The Missouri AP has a bizarre story about a Joplin daycare provider who allegedly drove a baby girl in her care to Arkansas on multiple occasions in an attempt to adopt the child to a pair of would-be parents in Lincoln.

The baby’s birth parents had no idea the woman, Lasonya Poindexter, was transporting their child across state lines while she was supposed to be in daycare. The adoptive parents didn’t either:

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Her plot fell apart in July when the would-be adoptive parents, Laura and Garry Parton, became suspicious and reached out to the baby’s birth parents, Ashley and Christian Still, on Facebook, an affidavit says.

The affidavit says Poindexter first contacted the Arkansas couple through a friend in June and began making arrangements for them to adopt the infant girl who, along with a sibling, was being left in her care a few days a week. Poindexter’s trips to Arkansas for the couple to bond with the baby lasted two to three hours each.

Poindexter has been charged with federal attempted kidnapping and is in custody. Here’s the affidavit.

It’s not clear from the affidavit just what Poindexter was trying to get out this scheme, but the story is a reminder that illicit adoptions can and do happen. A case in point is the frequent adoptions of Marshallese infants in Northwest Arkansas to American families, some of which take place under questionable circumstances and with little legal oversight (and to great profit for the attorneys involved). Reporter Kathryn Joyce brought attention to Arkansas’s Marshallese adoption circuit in an article for the New Republic in 2015.

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