UPDATE 1/15/2025, 6:30 –The trial of Jeanne Whitefeather and Donald Lantz, the Sissonville couple charged with 20 counts of child trafficking, forced labor, civil rights violations and gross child neglect resumed Wednesday afternoon with the testimony of another law enforcement officer.
A.C. Pile, a Detective with the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department took the stand after the trial reconvened after lunch.
While on the stand she says that she was notified by her supervisor of reports that there were children locked in a barn, and she was tasked with getting a search warrant before she made it to the scene.
“I was tasked with, as that evening evolved and they ended up finding children, I was tasked with obtaining a search warrant for the scene,” Pile said. “So, once I obtained that I arrived and assisted with processing the scene with Detective Alford.”
While they were at the scene of 225 Cheyanne Lane, the detectives observed Arlo surveillance cameras, one in an upstairs bedroom where the two younger kids were, another one in the barn where the two older kids were, and another one pointed towards the driveway to the house.
Pile said that once they saw the camera’s they needed to get a search warrant for the videos that were stored on the cloud. With the information from Whitefeather’s phone, in which she gave Alford permission to look at her phone, they were able to obtain her account information, which helped them get the search warrant for the company to send over any footage they had.
She said that the company sent her, over 7,000 videos spanning over seven days, September 29, 2023, to October 4, 2023. All of the videos varied in length, seeing as the cameras were motion-activated.
While Pile and another detected went through the video she observed two things. One was that they, the 16- and 14-year-old never left the barn/shed that they slept in. The two younger kids in the bedroom, only the little boy would be seen leaving the bedroom more than the little girl.
Another thing that she noticed was that none of the children slept on beds. The oldest girl, slept on a sleeping bag, while the older boy, slept on nothing but a cardboard box, with only a sheet to cover up with. The two younger kids, slept on the floor with blankets to cover up.
The state entered into evidence six condensed down surveillance video footage. Two of those videos, from September 28th and September 29th, were shown in court Wednesday afternoon.
In both of the videos, the four kids can be seen waking up and standing or sitting around doing nothing. The two older kids are shown not leaving the barn at all, with Lantz bringing them a bag of sandwiches and some type of drink. And the video showed them having to hold up a sheet, so that they could use the bathroom in the porta potty in the barn.
The trial is expected to continue Thursday morning, with Pile’s still on the stand and the last four surveillance video footage to be shown.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Witness testimonies continuing with law enforcement officers during the second morning of the trial for a Sissonville couple charged with 20 counts of child trafficking, forced labor, civil rights violations and gross child neglect.
The trial of Donald Lantz, 61, and Jeanne Whitefeather, 62, continued before Kanawha County Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers Wednesday morning after five neighbors presented their testimonies in the trial before a 12-member jury Tuesday.
The first witness to take the stand Wednesday morning was Kanawha County Sheriffs Deputy Hannah Burdette.
Burdette gave a testimony about the day deputies discovered the couple’s two of five black adoptive children locked in a shed at their Sissonville property at 225 Cheyanne Lane on October 2, 2023. 
This comes after concerns from several neighbors about the children working long hours on the property following the family’s move to the area from Washington in May of 2023.
Burdette, the first deputy to arrive to the scene, said she was responding to a 911 call from one of the neighbors about two children possibly locked in a barn.
“There was a house up on the hill, initially I approached the house to see if anybody was there, I knocked on the front and the back door, never made contact with anyone in the residence, I circled back around to where the barn was, and I called the complainant first and spoke with her before going out there, and she advised that there were a set of red doors, that’s where the children were being kept,” Burdette said to the court Wednesday.
She said Sergeant Miller then arrived to the scene and neither could get the set of red doors to the barn open.
“We continued to knock, nobody would answer, but I could hear movement inside,” Burdette said. “So, finally I just said, ‘you guys aren’t in trouble, we just want to make sure you’re okay,’ and that’s when one of the children answered and said they couldn’t open the door from the inside.”
Burdette said the children confirmed they had no running water or other basic necessities in the shed and that’s when the deputies made the decision to conduct a forced entry.
Upon making contact with the children, Burdette said they were a girl and boy, later determined to be the two oldest of the five siblings ages 14 and 16. She said they were noticeably dirty, the 14 year-old boy wasn’t wearing any shoes and had cuts and whelps on his feet, and both smelled of body odor.
Burdette said the girl told the officers that they had been inside the shed all day and that was normal for them.
At that time, Child Protective Services had already arrived to the scene and the officers handed the two children off to them.
Burdette said they then performed a search of the barn. She said as soon as they entered the shed they were immediately hit with a wave of heat and the smell of body odor among other odors.
“As you walked in you could smell not only body odor but an abundance of different types of smells, it’s kind of hard to explain, but they weren’t pleasant,” Burdette said. “And then, like I said, it was physically hot in the room as soon as you opened the door, I was probably standing five feet back from the door and when the door opened you could physically feel the heat escaping the room outside.”
A detective with the Kanawha County Sheriffs Office, Detective Robert Alford, who was the third officer to arrive at the scene and the second to testify Wednesday said they had to use several tools, including a sledgehammer, to get the door of the shed open.
He said Lantz was the first parent to arrive to the scene and gave them a set of keys, but none of them worked, causing them to also have to force entry into the main home on the property.
Upon entering the home, Alford said they located a small child in a loft scared and crying who they also turned over to CPS.
Alford said they took photos all around the shed and the main home which were all presented to the court Wednesday.
He too said the shed was very hot, but one of the first items they located as they walked into the shed was an air conditioning unit on the wall that did not appear to work.
Also in the shed Alford said there was a table and a couple of chairs, a plastic bag, a bag of bread and an empty bottle of juice on the table, which were depicted in the pictures.
Further search of the room presented a sleeping bag, a camper toilet, a cooler with various empty food containers inside, a plastic cup with a liquid that could have been urine inside of it, a pile of dirty clothes and a gray metal shelf. On top of this shelf, Alford said was a rope with a key attached.
When Whitefeather arrived to the scene, Alford said she appeared to be confused as to why they were there. He said deputies confiscated her cell phone.
Burdette said they had also located a fourth child in a van outside. She said the van also contained several bags of trash and bags of bread.
The trial was expected to continue Wednesday afternoon.