Traumatized & Unwilling to Speak: RT Searches for Families of 2 New Children in Baghdad Orphanage

Hadidja and Muhammad © RT   video 3:56

A search is underway for the families of two new arrivals at a Baghdad orphanage. The two children lost their parents, who are thought to have fled to Iraq to join ISIS. The children are traumatized by their experience and unwilling to speak.

Hadidja and Muhammad were recently brought to the same orphanage in the Iraqi capital, where other Russian-speaking children are being kept after their parents disappeared or were killed.

Their story is one of several that RT has already brought to light through its ‘Bring them home’ campaign, which appeals to anyone with information about the children in the videos to share it at children@rttv.ru.

Hadidja, who has severe burns on her foot, reacts aggressively when the orphanage personnel attempts to touch or address her. Muhammad was wounded in the leg and uses go-carts, as seen from the coverage.

Since start of the campaign, RT has received numerous calls from people who say they recognize children in the video. People shared heart-breaking stories about their sons, daughters, and in-laws who fled to join Islamic State.

In late August, five Russian-speaking children orphaned in Iraq were brought back home to Russia. The heartbreaking videos that featured sisters Fatima and Khadija, an older girl named Mariam, and two boys, Sultan Murad and Ali, allowed the relatives to identify the children. 

Earlier in August, a four-year-old Chechen boy, Bilal Tagirov, also returned to Russia after living with his jihadist father, who was fighting alongside IS in Mosul. 

Their return home is a complicated affair, as the children lack passports and there are bureaucratic hurdles and a difficult security situation in Iraq.

The Iraqi Embassy is actively cooperating with its Russian colleagues on the issue, Haidar Hadi, Iraqi Ambassador to Russia, told RT. 

“These children [in the orphanage] suffered a lot. And many of them are just 6-8 years old,” he said. Hadi recalled a case when one terrorist was asked why he took his son with him in Iraq. The man answered that it was easier to cross the border as the child arouses less suspicion, Hadi said.

RT is campaigning to help orphans stranded in war-torn Iraq to find their relatives and return home to safety and continues to appeal to family members who may recognize any of the children shown in RT’s coverage to get in touch with the channel at children@rttv.ru

I wonder if other countries are making attempts to identify and repatriate orphaned children from ISIS. 

Parents who take their children into that insanity will pay a high price when they stand before God, for the suffering they put them through.

Russian Boy Kidnapped by Gypsies Found 16 Years Later

‘He can’t read or write, or tell time’: 

Vasily at 6, and after being found last month © Interior Ministry

A boy long-thought dead was found in southern Russia, after escaping the Romani settlement which he was kidnapped in when he was a six-year-old back in 2000. The man has no formal education. His biological parents are dead, and his future remains uncertain.

In late July, a policeman found an apparently homeless man illegally sleeping in someone else’s parked van in the city of Volgograd.

When the man, possessing a sheaf of blonde hair, was taken to the station and asked to provide ID, he said he had no documents, and that he was a gypsy by the name of Dmitry Mikhay.

“Are you sure? Have you seen yourself in the mirror? Your complexion is way too light,” said the on-duty policeman, according to daily Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, whose journalist interviewed the officers dealing with the case.

The detainee immediately confessed that it wasn’t his real name, and that he remembers only that he was called Vasily, when he was snatched by gypsies on his way home from an outdoor market where his mother was a trader.

Police began to scan missing persons records. As well as a name, officers had another distinctive detail to work with – a large birthmark on Vasily’s chest.

Soon, a likely candidate came up. Vasily Musofranov, a six-year old boy, “missing two bottom front teeth” and with a birthmark on his chest, who disappeared 16 years ago from the small town of Shakty, 350 km away. Musofranov’s case was opened as a murder investigation back in 2002, and remained unsolved.

One look at the photograph was enough to convince police they were on the right path: the boy looked like a grown-up version of the child in a photograph that had been circulated in the media dozens of times in the past decade and a half.

To obtain definitive evidence, the body of Musofanov’s father was exhumed, and a DNA sample taken, which produced a match.


The couple accused of staging the kidnapping © Interior Ministry

Within days a 48 year-old woman and a 46 year-old man from a nearby Romani settlement had been arrested. In a statement, police have said that the couple have “made a full admission of guilt.”


No family to return to

According to the police, Vasily called his kidnappers “’mother’ and ‘father’, and his four new siblings ‘brother’ and sister.’”

“I was scared at first, but then got used to it,” Vasily has told Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Initially, his hair was dyed black to avoid suspicion, and he was never sent to school, meaning that he cannot read or write, or tell time.

From the age of 16 he was forced to work to earn an income, which he gave to his “mother,” but last year he grew resentful, and decided to escape. From then on, he lived as a hobo, surviving by begging and doing odd jobs.

Vasily has now been placed with a volunteer foster family, while his future is decided.

But a happy ending is some way off.

His closest surviving relative is aunt Elizaveta Bogomolova, who lives in Shakhty. She has said that his birth parents were problem drinkers, who were repeatedly fired from jobs, and were incapable of looking after their young son.

His father, an Afghan war vet, died soon after the kidnapping, while the mother suffered a long decline, losing another child in infancy, before dying herself.

Bogomolova says she is ready to help teach Vasily how to read and write, but is unsure if she can provide him with accommodation, as he prepares to return to life under his own name. His only other close relative is a half-sister, from his father’s first marriage, who emigrated to Finland even before Vasily disappeared.

The Defining Issue of Our Time

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the G20 Summit's chairman, decided that the event should focus on economic issues. But, in fact, the summit is hardly focused at all.

Canadian PM Harper agreed with Abbot but added that he expected the recent climate change deal between the U.S. and China, setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions, would also be a topic of discussion among the leaders of the world's top economies, as well as a host of other issues.

G20 Summit, Brisbane, Australia

The Summit started with a bit of a mauling of Russian President Putin for being a bully in Ukraine and for stationing 4 Russian Destroyers off the coast of Australia. The bully didn't appear to like being bullied and so was preparing to leave early.

On the sidelines of the summit, Obama pledged a $3 billion US contribution to the so-called Green Climate Fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change and develop cleaner sources of energy.

The move reportedly is part of Obama's intention to use his last two years in office pushing forward climate change policy.

Environmentalists have demanded climate be on the agenda at the G20 meeting, and the head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, called on the G20 to make the environment a priority in a news conference at the summit.

"Climate change is the defining issue of our times; it's only natural that G20 leaders should focus much more on this," he said.

Is climate change the defining issue of our times? While the US is spending $3 billion to help poorer countries adopt a cleaner environmental lifestyle, children in those countries are being raped by family members or sold as young as 4 years old to much older men for marriage, or to pimps who will use them at any age. In either case you are looking at thousands of rapes of those children before they turn 19.

Almost 1/3rd of a billion children are introduced to sexual molestation every 18 years. 75% of them will be repeatedly sexually abused. No-one seems to know the average number of abuses a child endures, but if it is as low as 5, the total number of CSAs every 18 years will be in the billions. If that number is 15 or higher, the total will be in the 10s of billions. Annual numbers are in the 100s of millions. 

Globally, a new child is introduced to sexual violation every 0.9 seconds. Because of repeated offences hundreds of children are sexually assaulted every minute. Depending on the average number of repeat offences and the average duration of each offence, the number of child sexual assaults occurring this very minute rises quickly into the thousands.

Between 20 and 33% of all American girls under 19 will be sexually abused. The culture of rape in universities makes it quite probable that a first year female student will suffer sexual abuse at the hands of fraternities or 'friends'.

 In the US an incident of child abuse is reported, on average, every l0 seconds. More than 2.9 million reports were made in 2003; the actual incidence is presumed to be much higher.
- A Month of Mental Health Facts:  Prepared by the staff of the Child Study Center   © 2006 Child Study Center, NYU School of Medicine

 "There are 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, and an estimated 80 to 100,000 of them are missing."

No, Mr Obama, Mr Ban Ki-moon, climate changes is not the defining issue of our time. Our spectacular sexual abuse of our children and our lack of enthusiasm to end CSA, is the defining issue of our time. That's how this generation will be defined; by us spending all our money and energies on wars and climate change, while our children suffer needlessly, and horrendously. Some of us will not do well when we stand before God in judgement!

American Pervert Round-up #4, Pastor, 2 Teachers & More

Former pastor pleads guilty in child sex abuse case

LURAY, Virginia -- A former pastor in Luray and Shenandoah County has pleaded guilty to six counts in a child molestation case in Page County Circuit Court.

The plea agreement of James Richard Daley, 71, a pastor at the Lebanon Lutheran Church in Lebanon Church for several years in the 1980s, did not specify any sentencing recommendations but Daley could spend the rest of his life in prison. Page County Commonwealth's Attorney Kenneth Alger II said the five felony counts of indecent liberties with a child and one felony count of aggravated sexual battery to a child less than 13 years old carry a prison term of up to 45 years.

Daley and his wife Margaret were arrested in mid-July after someone reported suspicions of child abuse to the Luray Police Department. James Daley has been held without bond in jail since then.

Daley was pastor at Beth Eden Lutheran Church in Luray at the time of his arrest. He and his wife operated a day care center out of their home, which served as a parsonage for one of several churches at which James Daley was a minister, according to authorities.

The town subsequently revoked the business license under which Margaret Daley operated the day care center.

Margaret Daley was convicted a few days ago in juvenile and domestic relations court on a new charge of failure to report a case of suspected child sexual abuse. She has appealed the case to Page County Circuit Court. Her conviction in juvenile and domestic relations court, if upheld, would require her to serve 10 days in jail out of a total sentence of 90 days.

The case against Margaret Daley also included a conviction on contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She is not appealing the latter conviction, which involves a fine of $500.


FORT MADISON, Iowa (AP) — A 69-year-old Fort Madison man has made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual abuse and one of lascivious acts with a child.

The Fort Madison Daily Democrat says  Roger Mendez made the pleas on Friday. Prosecutor Clinton Boddicker told Judge John Linn that Mendez also agreed to plead guilty later to three misdemeanors.

Police investigator David Doyle says that following Mendez's arrest in January, several other people came forward with accusations. Doyle says Mendez had victimized seven males, ages 7 to 20.

Doyle says the oldest accuser had made allegations years ago, but police couldn't develop enough evidence for charges then.


Casper, Wyoming man pleads guilty to child sex abuse

A Casper man pleaded guilty in Natrona County District Court on Wednesday to sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl.

William Allen Reed pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree sex abuse of a minor, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The incident occurred in August 2010 while the girl was staying at Reed’s home in Casper.

Reed pleaded guilty through an Alford plea, meaning he did not admit committing the crime but recognized he would likely be convicted at trial because of the strength of the state’s evidence.

A charge of child sexual abuse in the third degree was dismissed in accordance with the plea deal.


Warrensburg teacher arrested in child sex abuse investigation

Gasconade County Sheriff’s deputies on Tuesday afternoon arrested a former Warrensburg, Missouri, teacher wanted in connection with a felony child sexual abuse investigation from Johnson County.

Darron Joseph Chapmam, 36, of Warrensburg, was stopped at 2:30 p.m. June 24 on Route B entering Gasconade County near Redbird. Chapman was wanted on a Johnson County warrant alleging one count of statutory rape and four counts of statutory sodomy for offenses against a girl, now 10, which occurred at his home between October 2008 (her fifth birthday) and last Friday (June 20).

A $500,000 cash only bond was set. Chapman resigned his position as the IT director in the Warrensburg School District on June 17, according to a television report posted online.  He was charged Tuesday.


Piano teacher's wife does not believe child sex abuse allegations 

EAST GOSHEN, Pennsylvania — The wife of a piano teacher accused of molesting several of his young students said Wednesday she does not believe the allegations against her husband. I wonder if she knows Dottie Sandusky?

Anton Fomin, 44, of East Pikeland, Chester County, PA waived his right to two preliminary hearings on Wednesday in connection to allegations that he sexually abused five 6-year-olds and an 11-year-old during private piano lessons at the Malvern School of Music.

He faces a slew of felony abuse offenses in separate cases after investigators filed two sets of charges against him earlier this month.

Following the hearing, Fomin’s wife, Tatiana Abramova, said she did not believe her husband would harm children and said she believes there is more to the story.

“He is my husband, and I trust him,” said Abramova. “He is a noble man. I don’t believe he would do anything to harm those children. He wouldn’t be able to harm anyone, I know he wouldn’t.”

Abramova said she has been with her husband for more than 20 years, since they met in Russia before moving to the United States, and in that time she has never seen anything to make her believe he is capable of harming children.

“I just hope this works out for my family,” Abramova said. “There is more to it.”

Despite Abramova’s confidence in her husband, prosecutors say the evidence suggests otherwise. Three of the children allegedly told investigators that Fomin touched them inappropriately during private lessons, according to the complaint. Three others allegedly reported that Fomin showed them pictures of nude children and adults during their lessons, but did not tell investigators that he ever touched them.

Investigators also executed a search of Fomin’s East Pikeland home and allegedly discovered photographs of nude children and adults, including himself, on his personal computer, according to a criminal complaint.

After Wednesday’s proceeding, Fomin’s cases will now head to the Chester County Court of Common Pleas, where he will face trial on over 40 counts of sexual abuse and related offenses. A formal arraignment was scheduled for July 3, according to court records.

Following the waiver, Fomin was transported back to Chester County Prison in lieu of $300,000 bail for each case.

When You Thought Man's Depravity Couldn't Get Any Lower - You Hear This

You've heard about the gay couple who adopted a little Russian boy for the purpose of sexual exploitation by themselves and their friends.

You've heard about parents so desperately poor that they have sold one or more of their children as slaves, or sexual slaves - as young as 4 years old.

You've heard about organized crime syndicates arranging the sales of babies to infertile mothers desperate to have a child.

You've heard that such babies may have been kidnapped.

You've heard of the recent (March) raid on a baby factory in Nigeria where 8 pregnant women were rescued.

You might not know that similar raids were carried out in 2008, and two in 2011 where dozens of women were rescued. Denmark just passed a law forbidding the adoption of children from Nigeria.

You might not know that some of these women, or girls, were offered free abortions, but when they showed up at the hospital, they were locked up until their baby was born, whereupon it was removed and sold to some waiting customer.

You might find it hard to believe, but there are baby factories in India.

You might not know that baby factories are a thriving business in eastern Europe, especially Greece. Run by Organized Crime syndicates from Russia and Albania, they are increasing rapidly. 

The Daily Mail: The Greek authorities admit the babies-for-sale racket is worsening. 'This is an escalating problem, the scale of which is impossible to grasp,' said Lieutenant Colonel Antonia Andreakou, director of the Greek police's public security division, which handles cross-border crime.

Ms Andreakou said her department had traced nine sales of Bulgarian infants in the first six months of this year and arrested 33 suspected mediators - 24 Bulgarians, seven Greeks (including doctors and lawyers) and two Albanians.

'This is just a fraction of the number of cases,' she said. 'We need to prove that money has exchanged hands, as this is what makes the transaction illegal, but that is very difficult to do.'

Last month, five Albanians were arrested near the Greek-Albanian border for the alleged sale of eight Roma infants.

The gangs recruit the women in several ways. One, say police sources, is to seek out a young, attractive, healthy woman and tell her they can organise a false passport and papers to enable her to enter Greece.

Once this has been done, the girl is presented with a huge bill which she is unable to pay. She is then told that the debt will be written off if she gets pregnant and gives up her baby.

'The girls have no option but to comply,' says a police source. 'You would not want to upset these people.'

It is believed that these women are made pregnant by members of the gang - a man inevitably caught up in the other mafia 'businesses' of drug dealing and prostitution.

Another method of 'recruitment' is to prey on pregnant women who are drug addicts. They are offered money in return for their baby.

Some pregnant women or new mothers from poor states like Bulgaria and Romania, will voluntarily go to Athens to sell their babies. Some women, or girls, are literally kidnapped off the streets of Europe, drugged, smuggled across borders and chained to a bed in baby factory. One minute they are out on a date - the next thing they know, they are waking up a prisoner in a different country.

If that's not bad enough, some mafia type comes in and rapes the girl repeatedly until she is pregnant. Once her pregnancy is complete, the baby is nursed for awhile then removed and sold. 

The girl may be used again, or she may be forcibly hooked on drugs and sold or moved to a brothel where she will work until she is no more use. Then she is thrown out on the street where she will soon die of sickness or starvation.

Basically, the minute she drinks that drink with the date-rape drug, her life is over.

What happens to the children? 

Some are sold to adoptive parents who, like people who buy a dog from a puppy-mill, have no idea of the dreadful circumstances of the pregnancy or birth. They have a chance at a somewhat 'normal' life although never knowing their real parents or even their heritage.

Others are not so fortunate. They may end up as slaves working in factories, mines or farms. Some may end up as domestic slaves. Some will have limbs hacked off and are sent out onto the streets to beg. Children with missing limbs gain more sympathy than others.

Some will end up being sold to pedophiles to be used and abused,  others to brothels where sex-tourists pay a very high dollar to molest little children - the younger, the better.

Less commonly, some may even be sold to be tortured and/or sacrificed in black magic or witchcraft rituals.

Are you praying about child sex abuse (CSA)? Are you praying my 3:15 PM prayer, or something like it? Are you praying daily or weekly. 

While there are excellent groups that you can support who work against CSA, only God can bring it to an end; and He cannot do that without our prayers. Please pray, and please get this message to as many people as you can.

Pedophile Pair Buys Russian Baby for Sex Abuse

An Australian, who together with his domestic partner, bought a newborn boy in Russia and allowed men around the world to abuse him, has been sentenced in a US court to 30 years in jail.

Peter Truong, 36, born in Vietnam, and his partner Mark Newton, 42, born in the US, both Australian citizens, bought a newborn boy in Russia for US$8,000, according to prosecutors.

The boy’s birth papers were falsified to list Newton as his biological father. The fraud then allowed the boy to be adopted and taken to Queensland, Australia, where the pair lived.

Law enforcers assume the pair allowed at least eight men in different countries, including Australia, the US, Germany and France, to abuse the boy between the ages of two and six. The men recorded videos of their own sexual assaults on the baby and distributed them across a global pedophile web-source, known as the Boy Lovers Network.

In June, Mark Newton was sentenced for the maximum term of 40 years by a US judge in Indianapolis.

Truong and Newton with the child they bought

Truong faced a similar sentence. He however struck a plea deal with prosecutors. The deal could have allowed a minimum of 24 years. Both men were tried in the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.

While announcing the sentence in Indianapolis on Monday, District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker emphasized Truong’s cooperation with the authorities in helping them find other pedophiles. She also noted the fact the accused was himself a victim of childhood abuse.

The pedophile pair was arrested in Los Angeles in 2011. The boy has now reportedly been adopted by a US family.

The story caused a stir in the Russian media, with the country’s Ombudsman for Children’s Rights Pavel Astakhov promising to closely follow the boy’s life in the new family, as according to Russian law an adopted child remains a Russian citizen until adulthood.

“Russian orphans have always attracted foreign perverts because of accessibility. The foreigners were simply coming and taking children for money,” Astakhov told RT following Newton’s sentencing in June.

The story of the Australian pedophile pair once again added fuel to the debate over the issue of adoptions of Russian children by foreign citizens, which split the society, when the so-called ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’ was adopted in 2012.

Dima Yakolov

The law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children was named after a two-year old Russian boy, who died in 2008 from heatstroke after his adoptive US father left him locked in a car on a hot day. 

The supporters of the law have cited multiple cases of abuse from the US adoptive parents against Russian children. According to Pavel Astakhov, 19 Russian children have been killed in American families since 2001. 

The law’s opponents believe it’s a politically-motivated response to the US Magnitsky Act – the entry ban and asset freeze on Russian tax, law and court officials who, in view of the authors of the act, are guilty of violations of Human Rights.

In June 2013, Russia’s State Duma passed an amendment that bans the adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples from abroad and in September the coal-mining territory of Kemerovo voted to completely outlaw adoptions of local children by foreigners, making it the first region of the Russian Federation to introduce such a radical measure. Kemerovo MPs recently suggested that the State Duma follow suit with a complete ban on foreign adoptions.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev praised the laws restricting foreign adoptions, saying they resulted in increased number of domestic adoptions, which grew by 5,000 compared to 2012.

Medvedev also stressed that most of the children who had their American adoptions suspended when the Dima Yakovlev Law came into force had found new families in Russia.

“In all, we had 259 kids who were about to leave for America. All but 95 of them still have not received accommodation in a new family,” he reported. “We will definitely bring this process to its logical conclusion.”

Private Citizens Ready to Pay for Castration of Pedophiles

Three Russians – a member of the Public Chamber, a lawyer and a businessman – have volunteered to sponsor chemical castration for paedophiles.

The activists put forward their proposal to the lower house of parliament and the government, which had earlier criticized a law on chemical castration as being too pricy, writes Izvestia daily.

In 2011, the then Healthcare Minister Tatyana Golikova said the problem had no easy solution and that the use of the suggested method against rapists would cost 8mln roubles ($265,000) per year.

“We are ready to help the state with our own money,” Veniamin Rodnyansky from the Public Chamber told the newspaper.

Another person behind the idea businessman Andrey Ryabinsky is confident that there are quite a few people in Russia who are ready to donate money to protect children from violence.

A third proponent, advocate Shota Gorgadze said he was ready to provide not only financial, but also judicial help in fighting paedophiles.

According to official statistics, 401 children less than 14 years of age were raped in Russia between January and October last year, three more died as a result of sexual battery. However, experts say that the real number of sex abuse victims might be a lot higher as children often do not tell anyone what happened to them because of embarrassment or because they were threatened.

The idea of introducing chemical castration for paedophiles has been mulled over for a number of years, before the then President Dmitry Medvedev signed it into law in February 2012.

However, opponents of the method say that it is not efficient as a deterrent. Besides that, unlike surgical castration, it is reversible when the treatment is discontinued.

“Chemical castration requires a systematic use of medication. There’s no mechanism that would help to monitor whether the criminal regularly takes it,” MP Irina Manuilova observed.

As lawmakers are racking their brains striving to find a solution to the problem and parents are living in fear for their children, the statistics regarding sexual crimes against children continues to rise.

This month, 8-year-old Vasilisa Galitsyna was kidnapped and allegedly raped and killed in Russia’s Tatarstan. In Chechnya, 10-year old Linda Vidryaeva was allegedly raped and strangled.

Police in Irkutsk region are searching for man who could be behind the alleged murder of 11-year-old Ulyana Alexeeva, whose body was found in a sandpit earlier last week.

Pro Golfer still Loves Dad Who Sexually Abused Him

Nikolai Kovalevsky Wheeler's adopted father was arrested Nov. 1 on child pornography charges.

BLUFFTON, South Carolina — As the oldest child of an impoverished Russian family with an alcoholic, widowed mother who was in and out of jail, 9-year-old Nikolai Kovalevsky did his best to care for his brother and sister.

He stole food so they could survive, at least until authorities sent the siblings to separate orphanages. Despondent, Kovalevsky went several months without talking.

Then, in 2002, the 12-year-old thought he had been blessed with a miracle. Christopher D. Wheeler, an affluent American bachelor from an upscale Chicago suburb, adopted him.

"Today I speak English fluently. I speak Russian fluently. I play professional golf. I have a lot of good friends. He's done a lot more for me than my real parents ever did. For that, I'll always be grateful," Nikolai Kovalevsky Wheeler, now 23, said in an interview last week at the home he and his father bought on the outskirts of Hilton Head Island, S.C., where the young man spends his days playing golf.

But Nikolai Wheeler's miracle came at a horrible price — sexual abuse from the man he counts as his savior, according to a court affidavit released after Christopher Wheeler, most recently headmaster at Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Del., was arrested Nov. 1 on 25 counts of dealing in child pornography.

Police said they found explicit images of men molesting boys during an Oct. 22 search of Wheeler's mansion on the campus of the elite private school.

Wheeler Mansion

At Wheeler's first court appearance Friday, Deputy Attorney General Abigail Layton said investigators had recovered more than 1,400 images of child porn from Christopher Wheeler's computers and devices.

Nikolai Wheeler and his father moved to Wilmington in 2005 after Christopher Wheeler was hired as headmaster at Tower Hill, an elite college preparatory school founded in 1919 with longstanding ties to the du Pont family and DuPont Co.

At the time of Wheeler's hire, Pierre du Pont Hayward, president of Tower Hill's board of trustees, lauded the selection of the new headmaster, who had attended Westtown Friends School in nearby Chester County. Tower Hill representatives who met Wheeler during visits to Illinois were impressed with his credentials, demeanor, tenacity and energy.

"When you look into the soul of Chris Wheeler, you see someone who is honest, straightforward, humble, smart and very capable," Hayward said at the time.

Christopher Wheeler beat out 44 candidates to win the post, heading an institution where annual high school tuition now runs $26,400. It is a coveted and lucrative position, one that paid him total compensation of $360,876 in 2012 and allowed him to live in a 9,500-square-foot brick colonial that the school owns.

His mother was 14 and already an alcoholic when he was born, he said. His biological father died when he was a baby. He lived with his grandparents and his siblings, Nastya and Sergey, in a ramshackle hut in a remote Black Sea village. In his young life, he saw his mother only a handful of times when she wasn't in jail.

"It's another world," he said. "You have no water. Or you have no food, and you have to eat peas or tomatoes as your meal.

"I had my first job job when I was 7, gardening for a neighbor who would pay for my brother and my sister to go to school. Sometimes she would give us food, and sometimes I would have to steal food."

Because of one of those thefts ended up in his police custody, he said. That led authorities to commit the Kovalevsky children to separate orphanages.

"As bad as it was going through all those things, it's actually good because it taught me a lot about myself and what I'm capable of," Nikolai Wheeler said.

When he left Russia at age 12, he had not seen his siblings for two years.

He and his new father lived in the Chicago area, where Christopher Wheeler, a composer and licensed pilot, was a dean and wrestling coach at the exclusive Lake Forest Academy. Nikolai Wheeler, who spoke only Russian, struggled to adjust and regarded his new father as a savior.

Nikolai Wheeler

Christopher Wheeler introduced him to golf, and his son excelled, winning the Delaware state high school championship in 2009. Two years later, Christopher Wheeler sent his son to Southern California to study golf management at the Professional Golfers Career College.

Nikolai Wheeler now caddies at Chechessee Creek Club near Bluffton and aspires to become a professional golfer.

Asked if he had a complicated relationship with his adoptive father and conflicted feelings toward him, Nikolai Wheeler didn't mince words.

"Nope," he said. "I love my dad very much and I'm grateful for what he did for me, and that's that."

His goals are high. Next year, he hopes to qualify for the Canadian Tour and eventually become a touring pro with the Professional Golfers Association. He wants to qualify for the Russian or U.S. Olympic team in 2016.

He prays that his father can be part of the success he envisions.