A desperate 911 call from a teenager threatening to harm himself led Fayetteville police to a home in November 2023. What began as a mental health check quickly turned into a missing persons investigation. Officers discovered that two adopted children, Blake and London Deven, had been missing for years, and no one had ever reported it until now.
Fayetteville detectives uncovered five children had been adopted from three different North Carolina counties by the same woman. Two of them had vanished without a trace, and there was no credible record of what happened to them. The case exposed gaps in North Carolina’s foster and adoption systems—systems designed to protect vulnerable children that, in this case, failed them entirely.
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WRAL’s investigative documentary “Broken: Foster Care in North Carolina” examines the Deven case and the systemic failures that allowed it to happen.
Deven case timeline: WRAL documentary 'Broken' exposes NC's foster care failures
From foster care to missing: The case of the Deven children
Felicia Chandler held a stack of photos and keepsakes as she stood in Lake Louise Park in Weaverville, North Carolina—one of the last places she remembered seeing her sons play. Among the memories was a baby picture of Trenton Schuler, her firstborn, born on May 10, 2006.
“He was only 3 pounds, 10 ounces,” she said. “But he came right out of that NICU. He was very strong, always very strong.”
Chandler had two more sons – born in 2008 and 2010.
“I got lucky. I really did,” she said. “Three boys who loved their mama.”
In 2011, when Trenton was 5, Deven was 3, and Gabriel wasn’t even 1 year old, the Department of Social Services (DSS) in Madison County entered their lives. DSS intervened due to an alleged domestic violence incident—one Felicia says did not involve the children’s father and happened when the boys weren’t even home.
“I thought everything would be okay,” she said. “They’d see my house, see my kids were loved, and it would be fine.”
But that night, her sons stayed with relatives. The next day, they were placed into foster care.
More than a decade later, Chandler is still searching for answers.
“Even if there was a dispute, why didn’t they protect me and my children?” she asked. “Why did they take them from me?”
Felicia Chandler’s fight to regain custody of her three sons was long and complicated. She was assigned to a Madison County Department of Social Services [DSS] social worker, Catherine Hubbard, who remembered Chandler as incredibly motivated.
“Reunification was the goal,” Chandler said. “That was the plan.”
During the process, a woman named Avante Deven entered the picture.
Deven had been involved in the foster system as a respite caregiver—someone who provided temporary care for foster children when needed. Chandler was adamant that if her boys couldn’t be with her, they should at least stay together.
“If they’re not going to be with me, they need to be together,” she said.
Avante Deven seemed like the answer. As a licensed foster parent with two adopted daughters already in her care, she stepped forward and offered to take in all three boys.
Initially, Chandler thought it might be a blessing.
“At first, I thought maybe she was trying to help me and the boys,” she said. “And that’s why I don’t trust people very well today.”
Chandler was allowed visits and phone calls with her sons during the two years the case dragged through the system. Hubbard, who supervised many of those visits, said the complicated custody case stretched on for years.
“She worked very hard, and I know she loves her children,” Hubbard said. “But often, love is not enough.”
Chandler often felt like the odds were stacked against her. She admits she wasn’t always the easiest person to deal with but says she was young, scared, and vulnerable.
“It was very foggy and hazy through that whole thing,” Chandler said. “My attorney was … released by the courts to me. I showed up to court, and my attorney was brought in shackles during my custody hearing. He had charges for drinking and driving and other offenses. I was left with no attorney and never got another one after that.”
By 2013, the courts finalized Avante Deven’s adoption of all three boys. The adoption was closed, meaning Chandler had no legal rights to them.
Chandler said she fought back, calling agencies and searching for help, but she kept hitting dead ends.
“I didn’t just stop,” she said. “I tried to call all kinds of different places to figure out what to do next. And I just kept hitting brick walls.”
Avante Deven, now living with all five of her adopted children, eventually cut off all contact.
“And that was it,” Chandler said. “I never saw or heard anything from them again.”
After Avante Deven’s adoption of Chandler’s three sons was finalized, there was no oversight from the state of North Carolina or the counties.
“Once the adoption is done, the state basically just backs away,” WRAL anchor and reporter Chris Lovingood explained.
Unless a family is receiving financial support, there are no follow-ups. WRAL confirmed Avantae Deven declined any financial assistance from the state in 2013.
By 2015, she had moved the family from Leicester in Buncombe County to Fayetteville in Cumberland County and changed all the children’s names. Trenton became Blake Deven, Mariah became London Deven and Brianna became Cherish Deven. WRAL is not naming the other two children because they are minors, still in the system.
Public records showed Avantae Deven homeschooled the children at a school she named Deven Academy.
Chandler had no way to track them.
“For years, it’s like they didn’t exist,” she said.
In November 2023, Fayetteville police were called to the Deven home.
Chandler would later learn the caller was her middle son, who was now a teenager.
“He tried to take his own life to get attention because he said he hadn’t seen his brother in five years,” Chandler said.
After the teenager told police that his brother Blake was missing, Fayetteville police launched an investigation.
Two months later, in January 2024, Avante Deven called 911 herself to report Blake Deven, formerly Trenton Chandler, missing.
“He went to some sort of Buddhist retreat,” she claimed on the call. “But this time, he never called back.”
When asked by the 911 dispatcher if she had a phone number for Blake, she had none.
To Hubbard, a former social worker, it made no sense.
“How did he get there? How would he not have phone contact?” Hubbard asked.
In March 2024, Fayetteville police publicly announced that Blake Deven was missing. While he was 17, the last known photo of him was from childhood. Fayetteville police released an age-progression image of what he might have looked like in 2024.
Chandler held onto hope that her son had simply run away to find his birth family.
“The detectives came to my house. He was going to be 18 in a few months, and they were hoping he had just run away to come back home to his mother. And that’s what I’ve held onto and dreamed of for years,” she said. “But instead, it literally turned into a missing persons case.”
One month later, in April 2024, police revealed that Blake’s adoptive sister, London Deven, was also missing. Again, the only available photo was from childhood.
Authorities determined the last independent sighting of London Deven had been in 2019.
Avante Deven arrested, charged with murder of two adopted children
After months of questions, Fayetteville police detailed their findings in a news conference in June 2024. Detectives had uncovered evidence that both Blake and London were dead.
That same day, officers arrested Avante Deven at her home. She was charged with first-degree murder, concealment of death, kidnapping and felony child abuse in connection with those two children.
At the time of her arrest, Avante Deven still had custody of two children. A fifth, Cherish Deven, had reached maturity and moved out.
According to police, Avantae Deven abused the children, keeping them locked in dark rooms, depriving them of food and forcing them to write hundreds of paragraphs as punishment before they were allowed to eat.
“Some were beaten so badly they needed medical care,” Sgt. Jeff Locklear with the Fayetteville Police Department said. “Instead of treatment, they were given natural cures like honey.”
Chandler was devastated when she learned the details.
“I can’t even say some of the words that were done to my child,” she said. “No child should ever have had to go through that.”
Police believe Blake Deven died in a home on Eichelberger Drive in Fayetteville from abuse and starvation. His body, they allege, could no longer take the inhumane treatment.
After his death, Locklear said, Avante Deven forced one of her other adopted children to dismember and burn his remains.
Authorities allege that, like Blake, London Deven suffered prolonged abuse, starvation and neglect inside the Deven household
Police believe London Deven died under the same circumstances as Blake Deven, her body weakened by malnutrition and mistreatment until it could no longer endure.
Investigators say a different child was forced to help dispose of London Deven’s body.
During their investigation, police discovered a metal burn barrel on a property where the Deven family had lived.
Forensic testing revealed that the barrel contained two separate sets of human remains—one consistent with a female between the ages of 15 and 19, the other belonging to a child between the ages of 7 and 10.
In June 2024, testing confirmed that one set of remains belonged to London Deven.
The second set is still undergoing forensic examination.
Meanwhile, Avante Deven, the woman who adopted and raised these children, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. She remains in jail, awaiting trial. Her attorney declined WRAL News’ multiple requests for comment.
A recorded confession
Months after Deven’s arrest, a man named Nathan Mitchell contacted WRAL’s Chris Lovingood.
Mitchell had a recorded phone conversation from 2022—a confession from someone who lived in the Deven home detailing Blake’s death.
In the recording, the person admitted to their role in dismembering the body.
"My mother starved my oldest brother."
"She starved him so much that she killed him, bro. And then she didn't call the ambulance. She didn't call the police. She didn't try and make up a story to tell them, ‘oh, well, he passed away.’"
"She literally had me buy a trash can, dude, and keep him in there for a month. And then after that, she literally had me buy a saw to cut him open and disintegrate the body, dude. Like, this is messing with my head."
The voice belonged to Cherish Deven.
For months, WRAL News chose not to name her, as she had not been charged. But then, Cherish herself reached out. She wanted to speak publicly for the first time.
“I was forced to do it,” Cherish Deven said.
Now an adult, she said she endured years of the same horrific abuse.
“I was being starved and beaten too,” she said. “I would hide dog food in the vents just to eat.”
Cherish Deven said she was there the night Blake Deven died. She watched as he took his final breath.
"An hour before, I told her something was wrong,” Cherish Deven said. “I said, 'Take him in. Something isn’t right.' She wouldn’t listen."
Cherish Deven confirmed she was the person on the recording who said they were forced to dismember and dispose of Blake Deven’s body.
"It wasn’t that I wanted to do this. I was forced to do it,” she said. “Detectives know this. Everybody knows this already.”
Cherish Deven explained that she had been manipulated and controlled by Avante Deven for years.
"I was in the foster system. I thought that was love,” Cherish Deven said. “I trauma bonded with her. I had no idea what love was."
Chandler is haunted by what she learned.
"Five kids—five—just to torture them mentally and physically," she said. "Why? Who does that?"
A foster care system that failed
Blake and London Deven were removed from one home, placed into foster care, adopted—and then, authorities say, they died at the hands of the very person the state entrusted to raise them.
"Someone needs to be held accountable because Avante Deven is not the only one at fault here," Chandler said.
Chandler still struggles to understand how Avante Deven was allowed to adopt her sons.
“If you're going to take a child away from their biological parents, period, point blank, you should do a thorough investigation on the person you’re handing that kid over to,” she said.
Hubbard said Avantae Deven had gone through multiple layers of screening because she already had two children in her home when she adopted Chandler’s sons.
“She had already gone through multiple agencies, multiple courts, multiple judges, in order to have those children placed in the home,” Hubbard said.
Hubbard said she remembers Avantae Deven presenting herself as an experienced and capable caregiver.
“She presented as someone who had experience,” Hubbard said.
Even then, Hubbard said some things felt “off.”
“It seemed like everything was very … created,” Hubbard said. “Her voice pattern, the way that she dressed, her nails always done, more makeup than you’d expect from a mother of five. It was all carefully crafted.”
Hubbard said these weren’t things that she could use as evidence Avantae Deven wasn’t fit to foster children.
“The things I felt were unusual were not things that I could look on the witness stand to a judge with a straight face and say, there's something off here,” Hubbard said.
Hubbard also wondered about Deven’s financial situation.
“There didn’t seem to be any logical way she had the financial resources to have five children in her home, and yet, she had been approved for that,” Hubbard said.
Avantae Deven was a licensed foster parent from 2007 to 2013 through a nonprofit agency called Grandfather Homes. The agency required 40 hours of training and a background check.
Grandfather Homes said Avantae Deven provided seven letters of recommendation, including two from behavioral health agencies. However, citing privacy laws, the agency did not allow WRAL News to review those letters.
Cherish Deven, one of Avante Deven’s adopted children, said those letters could not have been truthful.
“There’s no way she got real recommendations saying she was a good person because she never was,” Cherish Deven said. “Even when she was adopting the youngest boys—Blake, all of them—me and Mariah (London) were being starved to death. We were coming out of the closet she kept us in.”
According to Cherish Deven, DSS visited their home the day after a night of forced labor
“She kept us up till five o’clock in the morning cleaning the Schluter Branch house, putting on a fake facade,” Cherish Deven said.
Hubbard now believes she and everyone else in the system were lied to.
“We were all lied to and misled by someone who never had anyone else’s best interests at heart,” she said.
In August 2024, Fayetteville police revealed information that Avante Deven had used at least eight different aliases.
Detectives released a photo of Deven from the 1990s, when she went by Prentiss Adams or Michelle Spiegel.
Chandler couldn’t believe how Deven had slipped through the system.
“I don’t understand how all the different aliases never caught up to her until now,” she said. “I have no idea how Grandfather Homes, DSS and all these agencies missed that information.”
The gaps in North Carolina’s foster system
There are nearly 11,000 people younger than the age of 21 in North Carolina’s foster care system and only 6,000 foster homes.
The state is one of just nine in the country with a state-supervised, county-administered system.
This means North Carolina’s 100 counties run their own programs while the state oversees them. However, critics say this structure has serious flaws.
“Having a hundred counties administer statewide policy in a hundred different ways is extremely problematic,” said Democratic state Sen. Sydney Batch, who represents Wake County and is also a family law attorney and social worker.
Batch compared the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to a life coach rather than an enforcer.
“They’re like, ‘Good job, DSS! We want you to do well. Here’s a new strategy or policy.’ But it’s really up to the county DSS director if they even listen to the state,” Batch said.
In most cases, DHHS has no authority to intervene in how counties operate unless there are extreme circumstances.
Karen McLeod, head of the nonprofit Benchmarks and a member of the state’s Child Fatality Task Force, has spent 30 years working in the foster care system. McCloud says North Carolina spends the least on child welfare among the nine states with county-administered systems.
“Lower-wealth counties don’t have enough money to spend,” McLeod said. “They have high turnover rates, which creates huge stressors for our counties.”
Another major issue: there’s no central IT system for social workers.
If children move to a different county, their history doesn’t follow them.
“The data on where children are in this state is completely fragmented,” Batch said. “If you wanted to know how many placements a child has had, where they were, where do you go? We’re still building a system to track that.”
Even worse, there is no single phone number to report child abuse in North Carolina.
“Right now, every county has its own number for reporting abuse and neglect,” McLeod said. “That means there are a hundred different counties reviewing those calls.”
Batch introduced Senate Bill 625 in 2023 to give DHHS more oversight of county DSS offices. It passed unanimously in the state Senate, but it stalled in the state House.
Republican state Sen. Jim Burgin, who represents Harnett, Lee and Sampson counties, worked across party lines with Batch and other Democratic lawmakers to improve foster care.
“Every time you take a child and put them in a different environment, sleeping on a different pillow, you chip off a little piece of that child,” Burgin said. “Eventually, they crack. We just can’t keep doing this.”
But State Rep. Sarah Stevens, a Republican who represents Surry and Wilkes counties, said the bill’s language would have given the state’s Department of Health and Human Services too much power.
The WRAL Documentary Team asked Burgin about Stevens’ decision to vote against the bill.
“Sarah and I are friends, and she’s a good legislator,” Burgin said. “I think we just need to sit down and go through things with her. Politics is funny sometimes—timing is everything.”
Asked what she would change to strengthen or improve the foster care system, Stevens and her office ignored multiple requests for an interview.
Batch plans to reintroduce the bill in 2025.
“When you have a system and you have the ability and the power to improve that system, I don't know why you would sit there on your hands and do nothing,” Batch said. “Our kids deserve more.”
Changes happening now to North Carolina’s foster care system
Even without new legislation, NCDHHS says changes are coming.
“We have a lot of things in progress,” said Susan Osborne, deputy secretary for opportunity and well-being at NCDHHS.
To provide more support to counties, the state has been divided into seven regions, each with 14 or 15 counties.
“One person supports each of those counties in safety,” Osborne explained. “They focus only on intake decisions and strong safety plans.”
The state will also begin reimbursing family members who step in where there is a shortage of licensed foster parents up to $400 a month.
“This is called kinship care,” Osborne said. “We know when kids are placed with family, their well-being improves, and there’s less trauma.”
Additionally, $22 million in recurring state funding has been set aside to address mental health gaps for children in foster care.
Osborne insists the system isn’t broken—just struggling.
“I don’t think we meet the definition of broken,” she said. “The system has struggled. We've made progress and there are a lot of things in place now that weren't in place five years ago. And there will be more on our list in the future.”
Felicia Chandler’s fight continues
“This isn’t your typical story where the mother didn’t fight,” Chandler said.
Chandler said she is determined to make sure no child slips through the cracks again.
“I fought for my boys, and I still am,” Chandler said. “I always will.”
For more than a dozen years, Chandler has carried stacks of paperwork and folders filled with documents hoping to one day go through it all with the two sons she hasn’t seen since they were little.
“They deserve to know the truth,” Felicia said. “And that is one reason I have kept and made sure to keep all these files. You’re probably wondering, ‘What made you keep all these things?’ Because one day, I hope I can sit down with them, go through all of this, and explain what really happened. There’s so much more to this story.”
Seeing her two sons again is something Chandler dreams about.
“I hope one day my boys figure out who I am,” she said. “And I hope they would like to meet me.”
But Chandler knows the system that took them away—the same system responsible for the now teenagers—would have to make that happen.
“I really wish they would just give me my boys back,” she said. “It seemed pretty cut and dry and simple for them to take them away from me and put them with complete strangers. But [it is] so complicated to just give them back to their mother.”
Chandler has stood in front of the Madison County DSS office several times with posters, hoping to share her story.
“I don’t want Trenton [Blake Deven] to be forgotten. I don’t want his brothers to be forgotten. I don’t want Mariah [London Deven] to be forgotten,” she said. “All their stories deserve to be told.”
Chandler is fighting to get the state to require check-ins on adopted children at least six months after adoption even if foster parents don’t receive financial assistance.
“I hope all moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, I hope everyone who will fight this with me,” she said. “But if not, that’s OK. Because I will do it by myself. I’m just hoping not to this time.”
Chandler knows she may never meet her sons again. She worries that this documentary may be her only chance to reach them.
Looking into the camera, she spoke directly to them:
“I hope this message finds Deven and Gabriel. I am your biological mother, Felicia Chandler. I was really hoping to be able to tell you this in a different way, but here we are. I just want you to know that I love you both so very much. Always have, always will. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about y’all, look at your pictures, or long for the day I get to see you again. I’m always here. If you ever need anything, I’m always here. And I do love you very much.”
Where to watch 'Broken: Foster Care in North Carolina'
"Broken: Foster Care" in North Carolina premieres at 7:30 p.m. on WRAL-TV on February 6, 2025. It airs on FOX 50 at 11:30 a.m. on February 16, 2025 and on WILM on February 8, 2025 at 8:30 a.m.
At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6, viewers can also stream the documentary on WRAL.com and the WRAL YouTube page.
About the WRAL Documentary Unit
The WRAL Documentary Unit creates in-depth investigative reports on critical issues facing North Carolina and beyond. For more information on "Broken" and other WRAL documentaries, visit wraldocumentary.com.