The offer by an impoverished Ethiopian couple to adopt a wayward Beverly Hills teenager has sparked a wave of outrage and indignation across the United States.
Dismissed as a cheap publicity stunt by the starving husband and wife from the remote northern village of Ilonaj-Anliege, the adoption move is being viewed from coast to coast as nothing more than an insult.
Tafir Sumontre (32) and his wife, Yiotle, made their offer after reading about the case of 14-year-old Hank Deloitte-Lasalle
The teenager made headlines when he appeared in a juvenile court charged with exposing himself to nuns, stealing an automobile from a disabled driver, threatening his classmates with a converted M15/SR16 carbine and selling his mother's underwear on eBay.
He also circulated colour drawings of his naked 16-year-old sister at a kindergarten in his neighbourhood.
The court was told that Hank had experienced a disrupted childhood. His father, a heavy cocaine user and president of a national bank, had left the family home and moved in with Hank's babysitter who also worked in an S&M bar.
His mother, the CEO of an international IT company, had a string of lovers and was now living with a 20-year-old tennis coach who had just broken into the porn movie business.
Hank's sister, Dumfries, was a member of the controversial religious sect, Paradise Pompoms, which believes in gospel-style worship, spanking and embezzlement.
After Hank was admonished because of his turbulent family life and given 12 weeks' community service, the Ethiopian couple, who had read about the case in a copy of National Enquirer passed on by a travelling priest, approached missionaries with their adoption offer.
"We feel Hank just needs love," they said in a letter to authorities. "While we have very little materially, other than our own hut, which we adore, we have love to spare.
"As we are unable to have children of our own, we feel we can offer Hank the security, focus, attention, respect, patience, understanding and affection that he has obviously lacked."
Although the Board of Education election is just beginning in Beverly Hills, interim president Tyrone Buckfaster, whose own family was terrorized by Hank in a Samurai sword incident last year, said: "It is inconceivable than we would even consider sending an American kid over there…unless he was in a uniform of course.
"Lord, he probably wouldn't even have a cell phone."
Hank was reluctant to comment but did say he thought his would-be Ethiopian parents "was (sic) a whole bunch of towel head primitives" and that they should continue to attempt conception upon themselves.
He is due to recommence his schooling in 2016.
