Mother Claims She Sold Her Son For Drugs; He Is Still Missing

Ke’Shaun Vanderhorst didn’t have the best start in life. Born in July 1993 while his mother was serving time in prison due to drug charges, he spent the first few months of his life in foster care. Tina Vanderhorst had already given birth to six children before Ke’Shaun, but none of her children lived with her. Two of her sons, one born in 1986 and one born in 1987, lived with their paternal grandmother. Tina would occasionally see them but played no real part in their upbringing. Her other four children had all died as infants. Three of these deaths were attributed to SIDS, while the fourth baby never even got the chance to leave the hospital. She spent her entire life in the hospital, born dangerously premature and addicted to crack cocaine. Weighing only 1 pound, 1 ounce at birth, she died when she was only a month old.

Despite her troubled past, Tina seemed to be trying to put her life back together. By November of 1994, she was out of prison and had gotten her own apartment in North Philadelphia. At a family court hearing on November 10th, the Department of Human Services (DHS) stated their plan to return 16-month-old Ke’Shaun to his mother. Ted Gorka, a lawyer who had been appointed by the court to act as Ke’Shaun’s advocate, objected to this. He told the court that while he wasn’t against reuniting Tina and her son at some point, he felt it was too soon. Reminding the judge about the four children who had already died, he recommended that Ke’Shaun remain in foster care. The judge ruled in favor of DHS. Ke’Shaun was to be returned to his mother under DHS supervision, and the judge told the DHS social worker to consult with Ted Gorka about the services they would provide to Tina. When the social worker told Ted that they would not begin providing any home services until after January 1 — almost two months later — Ted wasn’t happy. He called a DHS supervisor and told her that it would be in Ke’Shaun’s best interest for them to check in with Tina more frequently. The supervisor refused. Because Tina had never been accused of neglecting or abusing Ke’Shaun, he was not considered to be high-risk. The supervisor told Ted that if he was really worried, he could just check on the child himself. Annoyed, Ted gave DHS a chilling warning: this case was a headline waiting to happen. There was nothing he could do but wait it out and hope for the best.

Initially, everything seemed to be going fine and it looked as if Ted Gorka’s fears were unfounded. Neighbors all agreed that Tina seemed to be doing everything she could to be the best mother possible, and Ke’Shaun always appeared clean and properly cared for. It was a common sight to see Tina walking down the sidewalk trailed by Ke’Shaun on his little red tricycle. Tina rarely went anywhere without the child — money was tight and a babysitter was a luxury she couldn’t afford — and the entire community embraced Ke’Shaun. Vincent McCrary, who worked at a fruit stand on Cecil B. Moore Avenue, would watch Ke’Shaun two or three times a week. Tina would drop the boy off at the fruit stand, plunking him down on a chair and telling him she’d be right back. Ke’Shaun would always cry as Tina walked away, but Vincent soon learned that sugar-frosted tangerine candy and banana taffy would quickly put the smile back on his little face.

The fruit stand wasn’t the only business where Tina would leave her son. Kevin Roberts, who worked at Young’s Market, would also watch Ke’Shaun. He called the toddler “Little Shorty” and would give him orange and lime popsicles. Tina would usually be gone for around 30 minutes, and Ke’Shaun would pass the time by running up and down the aisles of the market.

In early January, Family Support Services, a private agency contracted by DHS, began sending a social worker to Tina’s apartment on a weekly basis. Social workers provided Tina with counseling and made sure she was properly taking care of Ke’Shaun. None of them had anything negative to say about Tina. She had attended some of the parenting classes sponsored by the agency and seemed to be a wonderful mother. Tina had told some of the social workers that she was working hard to build a better life for her son, and she began taking culinary classes. Public assistance would pay for daycare as long as she remained enrolled in classes, and she began sending Ke’Shaun to Lisa Coston’s daycare on Washington Street. Lisa saw Tina as a good mother who only wanted what was best for her son. Perhaps most importantly, social workers saw no indications that Tina had started using drugs again. It was starting to look as if she had beaten the odds and was winning her battle to turn her life around.

Tina’s last visit from Family Support Services was in June, at which point the agency determined that she no longer needed to be under supervision. Tina’s case was passed back to DHS, but they failed to make any home visits during July or August. The agency had no direct contact with Tina, but they did get some updates on her from her parole officer and she kept up with all her parole obligations. No one directly checked in to see how two-year-old Ke’Shaun was doing.

DHS and Ted Gorka would once again face off in court on August 10, 1995. DHS wanted to close Tina’s case. As far as the agency was concerned, there was nothing to indicate that Tina needed to be under any additional supervision. Ted did not agree and he urged the court not to close the case. He knew he was the only person looking out solely for Ke’Shaun’s welfare, and he still had some concerns about the toddler. He conceded that Tina had appeared to make a lot of progress, but thought it was still too early for DHS to pull out of the case altogether. After hearing from both sides, the judge ruled in favor of DHS. Though she would still have to stay in regular contact with her parole officer, Tina would no longer receive any visits from DHS.

There was no denying that Tina had made great strides towards getting her life back together, but at some point that August, things started to fall apart. She had been dating a man named James Simmons, but towards the end of summer, the relationship went sour. Tina was so upset by the breakup that she stopped attending her culinary classes. This meant she had to pull Ke’Shaun out of daycare because public assistance would no longer pay for it.

One day in September, Tina’s neighbors became concerned when they saw that Ke’Shaun had somehow managed to pull himself up onto a windowsill in the apartment. The boy stayed in the window for over 30 minutes, alternating between sobbing and wailing the entire time. Neighbors were unsure why Tina wasn’t responding to the child’s cries, but the reason soon became apparent: Tina wasn’t in the apartment. She had left Ke’Shaun there alone, something no one had ever seen her do before. Finally, the cries became too much for the neighbors to bear. A teenage boy pried the window open and pulled Ke’Shaun outside. Unsure what to do next, he stood there and rocked the inconsolable toddler, whispering soothing words to calm him down. Eventually, Tina came walking down the street. If she was at all surprised to find a crowd of people congregating around her open window with her son, she didn’t show it. Wordlessly, she grabbed Ke’Shaun and went inside. She didn’t offer any kind of explanation about where she had been, and she didn’t express any gratitude towards those who had been watching her son. All the neighbors could do was look at each other and shrug.

Though she had shown no reaction, it appears that Tina did learn a lesson about not leaving her son home alone. When she needed to go somewhere the following week, she asked one of her neighbors if she could watch Ke’Shaun for 15 minutes. The woman, who had three children of her own, was more than happy to watch the boy. A few hours later, Tina had still not returned. The woman had no idea where she had gone and when, or if, she was coming back, and Ke’Shaun desperately needed a clean diaper. With the help of another neighbor, she was able to convince Tina’s landlord to unlock the apartment for her so she could grab some diapers. Tina didn’t return until the following day, once again offering no explanation to her stunned neighbors.

One day in late September, Lisa Coston was surprised to see Tina on her doorstep. Since she no longer brought Ke’Shaun to Lisa’s daycare, the two women hadn’t seen each other for over a month. It was around 1:00 pm when Tina showed up, and it was immediately clear that she was very intoxicated. She was alone, and she told Lisa that Ke’Shaun was with his father. She was still very upset about her breakup with James, and Lisa did her best to console her. After they chatted for an hour or so, Tina asked if she could borrow some money for food. Lisa handed over some cash, and Tina gave her a big hug and kiss, telling her that she would come back to visit her soon and she would bring Ke’Shaun along to see her. With a final wave, she walked away.

Tina’s sister, Kim, had visited Tina and Ke’Shaun at their apartment on September 24th, but she didn’t hear anything from her sister after that. By October 13th, she was worried enough that she called the police and reported Tina and Ke’Shaun missing. Tina’s landlord told police that he had last seen Ke’Shaun about three weeks prior, though his brother had seen Tina the previous week. She didn’t have Ke’Shaun with her at the time, which he said was highly unusual. Even more chilling, police learned that Tina had visited her two older sons and told them that they wouldn’t see Ke’Shaun again.

On October 16th, police located Tina on Cecil B. Moore Avenue, not far from her apartment. She was livid when she learned that her sister had called the police to report her missing and made it clear she had no desire to speak with the officers. It appeared that she was no longer clean as she was high and had drugs in her possession when she was found. She was immediately arrested for violation of parole, but cops were far more concerned with locating her son. When they questioned her about him, she told them that DHS had removed him from her custody. Police were initially relieved; if DHS had the boy in their custody, at least they would know he was safe. Unfortunately, a quick call to DHS proved that Tina was lying. DHS did not have Ke’Shaun and no one from the agency had interacted with the boy in several months. Friends and neighbors told police that they hadn’t seen the toddler in weeks. Police searched Tina’s apartment for any clues to his whereabouts but came up empty. They combed through the front and back yard of the apartment building and also a vacant lot next door, all without success. Where was Ke’Shaun?

While she was locked up in the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, Tina admitted that her story about a DHS social worker coming and taking her son away had been a lie and said she wanted to tell the truth. She now claimed that she had given her son to a random stranger who knocked on her door and offered to take care of him. Police were stunned. They sat and listened as Tina told them a story that was far too unbelievable to be true. She told them that there had been a knock on her door on the afternoon of September 25th, and when she answered it she found a woman she had never seen before standing on her doorstep. She allowed the woman, who said her name was Virginia Graham, to come into her apartment. She described Virginia as a well-dressed black woman, about 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a medium build. She was wearing a maroon shirt and a cream-colored jacket and had designer fingernails. She told Tina that she had been sent there by someone who knew that Tina was having some difficulties in taking care of her son. She claimed that she was married, had two children, and lived in Philadelphia, and said that Ke’Shaun would be better off with her. Believing that there was absolutely nothing wrong with handing over her son to a complete stranger, Tina agreed to let the woman take Ke’Shaun. She claimed that the woman handed her a piece of paper that had a telephone number on it, but she didn’t see the need to keep it. The woman told her that she would still be allowed to see her son and that she would contact her to arrange visitations. With that, the woman supposedly handed Tina $500 in cash, scooped up Ke’Shaun, strapped the screaming and obviously hysterical toddler into a baby seat in the backseat of her light blue, four-door car, and drove away.

During the next few months, Tina’s story would change a couple more times. At one point she said she had dropped Ke’Shaun off at the fruit stand but couldn’t remember if she ever brought him home. The story she finally seemed to settle on was that she sold Ke’Shaun to a woman she didn’t know for $500 to buy crack cocaine. Police were convinced that drugs definitely had something to do with the case, but they expressed doubts that Ke’Shaun was still alive. When the homicide team took over the investigation, Ted Gorka was horrified. It was the outcome he had tried to warn the court about the previous year. The lawyer was devastated: the case was indeed making headlines now, exactly as he had predicted. For their part, DHS still claimed that the case was not mishandled as there was nothing in Tina’s past that could have warned them she was likely to sell her child for drug money.

Originally, Tina opted for a trial and it was scheduled for November of 1996. The day the trial was supposed to start, however, Tina decided to plead no contest to charges of selling an infant and endangering the welfare of a child. Tina did not challenge the charges that she sold her son to a stranger in exchange for money to buy cocaine. She claimed that she let drugs take control of her and that she never meant for any harm to come to her child. Despite an intense search encompassing most of the eastern seaboard, police were never able to determine exactly what happened to Ke’Shaun.

When Tina reported for sentencing in January of 1997, she once again changed her story about exactly what had happened to her son. While she still admitted she gave Ke’Shaun to a stranger who knocked on her door, she was once again claiming that she believed the woman was from DHS and she didn’t have a choice but to give her the baby. She denied selling her son and using the money for drugs, despite the fact that she had admitted to it all in court two months before. She was sentenced to a maximum of seven years in prison.

Ke’Shaun Vanderhorst has never been located and police are not sure if he is alive or dead. As with all missing children cases, there have been many rumors and theories over the years. Some people believed that Tina’s ex-boyfriend was responsible for Ke’Shaun’s disappearance. According to friends, he was aware of Tina’s problems with drugs and alcohol and had threatened to have Ke’Shaun removed from her custody because of her addictions. Police were unable to track down his movements after August of 1995 when he moved out of his apartment on Allegheny Avenue and cut off all ties with Tina. Some feel that he took Ke’Shaun and vanished in the hopes of giving him a better life, but this seems far-fetched. He was last seen in the Philadelphia area that August, and reliable witnesses verify that they saw Ke’Shaun as late as September 24th, long after James had left.

There are others who believe that Tina killed her son. It’s clear that Tina had a deep love for her son, at least when she was sober. Most of the people that police interviewed all said the same thing: they couldn’t imagine Tina harming her son. Everyone who knew Ke’Shaun said that he was always clean and well-fed, and they never saw any signs of physical abuse. It wasn’t until the month that he went missing that neighbors began to notice Tina was becoming neglectful, likely because drugs had once again managed to take over her life. If she was in the habit of leaving the child alone in the apartment while she went out to buy drugs and get high, it’s possible that Ke’Shaun died from some kind of accident while he was home by himself and Tina panicked and hid his body. Police did a thorough search of her apartment, however, and found no evidence indicating that Ke’Shaun had died there.

As distasteful as it seems, it is possible Tina was telling the truth when she said that she sold Ke’Shaun for $500 to buy drugs. Human trafficking is a thriving industry, and there are plenty of people who are willing to pay cash for children. If Ke’Shaun was sold to human traffickers, he most likely would have been taken outside the country almost immediately, which would explain why there have been no sightings of him.

Sadly, there was no happy ending for Tina Vanderhorst. In October 2016, she was arrested and charged with murder, arson, and robbery after she allegedly stabbed a Germantown man 77 times and then set fire to his apartment. She was homeless at the time of the crime.