Haleigh, now 20, is by all accounts a happy woman living surrounded by love with her siblings, her adoptive parents Keith and Becky Arnett, and other foster children the couple have taken in over the years.

But Haleigh is far from typical. Once the center of a public furor over official negligence and passive euthanasia, she now relies on a wheelchair for mobility and reads and understands the world at a Grade Seven level because of the terrible abuse by her aunt and uncle, Holli and Jason Strickland.

The Arnetts recently talked to the Boston Globe about life with Haleigh in order to draw attention to the need for more foster parents to deal with the 7,000-plus children removed from their families of origin yearly for their own protection. This is doubly apt: Haleigh's abuse occurred only after state child welfare authorities moved her from her mother's care to her aunt's when the latter complained about her natural mother's negligence. But it was her foster parents who physically abused her for years and transformed her from a cheerful music-loving, bicycle-riding young girl into someone medical staff and a judge agreed was in a permanent "vegetative state" appropriate to be removed from life support.

It turned out there had been a dozen complaints to child welfare authorities before her foster parents brought her to the emergency room covered in injuries and comatose, and medical staff called police in 2005. But officials had always preferred to believe Holli, a licensed child care operator, who told them the injuries were self-inflicted.

Charged with assault, Holli made a suicide pact with her own grandmother and died before trial.

The scandal mounted as her doctors applied to remove Haleigh from life support, and lawyers echoed the arguments heard earlier that year in the case of Terry Schiavo. In both cases judges ordered life support removed, but while the Florida woman died days later, early in 2005, Haleigh did the opposite, recovering consciousness almost immediately.

While her awareness steadily improved, she was seriously disabled and in need of long-term care, either in an institution, or a foster family. In 2008 the state began looking for suitable foster parents.

They could scarcely have done better than the Arnetts, who were ardent foster parents and churchgoers. After viewing videos and hearing official warnings about her impairments (she needed diapers and a wheelchair), they agreed to take her in. "As devout Christians," the Boston Globe reported, "they believed God's work required sacrifices." Though they had three boys of their own they had already taken in several foster children and saw fostering as an act of Christian love. Haleigh's notoriety did not deter them.

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