Adopted at 3, deported at 41
Family left ‘heartbroken’ as man to be sent to S. Korea after grim life in America
WASHINGTON— Adam Crapser was born in South Korea, but when he was 3 years old, an American couple adopted him.
Until recently, he lived in Vancouver, Wash., with his daughters and his pregnant wife. He has a son by an ex-girlfriend. He used to own a barbershop, but decided to become a stay-at-home dad, sometimes playing guitar and ukulele and watching a rescue dog.
But that will all soon change — Crapser is being deported back to South Korea, away from his family, away from the place he’s spent 37 of his 41years of life.
Currently, he’s being held in an immigration detention centre in Tacoma, Wash.
“He will be deported as soon as Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes the necessary arrangements,” Crapser’s attorney Lori Walls said. “Adam, his family and advocates are heartbroken.
Crapser’s deportation is a sad denouement to a life in the United States that’s been anything but easy.
After being abandoned near Seoul, Crapser and his older sister were adopted by an unnamed couple. All he brought with him across the ocean were a pair of green rubber shoes, a Korean-language Bible and a stuffed dog.
That couple, as the New York Times Magazine noted in an extensive profile of Crapser, abandoned the kids to the foster system after many episodes in which they forced Crapser to sit in the dark basement as punishment.
He and his sister were split up and, after several foster homes, he found himself adopted by Thomas and Dollar Crapser.
According to Crapser, that family was more abusive than the first. They would slam children’s heads on door frames, tape their mouths shut with duct tape and hit them with two-by-fours.
Eventually, they would be convicted in 1992 of several counts of criminal mistreatment and assault.
Before that, though, they kicked Crapser out of the house after an argument. It happened so quickly, he left his Bible and rubber shoes — the last remnants of his birth country — in the house. He was caught breaking into that house trying to retrieve the items and pleaded guilty to burglary. Twenty-five months in prison followed.
In the years following, Crapser committed some infractions. He was found guilty of unlawful firearm possession and, later, assault after getting into a fight with his roommate.
“I made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I’m not proud of it,” Crapser told the New York Times Magazine.
In the past few years, he’d been working to put his life back on track by getting married and focusing on family. Now, that’s over.
Returning to a country that is completely alien to him was not a punishment handed down from a judge. But that’s what’s happening.
Federal immigration officials found he had a criminal record, which makes him eligible for deportation.
In fact, it’s a circumstance created by the very parents who adopted, then abandoned, him in the first place. No family that adopted him, nor the adoption agency, ever registered the boy for U.S. citizenship.
Simple paperwork left undone.