The girl, who was adopted from Ukraine, suffers from dwarfism, and when she was 11 years old, her parents abandoned her in an Indiana apartment and moved to Canada. They even changed her age to 22 on legal documents.
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Kristine and Michael Barnett adopted the girl in 2010, and the doctor who examined her told them that she was probably about eight years old.
Oddly enough, the Barnett family had already appeared on television in 2012, in a segment on 60 Minutes. Although their adopted daughter briefly appeared in the segment with the family, the focus of the documentary was actually their son, who has Asperger's syndrome.
On the show, they talked about what raising a child with this autism spectrum disorder is like, and how he went from being told that he would never able to read to studying Physics at Purdue University, in Indianapolis.
But what's most shocking about this story is that the 11-year-old daughter was abandoned by her parents, who took the rest of the family to Canada, leaving her alone in an apartment, with no financial support.
But it turns out the parents weren't at fault. The girl really was in her twenties. According to Kristine Barnett, their daughter was trying to kill them:
‘I saw her putting chemicals, bleach, Windex something like that, in my coffee and I asked her, what are you doing? She said, "I am trying to poison you."
After taking her to a mental facility, the doctors there confirmed her age. The Barnetts also noticed some patterns that are only expressed in adults:
Natalia was a woman. She had periods. She had adult teeth. She never grew a single inch, which would happen even with a child with dwarfism.
