Erica Chapman Houston neighbor fed abandoned kids at apartment with skeletal remains of brother unaware to the degree of depravity the children were forced to endure.
A neighbor of the three children abandoned with the skeletal remains of their deceased sibling at a Texas home sensed something was wrong when she brought over food to the struggling brood.
Erica Chapman said she had once encountered the oldest sibling, a 15-year-old boy, sleeping on a playground slide near their Houston apartment building, KHOU reported.
‘I asked him if he was hungry. He said, ‘Yeah,’ and I brought him out some food and some drinks,’ Chapman told the outlet.
Chapman said that she had a feeling that something was wrong but she wanted to tread carefully so the boy would continue to come to her for help.
‘He wouldn’t talk about his parents,’ Chapman said. ‘I did not want him not come to me for food. If you’re that hungry, I want him to come to me because I at least knew he was eating.’
‘Honestly, I’m disgusted,’
The teen called authorities on Sunday to report that he and his two younger brothers, ages 10 and 7, had been living alongside their 9-year-old brother’s remains for a year.
Officers removed all three malnourished siblings from the squalid home they had been living in and brought them to the hospital.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says the rent for the apartment at at the CityParc II at West Oaks Apartments kept getting paid, with the mother not seen at the apartment in months. The 15-year-old it was revealed had been relying on Chapman, who started giving him food six months ago.
Chapman said that she was horrified to learn about the reality and extent of the abandoned children’s situation.
‘Honestly, I’m disgusted,’ Chapman said. ‘If I knew something was wrong with any of those kids, I would have took all of them.’
She said that she wishes she could tell the eldest brother ‘to keep his head up.’
‘I love him and I would take him and his brothers,’ she said, adding, ‘This ain’t his fault.’
Unanswered questions
Without electricity, the 15-year-old asked Thompson to charge a cellphone shortly before calling 911 on Sunday and alerting authorities to the horrors of the abandoned children’s situation.
Other neighbors also knew the situation in the apartment wasn’t normal, while also conceding they never imagined the true horror inside.
‘But I had no idea there was a skeleton in the house,’ said neighbor Trevor Thompson according to WGXA. ‘I never saw those other kids.’
The mother of the children and her boyfriend were brought in for questioning, but have since been released and no charges have been filed, authorities said.
It remained unclear why the children were left to fend for their own over the course of the last one year and the whereabouts of their parents.
The sheriff’s office is continuing to investigate the situation.
