Two young children are believed to have frozen to death early Monday morning, months after their mother pleaded for help.
The Detroit Free Press reported that a family consisting of an unidentified two-year-old and a nine-year-old, along with their mother, siblings, grandmother, and grandmother’s child, had been residing in a van for a minimum of two months. Unfortunately, both children suddenly ceased breathing.
During a news briefing on Tuesday, authorities disclosed that the van had driven into the ninth floor of the parking garage at Hollywood Casino around 1 am. However, the vehicle ran out of gas at some point during the night.
The children’s 29-year-old mother then called a ‘close relative,’ whom Fox 2 reports is the nine-year-old’s godmother, for help.
‘When the mother realized that her son wasn’t breathing, she did make a 911 call,’ Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison said.
Then, when the friend arrived at the scene, she immediately used her car to take the nine-year-old to Children’s Hospital of Michigan.
On the way to the hospital, the mother discovered that her two-year-old was also not breathing. In response, when her friend returned, the entire family hurriedly boarded the vehicle and rushed to the hospital.
There, both the nine year old and the two year old ‘were pronounced dead, with the early indicator being that they froze to death,’ Detroit Police Captain Nathan Duda told NBC News.
Temperatures were around 12 degrees Fahrenheit at the time, with a wind chill of six degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
The other three children, who range in age from four to 13, were also being treated at the hospital, but were in stable condition.
They are now in the care of other family members, as authorities investigate the children’s deaths, according to NBC News.
Their mother and grandmother were brought in for questioning and provided a statement, but nobody is in custody at the time.
‘It has to be [investigated] Duda said.
‘I don’t think anyone really wants to think about that at the moment with the two children passed, but the reality is that the circumstances have to be examined.
‘We have to figure out how to go forward.’
But it was also revealed at the news conference that the children’s mother had sought help from the city’s homeless resources.
Mayor Mike Duggan said that the family had reached out to the city’s ‘homeless response team’ multiple times, most recently on November 25.
They had been living with a family at the time, but said they could no longer stay there and they needed a place to go.
‘In the course of that conversation, there was no resolution reached,’ the mayor said.
‘As far as we’ve been able to determine so far, the family never called back again for service.’
He added that ‘for whatever reason, this wasn’t deemed an emergency that caused an outreach worker to visit the family.’
It seems that from there, the family started living in the van, and would move stay at various casino parking lots, which the police say they believe the family sought out for safety and so that they could use the casino’s bathrooms.
But just weeks after the mother spoke to the homeless response team, a shelter opened up nearby.
‘[It] brings home the point that having services available doesn’t mean very much if the residents who need them don’t know how to access them,’ Duggan said.
He is now calling for a review of the city’s services for homelessness, the city’s homeless call center and ways to make the services more accessible, according to the Detroit News.
‘We have to make sure that we do everything possible to make sure this doesn’t happen again,’ Duggan said.
‘I’m not trying to talk about an individual employee. I’m talking about the system as a whole. Are we doing everything to make sure people in the city know how to access this critical care?’
He tasked Deputy Mayor Melia Howard and the city’s housing department to determine what went wrong in this case and what is needed to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.
A report is now due in two weeks.
‘The full strength of this administration is behind this effort,’ Howard vowed.
‘No parent, no family, no mother should ever have to endure such hardships and heartbreak.
‘As Detroiters, I know that we will lift them up in our hearts.’
The mother, though, is now said to be lost without her children.
Detroit Board of Police Commissioner Tamara Liberty Smith, who also serves as director of Detroit Power Detroit Community Outreach, told the Free Press she saw the mother ask God why He didn’t take her instead.
‘They’re a family that’s trying. They don’t want to abandon each other,’ she said, adding that the mom was due to start an auto-related job in Flint on Wednesday.
‘They weren’t expecting a tragedy like this.’
