Topeka city councilman Jonathan Schumm, wife arrested Thursday after child abuse investigation; couple has 16 children | CJOnline.com

http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/Topeka-city-councilman-wife-arrested-for-child-abuse-351984611.html

So this is how it started,,,

Topeka City Councilman Jonathan Schumm, who as a candidate pledged to make public safety “my top priority,” and his wife, Allison Nicole Schumm, were arrested Thursday in connection with aggravated battery and other offenses in which the victims were children.

Warrants were obtained earlier on Thursday for the arrests of the Schumms, a statement issued by the city of

Topeka said, and the warrants were served on Thursday evening.

Later, a bit more information,,,

According to the city's statement, on Wednesday, November 4th, the Kansas Dept. of Children and Families (DCF) asked the Topeka Police Dept. for help investigating reports of physical abuse against children. DCF social workers and police detectives investigated the reports and notified the Shawnee Co. District Attorney's Office, who obtained the arrest warrant.
,,,
Court documents list five children as victims, all between the ages of five and 16. In detailing accounts of Aggravated Battery and Abuse of a Child, the document states a 12-year-old was tortured, or cruelly beaten by the Schumm's.

It get's worse,,, 

In 2013, the same year the family was given an award for their adoption activities, Kansas DCF investigators were looking into allegations that Jonathan Schumm and his wife had abused a child. A child’s foster care family had accused the Topeka councilman and Allison of “inflicting bruises” on him, and possibly abusing other children inside the home.

Allison wrote about the visit from Kansas child protective services staffers on her blog. She said that she took a trip to Manhattan to visit her family because she didn’t want to “deal with DCF at that point.” She also wrote that the children involved in the DCF investigation were separated from the rest of the family during this time.

“Up to this point, nobody had told us anything other than you can’t see the children. At this point we decided to leave all the children who the charges weren’t addressing at my mother-in-law’s house and only bring home the children the DCF wanted to talk to,” Allison Schumm wrote. “I was still terrified, but knew that I would need to trust God for His protection of our family.”

Much worse, according to Wonkette,,,

,,,We come knowing that people can snap on a kid, not out of malice but out of a lack of any more rope. And we wonder why the fuck social workers in the state of Kansas allowed this woman to adopt eight more children after she wrote this:

Here is my Desperate. My need to breath. Shortly after Kyrsten was born, I started getting sicker. I had been sick most of my life, but doctors had never been able to tell me what was wrong. After she was born I kept getting sicker and sicker. I was suffering from depression, bipolar, IBS, numbness in my hands, complex migraines, regular migraines, insomnia and fatigue. Being a mom of 8 at the time, I couldn’t understand why God would give me 8 beautiful children and then allow me to be unable to care for them.

So what did Allison Nicole Schumm do after releasing her burden to God? She and her husband adopted eight more kids, and she homeschooled them, with three still in diapers. And the state of Kansas, apparently, was just peachy with that — if by “peachy,” you mean “they tried to disrupt the second family adoption due to ‘unfounded’ abuse allegations, but people ‘lobbied’ to let the Schumms hoard kids and why does this remind us of Justin Harris anyway?”

Topeka city councilman Jonathan Schumm, wife arrested Thursday after child abuse investigation; couple has 16 children | CJOnline.com

See also::

• Jonathan Schumm, Topeka city councilman, appears in court with handcuffs, notes children's removal from home
• 16 Children of Jonathan and Allison Schumm
• Jonathan and Alison Schumm Abuse Case Raises Questions

I was surprised that the family received an Angels in Adoption award with (apparently) so little vetting. I read through the linked posts in which Allison tells her family’s adoption story (part 1, part 2, and part 3) and found additional details. It seems the Angels in Adoption award was not the only one the family received. Shortly before adopting the second sibling group of five, the Schumms received the “Project Belong 2013 Adoptive Family of the year” award. I also learned that the Schumms were initially told they would not be permitted to adopt this second sibling group, because they already had eight children (three biological and five adopted).