The Huffington Post has brought light to another case of child abuse has been reported in Denver where four boys, aged two, four, five, and six have been discovered malnourished and covered in cat feces. The guilty parents, Wayne Sperling and Lorinda Bailey, are charged separately with four accounts of felony child abuse. Their poor parenting skills were discovered when mom Lorinda took her two year old son to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Children Hospital in September to treat a cut on his head. It was at the hospital where the child was reviewed as neglected, smelling of cigarettes, which only led to police checking on the other kids at home. Bailey’s explanation for the cut was that the child fell, but according to The Denver Channel.com, the doctor also revealed there was bruising behind the child’s ear, a possible result of “hard pinching.”
The four brothers were found starving and not toilet-trained, explaining the feces that covered them and the house. Their communication was also limited to grunting with no actual use of conventional human language. The children’s father has said that their “infant-like” noises are “their own language.” Their development skills have been described as being “delayed.”
The house smelled of “decomposing animal” and cat urine, with the floorboards soaked in it, and with two inches of feline feces kept hidden under the children’s bunk beds. Sperling revealed that the cats refuse to use the litter box, which is hardly a reasonable excuse for such a deplorable situation. The apartment was also covered with flies everywhere, dead and alive. The children themselves were barely dressed in underwear and underwear-like diapers according to Fox 31 Denver and 9news.com.
Neighbors say that the children should have been picked up earlier and that they can always be seen looking and “hanging” out the window; they are not surprised by the charges against Sperling and Bailey. There was an attempt to home school the oldest of the boys, but it has yet to become a tangible situation and has most certainly been put on hold since the investigation of the disgraceful and inhumane situation.
Sperling and Bailey pleaded guilty to child abuse charges in 2009. The parents are each held under a five thousand dollar bond and will appear in court today. It was made clear that the children have lacking health records, leading to the possible fact that they have never been properly immunized. It is undisclosed what will happen to the six cats, who are also victims under the circumstances.
Image Credit: the Huffington Post