Unbelievable. It is stories like this that gets me wired up. This is so sad... The aid to have kids should be limited; After 2 kids, if still on Public Aid, the 2nd birth, tie the tubes!!! Where did she get the money to pay the utilities? Mom charged after 8 kids found alone living in filthy conditions
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August 18, 2009
BY KARA SPAK Staff Reporter
Eight children, including a 2-month-old girl, were in foster care after police found them alone about 1 a.m. Tuesday in a filthy home where the only running water was from an open pipe in the basement.
Their mother, Mary Steele, 29, of the 3800 block of South Calumet, was charged with eight misdemeanor counts of endangering the life and health of a child, Chicago police said. A concerned neighbor called police.
No adults were inside a residence the 3800 block of South Calumet Avenue, where eight children were found living in filthy conditions. The children were in good condition, but taken to University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital to be checked.
Steele was released on a recognizance bond. Outside the two-flat’s weed-filled lawn, she said she left for 15 minutes about 12:45 a.m. Tuesday to go to a drugstore three blocks away.
Steele said her children — two boys, 11 and 5, and six girls, 9, 7, 6, 2, 1 and 2 months old — were watching a kid’s television program when she left. When she returned, Steele said, police were outside the house, where she and the children have lived rent-free since June.“I’m mad, scared, hurt and terrified,” she said. “I’m mad at myself for leaving them for 10 to 15 minutes.”Steele’s father, Maurice Lawson, said he lived in the rental property until October, when a parole violation sent him to prison.
While he was locked up, he said drug dealers broke into the home, used it as a base for selling heroin and stole the building’s copper piping. When he was released, he returned to the home and called police, who evicted the drug dealers, Lawson and several neighbors said. Lawson said he lived there briefly after prison.
He said he suggested to his daughter earlier this summer that she move into the home with her children after she got into an argument with her mother and felt she and her children could no longer live with her mother and stepfather. Steele and Lawson said the house was in foreclosure. The woman they identified as the owner could not be reached for comment.
Steele said she thought she could fix the place up, and she even painted a daughter’s bedroom pink before moving in. She said she paid utility bills including cable, gas and electric, but she didn’t pay rent.
She said she washed her children by bringing buckets of water from the basement. The children would flush the toilet by pouring water down it, said Steele’s boyfriend, Bernard Bridgeman, 20.
City Department of Buildings Commissioner Richard Monocchio declined to describe what he saw in the home
but said police reports of human excrement were accurate.
“The home was really unfit for human habitation,” he said. “We’re just glad the children were removed safely.”
On July 29, a city inspector found several problems with the home’s exterior, including broken stairs, missing guard rail, high weeds, and glass and bricks in the backyard, officials said. The city was unable to gain entry to the home.
Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, said the agency had substantiated a report on Steele in April 2007 and recommended community-based services for the family.
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