Steven Pladl, 42, and his biological daughter Katie Pladl, 20, have been arrested and charged with incest after they had a baby together and then made plans to get married.
Steven Pladl fathered Katie in 1998 but put her up for adoption, local news site KRON 4 reports.
When Katie turned 18 she tracked down her biological parents using social media. She then moved to their home near Richmond, Virginia, in 2016.
She lived with her biological parents and their two other children.
But just months later Steven and his wife, Katie’s mother, legally separated.
In May last year Steven Pladl’s wife read in one of her children’s diaries that Katie was pregnant and Steven Pladl was the father.
When they were arrested the couple were living with a boy who was born in September 2017.
That’s when police got involved, charging the couple with incest with adult, adultery and contributing to delinquency.
Both were each issued a $1 million bond, which seems quite high. Normally such high bonds are for people who are at risk of flight.
The crimes can carry upto ten years in prison.
Steven Pladl has since been released on bond but Katie remains in jail, court records show.
There is a lot of complex emotions in this case and one can’t help but feel there is a lot more to the story than what is recorded in the arrest warrants.
There are a lot of victims here but the couple’s 4-month-old boy surely deserves special sympathy for being born into an impossibly complicated situation through no choice of their own.
You can only imagine the future that boy has ahead of him when he discovers the truth of his own parents.
Technically his dad is also his grandad and his mum is also his sister – which seems a cruel way to bring an innocent child into this world.
