On Monday, Crystina Schroer of Rose Hill was sentenced to nearly 18 years in prison for the death of her adopted daughter, Natalie Marie Garcia, also known as Kennedy Jean Schroer, the child’s adopted name.
Crystina pleaded no contest to second-degree murder, child abuse, making false information, and theft by welfare fraud.
Rose Hill police began investigating Natalie’s death and disappearance in September last year. Her remains were found buried in the backyard of her adoptive parents’ home. However, investigators determined the girl likely died in November 2022.
Police Chief Tyler Parlier released the following statement after Crystina’s sentencing explaining the investigation into Natalie’s death.
“The purpose of this release is to provide a thorough summary of the results of our investigation into the homicide of Natalie Marie Garcia. Natalie was born on July 14, 2014, at 11:06am in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Christa Helm. In August of 2017, Natalie and two biological sisters (4 years old and 9 months old) were temporarily placed as foster children with Joseph and Crystina Schroer of Rose Hill, Kansas. Joseph, a retired veteran having served with the Air Force, was working full-time as a mechanic for an area business. Crystina, a stay-at-home parent, raised the family’s four biological children, foster, and adopted children. In the fall of 2019 Natalie and her sisters were deemed wards of the State as their biological parents relinquished their parental rights. In November 2019 Natalie, her sisters and two other children (five girls in total, ages 1 ½ - 6 years old) were adopted by the Schroer family.
Almost immediately, Crystina began isolating the adopted children. Natalie and her eldest sister had been seeing mental health professionals for many months prior to adoption; however, once their adoption went through both were removed from clinical services in January 2020. Shortly thereafter, all minor children were removed from in person schooling, changing to homeschooling, under the guise of keeping an immunocompromised person safe in their home. She reported to family and friends that the girls were expelled from school, never allowed to return again, for behaviors like eating trash and being physically destructive. There are no school records of any such behavior, only a note from Crystina withdrawing the girls from school allegedly on a doctor’s order. After the adoption was finalized, Crystina changed Natalie’s name to Kennedy Schroer (referred to as Natalie, her birth name, for this statement). Our investigation determined Natalie was last known to be alive on Halloween 2020 and was murdered during November 2020, sometime after Halloween and before Thanksgiving.
Crystina tortured, abused, and neglected their adopted children. Crystina completely controlled the household and punished anyone who challenged her control. She manipulated the children, often only doting on the youngest child available and shunning the others. In the Schroer house, Crystina controlled every aspect of life through manipulation, intimidation, and favoritism. This control seemed an ever-present force for anyone who entered Crystina’s sphere.
She placed cameras throughout the interior and exterior of her home which would send a text or push notification to her cell phone of any movement in and around her house. She especially focused on the movements of the four eldest adopted children. If the girls played with their hair, moved their hands or feet or otherwise wiggled around in bed during the night even without making a sound this would send an alert to Crystina’s phone and inspire her rage. She would place the children in positions of motionlessness, on their bed facing down for a first offense and on the floor facedown for a second offense. Later, she would place the girls, individually or as a group, into basement closets to sleep or stay during the day and night with a bucket to use as a toilet. If Crystina felt that did not work, she would place the children into dog crates overnight and force medications on them to keep them from moving. She escalated her abuse of the girls to putting them into boxes or latching hard plastic storage boxes until they stopped moving or making a sound for 10 minutes.
Crystina killed Natalie in one of these boxes, made of reinforced cardboard (W-16 ½" x L-14″ x H-12 ½“), for the offense of moving in bed the previous night which was captured by the cameras and sent an alert to her phone. Crystina got angrier than most other times and placed heavy blankets and objects atop the box Natalie was forced into, increasing the heat inside the box and further limiting the air available to her little body. Crystina made one of Natalie’s sisters sit in the room, watch the box Natalie was in, and report back to Crystina if she was motionless and quiet for the required time. The sister, sobbing, told Crystina she thought her sister was dead, at which time Crystina kicked the box, and an unresponsive Natalie fell out.
Crystina admitted that she then placed a deceased six-year-old Natalie in her car and drove around for several hours, before returning home in the early afternoon and leaving Natalie in the car. It should be noted that the sister who watched Natalie get killed, reports to hearing her sister cough or clear her throat as Crystina left the house with her. Later that night, Crystina placed the naked, deceased body of Natalie into two trash bags, knotted them up and dug a hole, mere feet from her bedroom door. Crystina placed the trash bag covered remains into the cold earth in their backyard, then continued her life as if nothing happened.
Crystina created a lie about where Natalie had gone, later shifting blame to Natalie’s sister who had been made to watch her murder. On the afternoon of Natalie’s killing, Crystina falsely began telling family that Natalie had choked her younger sister until she was unresponsive. Crystina claimed that she was able to resuscitate the younger sibling but while doing so Natalie kept attacking her, so she had to call 911. This call never happened. No report was ever made to a local Fire District, County Emergency Medical Services, or law enforcement agency. No family member reported seeing any injury to any of the other children, nor did any other child corroborate Crystina’s story. Crystina told people that Natalie was taken away and placed into a locked facility for psychiatric care. And over the course of the next several years, Crystina reported that Natalie was continually going downhill in her care and the State ultimately deemed her unadoptable. In speaking with each family member and friends they all told us they asked Crystina about Natalie but did not press when given an answer. They all knew not to question Crystina. Over time they all just stopped asking and assumed what Crystina had told them was the truth.
Crystina was so accomplished at manipulation that she was able to successfully remember and build upon several lies over the same event to different people. Her family was so convinced of her persuasiveness and reach that they talked themselves out of reporting her to the authorities a year earlier, for possible neglect and mistreatment of the adopted girls, because who would believe them over her? In validation of their concerns, one of the children ran away from home not long after Natalie was killed and she reported to law enforcement at that time that she had been placed in boxes as punishment and hit. Our agency was unable to substantiate her claims at that time, Crystina’s false version of events seemed plausible, so with no corroboration of the child’s report she was returned home. We, law enforcement, were fooled by the façade Crystina had created. Everything she told us seemed to fit, and there were no physical manifestations of abuse. We would later find out there were no physical manifestations of abuse because Crystina ruled by fear and coercion, her marks and trauma were inflicted emotionally, verbally, and as a result could not be seen.
We later discovered that after Natalie was murdered, Crystina’s control tightened and her abuse of the other children became more frequent and crueler, including torture, physical abuse, neglect, malnutrition, and emotional/psychological abuse. Crystina’s abuse increased from early 2021and through late 2024. She continued to use boxes as a punishment for the three eldest adopted girls. One of the girls told investigators that it was hot and sweaty inside. Another drew a picture of the tubs and mentioned that the bottom of the lid had sharp points which hurt her. Crystina struck the girls with her hands, as well as objects like clothes hangers. She hung one of the girls in the closet by her wrists and poked one of them with knives.
She would limit food the children received and sometimes feed them moldy or physically stepped-on bread. One of the children went from weighing in the 75th percentile when she arrived at the Schroer house in 2017 to weighing below the 5th percentile for her age at the time she was removed from the Schroer home in 2024. The other adopted children showed similar declines in their weight, only gaining weight when they were able to eat at school. Crystina would give others in the home all the food they wanted, creating animosity amongst the adopted children. She would pit the girls against each other, blaming one, some or all the girls for different things and doling out punishment to the group for the actions of one, to turn them against each other. She created an environment where the children were rewarded for telling on a sibling, because they could hope to deflect Crystina’s anger towards a sibling and not them, playing on their survival instincts. When Crystina got angry at one child, she seemed to dote and focus positive energy on the others. Reinforcing her false narrative about what had happened with Natalie, Crystina would find pictures on the internet of a child strapped in a hospital bed and show that image to the girls as a reminder of what would happen if they stepped out of line.
From the earliest days of the children’s time with Crystina, she would lie about the children for financial gain. She cited for social workers a laundry list of maladies, ranging from self-harm, playing in their feces/urine, eating inedible things (Pica), to injuring themselves and others, which she claimed the two eldest adopted girls had, one of whom was Natalie. These exact same conditions were reported verbatim by Crystina to social workers about earlier foster children in the Schroer home. We concluded that Crystina made up these conditions to increase the amount of money she would receive from the State of Kansas for the children’s daily care. In short, the more problematic a child was or the more intensive supervision they required, the higher the per diem she received from the State. No one else apart from Crystina has ever observed any of these abhorrent behaviors. Report after report showed that these girls were age appropriate, well-mannered and had intelligence/socialization commensurate with their age group. Once their adoption was finalized, the per diem for the children was discontinued and Crystina stopped all of their medical care because it no longer served the purpose of increasing her income.
The children were treated as items on a ledger, either bringing income in or taking income away. One person in the investigation said: “Crystina viewed them (girls) as things, like lamps.” Evidence showed how Crystina diversified her income, with income streams coming from military retirement (spouse), military disability payments (spouse), Spousal employment, foster/adoption subsidies, Supplemental Security Income or SSI (adult child who required daily care), clothing sales online, and baking (which Crystina would bake but then falsely represent as being done by the adult child in care), all of which were safeguarded and curated by Crystina because she needed them to support her extreme gambling. Crystina spent millions of dollars between two casinos in the Wichita Metro area and four casinos in Oklahoma, and an unknown lifetime sum in online gambling as well. We were able to identify that Crystina spent more than $1 million more than she brought in, with total money-out exceeding 4 million dollars.
We found that each of the children in the household, biological/adopted/other, were all abused in one way or another. Some abuse was more apparent and insidious, other abuse was more indirect and manipulative. Crystina’s warmth toward her children was almost always short-lived and ended when one of the children had the temerity to go against her wishes. Once that break occurred, she would shift her warmth to a different child, making the first child feel even more alone, even though nothing was being done to them at that moment. Each child, biological or otherwise, has a different view of that home. That view and how they were treated will be weighed against what they now know about the treatment of others in the home, each person will have to heal from the wounds which Crystina gave them.
We cannot spin back time, and we cannot bring Natalie back to life. We cannot wipe away the abuse and torture committed against all these people, both young and old. I hope we can learn through the failures found in this investigation about what to look for and how to take action. Most importantly we can be active forces in the healing journey of those affected by Crystina’s crimes, helping them to see that no matter what they were told this was not their fault. While I cannot say that justice was done, I can say that a person who found perverse pleasure in placing other humans in boxes must now live in her own box. Crystina Scrhoer has been found guilty with her plea of No Contest and has been sentenced to 213 months of incarceration, where she must serve a minimum of 185 months. This is nowhere near a high enough price for her torturous killing of Natalie Garcia, a beautiful six-year-old child. This can never be enough to pay for the damage she has caused, it is the best outcome achievable without retraumatizing every person left in Crystina’s wake by having to go through a trial. While speaking for the dead we must also protect the living.
Think about the lives you have lived in the last 213 months, or 17 years. Every time you slept in, you went for a swim, ate a nice meal at a restaurant, went for a drive, changed the channel on your television, had a drink, or showered alone. At a minimum all of that will be denied to Crystina and she will have to exist with the daily knowledge that she is the architect of all her own pain. She can tell whoever may listen that she took this plea to protect the children, that is a lie. Crystina only took this deal to avoid the risk of spending the remainder of her life behind bars, this deal gives her hope of freedom. There is nothing selfless about Crystina Schroer, she took a life, buried the remains in trash bags and tried to blame it on one of the victims of her torture. We should never forget we only became aware of this murder when Crystina thought she was about to be caught and was trying to get ahead of and control the narrative. She did not report this to law enforcement because it was the correct thing to do, she reported it to try to control the narrative. The only thing which motivates her is gaining, maintaining, and growing her control. Crystina Schroer is not taking this deal to protect anyone but herself and to perpetuate the final lie she is hanging on to, that she is innocent of Natalie Garcia’s murder. This woman is not innocent; she is a monster.
Alternatively, these children she tortured will now be free to heal. They will be free to learn to trust, to love, to learn that it is okay to make mistakes, that it is okay to forgive, and most importantly that none of this was their fault. These girls will be free to live their lives, while their abuser will be confined to a cell and told what food she can eat, where she can go, and to whom she can speak. She will be in an entirely too large a box, of her own design, for the next 15 – 17 years."