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(NNC) - It all started when 27-yr old Donna Springer was driving along a Nebraska interstate highway on the night of June 15th. For Donna, it was just another Friday night and she was driving, as she does every weekend, down from South Sioux City to visit her boyfriend in Omaha. But her quiet drive was disrupted when her headlights illuminated what appeared to be a small boy walking along the side of the road. Donna immediately noticed that there was something wrong with him and pulled her car over. After getting out and approaching the boy, she noticed that he appeared to be severely traumatized as he was shaking and refused to speak. She lied him down on the back seat of her car and drove him to the nearest hospital.

But the first clue in what ultimately led the FBI to uncovering an illegal orphanage came when the boy started hysterically yelling nonsense as Donna pulled up to the hospital. He also became violent and fought the medical staff as they tried to remove him from Ms. Springer’s vehicle, but it was only after he was injected with a sedative that they were able to get him under control.

It turns out the boy, 10 year old Ben Raffport, was an undocumented child that claimed to have escaped from an orphanage just a few miles from where he was found. Local authorities had enlisted the help of the FBI due to the complicated nature of the case and a building that matched the boy’s description was stormed two days later.

What authorities uncovered was an illegal orphanage being run from a converted mansion that housed over 30 undocumented children and at least 10 workers. Though the children appeared not to have been physically mistreated, many of them seemed to have suffered severe mental abuse and their demeanor and thought processes evidenced extreme psychological manipulation resulting in distorted views and personality. The staff that were apprehended consisted of 9 nurses and one doctor who is being charged for running the orphanage.

But perhaps most disturbing about the case, and the reason that many believe the orphanage was “cult-like” in nature, is the loyalty and allegiance to the doctor that the nurses and children possess. Many of the children began crying upon discovering that the doctor was arrested and proceeded to beg for his release. Furthermore, several of the nurses refused to cooperate with authorities, one going as far as to warn “You made a big mistake,” and it’s this God-like devotion that leads many to speculate a cultish denomination.

The doctor has since been identified as American-native Dr. Daniel Frost who had studied at Harvard medical school and then went on to study psychology in Cambridge, England. After being hired to conduct private research for an undisclosed benefactor, Dr. Frost returned to the states and continued to incur huge sums of money for his research before abandoning the arrangement and disappearing from public view. It is speculated that Frost used his private funds to create and maintain the orphanage and recruited hand-selected nurses from all over the world to work with him.

And it seems the staff he recruited was talented indeed - the children all display an unparalleled level of knowledge and maturity and their personal vocabularies rival many college professors. Adding to the confusion, despite the boy’s initial trauma, Ben Raffport has fully regained consciousness and now demands to be released back to the orphanage and allowed to see Dr. Frost.

But the complexity of the case and the level of illegality involved precludes any possibility of the orphanage being restored to Dr. Frost. Authorities still fear that the widespread devotion to the doctor has been influenced by severely malicious and unlawful psychological manipulation. Further complicating matters, records found in Frost’s office document the adoption of over 50 additional children from the orphanage over the course of 20 years. Most baffling about the adoption is the fact that most of the clients appear to have paid outrageous sums of money - sometimes approaching $10 million - for the children, provoking many to question just what it is the doctor was selling.

POSTED AT 53: 31:12 BY BEN BOLDSTER, NEW YORK, NY

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