Filing: Teen says mom killed her siblings found in freezer

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By ED WHITE and COREY WILLIAMS

DETROIT (AP) — A teenager told authorities that her mother killed two siblings and forced her to put one of the bodies in the freezer of their Detroit home where both were found by an eviction crew.

Details of death and extreme abuse emerged Thursday as Mitchelle Blair appeared in court, two days after the bodies of a 9-year-old son, Stephen Berry, and 13-year-old daughter, Stoni Blair, were discovered.

Blair, 35, is charged with child abuse, but she could face murder charges when the bodies thaw and autopsies are performed, prosecutors said. Bond was set at $1 million. An attorney hasn't been assigned.

The Michigan Department of Human Services is taking steps to end Blair's rights to two other children, a 17-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son. In a court filing, the state said the teen described a house of horror, where she and her surviving brother were beaten with an extension cord and piece of wood, hit with a hot curling iron and burned with a clothing iron.

FULL story at link.



Mitchelle Blair stands during her video arraignment at the 36th District Court, Thursday, March 26, 2015, in Detroit. The Detroit woman charged with child abuse after the bodies of two of her children were found in her home freezer has been ordered to stay in jail Thursday unless she can post a $1 million bond. (AP Photo/Detroit News, Jose Juarez ) DETROIT FREE PRESS OUT; HUFFINGTON POST OUT

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150327/us--freezer_bodies-detroit-dfa3d0ae87.html

[840high]

1. Jesus H.

[Dont call me Shirley]

2. Stephen, Stoni, 17 and 8 year old...

[riversedge]

12. #1

[passiveporcupine]

3. How did she ever get bond?

[sakabatou]

4. O.O

[secondwind]

5. she looks mentally disturbed... :-(

[Joe Chi Minh]

6. Whatever psychiatrists might say,

I'm not all together convinced that mental illness covers repeated or systematic abuse, or indeed, acts of extreme malice, such as committing suicide and taking as many people with you as you can, as in the case of that crashed aeroplane.

[nomorenomore08]

9. Mental illness and malice are far from mutually exclusive. They can be a cataclysmic mix. n/t

[Joe Chi Minh]

16. Yes, I mentioned that on another thread, but

the media always dismiss the possibility of malice, if they can put it all down to mental illness.

You can blame relativism for that. According to that common atheist world-view, we are just aggregations of molecules darting about, bumping into each other, and producing everything from mathematics to the 23rd Psalm. No objective moral code. Each of us decides for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. We can no more be blameworthy than the apes we are supposed to be descended from. We just obey whatever our nature dictates. Of course, in reality, the behaviour of the proponents of relativism is not at all consistent with those beliefs in relation to their family and friends or they would be psychopaths. We are more than meat-heads.

[djean111]

18. That is the most ridiculous and wrong-headed definition of what atheists believe that

I have ever read. Sounds exactly like something the Duck Dynasty asshole would say, really. As an atheist, I believe people should know right from wrong without being told what is right or wrong, without needing a LIST to memorize, and without the threat of hellfire. That, to me, is just pathetic, like not killing people because one would go to hell. Don't kill people because it is Wrong!.

[Quantess]

19. Why bring atheism into this?

[Joe Chi Minh]

20. Beliefs have consequences. But you're both right. This

is not the place to do it.

If I don't sing from your hymn sheet, I don't have to tear it up. They're OK with atheist posters on the Christian forum I post to, and are even protected, though they sneer all the time at us. All very puzzling.

[Quantess]

21. It's unconventional, isn't it?

Normally in the USA it's Christians who get to verbally abuse everyone who isn't Christian, especially atheists and agnostics. Atheists and agnostics mostly stay quiet, since a lack of religion is often seen as shameful.

Normally Christians, or "Christians" in name only, get the run of the place, but not here at the DU. I love it.

[snooper2]

11. She looks like she is thinking, fuck they are going to give me the chair for sure

[bigworld]

7. Shouldn't the 17 year old have said something earlier?

I'm not in her shoes, of course. But she seems cognizant enough to recall everything for the police.

[djean111]

8. First, kids do not necessarily know that this is not normal.

Doesn't look like the neighbors or other family took notice. And the 17 year old may have feared for her life or the life of her sibling.

When I was a kid, my father used to beat my sister and brother and I, especially my little brother.
Rest of the family knew it, and were silent, as were the neighbors.
Oh, and the mother of a school friend I told about the beatings called social services, and a social worker came to the house, lectured my dad, and then left us there with him. Pretty bad.
So, yeah, we would have to be in her shoes and in her head in order to criticize. So I will not.

[Joe Chi Minh]

17. Austerity (as per your signature) is a terrrible misnomer, isn't it? And yet we

let the media get away with it all the time.

The reality comprises such principles as privatization for the few, and privation for the many. Better still, it should be called, 'accelerated economic polarization'.

[surrealAmerican]

10. How do we know she didn't?

A lot of complaints from kids never get followed up on.

[crim son]

14. Good point.

The State's concern for the welfare of minors, we know, tends to be erratic.

[riversedge]

13. umm. Neither the 17 yo nor the younger child has been in school for two years....

I can understand the 17 yo-maybe MI has only mandatory till 16. But who is watching the younger one?? Looks like Social serivice involved in earlier yeas but not past 9 years. Home schooling? But even if that is the case--the districts are involved. Something fishy as these kids slipped through the cracks.


..Medical exams revealed evidence of abuse, including numerous scars, on the children. The teenager said neither she nor her siblings have attended school for two years.

Earlier Thursday, Blair appeared in court on child abuse charges via a video feed from a police lockup. Magistrate Renee McDuffee entered a not-guilty plea on her behalf.

"The charges in this matter are so heinous," McDuffee said in explaining the $1 million bond.

The state said it investigated allegations of abuse in 2002 and 2005. Blair was referred to counseling.

The state said the two fathers of Blair's surviving children are unfit to care for them. Together they owe $50,000 in child support and haven't seen the kids in two to three years.

[marshall]

15. Extension cords were common methods of punishment used by parents when I was teaching

Back in the early 90s when I was teaching at a big city school I knew of several parents who used extension cords to discipline their children. On one occasion the secretary in the principal's office asked me to send her grandson from my class to the main office where she then whipped him with an extension cord. Another time after I sent a note home to a mother about her son's bullying other children she came to my class with extension cord in hand and whipped him in front of us all, then turned to me and asked "Is that enough?"

Extension cords did not cause too much alarm, but after another parent disciplined her daughter (at home after she got a report the girl had been truant) with a baseball bat the authorities did step in.

Needless to say that is part of the reason I am no longer teaching.