Monday, December 3, 2012

The monster continues to hunt and hurt

When does it end?  Does she ever stop?  When will lawmakers listen?

When I began my blog a few years ago I did so for two reasons.  #1 to help bring more public awareness to adoption scam and help protect other hopeful adoptive parents from being devastated  and  #2 to heal myself and release the painful scars Amy Ost left on me.

As time passed I wrote in spurts and then pretty much stopped.  My blog reads, for the most part, as my personal story and when I started reliving the emotional rape I suffered I would uncover bits and pieces I had forgotten or rather stored away as not to remember. I got to a point where I couldn't continue.  I honestly feel very selfish for quitting because perhaps I could have helped keep just one person, like me, from getting her heart ripped out by Amy and other adoption scammers.

Last year (2011), Amy conned a precious family from Idaho who contacted me and we all worked with law enforcement to try to bring her to justice.  But what happened?  She got away with it.  Again.  Because Amy isn't afraid to work with attorneys or agencies, her scams are not limited to the internet.  I shutter to think about all the people she has destroyed with her vicious, evil lies and games.  She doesn't even stop with preying on potential adoptive parents.  She cons men out of money and preys on other women.  She scours them out as a lover, reveals she is pregnant and they will be a family and steals their money and hearts.  She portrays herself as a helpless victim of rape and abuse and houses herself in shelters...shelters that struggle to help those who really need the help.

Now, she is at it again.  She is parading all over the country as I speak, emotionally raping women's dreams of becoming a mother to her baby.  She is stealing from shelters and those who feel sorry for her and want to help her in some instances, raise her baby.  She warns women to watch out for scammers because there was a big one uncovered in Nashville a few years ago.  What is perhaps most disturbing to me is that now, according to her more recent victims,  it's become more of an emotional game than a financial prowl.  She won't take much, if anything, financially from those she promises the baby to.  It's not a matter of "buying a baby" for these potential parents, it's about helping the women who wants to give them her child.  It doesn't matter what educational background, intellect,  financial stability, or lifestyle...Amy is a seasoned, well versed professional in destroying the lives of women who long for a child.  Once Amy told me she did it because she wanted to be like me and have the perfect life with a husband, house and kids.  She told me she wanted to be loved and needed by someone.  It's a sick mental game and after seeing her personally after scamming me, she still didn't realize what she had done.  I've said it a million times and I'll say it again.  Her eyes were empty.

As time passes and I come into contact with the women she has hurt, I try to facilitate change and knowledge, but she slides right through the cracks again becoming more stealthy and knowledgeable to the laws and ways of the court in the process.  She has made a mockery of potential parents, potential birth mothers and women who have placed their child for adoption, men and women she has built relationships with, the goodwill of shelters and those who have given her financial help and yes, our government.  Where is the passion?  Where is the anger and outburst that occurred after my story aired?  After the Vest's story aired?  Where is the caring from lawmakers to protect their citizens?  Per FBI, unless it's over 10k there is no case.  Law officials shake their heads because they literally have to search for a way to charge her and after all their work, it's thrown out of court.  According to public defender Chuck Pascal argued that one of Amy's victims weren't physically offended or otherwise endangered by Slanina's lie. "She took on a persona and lied and, as a result of that lie — what? — somebody flew here from Idaho? So what?" Pascal said. "If I were to start criminalizing when one person lies and, as a result of that lie, other people take an action, then everybody's in jail."
 
So this is what we are up against, which leaves me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. 

Another Holiday....time for Amy to resurface

November 10, 2012

Pregnancy scammer on the lam

KITTANNING — A woman with a criminal history of scamming people into showering her with attention and money by pretending to be pregnant or telling other sob stories is on the lam again, this time accused of staying at a battered women’s shelter in western Pennsylvania under false pretenses.

Amy Slanina, 33, was charged with theft of services after staying at the Helping All Victims in Need Shelter in Kittanning on Dec. 4-30 of last year and claiming to be married to a Pittsburgh police officer who abused her.

Slanina was supposed to stand trial or plead guilty in September, but, as she has other times when she’s perpetrated other scams in several states in the past, she’s disappeared.

A court summons for that appearance, mailed to the Ohio Reformatory for Women, was returned to sender with the word “Released” written in bold, black felt-tip marker. How and why western Pennsylvania authorities lost track of Slanina isn’t clear, and the man most responsible for tracking her down, Armstrong County District Attorney Scott Andreassi, hasn’t talked.

He did not respond to repeated telephone messages, nor a request for comment made at his office Thursday.

HAVIN’s executive director, Jo Ellen Bowman, said she’s concerned that law enforcement officials don’t take scammers such as Slanina seriously enough because their crimes seem relatively minor. Slanina’s free stay cost the shelter $1,250 and is considered a misdemeanor theft in Pennsylvania because it involved less than $2,000.

“But what may be insignificant to some may be a significant amount to others,” Bowman said, noting her shelter’s state funding increased by $2,000 for the first time in nine years. But there’s more than just money at stake.

“You can’t put a dollar amount on the emotional impact that woman inflicted and the pain she inflicted,” Bowman said.

While staying at HAVIN, Slanina struck up an online friendship with an Idaho couple whom she convinced to fly to Pennsylvania so they could adopt the baby she claimed to be carrying. Kittanning police initially charged Slanina in that case too, only to withdraw the charges because no money changed hands, so her tall tale wasn’t a crime under Pennsylvania law.

Try telling that to the Idaho couple, Barry and Rebecca Vest, who wonder what makes Slanina tick. “Are you that miserable that you have to make other people miserable?” Rebecca Vest said.

Or ask Jen Asbury, a Morgantown, W.Va., woman Slanina befriended and lived with last year. Slanina had convinced Asbury, a former Army reservist, that she was pregnant and wanted to marry Asbury and raise the child.

Police and Slanina’s targets say she gets away with the pregnancy claims because of her convincing line and her 5-foot-4, 175-pound build. The last time Asbury saw her in November 2011, Slanina said she was leaving to visit her newborn in a neonatal intensive care unit where, Slanina claimed, she had given birth prematurely during a trip to Pittsburgh weeks before.

A few weeks later, Slanina was busted for her stay at HAVIN and Asbury was recounting her story to the AP.

“It just amazes me that she does these terrible things and while it may not be a crime, per se, she emotionally rapes people,” Asbury said last week. She continues to scour the Internet for clues as to where Slanina might be.

Slanina was jailed in Kittanning until March, when a judge reduced her bond so she could be released and return to Ohio, where she was wanted on a parole violation.

She had met a Fredericktown, Ohio, woman online and persuaded the woman and her elderly mother to let her move in with them in 2010 and to lend her money to pay child support for children she doesn’t have.

Slanina promised to repay the women from “millions of dollars” she claimed to have inherited but said the money was frozen in a bank account due to red tape. The Fredericktown women believed her, right up to the day in February 2010 that Slanina borrowed the elderly woman’s car to “run some errands” and never returned.

Slanina served a few months in prison and was paroled in July 2011, before she was sent back to the Ohio prison in June because her Pennsylvania arrest violated her parole there.

Slanina was released again in August, but authorities in Pennsylvania hadn’t gotten a court order that she be returned, and she hasn’t been heard from since. She’s not in touch with Ohio correctional authorities who list her as a “violator at large,” and she’s a fugitive in Pennsylvania, where a judge issued a bench warrant in

September after she missed a court appearance.

Bowman has contacted every battered women’s shelter in Pennsylvania to ensure Slanina won’t find a home in any of them if she does come back.

“To misuse a system that is here to help people – in this type of way – is just really offensive,” Bowman said. “I just hope she gets stopped. ... I hope at some point, someone considers the cumulative effect of what she’s done and makes her pay for it.”

Slanina’s public defender, Preston Younkins, wouldn’t comment on the HAVIN charges, except to say he had been hoping to work out a plea bargain before Slanina skipped.

As to her whereabouts, “At this point, you have about the same information I have,” he said.