or take advantage of public or private safety net programs.

It appears the safe haven law was a way out for an overwhelmed single father.

The seven youngest live in Lincoln with a maternal aunt who hopes to adopt them. Foster parents of the two oldest boys will seek guardianship, Gary Staton said.

Their big sister says all of the kids are comfortable with their new lives and are working on renewing their relationships with their father, who has visited them a handful of times over the past six months.

Staton wants to see them, but he knows he could never provide for them. His children will have a better life now, he believes.

“I still love them to death,” he said. “I’m just so worried about trying again and failing.”

Bows to his wife’s dream of big family

RebelJane Staton ruled her home as strongly as her name implies.

While Gary Staton brought home a paycheck, Rebel paid the bills, arranged for food stamps and sometimes found temporary jobs.

She grounded the kids when they brought home bad grades and assigned book work to help them improve. For three years, she home-schooled a few.

After Gary and Rebel married at age 18, he adopted Amoria, Rebel’s daughter from a previous relationship. Then the couple had one child a year for four years. They had two more, in 1997 and 1998. Then two more, in 2001 and 2002.

Rebel didn’t believe in using birth control, her husband said. The children were part of her dream of having a large family on a farm. Though they moved frequently, to various rental homes in north Omaha, she kept books on building barns.

Gary went along with the dream.

In January 2007, Rebel gave birth to a 10th child even though doctors had told her having more might pose a health risk.

A few days after returning home, Rebel complained of a small headache. On the seventh day home, she asked to go to the hospital.

She collapsed on the porch.

Doctors said Rebel had suffered a cerebral aneurysm. They put her in a coma to relieve her pain.

“The woman that had a say in everything,” Gary said, “was silent.”

Rebel underwent two surgeries. Then came word that Rebel, 34, was brain dead.

With a heavy heart, Gary signed a “do not resuscitate” order.

At night, five of the kids sought comfort by piling into a twin bed with Amoria.

Gary slept next to the phone.

The call he expected came Feb. 21, 2007.

With Rebel gone, exhaustion and tears

Without Rebel in the house, Gary and Amoria embarked on an exhausting schedule.

Work earning $10.75 an hour as a machinist ended for Gary at 2 a.m. After a few hours of sleep, he took the kids to school.

Amoria watched the baby while Gary rested or ran errands, then went to school at 11 a.m. She returned home at 2:30 p.m., just in time to watch the baby while Gary picked up the older kids from school.

Gary left for work at 4 p.m., when a baby sitter arrived to help Amoria through the evening.

Amoria graduated from high school a year early and delayed college to run the household.

In between shifts at a fast-food restaurant, she looked over the kids’ homework in the evenings and fed the baby a bottle in the middle of the night.

Managing the household’s finances was harder.

Sure, Gary made money. But Rebel always had paid the bills. All of that was foreign to him.

He cried on the porch with Amoria after the kids had been put to bed.

He cried alone on long walks through N.P. Dodge Memorial Park.

“Three different times I had a knife in my hand, ready to end myself,” he said. “But I couldn’t. I could (en)vision the kids crying at my funeral, and that would break my heart even more.”

Gary held on, but his desire to be a father was melting away.

“I was 100 percent sure that I couldn’t last much longer doing this routine over and over and I wanted to just walk away from it all.”

Too proud to ask Rebel’s kin for help

Almost a year to the day from Rebel’s death, Gary began dating a woman he had met on the MySpace social networking Web site.

Amoria was glad that her father was trying to move on, even if some of her siblings disagreed.

The girlfriend moved in with the family and pitched in. Gary felt better, but the living situation raised tensions.

A few of the kids later told a caseworker that the girlfriend would cry when they mentioned their mother. And jealousy emerged over the time Gary spent with his girlfriend.

Their relationship fell apart after three months. And so did Gary.

“Mentally, I crashed hard,” he said.

He began missing work, getting lazy and snapping at the kids when they asked questions. He thinks he was depressed, but never saw a doctor about it.

With an income tax refund sitting in the bank, Gary received permission from his employer in June to leave work to get his life together.

Come September, money was dwindling. Bills were due. The family received $900 a month in food stamps and $250 a month in Social Security benefits for seven of the nine children, but it wasn’t enough and the family was close to getting evicted.

Gary filled out job applications at his old workplace, but he never heard back. He was too proud to ask Rebel’s large extended family for help.

Though state officials calculated that the family had received almost $800,000 in different forms of government aid, including more than $600,000 in food stamps, Gary didn’t check into subsidized housing or other aid once he was out of work.

“I could have gone and asked the state for help, but I didn’t,” he said. “There was no place for me and the kids to go and we were just too many. It would have been crazy just trying to fit all of us in.”

About that time, he heard news reports that people were dropping off kids at area hospitals, invoking the safe haven law and facing no criminal penalty.

After some Internet research, Gary made his decision in late September.

He huddled the children — everyone except Amoria — and told them he was taking them to the hospital to talk about their mother’s death.

Gary looked stressed to Amoria, but she imagined he was worried about bills. Still, when she left to run errands, she had an unsettled feeling.

She called a neighbor: If he comes back without the kids, call me right away.

Gary gave the four older children bus money and drove the youngest five to Creighton.

At the hospital, he told a woman at the front desk that he wanted to use the safe haven law for his kids.

How many? she asked.

Nine, he replied.

Her eyes opened wide and her mouth dropped.

Gary handed her an envelope with the kids’ birth certificates and Social Security cards, then went into a room to talk to police.

When it came time for him to leave — he recalls it was about an hour later — he asked a hospital staffer to take the kids to a separate room so they didn’t have to see him leave.

The staffer walked Gary outside, hugged him and asked if he was OK.

He wasn’t — and yet he was.

Gary left the hospital heartbroken, but feeling less burdened than he had in a long time.

Not long after that, Amoria’s cell phone rang.

It was the neighbor, reporting that Gary was home.

Alone.

Story becomes Internet sensation

After she hung up, Amoria’s phone rang again.

This time, her father was on the line.

You need to come home, he told her. We need to talk.

Even though her heart understood why he had dropped off her siblings, Amoria unleashed all her fury at him: “What the hell did you just do?!”

Gary explained that he couldn’t make it financially anymore. He told her he didn’t want the kids to think he hadn’t tried.

Amoria was panicked, not knowing where her brothers and sisters had been taken. She left her dad and pulled together everyone she knew.

You will find these kids, she told them.

Meanwhile, news outlets began reporting that nine kids had been left at Creighton.

Amoria’s phone started ringing with calls from friends, former high school teachers and siblings’ teachers who guessed it was her family.

The family’s name was released the next day. Reporters camped out in front of the Staton house, waiting for someone to come home.

One of his friends told Gary the family’s story was an Internet sensation.

Not wanting to face the press, he slept in his car in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Amoria lost contact with her father for a few weeks while she focused her energy on her siblings.

Though she was the closest person the kids had to a mother, she had to pass a background check in order to visit them in foster care.

A few days after the kids were dropped off, she and other relatives raced to them.

When she arrived to see the youngest siblings, she sprinted to the front door and tore into the house. Everyone cried, happy to be reunited. One of her sisters cried so hard that Amoria took her outside to talk.

“I don’t care what you do,” she told the girl. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She helped move most of her siblings to an aunt’s home in Lincoln. In the following weeks, the kids gave Amoria a list of personal items they wanted from their old home.

As she was retrieving those, she ran into her father for the first time since the day he left the kids.

I forgive you, she told him. We need to move on. We need to work on some type of relationship, because I’m not ready to lose you.

“That’s how all the other kids are looking at it,” she said. “They’re not ready to lose another parent.”

Having more kids out of the question

Gary doesn’t want to lose them either — at least not completely.

Staton recently promised his kids that he would keep in touch and stay in Omaha.

But for now, he wants to stay out of the courts’ way.

Staton doesn’t know what he would have done if the original law had not been in place — probably put his pride aside and ask a relative for help, he said.

Amoria visits her siblings about once a week, though not having a driver’s license means she has to arrange rides. She still works part time at a fast-food restaurant, waking as early as 5 a.m. on the weekends to catch a bus to work.

She attends classes at Metropolitan Community College. She hopes to be a nurse or to work as an advocate for children in the foster care system.

Staton still is looking for a job. The high school dropout lives with a friend while he scours the Internet.

He and his ex-girlfriend are chatting online again and see each other occasionally.

Having more children, he said, is out of the question.

His decision to leave the children he had doesn’t haunt him.

“It was the best thing I could do for them.”