The neighbors of an adopted child who was allegedly a 22-year-old woman have detailed her "inappropriate" and "evil" behavior.
Natalia Grace shot to fame as the subject of a Dr. Phil episode in 2019, BBC News reports. In the episode, she said her adoptive parents Michael and Kristine Barnett had abandoned her at an apartment when she was just a child, having adopted her nine years earlier in 2010. At that time, they were told that she was six years old.
Michael and Kristine defended their decision, claiming that Natalia was actually a woman who was pretending to be a child and that she had threatened to kill her adoptive parents and their biological sons.
Not long after they first adopted her, Michael and Kristine began to doubt Natalia's age and, in June 2012, Marion County Superior Court agreed to legally change her birth record to indicate she was born in 1989 and not 2003. Shortly after, the Barnetts set her up with her own apartment.
ID's six-part docuseries on YouTube details the unique case, with Michael himself explaining how he and his wife took Natalia apartment hunting and found a place for her to live on her own in Westfield, Indiana. They also paid for the first three months upfront, purchased Natalia some furniture, and even bought her groceries.
Several of Natalia's neighbors at the time took part in the documentary, where they described how they often called the building manager to complain about her strange behavior. One neighbor Andrew Rice said "didn't necessarily think she was a child at first", and claimed that Natalia had told her neighbors that she was 26. Rice also said she appeared disheveled and "emitted" an "unpleasant body odor" as well.
Another neighbor, Sue McCallum, said Kristina leave groceries for Natalia on the sidewalk, and that Natalia was also on food stamps - despite Michael and Kristina driving nice cars. "Having Natalia live by you, at first it was okay," McCallum said in the docuseries, but this apparently didn't last long. "She was really a pest to everybody. Nobody liked her, nobody. They kind of felt sorry for her, but they were leery about her and really didn't want her around," McCallum continued.
Other neighbors claimed that Natalia would simply show up to their homes uninvited, allow herself in, and look for food. She also reportedly told her neighbors that she no longer lived with her adoptive parents because they had become scared of her after she pulled a knife on them and tried to poison them.
A further neighbor, Toby Miles, also said that Natalia displayed worrying behavior around men and boys, saying: "She would want to know when our son would be home. Not our daughter, our son. That's when things went from uncomfortable to weird and almost borderline inappropriate. It just got to a point where we felt uncomfortable as parents."
In fact, another neighbor alleged that they witnessed Natalia playing with a young boy, before she "started undoing his pants." The boy's father allegedly confronted Natalia, but he did not wish to comment on the matter in the documentary.
After all the complaints against her, Natalia's lease was not renewed when it ended. "They got her out. Everybody was so relieved. Everybody was really happy to see her go. I think she's a little possessed. She presents herself like a nice person but she's really evil and devious," McCallum stated.
"People think she's small, she's deformed, she can't possibly do all this stuff everyone's saying. But they're wrong and she did do it. It is scary Natalia could still be doing this. I don't think she stopped, she's always finding another person to manipulate," she added.
