
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 28, 1993                   TAG: 9307280129
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: ANN ARBOR, MICH.                                LENGTH: Short

MICH. COUPLE ENDS FIGHT TO KEEP GIRL

Jan and Roberta DeBoer have given up their long and bitter court fight and told 2 1/2-year-old Jessica she is going away.

"Jessica said, `No, I'm not going' and started crying,' " Suellyn Scarnecchia, the DeBoers' attorney, said Tuesday. "It's what you'd expect her to do.

"They tell her she is going with Dan and Cara. It's not something they could have started telling her much earlier. A 2-year-old has a different sense of time."

For the Ann Arbor couple, time has run out.

On Tuesday, they ended their legal fight to keep Jessica, whom they have raised since infancy and had tried to adopt. Scarnecchia said the DeBoers concluded that they had little chance of winning any further appeals.

On Monday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens refused the DeBoers' request to block a Michigan Supreme Court order that Jessica be returned to her birth parents, Dan and Cara Schmidt of Blairstown, Iowa, by Aug. 2.

All that is left for the DeBoers is the packing, the good-byes and the tears.

- Knight-Ridder/Tribune

by CNB