Coroner: 46-Pound Woman Starved to Death

[Lone_Star_Dem]

Source: ABC

A Georgia couple living among cobwebs, cockroaches and feces face involuntary manslaughter charges after a blind and deaf family member weighing just 46 pounds was found dead outside their home.

Rescue personnel went to the couple's Augusta, Ga., residence Sunday evening after receiving a 911 call about a deceased person. Paramedics found 30-year-old Christine Baxter's tiny body in the front yard, Capt. Calvin Chew of the Richmond County Sheriff's Office told ABC News. Efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.

<snip>

Inside, investigators for the Richmond County Sheriff's Office found foul living conditions, including a roach infestation, walls and floor smeared with both human and animal feces, and a 200-pound pot-bellied pig living among several free-roaming dogs and cats.

<snip>

Baxter, whose health condition also prevented her from feeding herself, had previously lived under the care of her mother, Chew said, and when her mother died, she moved in with her sister and brother-in-law. While Baxter may have been at their residence, there was no documentation citing the pair as her new legal caregivers.

Read more: http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3775808&page=1

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[Turbineguy]

1. They can sell

the movie rights.:puke:

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. true bush supporters, obviously.

because no self-respecting democrat would ever do anything like that.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

3. No self-respecting human being would do anything like that.

It's heartbreaking to imagine what her life must have been like.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

12. . . . to imagine the horror that was her life

AND then to hear bush tell us that government has to get out of people's lives.

fuck that couple and fuck bush.

wait, no. Let's not fuck that couple. it may cause even more procreation, which would be a very bad thing.

[kestrel91316]

4. How can anyone live like that?

I mean, seriously - HOW CAN ANYONE LIVE LIKE THAT??????

Those pics make me wanna buy up some cleaning supplies and go down to that house and get to work. I HATE a messy, dirty house.

I had a BF years ago who was a bit of a packrat. He and his bachelor roommates, none of them liked to actually clean, so the kitchen was a pig sty. I had to spend two hours cleaning it stem to stern before I would even CONSIDER cooking in it. Thick layers of grease and dirt on every surface (but nothing a quart of ammonia couldn't solve).

[Catch22Dem]

6. Fuck that!

That house makes me want to buy up a bulldozer and get to work!

[ckimmy57]

21. All the ammonia in the world

would'nt help that pig sty...get the matches and light them.

[Blue_Tires]

30. i feel you

my messy living mates make me want to scream

[hedgehog]

5. I don't think this couple was capable of caring for themselves,

let alone the deaf-blind woman. What isn't clear is why she couldn't fee herself. That statement suggests that she never received a proper education or else had other problems as well.

This case illustrates a serious problem for society - do we declare that people living in filth or living on the streets are mentally ill and take care of them, or do we declare they have rights to live as they will and leave them alone?


(undoubtedly, the likelihood of a home inspection would vary with income!)

[pacalo]

16. I was thinking along the same line.

This couple must have mental problems, along with being destitute because of their mental states. This is a blatant example of how our society ignores & neglects the mentally ill. If people are unable to make a living, Lord help them, because our government, along with too many selfish constituents, don't care about helping those who can't help themselves.

[NashVegas]

26. Well

What isn't clear is why she couldn't feed herself.

You've got to wonder what was on the menu ...

[UpInArms]

7. why are there plates near that nasty toilet?

and can someone hold my hair whilst I go :puke:?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

13. great way to collect lunch. nt

[Alcibiades]

23. Probably to put food down for their many animals

Looks like someone forgot that the whole point of disposable plates is that you throw them away when you're done with them.

[DemoTex]

8. Tobacco Road?

Shades of Erskine Caldwell's 1932 novel Tobacco Road about ignorance and poverty, set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia.

[depakid]

14. Sounds more like something out of Deliverance to me

:scared:

[medeak]

9. why didn't anyone call adult protective services?

hello? there had to be a neighbor...someone who knew this was going on?

[tammywammy]

10. I need a shower just looking at those pictures

*shiver*

And that poor woman was starved to death there.

There was a case in Hutchins, Texas where these parents locked up and starved their daughter. It was just horrible.

[celestia671]

11. I remember that...

They locked her in the closet saying she ate too much, while the other siblings were well fed.

I'm not the neatest person in the world, but I do clean my house. I don't see how people can live like that! I've heard of people who let cats and dogs roam all over their house and do whatever, nasty!

[tammywammy]

19. Yeah that was it

It was very sad. The girl had been put into foster care when she was a baby and the mother (the one that starved her) took her back. The former foster parents ended up adopting her in the end.

My house definitely isn't spotless, it looks lived in, but it's at least tidy. I'll never understand how people can just let dishes sit there with food still on them. I don't have a dishwasher and I'm in the habit of washing dishes right after I'm done with them.

[pacalo]

15. This is probably the worst I've ever seen.

It breaks my heart to imagine the blind & deaf victim having had to navigate through this house (if she were allowed to):



I've only seen cobwebs this size in old horror movies, where the spider was colossal in size:



That poor, poor girl... :cry:

[Lone_Star_Dem]

17. I wondered how (if) she would have been able to get around in there too.

Being deaf and blind I imagine her sense of smell was heightened also.

What was odd was the outside was clean, if in need of some repairs, but the lawn was mowed and the yard litter free. It was a stark contrast to the inside.

[pacalo]

18. Look at the bottom of the brick on the outside: is that black mold?

If this couple isn't mentally ill, I'd be terribly surprised.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

20. It could be dead green algae

It looks like there's green algae further down. No doubt due to the lack of gutters which also has caused the fascia trim to look decayed.

There's no telling what all molds were in the house though. I can easily imagine that plumbing and roof leaks went unrepaired.

I have to agree with you. If they turn out to not to be mentally ill I'm going to be surprised.

[NashVegas]

27. Like Homeless People Who've Completely Let Go ...

Only they own property.

Certainly they knew there was something off about their living conditions, the outside was kept passable, and they didn't want to let police inside the house.

[jwirr]

22. What does the "health condition also prevented her from feeding

herself" mean?

I ask because some of you will remember the 15 year old girl in Wisconsin who died weighing only 15 pounds. There are 5 young adults in our area that have health conditions that prevent them from feeding themselves - all have had tubes inserted into their stomachs so they do not starve. The child in Wisconsin did not have a tube so her developmentally disabled mother was blamed for the death UNTIL some of us got on the phone and called the social workers and doctors on their neglect in that case.

It sounds like this case may not be that kind of situation but I would like to know more.

[northzax]

25. it's never made clear

what the condition is (besides being blind and deaf) these unfortunate people aer obviously unable to care for themselves, let alone someone needing 24 hour care. what a tragedy.

[Corkey Mineola]

33. wild guess

she was probably too weak to feed herself. You need to eat and have energy to consume and expend more energy. If you are deprived of nourishment (starvation) you will not have the energy to eat. Just my 2 cents.

[Hekate]

39. Or lack of training and assistance from the get-go. No more "special schools" are there?

AFAIK institutions to care for such as she have mostly been closed because some of them always were bad -- and to save money -- and it was easier to close them down when people recoiled than it was to make them better. And besides, you know, families have to take responsibility for their own and it would be wrong to interfere. (sarcasm)

But some families cannot cope. Some families are not fit. Some families are abnormal and defective -- I don't know what else you would call people who live in their shit like that.

Sometimes society itself -- i.e. govenment and our taxes -- has to take care of those who cannot care for themselves.

At least the poor woman/child is at rest and out of pain and misery now.

Hekate

[midlife_mo_Jo]

40. What sorry excuses for family

I would bet anything that they took her in for her disability check.

[Hekate]

42. Or maybe they just inherited her when their parents died. It is beyond sad. nt

[Mojorabbit]

24. No one who

is not mentally ill could live in that place. Look at that toilet. My house is not spotless but OMG next to this it looks absolutely pristine.

[Javaman]

28. I had a friend with a house like that...

when I was in college, I hung around with a guy that seemed by all means very normal. Yes, a little odd, but nothing along the lines of "uh oh" odd. Anyway, he invited my and another buddy of mine over to his house one day.

First sign of trouble was the un-mowed yard, and the piles of dog poop everywhere. The garage door was a bit "askew" and I saw what appeared to be things stuffed into the small opening.

I'm no detective but I got a very strange feeling about the whole thing.

When we got inside, whoa nelly! piles of trash bags filled with unknown and didn't want to know contents. His mom, dad, aunt, sister and brother were all sitting among this heep watching TV as if nothing was wrong.

The carpet was long since gone. Ancient tiles, some missing, most cracked and chipped covered the living room floor. In the spots that had missing tiles, was the wood floor, which one could see straight through to the ground below.

Piles of newspapers covered every other available square inch in the room. The walls were covered in mildew and chipped paint. The ceiling a collage of water stains.

We then proceeded to the kitchen. He offered me a glass of water. I declined even though I was dying of thirst.

The kitchen was a mess of old milk jugs, tin cans, more newspapers, unknown bags of who knows what, filthy counters, grease stained walls, an stove top piled with old dishes and pans.

The sink was a sight to behold. Dishes, piles of them with what appeared to be months and months of crud decaying on them. The floor and ceiling was more of the same in the living room.

We next went down to the basement (oh no! don't go down there!) Believe me, every horror movie that involved a basement, ran through my head at that moment. No dead bodies or jars of dead babies, but it was nearly as bad. It was so packed tight, I got a bit of claustrophobia (I don't usually get it). Clothes of every conceivable era hung from the plumbing pipes. Old broken toys, various machinery, tools, old paint buckets, etc. All over which was covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs.

It was so cluttered, I really couldn't take in the full extent of the mess. It really was mind boggling.

I looked at my other buddy, just through I contact, we both shared the same look of horror, confusion and complete and utter disbelief.

My friend got what he needed and we went back upstairs.

He apologized for not being able to hang out in his room because, get this, his aunt now lives with them and he has to sleep on the couch. I quickly thought of the couch upon our entrance and remembered a saggy, swayback, torn, ripped and quite literally on it's last legs. He had been sleeping on it for...3 years!

His dad was a cop for the county and made really really good money.

I just couldn't understand it.

[AngryAmish]

29. People get like this

Some people can, from all outward appearances, seem fine but they live in squalor.

It is possible to get used to it.

Many cat owners claim their house does not smell. It does smell, usually not at terrible levels, but it is detectable. But cat owners can't tell because they are used to it.

Same thing here, writ large.

One of the unfortunate things is they may have been embarrassed to have people in the house and that lead to this death.

All that said, there is no excuse for this.

[TrogL]

31. I can provide some insight into this

This looks eerily similar to my ex-wife's place on a normal day (one of the reasons she's "ex").

The only time it gets cleaned up is if she finds out the landlord's coming over to inspect. When the kids were still living there (one's with me, one's on her own, one's with his older sister(the ex's by a previous relationship) (ironically, she works for Molly Maid) to escape the squalor) I'd have to go over there for two days armed with a case of heavy-duty garbage bags, an array of industrial strength cleaners, power tools, a shop-vac, my own regular vacuum and mops (hers are broken), eye and breathing protection, heavy-duty thick rubber gloves, antihistamines and my own food and fluids. While she went around with a snow shovel (I wish I was making this up) forklifting trash and empty bottles into garbage bags, I'd go around behind cleaning up deposits of dog shit, rotten and moldy food, cigarette butts, spilled drinks, coffee cups half-full of mold and pots and pan encrusted with month-old detrius. By the time we were done, the back alley would be lined with 20 or so garbage bags, I'd have drained the hot-water tank twice just from doing dishes (there is a dishwasher), done 10 or so loads of laundry (taken from a sodden heap as tall as I am in the middle of the basement floor), emptied the shop vac about 5 times, gone through three vacuum cleaner bags.

Six months later I'd have to do the same thing. This last go-around, I said "enough is enough, let her get kicked out" but my daughter took pity on her and went over and did it. I'm in the middle of house renovations so I've got my own problems.

As far as I can tell, the problem is depression (for which she refuses treatment) and a complete lack of organizational skills (mine aren't much better, but I've devised various "divide and conquer" strategies). My version of "clean the coffee table" is something like; get a garbage bag, remove obvious trash, remove valuables to safer locations, dump dishes in kitchen sink (and plan a dishwasher load as next task), mark place in books and magazines and stack, put remotes on the back shelf, deal with whatever's left. Hers is; empty the five ash trays into one (but not dump it out), pile dirty dishes into one stack (but not transport to kitchen), dump books and magazines on floor, throw valuables on couch, shove everything else to one side, grab a fresh coffee (new cup), light up a smoke, discover she can't sit on the couch because it's covered in valuables so dump the valuables back on coffee table, discover she can't put her feet down 'cause the floor's covered in reading material so dump that on top of the valuables losing them to sight and mind, get someone else to turn the TV on (Cthulhu alone knows where the remotes are) and kick back.

She subscribes to newspapers because "normal people get the newspaper" (I don't - the local rags are so full of shit they don't even make good bird cage flooring, won't absorb any more) but rarely reads them past the third page. They quickly create large piles in the middle of the living room that you have to navigate around. The mail gets briefly glanced at but soon ends up on the floor. She never actually gets around to paying the bills so they mount up. In the meantime she's got "extra" money in her account so it gets spent on nonsense. My daughter finally got fed up and moved out when the power went out, yet again. The gas gets cuts off every few months. The only reason it's on during the winter is gas company policy not to freeze anybody out 'cause it would damage the pipes and they might get sued. She can no longer get landline, cable access or a cell phone plan 'cause they want a five-figure deposit. Her only link to the outside world is a pay-as-it-goes cell cards. I used to live across town but ended up moving across the back alley 'cause that's the only way I could keep an eye on the kids. Most nights they'd be banging at the back door demanding food. (No, I will not entertain a conversation about why they weren't living with me, maybe some other time).

The basement is completely impassible except a narrow path to the laundry room. The rest is full of old clothes that don't fit anybody, bags and boxes of collector coffee cups and other memorabilia, broken furniture and appliances, hundreds of stuffed animals, toys the kids wouldn't be caught dead playing with, cat shit (the cat died years ago), mouse droppings (no cat) and just stuff, stuff and more stuff. It can't be thrown out because....well...it just can't. I could fill three dumpsters with it and not even make a dent.

She literally cannot see the mess. She isn't aware that it's there until she literally trips over it (then she just kicks it to the side) or somebody else points it out and demands something be done. By that time it's so overwhelming that she literally has no idea where to start.

Her mother is an immaculate housekeeper, which I think may be part of the problem - the ex never had to lift a finger to clean things up. It just magically happened. However, I was in the same boat but I eventually learned at least some skills. My place tends to be a cluttered mess (especially with reno in progress) but nothing that can't be dealt with in an hour or so and at least there's a place for everything even if it's not necessarily in that place at any given time. Yeah, the cat litter stinks because I don't get down there every day, there's dirty dishes in the sink (but at least they're rinsed and the other sink is clear) and there's a few things in the fridge I'd prefer not to think about (but the majority of the contents is edible food) but I at least know there's problems and have some sort of clue on how to fix them.

Messies don't.

[Hugin]

32. That was very good of you, TrogL.

But, you can't do it forever. :(

Believe me, I understand clutter. But, filth is an entirely different thing. I think
you're correct in seeing depression as a contributing factor.

I'm sorry this has been a part of your life. Glad to hear you're taking it on by
both horns! :)

[lumberjack_jeff]

36. My mom was not unlike the situation you describe.

My dad flew 1500 miles to get me when I was 5. He was charged with kidnapping. Mom showed up to court drunk so the judge threw out the case. Because of that, I grew up in a safe environment.

We are all a product of our upbringing. Given the above, my immediate reaction was not charitable.

The word "enabling" came to mind.

<snip a lot of unhelpful stuff>

even from 40 years ago, this post brought back fairly strong feelings.

[TrogL]

45. I'm going to talk to my daughter about that

Although she's now as disgusted as I am so she may have reached the same conclusion. She's over there babysitting right now and I'll be interested to hear how long her cleanup job lasted.

[flashl]

37. Depression is a good call. n/t

[lumberjack_jeff]

34. Care for people with disabilities is the last frontier of civil rights.

We as a society have an obligation to care for disabled people.

99% of the time, this means care in a neighborhood setting, but only if they (and their families) get the support they need which also means frequent household visits and oversight by social workers.

[-..__...]

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[musiclawyer]

38. Houses like these usually result in a coordinated response

from the local government: Code enforcement, Public Guardian, APS, CPS, Sheriff, Animal Control, Mental Health, Public Health, Environmental Health, County/City Attorney, Fire Department. I have seen a few and coordinated some. They can be crime scenes, but usually end up as public nuisance and mental health cases.
The vast majority of the time, the house cannot be salvaged. The last case we had was about 3 years ago-- a man and wife in their 80's literally living in their owen feces, 6- 8 inches high throughout the house. Everyone had to "suit up." We had to burn the house down. You don't need a court order in such cases. And this stuff happens in every state in the land I can assure you.

[Odin2005]

41. My God. I'm, admittedly, not as concerned about cleaning as I should be, but that is DISGUSTING!

:puke:

[cathandler]

43. There was a house like that in Denver about 10 years ago.

What alerted the authorities is that a six-month old baby, who'd been left in the house for babysitting, was found dead later that evening lying in a bed beside a dead cat. Now, the cat had been dead so long it had mummified (as things tend to do out here where there's no humidity). The floors, which were carpeted, were so filthy with feces that, at first, the cops thought the floors were linoleum.

There was nothing to do but bulldoze.

[janx]

44. Housecleaning day today!

If this doesn't motivate me, nothing will.


How terrible. I'd be willing to bet there are some serious depression/addiction problems in that house. No sane person could live like that.

[camero]

46. Social Darwinism at work

Figures