Horrific ordeal of Americans accused of starving daughter to death in Qatar

THIS family went to Qatar to work, but it all went wrong. When their daughter died suddenly, they ended up losing everything.

WHEN Gloria Huang’s father found her lying on the floor of her room foaming at the mouth, he gathered her up, ran to the car and drove her to hospital.

It was too late. Hospital staff said the eight-year-old had gone into cardiac arrest, and she was pronounced dead on arrival. That was just the beginning of a nightmare ordeal for her parents Matt and Grace, which would last for years. The couple were accused of starving their daughter to death, separated and thrown in jail, while their other two children were placed in a orphanage. Matt was assaulted and sexually abused during his time in prison, and lost his job. It was his job that had taken the family from California to Qatar, where the Huangs’ problems came to a head. Now free and back in LA with their children after two years of torment, they are now suing MWH Global for negligence and wrongful dismissal, New York Magazine reports, claiming that the American firm had a responsibility to take care of them. The Christian couple, both of Asian descent, could not conceive naturally — so they decided to adopt a six-year-old boy and four-year-old girl from Ghana — the sort of children who are usually overlooked. Slowly, it emerged that their daughter had complicated issues around food. When she arrived in LA in 2009, she had a parasitic infection, and she struggled to put on weight, often refusing to eat and then bingeing at night on leftovers from the fridge and the bin, even finding and eating tissues and painkillers. Concerned, her parents began locking her bedroom door. She was then diagnosed with “reactive attachment disorder” as a result of her early deprivation, meaning she suffered feelings of physical and emotional emptiness. Still, doctors told her parents she was healthy, and in 2011, they adopted a second boy, this time from Uganda. In 2012, Matt was offered a two-year job in Doha working on a water-purification project for the 2022 World Cup, and they flew to Qatar to start a new expat life. Before they left, Gloria was given a clean bill of health. Soon after they arrived, she became withdrawn. One day, she gorged herself on cakes and biscuits and then stopped eating. Her parents were worried, but didn’t yet know any English-speaking paediatricians and decided to wait it out rather than scare her. She still looked fine, playing with children near her house. Four days after the cake binge, she was dead. “They said, ‘How did she die?’ ” Matt told the magazine. “They asked me that ten, 15 times.” The Huangs were flung in jail on murder charges. Investigators suggested the couple were people traffickers since they were Asian with African children, and adoptive parents would normally choose “good-looking” kids who shared their “hereditary traits”. Eventually, the California Innocence Project took up their case, Al Jazeera reported. The organisation spoke to American lawyers and doctors who said the autopsy on Gloria’s body had been inadequate, failing to take tissue samples that could have revealed any underlying medical conditions that caused her death, or problems linked to her earlier infection. Her eating problems could have exacerbated the effects. One medial examiner said a child could not be found to have starved to death if they were walking and functioning a day earlier. Friends testified for the Huangs’ devotion to their children, and the couple obtained the help of Eric Volz from the David House Agency, an LA-based international-crisis firm. “We have lost our daughter, and our sons have lost their sister,” Matt said after a court hearing in February. “This court has taken more than a year of our lives, and the process has only made it worse. In the midst of our innocence, we feel that we have been kidnapped, and we just want to go home.” Mr Volz said American cases are sometimes treated opportunistically by foreign governments looking for bargaining chips. “We believe institutional kidnapping is a new form of asymmetric warfare used by small regions to engage larger powers,” he told New York Magazine. Volz said he met with the Qatari lawyer general, who said he needed the campaign for the Huangs to end. In November 2014, a UN monitor identified a violation of international law. The couple was freed that month, and the US ambassador took them to the airport. Their passports were confiscated, and it took a call from John Kerry to the Qatari foreign minister to get them out. Finally, they are at home in the US with their sons, but nothing will bring their daughter back. They still don’t know exactly what caused her death. But at least now they are free to grieve. “I had a lot of dreams and hopes once,” Matt says, “and now I’m in a phase where frankly I don’t know the future.”