The Quigleys are one big happy family

DAVID THOMAS

There is a 25-passenger bus parked behind the Quigley residence with a camper trailer attached. The back yard is full of boxes built up from dozens of trips to Sam’s Club and the hundreds of bulk items the Quigley family purchased. Several parked bikes sit on the front porch, and dozens of toys and stuffed animals line the living room.

Alicia and Jim Quigley had five of their own children. However, after watching a “20/20” special about the conditions of orphanages in Romania, the couple knew they had to adopt a child.

“I was five months pregnant when I saw the ‘20/20′ (special) … I just absolutely knew we had a child in Romania,” Alicia said.

Jim said he and his wife started their research to find out what it would take to bring a Romanian child home and away from the poor living conditions. He said they were able to contact other families who had recently been to Romania and had adopted children.

“These families gave us a list of things we should bring to help the process along,” Jim said. “We went to Sam’s Club and bought a full cartful of cigarettes and coffee, and I had suitcases full of it.”

Alicia said Jim went to Romania and spent two-and-a-half weeks in search of a child so their daughter Kilee could have friend. After two weeks of searching the family found its first adopted child, Jordan. From there it took five more weeks before they could take their new daughter home with them, Jim said.

The coffee and cigarettes were used for leverage in situations in which Jim’s translator would have to bribe an official, including when it came time to get a passport for the adopted child.

“The translator took the guy aside and gave him a carton of cigarettes, and the guy said, ‘OK, 20 minutes,'” Jim said.

“It was a system that was just horribly corrupt,” Alicia said.

When they brought Jordan home from Romania, he was 11 months old and weighed 16 pounds, Jim said.

Since adopting Jordan, Jim and Alicia have adopted 16 other children — the most recent child was adopted in May.

Alicia said all of the adopted children have either physical or mental handicaps, and, in some cases, the children have both. Including biological offspring, Jim and Alicia Quigley have 22 children.   

Because of the children’s specific needs, the family employs a full-time nursing service that is in their home seven days a week, nine hours a day. The Quigleys also hired two certified nursing assistants and a full-time nanny, Alicia said.

Their daughter, Nona, was the first internationally adopted child in their family, originally from the Republic of Georgia, Alicia said.

She is also one of the oldest children and works as the family’s nanny. She works full-time and does it all without the full use of her right arm, which was amputated just below the elbow, Alicia said.

Nona said many of her responsibilities include caring for the children’s medical needs. The day-to-day requirements include everything from distributing medication to applying tracheotomies, and she said almost all her training comes from on-the-job experience.  

“We have 50 meds we do every single day, sometimes four times a day,” Alicia said.

“They need to be showered, dressed, (take) meds, fed, and on that bus at 7 o’clock in the morning.”

Nona said the job is boring sometimes. In addition to her job helping the family, she is engaged and planning her May wedding.

Raising all of these children is not as hectic as it may sound, Alicia said.

The Quigley’s are not alone in the number of children they added to their family, Alicia said. There are more than 10 other families in Utah with 20-plus children — the majority of which have been adopted.

Alicia said none of the children in her family were put there by accident. Each child the Quigley’s adopted is special.

“I knew each one of my children was mine,” Alicia said. “This is not an institution. This is our family.”

While Alicia volunteers with the family, Jim drives every day from Mantua to Salt Lake City for work where he has a full-time job designing computers for airplanes. He said the long car ride is therapeutic.  

The Quigley family is in planning stages to remodel their house and make it more accessible for their children’s diverse needs. The remodel will cost between $10,000 and $20,000, Alicia said. The goal is to create more spacious living areas on the ground floor and have a fully-functioning bathroom.

The family was denied by Extreme Home Makeover and are now in the process of raising the funds themselves, reaching out to the Make a Wish Foundation.

“We’re worried about how much it’s going to cost,” Alicia said.

They were audited in 2011, which has taken a year to process, Jim said.

“Everybody who claimed adoption expenses got audited this year,” Alicia said.  

Alicia said nobody knows or cares about the difficulties the government places on families in their situation. Their family has had a variety of difficulties to work through without added stress from the government, even tragedy, she said.

Claire Quigley was terminally ill with a genetic mutation known as Rett Syndrome, which eventually led to her death.

“She would pass out probably 10-15 times a day,” Alicia said.

The Kaysville Police Department investigated Claire’s death, which Alicia said was treated similar to a homicide case.

Kilee Quigley, a current USU student, and one of Alicia and Jim’s biological children, said she remembers the police walking down the halls of their house, taking photos of their recently deceased sister in front of the other children without regard to the emotional trauma they were experiencing.

“They went from room to room. They didn’t ask — they just went,” Kilee said. “They didn’t have a warrant. But we were all 16, what were we supposed to do?”

Jim and Alicia hurried to the hospital to see Claire as soon as they received news from the hospital that she had passed away, Jim said.

“They (the police) even sent a cop to the hospital,” Alicia said.

Alicia said she remembers looking at Claire’s body at the hospital while she said the police officer sat in the room, staring at them.

One of the children who was most heavily questioned by the police developed schizophrenia soon afterward, she said, and only recently started to recover from a fear of police officers and emergency vehicle sirens.   

“It went on for a year and a half, and it was horrible,” Alicia said.

At the end of the case all the charges were dropped, Alicia said.

“We thought a little while about suing the police, because we don’t want it to happen again either, but I don’t know that my heart could take anymore from them,” Alici
a said.

The Quigley family has called Mantua home for a year and a half, and is trying to put the Kaysville police incident behind them, Alicia said. The family is focusing on more positive events that will bring their family together, including planning a vacation.  

“This summer we are packing the whole family that is living at home in the bus, and we are driving to New York,” Jim said.

– David.thomas@aggiemail.usu.edu